Slavoj Zizek lecture Totality or Assemblage 01
Lecture · John Hillman ·
2022-02-23 · 1:31:00 · 11,677 words
philosophy-generalreligion-theologycinema-art-cultureideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsgeopolitics-warfascism-populismcommunism-socialismsubjectivityeveryday-lifeecology-climatecapitalismpolitics
Žižek begins a lecture on 'new realism' (speculative realism, OOO, assemblage theory) by contrasting it with subject-centered philosophy. He uses a clip from the Danish noir 'A Conspiracy of Faith' to illustrate his concept of 'Christian atheism,' arguing that true compassion requires the atheistic realization that God will not intervene. He also digresses into anecdotes about film censorship in Yugoslavia and the cultural politics of movie titles. Žižek critiques Jane Bennett’s ‘vibrant matter’ by arguing that an ‘inhuman view’ of reality, viewing the world as an indifferent assemblage of actants, is ethically necessary, using Auschwitz as the ultimate test case. He reinterprets Kant, Marx, and Protestantism to argue that true ethics emerges only after accepting this terrifying, indifferent reality, rejecting any ‘higher harmony’ that justifies suffering. The excerpt concludes with a political aside criticizing Jacques-Alain Miller’s Lacanian political stance in France, specifically his support for Macron and attack on Mélenchon. Žižek argues that the core of revolution is not chaos but the creation of new, often vulgar, clichés and order, contrasting this with the 'boring' idea of exploding revolution. He analyzes the 'obscenity of power' in contemporary politics, citing Trump, Putin, and Kaczyński as figures who publicly perform the hidden obscene desires of their constituencies. He concludes by reinterpreting Mao’s Lushan Conference speech through the lens of 'moral masochism' and defining modern ideology as 'augmented reality' (using Pokémon GO as an analogy), where ideology structures reality to make it narratively coherent and desirable. Žižek critiques the moral logic of modern environmentalism and political correctness, arguing that the dispersal of guilt through concepts like 'coltan' immobilizes action by creating a false sense of shared complicity. He illustrates this with a story of a Mexican judge and a joke about Will Self, linking it to the concept of surplus enjoyment and the perverse structure of guilt. He then discusses a text by Rebecca Carson on fictitious capital and direct domination, referencing Julian Assange’s book on Google and WikiLeaks, and concludes with a critique of the Democratic Party’s paranoia regarding Russian hacking as an ideological evasion of internal political failures.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 29
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
A description of reality (borrowed from Deleuze/Bennett) as an interaction of multiple actants (human and non-human), which Žižek applies to Auschwitz to highlight its ontological horror.
A collective term for emerging fields (speculative realism, OOO, new materialism) that dismiss the subject as primary, treating it as one object among others.
as “subject is one among objects”
Žižek's summary of the 'new realism' project: the subject is demoted from a transcendental position to mere ontological parity with other objects.
as “unintended consequences of censorship”
The phenomenon where state censorship, intended to suppress content, inadvertently produces a deeper, more profound artistic or existential meaning.
Žižek's claim that one must be an atheist (believing God will not save us) to truly achieve the pure ethical level of Christian compassion.
The idea that compassion is only authentic when stripped of the hope for divine reward or intervention.
A perspective that views reality as an interaction of actants independent of human perspective, which Žižek argues is morally impossible/unbearable but ethically necessary to 'go through'.
The point where ethical subjectivity emerges only after passing through the traumatic realization of nature's utter indifference and the 'inhuman view.'
as “opium and people”
A twist on Marx's 'religion is the opium of the people': today, both the drugs ('opium') and the populist organic unity of 'the people' function as the opium.
Reinterpreted by Žižek not as objective reality independent of us, but as the 'impossible point of perception' that, if seen, causes reality to disintegrate.
Freud's 'loss of reality,' described as a moment of confusion where one questions if a horrific or disgusting event can be part of reality.
The synthesis of the radical inhuman view (we are specks of dust in an indifferent universe) with radical anthropocentrism (the world was created for our ethical decisions).
as “Cartesian subject”
Described by Žižek as a 'totally abstract inhuman point' or 'monster,' representing the pure Cogito that remains when the human person is stripped away.
Husserl's radical bracketing of the world, which Žižek argues comes close to the 'inhuman view' by stepping out of engaged existence.
Heidegger's concept of 'being-there' or 'human reality,' which Žižek contrasts with Husserl's epoché, arguing Dasein remains too engaged in the world.
as “Le Pennot-Trotskyist”
A derogatory term coined by Jacques-Alain Miller to dismiss the French left (specifically Mélenchon) as Trotskyists serving fascists, mirroring Stalinist logic.
as “new proverbs”
Revolutionary slogans that function as new clichés or spontaneous forms of life, created by true founders of new orders rather than using old wisdom.
as “obscenity of power”
The phenomenon where the hidden, vulgar, or obscene desires of a political group are brought into explicit public discourse, rather than being suppressed by polite norms.
Instructions in authoritarian discourse that are meant to be ignored or performed in the opposite way; the art of survival is recognizing when a command is a call to do the exact opposite.
as “objective social function”
The unintended historical consequence of an event (e.g., Cultural Revolution clearing the slate for Deng Xiaoping’s capitalism) that contradicts its stated subjective intent.
Referenced via Naomi Klein’s book, describing how crises are used to open space for radical neoliberal/capitalist restructuring, here applied to the Cultural Revolution.
The Lacanian concept (objet petit a) used here to describe how ideology inserts a specific figure (like a Jew or a Pokémon) into reality to trigger and structure desire.
as “ideology as augmented reality”
The definition of ideology not as false consciousness hiding reality, but as a layer (like AR) that structures reality to reveal a figure (object of desire) that makes the confusing world narratively coherent and interesting.
The perverse enjoyment derived from self-criticism and guilt, where ethical responsibility is reduced to a simple, almost physical act (like flatulence) that provides relief rather than genuine ethical engagement.
The extra, perverse pleasure or satisfaction gained from the act of guilt itself, beyond the primary object or action.
Capital that exists primarily as speculation on future value rather than direct investment in actual production, which Žižek argues is the obverse of a return to direct personal domination.
as “direct personal domination”
The paradoxical result of financialization where money functions not just as an abstract medium of exchange but as a direct tool of interpersonal political control and domination.
The mechanism by which focusing on an external threat (like Russian hackers) allows a political group to avoid confronting their own internal failures and contradictions.
as “object-oriented ontology”
A philosophical movement (associated with Graham Harman) that Žižek critiques but acknowledges contains valid points regarding the status of objects and subjects.
Stories he reaches for 9
Producer Sam Goldwyn, criticized for using old clichés, orders his writers to create 'new clichés.' Žižek uses this to argue that revolution requires creating new clichés (new forms of life), not just breaking old ones.
“we need new clichés”
Žižek proposes analyzing Auschwitz not as Germans killing Jews, but as an 'inhuman' interaction of actants: Jewish corpses, worms, wood, gas. This highlights the 'utter indifference of nature' and the horror that 'the sun didn't turn dark.'
“analyze Auschwitz as an assemblage like forget about Germans killing Jews look at it as an interaction of actants”
Žižek admits Julian Assange's best work is a book titled 'When Google Met WikiLeaks,' which he says is totally ignored, using it to discuss how money functions as a tool of direct domination by tech giants.
“his best work for me is a book i forgot the title When Google Met WikiLeaks and it's typical how that book is totally is totally ignored”
Žižek cites Mao Zedong's calm calculation that 'half a billion Chinese may die' and that an atomic war ruining the earth is 'just a tiny explosion in a vast universe' as an example of the 'inhuman view' practiced in politics.
“half a half a billion Chinese may die so what another half a billion or the numbers were a little bit lower that time will survive”
Mao Zedong, taking responsibility for the Great Leap Forward deaths, told cadres to 'shit' and 'fart' to feel better. Žižek argues this equates ethical responsibility with physical flatulence, a vulgar 'moral masochism.'
“if you have to shit shit if you have to fart fart you will feel much better for it”
In communist Yugoslavia, the crucifixion scenes of 'Ben-Hur' were censored. The result was that the film became a profound existential drama about victory as loss, with the hero walking alone in an empty stadium, stripping away Christian redemption.
“out of a rather simple Christian propaganda it became almost a deep existential drama you know like the moment of victory is the moment of loss”
Žižek recounts Lacan's dream where the Cartesian subject is an 'inhuman monster,' arguing that the pure Cogito is not a human person but an abstract, depersonalized point of view.
“the eye that remains is the pure Cartesian subject who is no longer a human person”
Žižek references Claude Lanzmann's claim that if he found film reels of Nazis recording prisoners dying in Auschwitz, he would burn them, because 'you see too much', it is an 'impossible phenomenon' that disintegrates reality.
“if I were to get hold of those shots I would have immediately burned them”
Pokémon GO adds a figure (Pokémon) to reality, making it interesting. Žižek analogizes ideology to this AR: it structures reality to reveal an 'object cause of desire' (e.g., the Jew for Hitler) that makes the world coherent.
“ideology is augmented reality in this sense that you you look at reality and ideologically structures the space so that you see more”
Works invoked 20
Psycho film
Cited for its alleged Portuguese title 'The Man Who Was His Own Mother'.
Žižek's own work, referenced where he previously used the example of unintended censorship consequences.
North by Northwest film
Cited for its German title 'Der unsichtbare Dritte' (The Invisible Third).
Being and Time book
Heidegger's 'megamasterpiece,' which Žižek criticizes for describing 'engaged existence' rather than the 'inhuman view' of stepping out of engagement.
Shoah film
Claude Lanzmann's film; Žižek references an interview where Lanzmann says he would burn reels of Nazis recording prisoners dying.
The Shock Doctrine book
Naomi Klein's book; Žižek laments that she did not use his analysis of the Cultural Revolution as a 'shock' for capitalism.
Used as a primary example to illustrate 'Christian atheism' and the nature of faith/atheism.
Relire la Révolution book
Jean-Claude Milner's book reporting on Althusser's classification of revolutionaries.
Vibrant Matter book
Jane Bennett's book, cited for its description of a trash site as an 'assemblage' of actants.
Described as Julian Assange's 'best work' and 'totally ignored,' used to illustrate how money functions as a tool of direct domination by tech giants.
Immaterialism book
A short book by Graham Harman that Žižek recommends as 'nicely written' and 'extremely readable' for understanding object-oriented ontology, though he remains critical of the philosophy itself.
Ben-Hur film
Used to illustrate how censorship in Yugoslavia transformed a Christian propaganda film into an existential drama.
The Children's Hour play
Lillian Hellman's play about lesbians, used in the Sam Goldwyn anecdote to illustrate censorship and 'moving' content.
Pokémon GO other
Augmented reality game used as the primary analogy for how ideology structures reality by adding a figure (object of desire) to make it coherent.
Cited alongside Ben-Hur as a film shown in communist Yugoslavia.
Après la finitude book
Cited as the starting point for the field of new realism.
Sartre's book, cited for translating Heidegger's 'Dasein' as 'human reality.'
Le Quotidien Lacanien journal
A 'digital daily newspaper' organized by Jacques-Alain Miller, described as a 'pure Macronian edifice' that attacks the French left and Žižek.
A publication where Žižek published a text (topic: domination/fictitious capital) which he admits is 'not great' but has an 'interesting topic,' and which he encourages the audience to find online.
Mao on Contradiction book
Žižek's own book, published with an addendum by Alain Badiou showing where Žižek is wrong.
People invoked 49
Cecil B. DeMille positive
Cited as the director of 'The Ten Commandments' and 'Ben-Hur'.
Jane Bennett positive
Cited as a proponent of 'new materialism,' a branch of new realism.
Mentioned in the context of Miller's political strategy to 'de-diabolize' and then 're-re-diabolize' her as a fascist danger.
Jacques Derrida positive
Žižek states he is 'basically on Jacques Derrida's side' in the debate with Foucault regarding Descartes and madness.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited alongside others for suggesting the 'two opiums' twist on Marx's formula.
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz positive
The serial killer in 'A Conspiracy of Faith,' described as a 'German Parsifal' and 'son of devil.'
Mentioned as the beneficiary of the Cultural Revolution's 'objective social function,' which cleared the slate for Chinese capitalism.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited as a figure whose early texts were taken up by the audience member; Žižek contrasts serious readings of Lacan with quick deconstructionist appropriations.
Oliver Stone positive
Director of a documentary on Putin; Žižek uses Stone's interview clips to illustrate Putin's vulgarity, though he expresses some discomfort with Stone's approach.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Cited for the claim that morality/religion is the greatest secret conspiracy.
Louis Althusser positive
Attributed with the theory of three types of revolutionaries (proverbs); Mao is placed in the category of 'true founders' who create new proverbs.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Žižek borrows the term 'inhuman view' from Deleuze, who describes it as the interaction of actants where human perspective is just one standpoint.
Carl Fredrik Mörck positive
The protagonist of 'A Conspiracy of Faith,' described as 'terminally depressed.'
Donald Trump positive
Used as an example of 'obscenity of power'; his vulgarity is not a mask but the explicit expression of the hidden desires of Christian conservatives.
Playwright of 'The Children's Hour,' referenced in the Sam Goldwyn anecdote about censorship.
Naomi Klein positive
Author of 'The Shock Doctrine'; Žižek notes his disappointment that she did not use his analysis of the Cultural Revolution as a shock for capitalism.
Will Self negative
Žižek cites Will Self as an example of someone doing 'what he shouldn't have done' by pointing out the audience's complicity with coltan, which Žižek views as an obscenity that disperses responsibility.
Emmanuel Macron negative
Miller's movement supports Macron; Žižek implies skepticism toward this 'Macronian edifice.'
Antonio Negri positive
Referenced via his 'Italian followers' (autonomists) who developed the idea of money functioning as a direct tool of personal domination through state support and companies like Google.
Mentioned as someone who 'never pardoned' Žižek for mentioning Mao.
Graham Harman negative
Author of 'Immaterialism'; Žižek recommends his book as 'extremely readable' and a clear description of object-oriented ontology, but states he is 'critical towards that book' and that 'we must be critical towards them.'
Jean-Claude Milner positive
Cited as the source for Althusser's classification of revolutionaries in his book 'Relire la Révolution'.
Bruno Latour positive
Cited as a proponent of 'assemblage theory.'
Bernie Sanders positive
Mentioned as a figure the Democratic Party allegedly mistreated, leading to internal struggles to 'get rid of all Sanders supporters' which the party masks with paranoia about Russia.
Mentioned as a 'friend' with whom Žižek has problems, alongside Oliver Stone.
Maximilien Robespierre positive
Cited as a 'radical' who uses no proverbs, standing between old revolutionaries and true founders.
Michel Foucault negative
Žižek disagrees with Foucault's argument that madness is 'ultra-belief' rather than skepticism, siding with Derrida.
Martin Heidegger negative
Žižek criticizes Heidegger's 'Dasein' as still being 'engaged existence' and 'human reality,' arguing it fails to break out of the world like Husserl's epoché.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Described as organizing a 'vast quasi-political movement' and 'Macronian edifice.' Žižek criticizes his 'Stalinist' attacks on the French left and his personal attacks on Žižek ('Žižek Fraud').
Claude Lanzmann positive
Žižek states he is 'not a total fan' but agrees with Lanzmann's claim in an interview that he would burn film reels of Nazis recording prisoners dying in Auschwitz because 'you see too much.'
Manuel DeLanda positive
Cited as a proponent of 'assemblage theory.'
Jarosław Kaczyński positive
Polish politician whose vulgar quote ('fuck the whore') is used to reveal the hidden brutality and 'actualit[y] of Christian moral majority'.
Mao Zedong negative
Žižek is 'critical of Mao' and finds his 'inhuman view' (calculating half a billion deaths) 'strictly impossible' and morally repugnant, contrasting it with Protestant ethics.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon positive
Žižek admits he has 'no great sympathy' for Mélenchon but finds him a 'nice guy' compared to Miller's brutal attacks, noting Miller calls him 'corrupteur de jeunesse.'
Edmund Husserl positive
Žižek argues Husserl deserves to be 're-read' for his 'phenomenological epoché,' which comes close to the 'inhuman view' and Buddhist withdrawal, placing him 'on the side of Husserl against Martin Heidegger.'
Quentin Meillassoux positive
Cited as the originator of the field with 'Après la finitude'.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited by an audience member for the line 'standing up to this experience is letting God be God,' which Žižek uses to discuss the temptation of the ethical.
Identified as the actor playing Messala in 'Ben-Hur'.
Samuel Goldwyn positive
Hollywood producer used in anecdotes to illustrate the concept of 'new clichés' and the move from 'lesbians to Americans.'
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Cited for 'North by Northwest' and 'Psycho' as examples of film titles and cultural reception.
Vladimir Putin positive
Cited via Oliver Stone's documentary for displaying 'absolute vulgarities' and 'obscenity of power' (karate/judo response, period comparison).
Identified as the star of 'Ben-Hur'.
Joseph Stalin negative
Categorized as an 'old dangerous bad revolutionary' who uses old proverbs/clichés; associated with 'sad' new clichés of Stalinism.
Rebecca Carson positive
A young American researcher whose idea Žižek 'stole' (openly admitting it) regarding the link between fictitious capital and direct personal domination; he calls it a 'wonderful idea' and 'ingenious.'
Karl Marx positive
Cited for the concept that in commodification, 'relations of personal domination are transposed onto relations between things so that formally we are free.'
René Descartes positive
Žižek defends Descartes' 'Cogito' as a 'totally abstract inhuman point' or 'monster,' siding with Derrida's reading of Descartes against Foucault.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the concept of 'Realitätsverlust' (loss of reality) and the idea that the 'real in itself' is the impossible point of perception.
Immanuel Kant positive
Žižek uses Kant to distinguish phenomena from things in themselves, and later to synthesize the 'inhuman view' (we are specks of dust) with 'radical anthropocentrism' (the world was created for our ethical decisions).
Jean-Paul Sartre positive
Cited for translating Heidegger's 'Dasein' as 'human reality,' which Žižek agrees with in a specific sense.
Transcript 46 turns
Slavoj Žižek
You know that I love you and that's how I read through my love my your introduction basically it meant you did something tolerable thirty years ago and from that point on it went downwards that's how I creatively read it and I should also say okay to return the compliment that already at that time to remind you of your age maybe even earlier a little bit didn't you write about Lacan imaginary some early texts which were the first like not just this please no irony intended here honest serious reading of Lacan because there were around you already some echoes of Lacan but they were more in the style of these quick deconstructionist appropriations and so on without this was this was where it all began for us at that point okay you have to excuse me today it will be more in my usual style three four fragments I will approach already the topic of assemblage but then from tomorrow I will really go into it because the more I circulate this miserable earth the more I see how important sorry we should move this sorry I’m going to move this ah sorry okay now I am traditional you’ll say male chauvinist pig but you’re a lady you should have asked me you know oh no
You know that I love you and that's how I read through my love my your introduction basically it meant you did something tolerable thirty years ago and from that point on it went downwards that's how I creatively read it and I should also say okay to return the compliment that already at that time to remind you of your age maybe even earlier a little bit didn't you write about Lacan imaginary some early texts which were the first like not just this please no irony intended here honest serious reading of Lacan because there were around you already some echoes of Lacan but they were more in the style of these quick deconstructionist appropriations and so on without this was this was where it all began for us at that point okay you have to excuse me today it will be more in my usual style three four fragments I will approach already the topic of assemblage but then from tomorrow I will really go into it because the more I circulate this miserable earth the more I see how important sorry we should move this sorry I’m going to move this ah sorry okay now I am traditional you’ll say male chauvinist pig but you’re a lady you should have asked me you know oh no
unknown
I’m a mother also ah you think that’s an
I’m a mother also ah you think that’s an
Slavoj Žižek
interesting theory that mother and lady are mutually
interesting theory that mother and lady are mutually
unknown
exclusive yes don’t you
exclusive yes don’t you
Slavoj Žižek
okay yeah okay I don’t want to lose as usual too much time because I would like to go into it are you as crazy a mother as I am a crazy father you know like turning okay sorry let’s go on don’t be disappointed you I just want to make some political also philosophical introductory remarks theological even and then from tomorrow we will be really doing did you get I forgot if you want to get an idea I was thinking I am referring to this new field which is now emerging and many of my friends dismiss it as oh it’s total bullshit don’t take it seriously it has different names it all began with Quentin Meillassoux Après la finitude and then it developed into different fields like one is that more neo-spiritualist one Jane Bennett so-called new materialism another direction is object-oriented ontology OOO a third one which is relatively independent is so-called assemblage theory Manuel DeLanda Bruno Latour and so on all of them are forms of new realism which the big idea is dismissing the subject subject is I simplify to the utmost subject is one among objects and it’s a detailed systematic confrontation that I want to do but I would love sorry let me find this I would love to begin with a clip and I will return to it if there will be time towards the end just so that I get over this nervousness of mine with a clip I was told so we blame you if I was wrong that I didn’t yet show it here it’s you know one of the good things about globalization is that it’s not only bad is that many minor so-called minor quantitatively countries or countries out of focus can participate in global culture like me I like detective novels movies or crime and now one of the big moments is the moment not so much Sweden but Denmark even more and they have a cool series of TV movies one of them is a trilogy I forgot even the name about a detective called Carl Mørck who is nicely characterized as a burnt-out terminally depressed person I like this expression terminally depressed and it’s a movie the last one in this trilogy I think the it’s very good English translation of the title the original title is Flaskepost fra P which means message in a bottle Flaschenpost the English translation is A Conspiracy of Faith and I like this title because it reminds me of G. K. Chesterton who always claimed you know morality religion is the greatest secret conspiracy and so on it’s a Danish noir about this terminally depressed detective incidentally you know what would be but I don’t have time to go into it a nice one can make a whole talk of it about the culture of changing movie titles for translation in different countries for example Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in Germany you know it Cary Grant and so on in Germany the title was Der unsichtbare Dritte the invisible third in French it was I think an affaire internationale international or was in Spanish whatever and then you get into these beautiful racist jokes like okay among the same race I will not I hope offend anyone because you know the myth in Brazil is that those Portuguese who had any brain left to Brazil and those who stayed in those who stayed in Portugal were the idiots too stupid to live so they have jokes Portuguese in Brazil about Portuguese Portuguese and you know the story of Psycho no Hitchcock the idea is that in Portugal they didn't get the movie and they had to invent a special title the the man who was his own mother you know and then the people got it then the title but again if you allow me a brief improvisation I would even love to do something I used this I’m not sure if in my Sublime Object already at that point also I’m always fascinated by unintended consequences of censorship or you know something that may appear to be a brutal intervention but in a totally unintended way it produces another effect like did you see not these new versions the big old kitsch with Charlton Heston Ben-Hur okay it was shown in ancient I’m sorry if you know this story it was shown in old Yugoslavia but it was still communism they were not too tough we saw even Cecil B. DeMille Ten Commandments and so on because the main opponent of the regime ideological was the church Christian mostly Catholic so they Christ crucifixion was too much and they did something which in a totally non-intended way worked perfectly we saw exactly the same movie just you remember those famous horse races after that you remember Messala or what the bad guy played by Stephen Boyd is it Messala I don’t know was overrun by horses lost it is there dying Ben-Hur approaches him and Messala dying tells him yes but I nonetheless won your mother sister whatever they are in leper colony and and dies and then you see the in an the empty stadium Ben-Hur walking alone the void end of the film and you know none of the crucifixion redemption and what fascinated me so much is how through this totally stupid censorship out of a rather simple Christian propaganda it became almost a deep existential drama you know like the moment of victory is the moment of loss you never you it was an incredible achievement I claim I would I wonder how many examples of okay but I feel bad let’s not lose time so let’s use it use that clip the I will first just it will work like this I will describe just to give you a brief introduction you don't need to know all the story you will just see the final or a little bit before the end confrontation it's just four people on a hut which is a wooden hut close to the close to the close to the coast on the sea there are four people all action almost except a short flashback will take place in this hut wooden hut we have this terminally depressed detective totally desperate guy then we have the bad guy the serial killer who is more kind of a German Parsifal handsome blond hero he is the serial killer called Johannes with all the un-important theological baggage he claims he is the son of devil whatever and then two of his prospective victims a small boy and his slightly older sister that's the situation don't be confused by a short flashback it's just explanation how the murderer it's his flashback of the blond murderer how he became the murderer the idea is that when his mother was I don’t know even more evil to him dying the devil gave him the strength to slaughter her and so on and so on for those of you who are morally okay morally sensitive to brutality to calm your anxieties you will see the small kid drown don’t worry just after this scene they discover that he is not yet dead and so don't worry too much no okay so let’s do this because the reason I’m showing you this is that when people ask me what do you mean by your shitty are you joking is it another of your postmodern jokes your shitty idea of Christian atheism I mean it quite literally my claim is not just that it’s not this stupid old humanist point that we this patronizing concession that some Christian make even if you are not a Christian you can still be a good man you are just not aware of the divine spark in you and so on and so on my point is much stronger that this pure level of Christian ethics of compassion and so on it's only as an atheist that you can get it okay we talked too much I think why don't we do it now you know what I’m just afraid that if we move this too much we will cause some catastrophe there are you sure let’s move it there simply oh my god I’m so sorry I was not aware ah you removed everything I’m so sorry for I didn't know we'll cause all this trouble okay just to see that there is enough that the there are subtitles in English did you move the chair sorry ah yeah okay okay I apologize again terminally depressed detective one child Parsifal blond murderer Do you know what I am? Du kunne dø for det. One thing at a time. First answer my question. Do you know what I am? Nei. I am the devil’s son. I know what it’s like Johannes. Satan. Is that why you do it? Dette har ingenting med barn gjøre. I understand that. But I’ve found the only way, the cleanest way, the final way to start over with God. I take faith away from those who believe. First from the children, then the parents, then the families. Everyone loses their faith and it spreads. And now, and now, and now I will take faith from you too. You’re wasting your time. I don’t believe in God. Jeg tror ikke på en skitt. Johannes. Johannes. Carl. Carl. Johannes. Johannes. Carl. Johannes, take me instead. Johannes, take me instead. Carl. Johannes. Take me instead. Carl. Carl. Johannes. Carl. Johannes. Carl. Johannes, look at me. Carl. Look at me. Johannes. Johannes. Carl. Johannes. Johannes, he is just a little boy. He hasn't done anything. Ja, ja. He is a little boy. So why is nobody helping him? Take me instead. Johannes, take me instead. Johannes. Johannes. Look at me. Stab me. Stab me. Johannes. Stab me. Johannes. No. Carl. Carl. Carl. You should have asked God, Carl. Will he show up now with such power to stop me? No. Carl. No. No. No. Carl. I think you're going to remember this day, Carl. For ever. That you were here and it changed nothing. And God never came. No. Carl. No. Carl. Johannes. Johannes. Johannes, don't do that. Take me instead. Da tar du denne. Johannes. Da tar du ham. Så blir du hans, så blir du fri. Nei. Johannes. Carl. Carl. Carl. Carl. Carl. Carl. Carl. Stikk meg. Johannes. Stikk meg. Stikk meg så blir du fri. Stikk meg. Johannes. Johannes. Nå har du sett. Nå skal du leve. Let's stop. Jeg sier stop! For de maskinene! Carl! Se på ham! Se på ham! I’m so sorry for this
okay yeah okay I don’t want to lose as usual too much time because I would like to go into it are you as crazy a mother as I am a crazy father you know like turning okay sorry let’s go on don’t be disappointed you I just want to make some political also philosophical introductory remarks theological even and then from tomorrow we will be really doing did you get I forgot if you want to get an idea I was thinking I am referring to this new field which is now emerging and many of my friends dismiss it as oh it’s total bullshit don’t take it seriously it has different names it all began with Quentin Meillassoux Après la finitude and then it developed into different fields like one is that more neo-spiritualist one Jane Bennett so-called new materialism another direction is object-oriented ontology OOO a third one which is relatively independent is so-called assemblage theory Manuel DeLanda Bruno Latour and so on all of them are forms of new realism which the big idea is dismissing the subject subject is I simplify to the utmost subject is one among objects and it’s a detailed systematic confrontation that I want to do but I would love sorry let me find this I would love to begin with a clip and I will return to it if there will be time towards the end just so that I get over this nervousness of mine with a clip I was told so we blame you if I was wrong that I didn’t yet show it here it’s you know one of the good things about globalization is that it’s not only bad is that many minor so-called minor quantitatively countries or countries out of focus can participate in global culture like me I like detective novels movies or crime and now one of the big moments is the moment not so much Sweden but Denmark even more and they have a cool series of TV movies one of them is a trilogy I forgot even the name about a detective called Carl Mørck who is nicely characterized as a burnt-out terminally depressed person I like this expression terminally depressed and it’s a movie the last one in this trilogy I think the it’s very good English translation of the title the original title is Flaskepost fra P which means message in a bottle Flaschenpost the English translation is A Conspiracy of Faith and I like this title because it reminds me of G. K. Chesterton who always claimed you know morality religion is the greatest secret conspiracy and so on it’s a Danish noir about this terminally depressed detective incidentally you know what would be but I don’t have time to go into it a nice one can make a whole talk of it about the culture of changing movie titles for translation in different countries for example Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in Germany you know it Cary Grant and so on in Germany the title was Der unsichtbare Dritte the invisible third in French it was I think an affaire internationale international or was in Spanish whatever and then you get into these beautiful racist jokes like okay among the same race I will not I hope offend anyone because you know the myth in Brazil is that those Portuguese who had any brain left to Brazil and those who stayed in those who stayed in Portugal were the idiots too stupid to live so they have jokes Portuguese in Brazil about Portuguese Portuguese and you know the story of Psycho no Hitchcock the idea is that in Portugal they didn't get the movie and they had to invent a special title the the man who was his own mother you know and then the people got it then the title but again if you allow me a brief improvisation I would even love to do something I used this I’m not sure if in my Sublime Object already at that point also I’m always fascinated by unintended consequences of censorship or you know something that may appear to be a brutal intervention but in a totally unintended way it produces another effect like did you see not these new versions the big old kitsch with Charlton Heston Ben-Hur okay it was shown in ancient I’m sorry if you know this story it was shown in old Yugoslavia but it was still communism they were not too tough we saw even Cecil B. DeMille Ten Commandments and so on because the main opponent of the regime ideological was the church Christian mostly Catholic so they Christ crucifixion was too much and they did something which in a totally non-intended way worked perfectly we saw exactly the same movie just you remember those famous horse races after that you remember Messala or what the bad guy played by Stephen Boyd is it Messala I don’t know was overrun by horses lost it is there dying Ben-Hur approaches him and Messala dying tells him yes but I nonetheless won your mother sister whatever they are in leper colony and and dies and then you see the in an the empty stadium Ben-Hur walking alone the void end of the film and you know none of the crucifixion redemption and what fascinated me so much is how through this totally stupid censorship out of a rather simple Christian propaganda it became almost a deep existential drama you know like the moment of victory is the moment of loss you never you it was an incredible achievement I claim I would I wonder how many examples of okay but I feel bad let’s not lose time so let’s use it use that clip the I will first just it will work like this I will describe just to give you a brief introduction you don't need to know all the story you will just see the final or a little bit before the end confrontation it's just four people on a hut which is a wooden hut close to the close to the close to the coast on the sea there are four people all action almost except a short flashback will take place in this hut wooden hut we have this terminally depressed detective totally desperate guy then we have the bad guy the serial killer who is more kind of a German Parsifal handsome blond hero he is the serial killer called Johannes with all the un-important theological baggage he claims he is the son of devil whatever and then two of his prospective victims a small boy and his slightly older sister that's the situation don't be confused by a short flashback it's just explanation how the murderer it's his flashback of the blond murderer how he became the murderer the idea is that when his mother was I don’t know even more evil to him dying the devil gave him the strength to slaughter her and so on and so on for those of you who are morally okay morally sensitive to brutality to calm your anxieties you will see the small kid drown don’t worry just after this scene they discover that he is not yet dead and so don't worry too much no okay so let’s do this because the reason I’m showing you this is that when people ask me what do you mean by your shitty are you joking is it another of your postmodern jokes your shitty idea of Christian atheism I mean it quite literally my claim is not just that it’s not this stupid old humanist point that we this patronizing concession that some Christian make even if you are not a Christian you can still be a good man you are just not aware of the divine spark in you and so on and so on my point is much stronger that this pure level of Christian ethics of compassion and so on it's only as an atheist that you can get it okay we talked too much I think why don't we do it now you know what I’m just afraid that if we move this too much we will cause some catastrophe there are you sure let’s move it there simply oh my god I’m so sorry I was not aware ah you removed everything I’m so sorry for I didn't know we'll cause all this trouble okay just to see that there is enough that the there are subtitles in English did you move the chair sorry ah yeah okay okay I apologize again terminally depressed detective one child Parsifal blond murderer Do you know what I am? Du kunne dø for det. One thing at a time. First answer my question. Do you know what I am? Nei. I am the devil’s son. I know what it’s like Johannes. Satan. Is that why you do it? Dette har ingenting med barn gjøre. I understand that. But I’ve found the only way, the cleanest way, the final way to start over with God. I take faith away from those who believe. First from the children, then the parents, then the families. Everyone loses their faith and it spreads. And now, and now, and now I will take faith from you too. You’re wasting your time. I don’t believe in God. Jeg tror ikke på en skitt. Johannes. Johannes. Carl. Carl. Johannes. Johannes. Carl. Johannes, take me instead. Johannes, take me instead. Carl. Johannes. Take me instead. Carl. Carl. Johannes. Carl. Johannes. Carl. Johannes, look at me. Carl. Look at me. Johannes. Johannes. Carl. Johannes. Johannes, he is just a little boy. He hasn't done anything. Ja, ja. He is a little boy. So why is nobody helping him? Take me instead. Johannes, take me instead. Johannes. Johannes. Look at me. Stab me. Stab me. Johannes. Stab me. Johannes. No. Carl. Carl. Carl. You should have asked God, Carl. Will he show up now with such power to stop me? No. Carl. No. No. No. Carl. I think you're going to remember this day, Carl. For ever. That you were here and it changed nothing. And God never came. No. Carl. No. Carl. Johannes. Johannes. Johannes, don't do that. Take me instead. Da tar du denne. Johannes. Da tar du ham. Så blir du hans, så blir du fri. Nei. Johannes. Carl. Carl. Carl. Carl. Carl. Carl. Carl. Stikk meg. Johannes. Stikk meg. Stikk meg så blir du fri. Stikk meg. Johannes. Johannes. Nå har du sett. Nå skal du leve. Let's stop. Jeg sier stop! For de maskinene! Carl! Se på ham! Se på ham! I’m so sorry for this
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comedy but I liked it when it’s over I’m sorry thank you so that no longer we have that anxiety who of if it will work or not okay uh oh sorry that’s not important just the water you will not starve me here to die of thirst sorry sorry forget about my god ah now I see that you will not again you are still up to some okay it's a very simple scene I'm not projecting big into it but okay let’s begin at the beginning which is you know when the murderer tells him you see God didn’t show up of course in a vulgar way we can say he did and two times first when Mørck the detective said as an atheist said take me up take me instead and so on and the second time when the girl refused to stab the bad guy but what I want to point out is that uh when the detective said I don’t believe
comedy but I liked it when it’s over I’m sorry thank you so that no longer we have that anxiety who of if it will work or not okay uh oh sorry that’s not important just the water you will not starve me here to die of thirst sorry sorry forget about my god ah now I see that you will not again you are still up to some okay it's a very simple scene I'm not projecting big into it but okay let’s begin at the beginning which is you know when the murderer tells him you see God didn’t show up of course in a vulgar way we can say he did and two times first when Mørck the detective said as an atheist said take me up take me instead and so on and the second time when the girl refused to stab the bad guy but what I want to point out is that uh when the detective said I don’t believe
Slavoj Žižek
in anything and so on I’m an atheist and then when the murderer tells
in anything and so on I’m an atheist and then when the murderer tells
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him no I’ve never met anyone who believed so much and so on and so on we shouldn't take this again in the usual apologetic way yes he may think that he doesn't believe but at a deeper level he does no it’s literally this like when you are totally desperate terminally depressed you accept what exactly you accept in advance what the murderer tries to demonstrate to you to put it in vulgar Lacanian terms that there is no Big Other there is no higher guarantee whatever when evil
him no I’ve never met anyone who believed so much and so on and so on we shouldn't take this again in the usual apologetic way yes he may think that he doesn't believe but at a deeper level he does no it’s literally this like when you are totally desperate terminally depressed you accept what exactly you accept in advance what the murderer tries to demonstrate to you to put it in vulgar Lacanian terms that there is no Big Other there is no higher guarantee whatever when evil
Slavoj Žižek
happens it just
happens it just
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happens nobody will prevent it what dies here is what according to Hegel
happens nobody will prevent it what dies here is what according to Hegel
Slavoj Žižek
dies on the cross not a representative of God but as
dies on the cross not a representative of God but as
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Hegel repeats it a couple of times what dies on the cross is God himself which God precisely that God which guarantees to put it naively meaning whenever horrors happen they must have some deeper function you know or meaning or whatever like don't despair even if things look horrible they play a certain role in the divine plan we can rely on some higher force and again the point of this in the theological formulation is a little bit ridiculous son of the devil is to
Hegel repeats it a couple of times what dies on the cross is God himself which God precisely that God which guarantees to put it naively meaning whenever horrors happen they must have some deeper function you know or meaning or whatever like don't despair even if things look horrible they play a certain role in the divine plan we can rely on some higher force and again the point of this in the theological formulation is a little bit ridiculous son of the devil is to
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bring you to this that there is no higher force of course he Johannes is cheating because he himself the only way to do it is to present himself as the executor of another’s will of the of the devil’s will and so on and so on so
bring you to this that there is no higher force of course he Johannes is cheating because he himself the only way to do it is to present himself as the executor of another’s will of the of the devil’s will and so on and so on so
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paradoxically I would have put it that the only person who believes in higher authority is Johannes is the murderer no he just out of despair that God didn't show he choose chosen the other side but his structure remains theological while again Mørck the detective this is what I want to point out when he said take me instead and so on and so on it's not grounded in any transcendent
paradoxically I would have put it that the only person who believes in higher authority is Johannes is the murderer no he just out of despair that God didn't show he choose chosen the other side but his structure remains theological while again Mørck the detective this is what I want to point out when he said take me instead and so on and so on it's not grounded in any transcendent
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higher authority is this pure surplus of sympathy and this is I think if you allow me this slightly megalomaniac notion this is the position of Christ Christ doesn't as a rule
higher authority is this pure surplus of sympathy and this is I think if you allow me this slightly megalomaniac notion this is the position of Christ Christ doesn't as a rule
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intervene Christ is just this pure sympathy take
intervene Christ is just this pure sympathy take
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me
me
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instead but not in the in the sense of all-powerfulness just in the sense of you are impassive observer you see the world is terrifying
instead but not in the in the sense of all-powerfulness just in the sense of you are impassive observer you see the world is terrifying
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horrible we can’t do anything basically all we can do is this pure maybe even futile gesture of gesture of goodness now your obvious I think I already did this line here to point out that now your obvious counterargument would be here okay fuck it isn't this again just a simple honest good old-fashioned atheist logic
horrible we can’t do anything basically all we can do is this pure maybe even futile gesture of gesture of goodness now your obvious I think I already did this line here to point out that now your obvious counterargument would be here okay fuck it isn't this again just a simple honest good old-fashioned atheist logic
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why call this even Christian atheism no I think that it's much more complex it's not this simple assertion of this world it may be horrible but
why call this even Christian atheism no I think that it's much more complex it's not this simple assertion of this world it may be horrible but
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we have to accept it to do it and so on here I quote and I know I already did it here so I'm not read entire
we have to accept it to do it and so on here I quote and I know I already did it here so I'm not read entire
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quote Rowan Williams in his book on Dostoevsky where he points out that the minimal dimension of theology is not some positive notion of God he refers to four English Catholic writers and he asks the simple question Rowan Williams but why
quote Rowan Williams in his book on Dostoevsky where he points out that the minimal dimension of theology is not some positive notion of God he refers to four English Catholic writers and he asks the simple question Rowan Williams but why
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are they Christian and he says that it's just this basic experience that this world where we live in is out of joint without any positive idea of higher order he implies probably he Rowan Williams wouldn't go so far to say this he implies that this that this higher order
are they Christian and he says that it's just this basic experience that this world where we live in is out of joint without any positive idea of higher order he implies probably he Rowan Williams wouldn't go so far to say this he implies that this that this higher order
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comes
comes
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afterwards the original experience is just this negative theology negative theology not in the usual sense of there is God out there but all our qualifications of God are are too limited God is above them but negative theology in a much more radical sense God is just this negative dimension of this world cannot be the ultimate order because it's terrifyingly out of joint so in other words what I want this would be for me you may disagree maybe I'm too desperate here the ultimate let’s say
afterwards the original experience is just this negative theology negative theology not in the usual sense of there is God out there but all our qualifications of God are are too limited God is above them but negative theology in a much more radical sense God is just this negative dimension of this world cannot be the ultimate order because it's terrifyingly out of joint so in other words what I want this would be for me you may disagree maybe I'm too desperate here the ultimate let’s say
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ontological and at the same time ethical constellation without any introduction of some transcendence and so on this basic experience the world is out of joint terrifying antagonistic whatever which again is at the same time an ethical statement and here I would like to if you allow me to improvise a little bit and to
ontological and at the same time ethical constellation without any introduction of some transcendence and so on this basic experience the world is out of joint terrifying antagonistic whatever which again is at the same time an ethical statement and here I would like to if you allow me to improvise a little bit and to
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approach assemblage the notion of assemblage here I like although I don’t give the same twist to it as she takes I like Jane
approach assemblage the notion of assemblage here I like although I don’t give the same twist to it as she takes I like Jane
Slavoj Žižek
Bennett’s in her in her Vibrant Matter book a famous description of a trash site as an assemblage instead of observing it just as a background of what humanity is doing she takes almost a positive look at it as a description of the interaction of multiple actants you have human debris you have worms you have insects poisons and so on it's literally I think a nice example of what Gilles Deleuze called somewhere the inhuman view you look at it as an interaction of actants where our human perspective is just one among the standpoints where I would maybe split ways with her is that I think that such a position we should go through it but it's impossible no not impossible in the simple stupid sense that we cannot look at it in this way but impossible in the sense of morally impossible unbearable and to challenge you I’m sorry if I repeat myself here but not against the background of this clip from the film this is why and I don't mean it in any way as an ethical or rather bad taste ethical provocation this is why my ideal supplement to Jane Bennett and I haven't met her but I almost dream how would she react to it would be to analyze Auschwitz as an assemblage like forget about Germans killing Jews look at it as an interaction of actants Jewish corpses worms wood burning in gas or whatever was burning gas in gas ovens and so on there just a kind of inhuman view of it what's my point here not to see anything liberating in it but to go through this harshness to accept what maybe in old-fashioned terms we can say the utter indifference of nature you can describe it in this way and I claim that the ethical agency at its zero level emerges only if you go through this point no it’s not it’s not some kind of a perverse experiment because if you don’t go through this point then you are still playing games maybe Catholic games you know in the sense of in the sense of this is the basic unintended to agree with it Protestant reproach to Catholicism no matter how you twist it but for example even if they would say no it’s not in this sense calculating but for me I’m sorry if I offend someone here the Catholic approach to that scene would still have been that nonetheless if I offer myself to take the place of the kid who was drowning maybe I will be repaid by God maybe it will make me feel good and so on and so on no the world objectively is terrifying there is absolutely no higher force I think that the gesture of Christ compassion and so on only has meaning against this background goodness only counts as goodness once you go through this zero point and this is how I would have read today I’m sorry again if I repeat an old stuff this is how I would have read today this or re-read twist give a new twist to this Marxist formula religion is opium of the people you know the first mistranslation is Marx doesn't say for the people because this would be too primitive as if some evil priests corrupted are doing it but again sorry if I repeat it already here this idea but Theodor Adorno and some others suggested two wonderful twists to it we have today two opiums of the people and you know what they are opium and people on the one hand for us the degenerate intellectuals we take drugs blah blah for new transcendental experiences whatever on the second hand what we have today as all this European pop- not only European Trump and so on populism it's precisely people themselves but in this populist way people as an organic unity to be protected from immigrants or whatever people themselves or itself functions as the opium of the people and I think that against this background one should stick to this idea of again passing through this impossible point of viewing reality with an with an inhuman eye Deleuze from whom I borrow this term even uses here Kantian terminology he says reality in itself in the sense of not just phenomenal reality the way we perceive it but if you view the world through inhuman eyes you see the way things are in themselves here in a Lacanian mode I would have changed the coordinates what Kant when he opposes phenomena and things in themselves conflates two dimensions one is this simple ontological dimension things appear in a certain way to us but they exist independently of us as things in themselves the other is a much more interesting dimension which is that every field of phenomena implies a certain point of impossibility like you see things but somebody has to be excluded from the space of what you can see and if you come to see it then reality disintegrates it's too strong for you to see it I'm sorry again if I repeat myself but that's where I agree although I'm not a total fan of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah when Claude Lanzmann said or wrote rather I think in an interview I don't know where that let's say that we would have discovered by chance some reels reels of cinema where a weird perverted Nazi guard succeeded in shooting on with camera registering recording the last moments of of prisoners dying when they burn when they are gassed in Auschwitz and so on and Lanzmann says if I were to get hold of those shots I would have immediately burned them no yeah because again you see too much but you see what I mean here it's not you see too much in a certain basic ethico-ontological sense by ethical you mean it's too traumatic you cannot accept it by ontological you I mean it's literally excluded from your space of reality and that would be I think the fundamental lesson of Freud and Lacan that the real in itself in the sense of inaccessible to your phenomenal reality is not how things are independently of you of your perception but the impossible point of perception itself something you can see it's an impossible phenomenon I call it something you can see but if you see it all your sense of reality falls apart and I mean this in a quite literal sense like I'm sorry for this tasteless you know I like them mental experiment but the point is precisely tastelessness let's say that oh my god this will be so disgusting my mind is really dirty i want to sorry let me say this for you stop find another example no no no I will I will I respect her no no no not stupid respect okay imagine something sexually or whatever really disgusting and imagine me now it's up to them to imagine it no we put the blame on them imagine me doing it now admit it that it would be very difficult for you to you would have a moment of what Freud calls Realitätsverlust loss of reality in the sense of you okay maybe you are a monster but I think most of you are not you you would have this confusion can this be part of reality and I had a similar experience totally full page I remember it was a shock for me when I started to doing my military service it was such a break from my everyday life that two three days I was literally in a half psychotic state and then I accepted life in the army even in a perverted way I began to enjoy it but it's typical how I intimately disconnected from normal civil life reality out there it became something you dream about you see on TV screen it's not my reality and I was so shocked to remember how after I finished my military service when I returned to civil life immediately I lost contact with military life like they were simply literally ontologically not part of the same reality that would be the message of it so again going back to my example I think that the difficulty today is to accept this inhuman view let's call it like this you see the horror of reality Auschwitz is happening and as they say the sun didn't turn dark and you know some authors of books on Auschwitz I forgot who is the guy even wrote a book I think on eclipse dark sun whatever the idea is that in Auschwitz something so horrible happened that it's an ontological scandal shame that the sun continued to shine and so on and so on so but I claim that again you have to go through that point but and not adopt what with all my respect of Mao Zedong here I’m critical of Mao it’s a very detailed ontological point and but you never pardoned me Alain Badiou for mentioning it you know in Mao Zedong you do find practicing this in a calm way this inhuman view for example when he deals with atomic war Mao says okay those famous statements okay half a half a billion Chinese may die so what another half a billion or the numbers were a little bit lower that time will survive and then he even goes on and says okay but let’s say that an atomic war will ruin the earth entirely and then Mao Mao says so what will be just a tiny explosion in a vast universe it doesn't matter and so on i claim that this position is strictly impossible and what I find in Protestantism not in explicit Protestantism but as the implication is precisely this awareness of looking at the world with inhuman eyes accepting not too much to say accepting going through that experience and then immediately translating this experience into the ultimate ethical challenge you see the paradox it's at the same time total objectivism I see reality the way it is in all its brutality but this inhuman view immediately constitutes you as ethical subject not an all-powerful ethical subject not i can but with this infinite burden of i am co-responsible for it it's my duty to to act and so on and so on so as Kant put it somewhere that’s for me the great thing of modernity that at the same time when people say modernity is Cartesian subjectivism yes but never forget that the notion this inhuman view although it's not really inhuman of course the notion of reality as just a vast infinite mechanisms which is indifferent to our suffering and so on and so on this is a typical modern view you don't find this in pre-modern universe in pre-modern universe even if we humans are not in the center of the universe but it's nonetheless a universe where some divine authority guarantees global meaning and so on and so on so we should combine this radical inhuman view we are nothing just a speck of dust in an infinite universe with radical ethnocentrism and in this sense anthropocentrism in the sense that as Kant put it nicely although we know we are just a speck of dust but from the ethical standpoint the world was created not only created but when we have big ethical decisions it is as if the world was created for us to win or lose that battle you know we should have this absolute anthropocentric attitude of now in our concrete ethical struggles the fate of the whole universe is decided in a way it was re- Kant puts this nicely reality was created for us as a background for our ethical test and again to bring these two dimensions together would be for me the true ethical atheism sorry the yes the true Christian atheism sorry again I cannot emphasize this enough how we should forget totally all that usual topic of Jesus Christ as a Messiah you know God sent him it failed okay my son come back to me maybe I will try again in years or whatever no it's not that Christ means the total death of God when we see horrors there is no higher guarantee for this is why if you permit me another old metaphor that I always often use this is why as a if you want to be a true Christian atheist you have to totally to abandon this stupid idea that you know this the most disgusting metaphor that I can imagine that when you see something terrifying the metaphor they like some theologians is like a painting you look too close at it you see a stain but from a proper distance you see that what appeared to you as confused stain is really contributes to the how you look at a beautiful painting like this it's stain from here you see how stain is part of a larger harmony and I think the whole point of Christian ethics is that if Jesus Christ stands for something it's precisely against for radical rejection of this metaphor like do you dare to say to victims today in Congo or standard examples Gulag Holocaust like would you dare to step to a Jew on his or her way to gas oven and a Jew and tell him listen from your limited view you are now in deep shit but don't forget please step back and you can see how your tiny trouble contributes to harmony of the universe no this is impossible this impossibility is at the core of Christian ethics I claim this absolute prohibition to step back and adopt sorry please yes I I wanted to ask you about you’re even characterizing you’re characterized inhuman eyes in terms of the brutality and the terrifying that they might see so I don’t know who’s looking who’s looking then me myself but with a totally depersonalized I’m there okay that’s another topic it’s a beautiful question my answer would be a very simple one the eye that remains is the pure Cartesian subject who is no longer a human person you know what I mean like in all intelligent Cartesians know this that Descartes' Cogito is precisely this totally abstract inhuman point it's a beautiful reading and even Lacan suggested somewhere that Renaissance was humanist with this you know warm human beings part of reality while the Cartesian subject is an inhuman monster well it’s a dream isn’t it he it comes from his dream I mean his dream and the and the Cogito yeah you know what I mean the experiment even if and so on and so on no although again there are big debates there like it’s interesting to follow and they both are right in a same way although I’m basically on Jacques Derrida's side you probably know the great polemic here between Derrida and Michel Foucault where Derrida is to put it very naively for Descartes he takes seriously Descartes' radical doubt at the point of madness while Foucault tries to prove that this apparently daring mental experiment imagine that the whole reality is just effect of a all that how do you call that génie malin evil genius what evil spirit it’s still avoiding madness and Foucault has a wonderful counter-argument his argument is that madness is not this ultra-skepticism mad people are not oh my god what everything is a dream madmen are as a rule psychotics ultra-believers they even take spirits everything exists for them fully so the skepticism is not is not sign of madness but nonetheless okay it’s another story I think it’s much more complex I think that okay let’s not go into that direction but what I want to say when you say this you see this bring us back to what I was saying about impossible phenomenon inhuman view for me is not the way things objectively are but inhuman view means that you dare to confront what is excluded from your vision of normal everyday human reality like if there are two strong points sexual so-called perversions although this is an ironic term because precisely perverts are ultra-normal for me Lacan in a very nice move emphasizes how so-called normality is a sub-sub-species of perversion but what I want to say that's why you produce out that's why I remain Cartesian and know Cartesian Cogito again would have been and I inhuman view that's why I claim with romanticism and so on humanity violently returns it's very difficult to sustain and we don't have time to do it now but it would have been wonderful to look at modern philosophy which philosophers tried to approach this inhuman view I'm sorry this is foreign to some of you but you know which philosopher needs deserves to be not so much rehabilitated as re-read Edmund Husserl i think in his radical notion of phenomenological epoché he comes he comes close to this and insofar as i'm here very open i'm far from the anti-oriental like you can also say that this Buddhist reduction to reality as just dance of phenomena when you no longer when you step out of your personality as they beautifully put it when you have thoughts without thinker that at that point you gain the inhuman view and it's so interesting that in his late years when he was already practically excommunicated retired early because of his Jewishness and so on you know that Husserl in his last decade was deeply influenced by Buddhism and oriental thought in general and he even in one of his manuscripts wrote that that the only thing which comes almost close to his transcendental epoché is Buddhist attitude towards withdrawing from reality and so on and so on so here i would be on the side of Husserl against Martin Heidegger because Heidegger's Dasein is still i know Heidegger hated this Jean-Paul Sartre’s translation but Sartre in his Being and Nothingness translated Dasein in the sense of we humans as the here of being as réalité humaine i think human reality but in a way he was right imagine the world Heidegger describes it in his megamasterpiece Being and Time it's simply an engaged existence we are all always already thrown into the world the world has a meaning this engagement but in a radical gesture Husserl tries to break out of it like that we can step out of this engagement these are complex topics so maybe we should sorry so maybe i should nonetheless stop here and at the end maybe rejoin it and do the other sorry i just want to how it looks we have time okay now we will return to it maybe later but now i would like to begin at the beginning this was something that because of my nightmare fear i had to begin with so that i functioned some political and so on remarks first let me tell you something just a warning because people told me that that there are rumors circulating around this i will not talk about it today because i find it too disgusting and too low for my taste just so that you will not think that i am avoiding it maybe you noticed it in the latest Lacanian misadventures in France that Jacques-Alain Miller now organized a vast quasi-political movement they have a digital daily newspaper Le Quotidien Lacanien which is a pure Macronian edifice for example just to give you some the hints Miller and his comrades now follow this line okay at the beginning one would almost agreed with them that the trends of the last years de-diabolized which means rendered her human Marine Le Pen and that the point now is to re-re-diabolize her to show her as the true fascist danger and so on which is why that's the problem we should unconditionally support Emmanuel Macron and the position of Miller now he claims is not directly a political position but some kind of standing for the secular ideas of the French Republic it's French Republicanism and okay there are then some sad consequences of it one is that Miller and his fellows brutally attack every distance towards Macron as in the best Stalinist way as objectively serving Le Pen for example for Jean-Luc Mélenchon you know the radical left candidate and I don't have great sympathy for him but now he almost appears to me as a nice guy because you know how he check it up just go Google Le Quotidien Lacanien in the last issue Mélenchon is called is called corrupteur de jeunesse the corrupting the one who corrupts is corrupteur of youth yeah corrupteur of youth and then Miller even in the best Stalinist way coined the the phrase Le Pennot-Trotskyist that you know French left is dismissed as Trotskyists who serve the fascists something that i think Stalin must be jumping in his grave out of joint and okay it doesn't matter the violence of this gesture is incredible but i don't want as i promised you to lose time on it i just have to warn you that one of the people brutally attacked is me there was check it up there a series of texts by some person from Slovenia i will not go into it with the title Žižek Fraud and it really means it the text claims that i was stealing all the ideas from Miller and disavowing it that i am part of corrupted Slovene elite that i am it goes through the whole series of sins and so on it's breathtaking the saddest thing is that
Bennett’s in her in her Vibrant Matter book a famous description of a trash site as an assemblage instead of observing it just as a background of what humanity is doing she takes almost a positive look at it as a description of the interaction of multiple actants you have human debris you have worms you have insects poisons and so on it's literally I think a nice example of what Gilles Deleuze called somewhere the inhuman view you look at it as an interaction of actants where our human perspective is just one among the standpoints where I would maybe split ways with her is that I think that such a position we should go through it but it's impossible no not impossible in the simple stupid sense that we cannot look at it in this way but impossible in the sense of morally impossible unbearable and to challenge you I’m sorry if I repeat myself here but not against the background of this clip from the film this is why and I don't mean it in any way as an ethical or rather bad taste ethical provocation this is why my ideal supplement to Jane Bennett and I haven't met her but I almost dream how would she react to it would be to analyze Auschwitz as an assemblage like forget about Germans killing Jews look at it as an interaction of actants Jewish corpses worms wood burning in gas or whatever was burning gas in gas ovens and so on there just a kind of inhuman view of it what's my point here not to see anything liberating in it but to go through this harshness to accept what maybe in old-fashioned terms we can say the utter indifference of nature you can describe it in this way and I claim that the ethical agency at its zero level emerges only if you go through this point no it’s not it’s not some kind of a perverse experiment because if you don’t go through this point then you are still playing games maybe Catholic games you know in the sense of in the sense of this is the basic unintended to agree with it Protestant reproach to Catholicism no matter how you twist it but for example even if they would say no it’s not in this sense calculating but for me I’m sorry if I offend someone here the Catholic approach to that scene would still have been that nonetheless if I offer myself to take the place of the kid who was drowning maybe I will be repaid by God maybe it will make me feel good and so on and so on no the world objectively is terrifying there is absolutely no higher force I think that the gesture of Christ compassion and so on only has meaning against this background goodness only counts as goodness once you go through this zero point and this is how I would have read today I’m sorry again if I repeat an old stuff this is how I would have read today this or re-read twist give a new twist to this Marxist formula religion is opium of the people you know the first mistranslation is Marx doesn't say for the people because this would be too primitive as if some evil priests corrupted are doing it but again sorry if I repeat it already here this idea but Theodor Adorno and some others suggested two wonderful twists to it we have today two opiums of the people and you know what they are opium and people on the one hand for us the degenerate intellectuals we take drugs blah blah for new transcendental experiences whatever on the second hand what we have today as all this European pop- not only European Trump and so on populism it's precisely people themselves but in this populist way people as an organic unity to be protected from immigrants or whatever people themselves or itself functions as the opium of the people and I think that against this background one should stick to this idea of again passing through this impossible point of viewing reality with an with an inhuman eye Deleuze from whom I borrow this term even uses here Kantian terminology he says reality in itself in the sense of not just phenomenal reality the way we perceive it but if you view the world through inhuman eyes you see the way things are in themselves here in a Lacanian mode I would have changed the coordinates what Kant when he opposes phenomena and things in themselves conflates two dimensions one is this simple ontological dimension things appear in a certain way to us but they exist independently of us as things in themselves the other is a much more interesting dimension which is that every field of phenomena implies a certain point of impossibility like you see things but somebody has to be excluded from the space of what you can see and if you come to see it then reality disintegrates it's too strong for you to see it I'm sorry again if I repeat myself but that's where I agree although I'm not a total fan of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah when Claude Lanzmann said or wrote rather I think in an interview I don't know where that let's say that we would have discovered by chance some reels reels of cinema where a weird perverted Nazi guard succeeded in shooting on with camera registering recording the last moments of of prisoners dying when they burn when they are gassed in Auschwitz and so on and Lanzmann says if I were to get hold of those shots I would have immediately burned them no yeah because again you see too much but you see what I mean here it's not you see too much in a certain basic ethico-ontological sense by ethical you mean it's too traumatic you cannot accept it by ontological you I mean it's literally excluded from your space of reality and that would be I think the fundamental lesson of Freud and Lacan that the real in itself in the sense of inaccessible to your phenomenal reality is not how things are independently of you of your perception but the impossible point of perception itself something you can see it's an impossible phenomenon I call it something you can see but if you see it all your sense of reality falls apart and I mean this in a quite literal sense like I'm sorry for this tasteless you know I like them mental experiment but the point is precisely tastelessness let's say that oh my god this will be so disgusting my mind is really dirty i want to sorry let me say this for you stop find another example no no no I will I will I respect her no no no not stupid respect okay imagine something sexually or whatever really disgusting and imagine me now it's up to them to imagine it no we put the blame on them imagine me doing it now admit it that it would be very difficult for you to you would have a moment of what Freud calls Realitätsverlust loss of reality in the sense of you okay maybe you are a monster but I think most of you are not you you would have this confusion can this be part of reality and I had a similar experience totally full page I remember it was a shock for me when I started to doing my military service it was such a break from my everyday life that two three days I was literally in a half psychotic state and then I accepted life in the army even in a perverted way I began to enjoy it but it's typical how I intimately disconnected from normal civil life reality out there it became something you dream about you see on TV screen it's not my reality and I was so shocked to remember how after I finished my military service when I returned to civil life immediately I lost contact with military life like they were simply literally ontologically not part of the same reality that would be the message of it so again going back to my example I think that the difficulty today is to accept this inhuman view let's call it like this you see the horror of reality Auschwitz is happening and as they say the sun didn't turn dark and you know some authors of books on Auschwitz I forgot who is the guy even wrote a book I think on eclipse dark sun whatever the idea is that in Auschwitz something so horrible happened that it's an ontological scandal shame that the sun continued to shine and so on and so on so but I claim that again you have to go through that point but and not adopt what with all my respect of Mao Zedong here I’m critical of Mao it’s a very detailed ontological point and but you never pardoned me Alain Badiou for mentioning it you know in Mao Zedong you do find practicing this in a calm way this inhuman view for example when he deals with atomic war Mao says okay those famous statements okay half a half a billion Chinese may die so what another half a billion or the numbers were a little bit lower that time will survive and then he even goes on and says okay but let’s say that an atomic war will ruin the earth entirely and then Mao Mao says so what will be just a tiny explosion in a vast universe it doesn't matter and so on i claim that this position is strictly impossible and what I find in Protestantism not in explicit Protestantism but as the implication is precisely this awareness of looking at the world with inhuman eyes accepting not too much to say accepting going through that experience and then immediately translating this experience into the ultimate ethical challenge you see the paradox it's at the same time total objectivism I see reality the way it is in all its brutality but this inhuman view immediately constitutes you as ethical subject not an all-powerful ethical subject not i can but with this infinite burden of i am co-responsible for it it's my duty to to act and so on and so on so as Kant put it somewhere that’s for me the great thing of modernity that at the same time when people say modernity is Cartesian subjectivism yes but never forget that the notion this inhuman view although it's not really inhuman of course the notion of reality as just a vast infinite mechanisms which is indifferent to our suffering and so on and so on this is a typical modern view you don't find this in pre-modern universe in pre-modern universe even if we humans are not in the center of the universe but it's nonetheless a universe where some divine authority guarantees global meaning and so on and so on so we should combine this radical inhuman view we are nothing just a speck of dust in an infinite universe with radical ethnocentrism and in this sense anthropocentrism in the sense that as Kant put it nicely although we know we are just a speck of dust but from the ethical standpoint the world was created not only created but when we have big ethical decisions it is as if the world was created for us to win or lose that battle you know we should have this absolute anthropocentric attitude of now in our concrete ethical struggles the fate of the whole universe is decided in a way it was re- Kant puts this nicely reality was created for us as a background for our ethical test and again to bring these two dimensions together would be for me the true ethical atheism sorry the yes the true Christian atheism sorry again I cannot emphasize this enough how we should forget totally all that usual topic of Jesus Christ as a Messiah you know God sent him it failed okay my son come back to me maybe I will try again in years or whatever no it's not that Christ means the total death of God when we see horrors there is no higher guarantee for this is why if you permit me another old metaphor that I always often use this is why as a if you want to be a true Christian atheist you have to totally to abandon this stupid idea that you know this the most disgusting metaphor that I can imagine that when you see something terrifying the metaphor they like some theologians is like a painting you look too close at it you see a stain but from a proper distance you see that what appeared to you as confused stain is really contributes to the how you look at a beautiful painting like this it's stain from here you see how stain is part of a larger harmony and I think the whole point of Christian ethics is that if Jesus Christ stands for something it's precisely against for radical rejection of this metaphor like do you dare to say to victims today in Congo or standard examples Gulag Holocaust like would you dare to step to a Jew on his or her way to gas oven and a Jew and tell him listen from your limited view you are now in deep shit but don't forget please step back and you can see how your tiny trouble contributes to harmony of the universe no this is impossible this impossibility is at the core of Christian ethics I claim this absolute prohibition to step back and adopt sorry please yes I I wanted to ask you about you’re even characterizing you’re characterized inhuman eyes in terms of the brutality and the terrifying that they might see so I don’t know who’s looking who’s looking then me myself but with a totally depersonalized I’m there okay that’s another topic it’s a beautiful question my answer would be a very simple one the eye that remains is the pure Cartesian subject who is no longer a human person you know what I mean like in all intelligent Cartesians know this that Descartes' Cogito is precisely this totally abstract inhuman point it's a beautiful reading and even Lacan suggested somewhere that Renaissance was humanist with this you know warm human beings part of reality while the Cartesian subject is an inhuman monster well it’s a dream isn’t it he it comes from his dream I mean his dream and the and the Cogito yeah you know what I mean the experiment even if and so on and so on no although again there are big debates there like it’s interesting to follow and they both are right in a same way although I’m basically on Jacques Derrida's side you probably know the great polemic here between Derrida and Michel Foucault where Derrida is to put it very naively for Descartes he takes seriously Descartes' radical doubt at the point of madness while Foucault tries to prove that this apparently daring mental experiment imagine that the whole reality is just effect of a all that how do you call that génie malin evil genius what evil spirit it’s still avoiding madness and Foucault has a wonderful counter-argument his argument is that madness is not this ultra-skepticism mad people are not oh my god what everything is a dream madmen are as a rule psychotics ultra-believers they even take spirits everything exists for them fully so the skepticism is not is not sign of madness but nonetheless okay it’s another story I think it’s much more complex I think that okay let’s not go into that direction but what I want to say when you say this you see this bring us back to what I was saying about impossible phenomenon inhuman view for me is not the way things objectively are but inhuman view means that you dare to confront what is excluded from your vision of normal everyday human reality like if there are two strong points sexual so-called perversions although this is an ironic term because precisely perverts are ultra-normal for me Lacan in a very nice move emphasizes how so-called normality is a sub-sub-species of perversion but what I want to say that's why you produce out that's why I remain Cartesian and know Cartesian Cogito again would have been and I inhuman view that's why I claim with romanticism and so on humanity violently returns it's very difficult to sustain and we don't have time to do it now but it would have been wonderful to look at modern philosophy which philosophers tried to approach this inhuman view I'm sorry this is foreign to some of you but you know which philosopher needs deserves to be not so much rehabilitated as re-read Edmund Husserl i think in his radical notion of phenomenological epoché he comes he comes close to this and insofar as i'm here very open i'm far from the anti-oriental like you can also say that this Buddhist reduction to reality as just dance of phenomena when you no longer when you step out of your personality as they beautifully put it when you have thoughts without thinker that at that point you gain the inhuman view and it's so interesting that in his late years when he was already practically excommunicated retired early because of his Jewishness and so on you know that Husserl in his last decade was deeply influenced by Buddhism and oriental thought in general and he even in one of his manuscripts wrote that that the only thing which comes almost close to his transcendental epoché is Buddhist attitude towards withdrawing from reality and so on and so on so here i would be on the side of Husserl against Martin Heidegger because Heidegger's Dasein is still i know Heidegger hated this Jean-Paul Sartre’s translation but Sartre in his Being and Nothingness translated Dasein in the sense of we humans as the here of being as réalité humaine i think human reality but in a way he was right imagine the world Heidegger describes it in his megamasterpiece Being and Time it's simply an engaged existence we are all always already thrown into the world the world has a meaning this engagement but in a radical gesture Husserl tries to break out of it like that we can step out of this engagement these are complex topics so maybe we should sorry so maybe i should nonetheless stop here and at the end maybe rejoin it and do the other sorry i just want to how it looks we have time okay now we will return to it maybe later but now i would like to begin at the beginning this was something that because of my nightmare fear i had to begin with so that i functioned some political and so on remarks first let me tell you something just a warning because people told me that that there are rumors circulating around this i will not talk about it today because i find it too disgusting and too low for my taste just so that you will not think that i am avoiding it maybe you noticed it in the latest Lacanian misadventures in France that Jacques-Alain Miller now organized a vast quasi-political movement they have a digital daily newspaper Le Quotidien Lacanien which is a pure Macronian edifice for example just to give you some the hints Miller and his comrades now follow this line okay at the beginning one would almost agreed with them that the trends of the last years de-diabolized which means rendered her human Marine Le Pen and that the point now is to re-re-diabolize her to show her as the true fascist danger and so on which is why that's the problem we should unconditionally support Emmanuel Macron and the position of Miller now he claims is not directly a political position but some kind of standing for the secular ideas of the French Republic it's French Republicanism and okay there are then some sad consequences of it one is that Miller and his fellows brutally attack every distance towards Macron as in the best Stalinist way as objectively serving Le Pen for example for Jean-Luc Mélenchon you know the radical left candidate and I don't have great sympathy for him but now he almost appears to me as a nice guy because you know how he check it up just go Google Le Quotidien Lacanien in the last issue Mélenchon is called is called corrupteur de jeunesse the corrupting the one who corrupts is corrupteur of youth yeah corrupteur of youth and then Miller even in the best Stalinist way coined the the phrase Le Pennot-Trotskyist that you know French left is dismissed as Trotskyists who serve the fascists something that i think Stalin must be jumping in his grave out of joint and okay it doesn't matter the violence of this gesture is incredible but i don't want as i promised you to lose time on it i just have to warn you that one of the people brutally attacked is me there was check it up there a series of texts by some person from Slovenia i will not go into it with the title Žižek Fraud and it really means it the text claims that i was stealing all the ideas from Miller and disavowing it that i am part of corrupted Slovene elite that i am it goes through the whole series of sins and so on it's breathtaking the saddest thing is that
unknown
it's written by a lady young lady from Slovenia who is Miller's analysand patient and i really deplore as extremely unethical because it's not just Miller that it's doing it all
it's written by a lady young lady from Slovenia who is Miller's analysand patient and i really deplore as extremely unethical because it's not just Miller that it's doing it all
Slavoj Žižek
groups in France you know this disgusting attitude of using your patients who are still your patients to fight public battles for so just i will stop here i don't want to just so that you will not think that i avoid the topic so let's go on i i want to to introduce my political direction here i would like to repeat something that i already used here i think but i’m again fascinated in his last book Relire la Révolution, Re-reading Revolution Jean-Claude Milner reports on how once forty years ago when they were sitting at a table Louis Althusser claimed that there are three types of revolutionaries those
groups in France you know this disgusting attitude of using your patients who are still your patients to fight public battles for so just i will stop here i don't want to just so that you will not think that i avoid the topic so let's go on i i want to to introduce my political direction here i would like to repeat something that i already used here i think but i’m again fascinated in his last book Relire la Révolution, Re-reading Revolution Jean-Claude Milner reports on how once forty years ago when they were sitting at a table Louis Althusser claimed that there are three types of revolutionaries those
unknown
who use old proverbs
who use old proverbs
Slavoj Žižek
those who use no proverbs and those who create new proverbs and i love this idea like old dangerous bad revolutionaries like Joseph Stalin they always you can recognize them by this they always use old proverbs like old wisdom then you have radicals like Maximilien Robespierre no proverbs and then it's true like for Althusser Mao i doubt it the true founders of the new they create new proverbs but i think it's a good definition why because proverbs as i emphasized here are this everyday stupidity new clichés and i think this was always the most difficult part of a revolution sorry if i repeat another old joke by me about Sam Goldwyn you know that story i repeated it here four five times that Sam Goldwyn the greatest my god he is the greatest you know when he was putting to film as a producer Lillian Hellman's what's the name of the play The Children's Hour or what which takes place among lesbians you know and this was Hays Code and his produced his scenario writers told him but you know we will not be allowed to shoot it because it takes place among lesbians you know this was prohibited under Hays you know what Sam Goldwyn answered no problem we will move it from lesbians to up to among Americans you know and another ingenious was idea of Goldwyn is when he read in newspapers that his movies are were criticized for too many old clichés he wrote a memo to his scenario department we need new clichés and he was right the problem of the revolution is not break out of the old but to create new clichés clichés stand here for me for these new spontaneous forms of life whenever communists in power created them they did create some new clichés but they were pretty sad ones like all the cynical wisdoms clichés of Stalinism and so on and so on so against this background my repulsion of this idea wonderful revolution it’s exploding and so on i’m so bored by it i like order the true test of a revolution is a new order not totally but you know what i mean as i always repeat it what happens when things return to normal so here here i would like to approach to finish for today what is happening today i think basically what is happening it's not something as new as it may appear it is new but the novelty is more or less that what was always already here but in an implicit way is coming out explicit getting explicit for example what do Donald Trump Vladimir Putin and others stand for listen all these tasteless Twitters by Donald Trump and so on i mean if you look at biographies of American presidents privately they were all telling even nastier dirty jokes and so on and so on but they were not doing it publicly and form matters for me you know like it’s totally wrong this moralist view it’s better that we have it out in the public eh i doubt it it’s better you know and so the obscenity of power is simply becoming part of the public discourse and if you permit me i will give you three examples here one is i put a variation of what i’ve already presented here you know some of my naive American friends were shocked by the idea of how can Donald Trump a perverted destitute ridiculous person if you have any sense of Christian decency you should say the very opposite of Christian decency how can he function as the chosen hero of American Christian conservatives and the answer i get is that while Christian conservatives are well aware of the problematic character of Trump's personality they have chosen to ignore this side of things since what really matters to them is Trump's agenda i mean you cannot imagine how important for them for example is prohibiting abortion and they say okay we will tolerate all of this but if Trump nominates the two i think he has now two posts free the two Supreme Court judges and they overturn how's that one called Roe versus Wade or whatever that will be enough but i agree with this explanation up to a point but with my evil psychoanalytic mind i think that the solution is much more vulgar and brutal what if this apparent duality of Trump Christian values publicly and all this brutal tasteless anti-feminist and so on obscenity what if precisely this duality finds an echo in every conservative Christian what if they are like this i i’m much more much closer to this brutal interpretation that Christian fundamentalist recognize themselves precisely in this tension you pretend to be a Christian secretly full of obscenities rape jokes gay jokes whatever this is what they are so it's not something that they are embarrassed at Christian conservatives this is what they identify with and in next step i want to emphasize how you know don’t be too quick in just bashing the United States how at least in some places we in Europe are approaching it for example i will not tell you the usual thing and here i have some problems even with my otherwise friend Julian Assange not to mention Oliver Stone i i saw some clips on you know Oliver Stone now made a four hours documentary on Putin yeah you heard it that some parts are incredibly even for me to put it mildly not exactly known for his refined finesse whatever are too much you know like those absolute vulgarities like you know Oliver Stone asked him what would you have done if you were to find yourself in a shower with a gay man and and Putin said oh I practice karate or whatever judo and i would deal with him or even most tasteless for me when Oliver Stone asked Putin aren't you somehow people accuse you that you have these nervous outbursts mood no and you know what Putin answer i am not a woman woman has this mood every month when they have their period it's just vulgarities but let me move to another i was so shocked that i had to confirm with my Polish friends let’s take one of the big heroes of European Christian conservative morality it’s Jarosław Kaczyński the de facto boss of Poland the leader of that Law and Justice whatever party you know that my friends told me that when he for the first time with his brother took power in he used and that’s my point maybe we all privately talk like this but publicly on TV and in an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza which is the great left-center daily he used a term i will first put it in Polish Teraz kurwa my which vaguely translated means something like now it’s our time to fuck the whore now it’s our term we are now in power like but you know what’s so horrible you know to what this phrase in Polish refers it’s like in the sense of i was told by my friends it's a low class expression if you that you know these military gang rapes that you wait in turn to fuck sorry to whatever the prostitute and you know now it's my turn in the line to fuck her and again people were shocked i say no this is the actuality of Christian moral majority my god it's absolutely crucial to see this how i won’t try to do here in a much more brutal way the same way you you how to offend you if i say Jackie you will be mad no yes okay okay so i will not say it ha ha ha did you do an analysis of of long ago some more than years ago major times and earlier no all these who is our probably favorite character that ridiculous jockey guy Norman Debatt or who you don't remember he used some not quite like this but some you know all of a sudden sorry his racism yeah yeah and but not just racism racism put often in these quite vulgar terms and so on so again this is part of it i was shocked by this and so they will not say that i just attack the right i was shocked to read and he really did it i checked with my Maoist friends now comes the nastiest part Mao Zedong they just told me friendly it will amuse you read Mao's speech at the Lushan party conference in July and it's quite something you know why this was the moment when the first catastrophic results of the Great Leap Forward were known was already Cultural Revolution beginning Mao already plans his comeback but here Mao called the party cadre to assume their part of responsibility for millions dead and so on but the metaphor that he uses is please don't accuse me for dirty words i am embarrassed to pronounce them i quote Mao he himself admits his responsibility for the catastrophe and again we are not talking about small economic troubles we are talking about millions of people dead quote from Mao check it up just put Google Mao Lushan conference and then add shit and fuck and you will get it here is the quote the chaos caused was on a grand scale and i take responsibility comrades you must all analyze your own responsibility if you have to shit shit if you have to fart fart you will feel much better for it that's quote end of quote this is the final sentence of the report so you cannot even say oh this were somewhere this was somewhere in the middle or whatever covered up this was the final point now you know what i find a little bit weird here let's drop the vulgarity of it this type of F-word that i'm sorry i used here did you notice i would never have used it while the other F-word the big one i am ready to use it not this one what bothers me it's not the vulgarity but what is Mao really apologizing for through this metaphor he is talking about his responsibility for millions of death and about how to take responsibility that you get rid of the guilt and his metaphor for admitting the guilt taking responsibility is like flatulence like do this it will make you feel better and so on and so on it's a very sad vulgarity not because of vulgarity as such but you see how often the metaphor tells more than it intends to say it tells a lot about because you know to compare again taking responsibility for millions of death with an act of flatulence which sorry wait does examples does that connect to that phrase that you use sometimes that there are moments at which the ethical itself becomes a temptation is this in in that line where standing up to this experience is letting God be God but is this is this this kind of moment but do you know that this line is from is from Søren Kierkegaard you know yeah yeah wait the way i see it is that when he tells them just just go with it and says like admit your responsibility act and the perversion here is that as if there was a way in that moment to do that and that was as simple as just releasing some you know letting your body function you see what i mean yeah but again this is what i this is what i found problematic that's the obscenity of that moment yeah it masquerades physical as the ethical it equates those two i in yeah yeah yeah right yeah yeah yeah right so in that sense yeah yeah no i agree with your point because like if i got you correctly i’m not saying that you should the opposite would also be wrong this kind of endless self-criticism or whatever and so on and so on but nonetheless it makes out of self-criticism a kind of a almost i would say in an obscene way pleasant simple experience moral masochism sorry it replaces what you call the point of the impossible with an exercise in collective moral masochism yeah moral masochism although i don't think that Mao would even call it masochism you know well he wouldn't but would you you wouldn't no masochism no no i see Mao ah i will give you an answer here i see masochism maybe in other things for example maybe i'm wrong but imagine if somebody stood up at that congress and actually did what he told them to do and said comrade Mao i'm doing it that would be moral masochism this is now now you think like me because i always like to imagine it how Mao would have reacted if somebody with just stood up another himself at debate stood up say i support comrade Mao do that gesture and i think that it's more complex in the sense of he would probably immediately be arrested and so on you know because that’s the whole art of political discourse and especially in China i was told they are sensitive to it one thing is to be called to do something another thing is to really do it the whole art of public discourse in this i used here this innumeral boring examples of Stalin criticize him or not is that quite often when you are explicitly called to do something the most dangerous thing is to do it the whole art of finding your way in an authoritarian situation is to recognize when calls are empty calls like you have to do you have to do the exact you have to do the exact opposite so so let's go back in it you know here is my pessimism although with Mao Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution for which Badiou attacked me he wrote a text friendly text nonetheless it was in a quite Stalinist way if you look at French translation of my Mao on contradiction it was published with an addendum by Badiou where he shows where i am wrong and so on but you know what he doesn't accept maybe he's right i don't know in my reading and that's the brutal irony the objective social function of Cultural Revolution was to create the space for Deng Xiaoping because the only thing that Cultural Revolution objectively achieved was to destroy the traditional ethical foundation the past was over and people the result was that people found themselves millions of young people like naked ideologically with no perspective and so on they were totally disappointed but it was no longer possible to return to the old traditional view and then this was the ideal space clearing the slate the table for capitalism for and it i was very disappointed that Naomi Klein didn't use this in her The Shock Doctrine objectively Cultural Revolution was the greatest shock to open up the space for for Chinese capitalism so i don't think again maybe this is my paranoia maybe even Mao knew it secretly because you know Alain Badiou told me this you know that when Deng Xiaoping was purged Mao gave an order don't kill him we will need him later so who knows what Mao was thinking and so on and so on so again this is my first point of how the second point about but i already used this line here so i will just very briefly go into it the second point is you remember maybe not with you but i developed this here another example i don't get it why people are so shocked about Pokémon GO and those augmented reality games i think again it's the same as with obscenity something that was here all the time came out open i think that the you know the trick of Pokémon GO i only observed my son watching it it’s something extremely interesting because it’s no longer virtual reality as escape from reality you look at reality but when you look at it from the screen something is added to it Pokémon figure so you have the usual sheet of reality and quite literally the figure Pokémon is the object cause of desire you look at the reality it's confusing if you look at the same reality through the screen oh my god it's the figure Pokémon i have to catch it and so on you know it literally renders reality as part of a consistent narrative triggers your desire and so on so i was in Germany attacked when i compared claiming that the the Jew was Hitler's Pokémon you know isn't this exactly what Hitler did reality was boring confusing for ordinary people crisis they perceive it as moral decadence chaos and so on eh Hitler told them basically let's play Pokémon GO look at it through my ideological glasses you will see the Jew you know let's let's catch it let's and the game becomes interesting so of course i am not saying that Pokémon GO is in any sense Nazi i am just saying this that the best definition in contemporary terms of ideology would have been ideology is augmented reality in this sense that you you look at reality and ideologically ideology structures the space so that you see more you see some equivalent of Pokémon figure etc and things become things become interesting and so on and so on now i am not saying i don't have time to develop it now but i am not saying that we should simply return to pure to looking at reality the way it is it's much more complex what i'm just saying and that's my point is through digitalization of our life and it’s a very dangerous operation something that before was done through anonymous ideological mechanisms you know like are we not all the time when and we always are in a way part of ideological space are we not playing Pokémon games what is for example Islamophobic racism i meet an Arab friend ah Pokémon tells me he’s a dangerous terrorist rapist and so on and so on it's literally ideology fills in
those who use no proverbs and those who create new proverbs and i love this idea like old dangerous bad revolutionaries like Joseph Stalin they always you can recognize them by this they always use old proverbs like old wisdom then you have radicals like Maximilien Robespierre no proverbs and then it's true like for Althusser Mao i doubt it the true founders of the new they create new proverbs but i think it's a good definition why because proverbs as i emphasized here are this everyday stupidity new clichés and i think this was always the most difficult part of a revolution sorry if i repeat another old joke by me about Sam Goldwyn you know that story i repeated it here four five times that Sam Goldwyn the greatest my god he is the greatest you know when he was putting to film as a producer Lillian Hellman's what's the name of the play The Children's Hour or what which takes place among lesbians you know and this was Hays Code and his produced his scenario writers told him but you know we will not be allowed to shoot it because it takes place among lesbians you know this was prohibited under Hays you know what Sam Goldwyn answered no problem we will move it from lesbians to up to among Americans you know and another ingenious was idea of Goldwyn is when he read in newspapers that his movies are were criticized for too many old clichés he wrote a memo to his scenario department we need new clichés and he was right the problem of the revolution is not break out of the old but to create new clichés clichés stand here for me for these new spontaneous forms of life whenever communists in power created them they did create some new clichés but they were pretty sad ones like all the cynical wisdoms clichés of Stalinism and so on and so on so against this background my repulsion of this idea wonderful revolution it’s exploding and so on i’m so bored by it i like order the true test of a revolution is a new order not totally but you know what i mean as i always repeat it what happens when things return to normal so here here i would like to approach to finish for today what is happening today i think basically what is happening it's not something as new as it may appear it is new but the novelty is more or less that what was always already here but in an implicit way is coming out explicit getting explicit for example what do Donald Trump Vladimir Putin and others stand for listen all these tasteless Twitters by Donald Trump and so on i mean if you look at biographies of American presidents privately they were all telling even nastier dirty jokes and so on and so on but they were not doing it publicly and form matters for me you know like it’s totally wrong this moralist view it’s better that we have it out in the public eh i doubt it it’s better you know and so the obscenity of power is simply becoming part of the public discourse and if you permit me i will give you three examples here one is i put a variation of what i’ve already presented here you know some of my naive American friends were shocked by the idea of how can Donald Trump a perverted destitute ridiculous person if you have any sense of Christian decency you should say the very opposite of Christian decency how can he function as the chosen hero of American Christian conservatives and the answer i get is that while Christian conservatives are well aware of the problematic character of Trump's personality they have chosen to ignore this side of things since what really matters to them is Trump's agenda i mean you cannot imagine how important for them for example is prohibiting abortion and they say okay we will tolerate all of this but if Trump nominates the two i think he has now two posts free the two Supreme Court judges and they overturn how's that one called Roe versus Wade or whatever that will be enough but i agree with this explanation up to a point but with my evil psychoanalytic mind i think that the solution is much more vulgar and brutal what if this apparent duality of Trump Christian values publicly and all this brutal tasteless anti-feminist and so on obscenity what if precisely this duality finds an echo in every conservative Christian what if they are like this i i’m much more much closer to this brutal interpretation that Christian fundamentalist recognize themselves precisely in this tension you pretend to be a Christian secretly full of obscenities rape jokes gay jokes whatever this is what they are so it's not something that they are embarrassed at Christian conservatives this is what they identify with and in next step i want to emphasize how you know don’t be too quick in just bashing the United States how at least in some places we in Europe are approaching it for example i will not tell you the usual thing and here i have some problems even with my otherwise friend Julian Assange not to mention Oliver Stone i i saw some clips on you know Oliver Stone now made a four hours documentary on Putin yeah you heard it that some parts are incredibly even for me to put it mildly not exactly known for his refined finesse whatever are too much you know like those absolute vulgarities like you know Oliver Stone asked him what would you have done if you were to find yourself in a shower with a gay man and and Putin said oh I practice karate or whatever judo and i would deal with him or even most tasteless for me when Oliver Stone asked Putin aren't you somehow people accuse you that you have these nervous outbursts mood no and you know what Putin answer i am not a woman woman has this mood every month when they have their period it's just vulgarities but let me move to another i was so shocked that i had to confirm with my Polish friends let’s take one of the big heroes of European Christian conservative morality it’s Jarosław Kaczyński the de facto boss of Poland the leader of that Law and Justice whatever party you know that my friends told me that when he for the first time with his brother took power in he used and that’s my point maybe we all privately talk like this but publicly on TV and in an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza which is the great left-center daily he used a term i will first put it in Polish Teraz kurwa my which vaguely translated means something like now it’s our time to fuck the whore now it’s our term we are now in power like but you know what’s so horrible you know to what this phrase in Polish refers it’s like in the sense of i was told by my friends it's a low class expression if you that you know these military gang rapes that you wait in turn to fuck sorry to whatever the prostitute and you know now it's my turn in the line to fuck her and again people were shocked i say no this is the actuality of Christian moral majority my god it's absolutely crucial to see this how i won’t try to do here in a much more brutal way the same way you you how to offend you if i say Jackie you will be mad no yes okay okay so i will not say it ha ha ha did you do an analysis of of long ago some more than years ago major times and earlier no all these who is our probably favorite character that ridiculous jockey guy Norman Debatt or who you don't remember he used some not quite like this but some you know all of a sudden sorry his racism yeah yeah and but not just racism racism put often in these quite vulgar terms and so on so again this is part of it i was shocked by this and so they will not say that i just attack the right i was shocked to read and he really did it i checked with my Maoist friends now comes the nastiest part Mao Zedong they just told me friendly it will amuse you read Mao's speech at the Lushan party conference in July and it's quite something you know why this was the moment when the first catastrophic results of the Great Leap Forward were known was already Cultural Revolution beginning Mao already plans his comeback but here Mao called the party cadre to assume their part of responsibility for millions dead and so on but the metaphor that he uses is please don't accuse me for dirty words i am embarrassed to pronounce them i quote Mao he himself admits his responsibility for the catastrophe and again we are not talking about small economic troubles we are talking about millions of people dead quote from Mao check it up just put Google Mao Lushan conference and then add shit and fuck and you will get it here is the quote the chaos caused was on a grand scale and i take responsibility comrades you must all analyze your own responsibility if you have to shit shit if you have to fart fart you will feel much better for it that's quote end of quote this is the final sentence of the report so you cannot even say oh this were somewhere this was somewhere in the middle or whatever covered up this was the final point now you know what i find a little bit weird here let's drop the vulgarity of it this type of F-word that i'm sorry i used here did you notice i would never have used it while the other F-word the big one i am ready to use it not this one what bothers me it's not the vulgarity but what is Mao really apologizing for through this metaphor he is talking about his responsibility for millions of death and about how to take responsibility that you get rid of the guilt and his metaphor for admitting the guilt taking responsibility is like flatulence like do this it will make you feel better and so on and so on it's a very sad vulgarity not because of vulgarity as such but you see how often the metaphor tells more than it intends to say it tells a lot about because you know to compare again taking responsibility for millions of death with an act of flatulence which sorry wait does examples does that connect to that phrase that you use sometimes that there are moments at which the ethical itself becomes a temptation is this in in that line where standing up to this experience is letting God be God but is this is this this kind of moment but do you know that this line is from is from Søren Kierkegaard you know yeah yeah wait the way i see it is that when he tells them just just go with it and says like admit your responsibility act and the perversion here is that as if there was a way in that moment to do that and that was as simple as just releasing some you know letting your body function you see what i mean yeah but again this is what i this is what i found problematic that's the obscenity of that moment yeah it masquerades physical as the ethical it equates those two i in yeah yeah yeah right yeah yeah yeah right so in that sense yeah yeah no i agree with your point because like if i got you correctly i’m not saying that you should the opposite would also be wrong this kind of endless self-criticism or whatever and so on and so on but nonetheless it makes out of self-criticism a kind of a almost i would say in an obscene way pleasant simple experience moral masochism sorry it replaces what you call the point of the impossible with an exercise in collective moral masochism yeah moral masochism although i don't think that Mao would even call it masochism you know well he wouldn't but would you you wouldn't no masochism no no i see Mao ah i will give you an answer here i see masochism maybe in other things for example maybe i'm wrong but imagine if somebody stood up at that congress and actually did what he told them to do and said comrade Mao i'm doing it that would be moral masochism this is now now you think like me because i always like to imagine it how Mao would have reacted if somebody with just stood up another himself at debate stood up say i support comrade Mao do that gesture and i think that it's more complex in the sense of he would probably immediately be arrested and so on you know because that’s the whole art of political discourse and especially in China i was told they are sensitive to it one thing is to be called to do something another thing is to really do it the whole art of public discourse in this i used here this innumeral boring examples of Stalin criticize him or not is that quite often when you are explicitly called to do something the most dangerous thing is to do it the whole art of finding your way in an authoritarian situation is to recognize when calls are empty calls like you have to do you have to do the exact you have to do the exact opposite so so let's go back in it you know here is my pessimism although with Mao Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution for which Badiou attacked me he wrote a text friendly text nonetheless it was in a quite Stalinist way if you look at French translation of my Mao on contradiction it was published with an addendum by Badiou where he shows where i am wrong and so on but you know what he doesn't accept maybe he's right i don't know in my reading and that's the brutal irony the objective social function of Cultural Revolution was to create the space for Deng Xiaoping because the only thing that Cultural Revolution objectively achieved was to destroy the traditional ethical foundation the past was over and people the result was that people found themselves millions of young people like naked ideologically with no perspective and so on they were totally disappointed but it was no longer possible to return to the old traditional view and then this was the ideal space clearing the slate the table for capitalism for and it i was very disappointed that Naomi Klein didn't use this in her The Shock Doctrine objectively Cultural Revolution was the greatest shock to open up the space for for Chinese capitalism so i don't think again maybe this is my paranoia maybe even Mao knew it secretly because you know Alain Badiou told me this you know that when Deng Xiaoping was purged Mao gave an order don't kill him we will need him later so who knows what Mao was thinking and so on and so on so again this is my first point of how the second point about but i already used this line here so i will just very briefly go into it the second point is you remember maybe not with you but i developed this here another example i don't get it why people are so shocked about Pokémon GO and those augmented reality games i think again it's the same as with obscenity something that was here all the time came out open i think that the you know the trick of Pokémon GO i only observed my son watching it it’s something extremely interesting because it’s no longer virtual reality as escape from reality you look at reality but when you look at it from the screen something is added to it Pokémon figure so you have the usual sheet of reality and quite literally the figure Pokémon is the object cause of desire you look at the reality it's confusing if you look at the same reality through the screen oh my god it's the figure Pokémon i have to catch it and so on you know it literally renders reality as part of a consistent narrative triggers your desire and so on so i was in Germany attacked when i compared claiming that the the Jew was Hitler's Pokémon you know isn't this exactly what Hitler did reality was boring confusing for ordinary people crisis they perceive it as moral decadence chaos and so on eh Hitler told them basically let's play Pokémon GO look at it through my ideological glasses you will see the Jew you know let's let's catch it let's and the game becomes interesting so of course i am not saying that Pokémon GO is in any sense Nazi i am just saying this that the best definition in contemporary terms of ideology would have been ideology is augmented reality in this sense that you you look at reality and ideologically ideology structures the space so that you see more you see some equivalent of Pokémon figure etc and things become things become interesting and so on and so on now i am not saying i don't have time to develop it now but i am not saying that we should simply return to pure to looking at reality the way it is it's much more complex what i'm just saying and that's my point is through digitalization of our life and it’s a very dangerous operation something that before was done through anonymous ideological mechanisms you know like are we not all the time when and we always are in a way part of ideological space are we not playing Pokémon games what is for example Islamophobic racism i meet an Arab friend ah Pokémon tells me he’s a dangerous terrorist rapist and so on and so on it's literally ideology fills in
unknown
the space with Pokémon figures something added to reality to because this i always like here a propos Hitler to emphasize this beautiful ambiguity in English of
the space with Pokémon figures something added to reality to because this i always like here a propos Hitler to emphasize this beautiful ambiguity in English of
Slavoj Žižek
the word plot which at the same time is plot-complot dark plot and plot in the sense of narrative
the word plot which at the same time is plot-complot dark plot and plot in the sense of narrative
unknown
Hitler knits the Jewish plot conspiracy to offer to the people a consistent plot you don't know what is happening i will tell you what is happening here we have the simple narrative the Jew and so on and so on and when you mentioned
Hitler knits the Jewish plot conspiracy to offer to the people a consistent plot you don't know what is happening i will tell you what is happening here we have the simple narrative the Jew and so on and so on and when you mentioned
Slavoj Žižek
masochism
masochism
unknown
before here masochism enters in a more sorry a complex way for example i see where are we
before here masochism enters in a more sorry a complex way for example i see where are we
Slavoj Žižek
okay i still have time i see masochism also in more in a certain type of political correctness you know the falsity it makes you what i reproach political correctness with is that it thrives on making you feel guilty permanently you know like many of
okay i still have time i see masochism also in more in a certain type of political correctness you know the falsity it makes you what i reproach political correctness with is that it thrives on making you feel guilty permanently you know like many of
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my American friends you know oh my god i use that expression black is it right was i not a racist should i
my American friends you know oh my god i use that expression black is it right was i not a racist should i
Slavoj Žižek
say African-American but if i say that what about Caribbean Americans are they af- you know the idea is this all the time
say African-American but if i say that what about Caribbean Americans are they af- you know the idea is this all the time
unknown
i should feel guilty and the same is with ecology you know did i did i recycle all my trash cans and so on and so on of course i didn't
i should feel guilty and the same is with ecology you know did i did i recycle all my trash cans and so on and so on of course i didn't
Slavoj Žižek
and i wasn't in a good mood but this was the example that unfortunate with Will Self that i had in Emanuel Centre debate and he went directly into this direction he said yes i agree with you because of ecology we are all doomed it’s a problem and then he did what he shouldn't have done from my standpoint he said he turned to the people and said but look at you do you not all have cell phones and so on are you not aware that there is what’s that stupid metal from Congo coltan in it so you are all guilty and so on precisely this dimension should be because it’s an obscenity to say you know we are all guilty no fuck it we are not all guilty in the same way it’s an obscenity that a big company which ruins whole countryside will tell you ah but you are using my coltan you are also guilty it's an obscenity because this kind of dispersal of responsibility guarantees that nothing will be done it just offers you a small way a small this is moral masochism which even and another topic i already improvised on it here another topic would have been to enter here surplus enjoyment how you remember that disgusting story maybe i already used it here of a Mexican judge i think i did the last time yes i did yes fuck you who allowed you to to you should say no you didn't you should sacrifice yourself no okay you remember it's disgusting i checked with my Mexican friends a girl was raped seriously by young men and one of them as if by chance the wealthiest one young boy was pardoned by the judge why his defense was it’s not a joke feminist exploded in Mexico and they were fully right the defense claimed that no facts were disputed the guy gladly admitted probably with open obscenity that he was i don't want touching her intimately and brutally i will not go into details but the catch is that he claimed i didn't i wasn't aroused i didn't enjoy it sexually and the judge claimed if there was no pleasure sexual you cannot be guilty it was madness but what okay it was obvious corruption i agree with you but what i try nonetheless to reconstruct is the potential reasoning of the judge and i think it was not only that sexuality or sexual pleasure as such is sinful brings guilt but maybe we should to understand the perversity of our universe go a step further and claim that also some kind of guilt feeling is a condition of pleasure that if it's just sexual pleasure you just it's pleasure so what it can be vulgar but to get that little bit more which makes he probably just got money no of course it was this no no the guy was bribed it's clear but nonetheless i think that this perversity i agree with you no it's disgusting i agree with you yeah yeah but nonetheless what interests me is this additional perverted twist again not only sexual pleasure is sinful but that without the spicy touch of sin it's not real pleasure you have to have it don't under- don't underestimate this and again this worries me about about political correctness about certain type of of ecology and so on and so on how they immobilize you precisely by diffusing this abstract level of guilt okay now just to conclude to tell you i think i'm already i presented here i would like to go into this out of this modern constellation where as i tried to point out what was till now implicit is coming out explicitly if you want to so that i will not lose time next time in LARB Los Angeles Review of Books they have philosophical salon and there it's very marginal but it's easy to get so that i will not lose time here reading things that are available to you they published about a month ago now i think a text which is not great by me but i think its topic is interesting i've stolen the idea i admit it from a young American researcher Rebecca Carson it's a wonderful idea you know people may be my friends but when it's about good ideas i steal them ruthlessly and i was kind to acknowledge her because you know what's the usual way to steal an idea is to write at the time when this article was finished i noticed that another person also developed a similar idea and so on no i openly admit it you know what's the ingenious idea because this is another way of how what was implicit comes out explicit her idea is that on the one hand we emphasize how capital is today more and more fictitious capital like do you know that much more money is moved around in this fictitious speculations with future than with actual investments but her idea is a very simple one it’s that the obverse of this fictionalization financial is the return of direct personal domination in interpersonal relations i found this idea ingenious that it’s not just that it’s more and more fictitious the obverse at least in good old commodification when i sell myself my labor force to a capitalist i remain free as Karl Marx put it relations of personal domination are transposed onto relations between things so that formally we are free now the price we are paying for this fictionalization is that interpersonal relations are again more and more becoming relations of direct domination and maybe i will so i don't want to repeat myself please Google put my stupid name Žižek LARB and domination and you will immediately get it it's a short text where i try to give all the dimensions i like this very Hegelian idea how where you think that you are at the most fictitious you know oh it's just pure even computers can do it for us we pay the price and i would like to connect this i didn't yet do it in at that text it only later came to me to how because money still functions but and some Italian followers of Antonio Negri developed this idea in a quite nice way some of those autonomista or whatever of how money through all these foundations state support or even big companies like Google and so on it’s no longer at least not directly in immediate way it still is money through exploitation commodification but that money here functions in a new way with somebody who has such a lot of money like again Google and so on it’s money as direct tool of personal domination you know who gets financial support and so on and so on it's a different logic where again in an incredible way money is directly politicized but politicized as
and i wasn't in a good mood but this was the example that unfortunate with Will Self that i had in Emanuel Centre debate and he went directly into this direction he said yes i agree with you because of ecology we are all doomed it’s a problem and then he did what he shouldn't have done from my standpoint he said he turned to the people and said but look at you do you not all have cell phones and so on are you not aware that there is what’s that stupid metal from Congo coltan in it so you are all guilty and so on precisely this dimension should be because it’s an obscenity to say you know we are all guilty no fuck it we are not all guilty in the same way it’s an obscenity that a big company which ruins whole countryside will tell you ah but you are using my coltan you are also guilty it's an obscenity because this kind of dispersal of responsibility guarantees that nothing will be done it just offers you a small way a small this is moral masochism which even and another topic i already improvised on it here another topic would have been to enter here surplus enjoyment how you remember that disgusting story maybe i already used it here of a Mexican judge i think i did the last time yes i did yes fuck you who allowed you to to you should say no you didn't you should sacrifice yourself no okay you remember it's disgusting i checked with my Mexican friends a girl was raped seriously by young men and one of them as if by chance the wealthiest one young boy was pardoned by the judge why his defense was it’s not a joke feminist exploded in Mexico and they were fully right the defense claimed that no facts were disputed the guy gladly admitted probably with open obscenity that he was i don't want touching her intimately and brutally i will not go into details but the catch is that he claimed i didn't i wasn't aroused i didn't enjoy it sexually and the judge claimed if there was no pleasure sexual you cannot be guilty it was madness but what okay it was obvious corruption i agree with you but what i try nonetheless to reconstruct is the potential reasoning of the judge and i think it was not only that sexuality or sexual pleasure as such is sinful brings guilt but maybe we should to understand the perversity of our universe go a step further and claim that also some kind of guilt feeling is a condition of pleasure that if it's just sexual pleasure you just it's pleasure so what it can be vulgar but to get that little bit more which makes he probably just got money no of course it was this no no the guy was bribed it's clear but nonetheless i think that this perversity i agree with you no it's disgusting i agree with you yeah yeah but nonetheless what interests me is this additional perverted twist again not only sexual pleasure is sinful but that without the spicy touch of sin it's not real pleasure you have to have it don't under- don't underestimate this and again this worries me about about political correctness about certain type of of ecology and so on and so on how they immobilize you precisely by diffusing this abstract level of guilt okay now just to conclude to tell you i think i'm already i presented here i would like to go into this out of this modern constellation where as i tried to point out what was till now implicit is coming out explicitly if you want to so that i will not lose time next time in LARB Los Angeles Review of Books they have philosophical salon and there it's very marginal but it's easy to get so that i will not lose time here reading things that are available to you they published about a month ago now i think a text which is not great by me but i think its topic is interesting i've stolen the idea i admit it from a young American researcher Rebecca Carson it's a wonderful idea you know people may be my friends but when it's about good ideas i steal them ruthlessly and i was kind to acknowledge her because you know what's the usual way to steal an idea is to write at the time when this article was finished i noticed that another person also developed a similar idea and so on no i openly admit it you know what's the ingenious idea because this is another way of how what was implicit comes out explicit her idea is that on the one hand we emphasize how capital is today more and more fictitious capital like do you know that much more money is moved around in this fictitious speculations with future than with actual investments but her idea is a very simple one it’s that the obverse of this fictionalization financial is the return of direct personal domination in interpersonal relations i found this idea ingenious that it’s not just that it’s more and more fictitious the obverse at least in good old commodification when i sell myself my labor force to a capitalist i remain free as Karl Marx put it relations of personal domination are transposed onto relations between things so that formally we are free now the price we are paying for this fictionalization is that interpersonal relations are again more and more becoming relations of direct domination and maybe i will so i don't want to repeat myself please Google put my stupid name Žižek LARB and domination and you will immediately get it it's a short text where i try to give all the dimensions i like this very Hegelian idea how where you think that you are at the most fictitious you know oh it's just pure even computers can do it for us we pay the price and i would like to connect this i didn't yet do it in at that text it only later came to me to how because money still functions but and some Italian followers of Antonio Negri developed this idea in a quite nice way some of those autonomista or whatever of how money through all these foundations state support or even big companies like Google and so on it’s no longer at least not directly in immediate way it still is money through exploitation commodification but that money here functions in a new way with somebody who has such a lot of money like again Google and so on it’s money as direct tool of personal domination you know who gets financial support and so on and so on it's a different logic where again in an incredible way money is directly politicized but politicized as
unknown
direct means
direct means
Slavoj Žižek
of domination and this would be
of domination and this would be
unknown
very
very
Slavoj Žižek
interesting to do for example again with things like Google although i have many problems with Assange but i must admit that his best work for me is a book i forgot the title When Google Met WikiLeaks and it's typical how that book is totally is totally ignored another okay i've got about two more minutes okay then i will just finish with another point where i agreed with Julian Assange with all my criticism about him too soft to Russia and so on don't you think he is right when he claims that although probably Russians did it that all that how do you call it hacking meddling yeah but it’s deeply suspicious in what way American Democratic Party is obsessed with this idea i think it's very dark political plot not of Russians of them their logic is this one without Russian hackers they would have to admit we screwed up the election and ask what they did wrong how they treated Bernie Sanders and so on now they can claim we objectively won it's just the foreigners the Russians and so on what is now happening in United States is horrible silent struggle in the Democratic Party to get rid of all Sanders supporters and so on and so on you see how paranoia still functions it's a pure case of ideology even if it's true it nonetheless a paranoia you focus on Russian hackers and so on to avoid the key political gesture ah i even have thirty seconds okay so i'm sorry if it was confused today but i promise you tomorrow we end yes and the last thing if you want a short book which is not a great book but nicely written it's one evening reading i think i did it send it to you in literature it's Graham Harman Immaterialism it's just a pages extremely readable and critical towards that book but there you have all this assemblage object-oriented ontology described in a very briefly in clear terms because again i think that nonetheless they have a point but we must be critical towards them that's what i will i promise you even if i die from grave i will address you i will i will we will go in a because we can draw so many interesting conclusions theoretically as to the status of the subject what is subjectivity and so on so tomorrow i promise we get confrontation with assemblage theory i’m grateful for your attention and fuck life see you tomorrow
interesting to do for example again with things like Google although i have many problems with Assange but i must admit that his best work for me is a book i forgot the title When Google Met WikiLeaks and it's typical how that book is totally is totally ignored another okay i've got about two more minutes okay then i will just finish with another point where i agreed with Julian Assange with all my criticism about him too soft to Russia and so on don't you think he is right when he claims that although probably Russians did it that all that how do you call it hacking meddling yeah but it’s deeply suspicious in what way American Democratic Party is obsessed with this idea i think it's very dark political plot not of Russians of them their logic is this one without Russian hackers they would have to admit we screwed up the election and ask what they did wrong how they treated Bernie Sanders and so on now they can claim we objectively won it's just the foreigners the Russians and so on what is now happening in United States is horrible silent struggle in the Democratic Party to get rid of all Sanders supporters and so on and so on you see how paranoia still functions it's a pure case of ideology even if it's true it nonetheless a paranoia you focus on Russian hackers and so on to avoid the key political gesture ah i even have thirty seconds okay so i'm sorry if it was confused today but i promise you tomorrow we end yes and the last thing if you want a short book which is not a great book but nicely written it's one evening reading i think i did it send it to you in literature it's Graham Harman Immaterialism it's just a pages extremely readable and critical towards that book but there you have all this assemblage object-oriented ontology described in a very briefly in clear terms because again i think that nonetheless they have a point but we must be critical towards them that's what i will i promise you even if i die from grave i will address you i will i will we will go in a because we can draw so many interesting conclusions theoretically as to the status of the subject what is subjectivity and so on so tomorrow i promise we get confrontation with assemblage theory i’m grateful for your attention and fuck life see you tomorrow