Slavoj Zizek lecture Totality or Assemblage 03
Lecture · John Hillman ·
published 2022-02-25 · 1:50:52 · 14,935 words
the date above is when the video was uploaded, no recording date was found
ideologypsychoanalysiscinema-art-culturephilosophy-generalcommunism-socialismscience-physicshistorysubjectivityhegel-dialecticssexuality-gendercapitalismrevolution-violence
Žižek begins with autobiographical anecdotes illustrating the 'obsessional neurotic' as a 'vanishing mediator' who causes catastrophe while remaining unseen, using this to critique Levi Bryant’s 'flat ontology' and 'politics of things.' He praises Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera as a model of 'cinematic communism' and Richard Lewontin/Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of 'exaptation' to argue against Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology. Žižek contends that Harman’s substantialist view of objects’ 'inner wealth' fails to account for the irreducible role of language/symbolic practice and the antagonistic nature of relations, illustrated by a critique of Spinoza’s natural inferiority of women. Žižek argues for the priority of formal relations over static properties, using human rights and the example of coffee to illustrate how 'essence' is a diagram of potentialities opened by historical relations. He critiques Badiou’s ontology of the event, arguing that actualization precedes possibility, and uses examples like Antigone and Phyllis Schlafly to show how formal gestures can shift the 'diagram' of social identities and rights. Žižek explores the dialectic of mediation and immediacy, arguing that the subject is a retroactive effect rather than a pre-existing substance, illustrated through examples of romantic love, teaching, and political leadership. He critiques Freud’s genetic positivism in favor of Lacan’s retroactive logic, applying this to the figure of the 'primordial father' and contemporary politics (Trump). The excerpt concludes with an analysis of the 'plus' in LGBTQ+ as a structural placeholder for lack and a critique of object-oriented ontology’s substantialism. Žižek analyzes Alenka Zupančič’s book What is Sex? to argue that sexual difference is structured by a 'plus' (hysterical questioning) rather than a binary, positioning subjectivity as a failure of self-recognition. He critiques Ernesto Laclau’s hegemony theory by introducing the 'zero point' exception (the excluded) as the true site of antagonism. Finally, he redefines subjectivity not as active substance but as a passive, 'hysterical' void or 'madness' that precedes and grounds human reality, drawing on Hegel, Lacan, and Schelling. Žižek critiques Alain Badiou’s reading of Greek tragedy, arguing for Sophocles’ anxiety over Aeschylus’ event, before launching into a Q&A session. He engages with Lacanian ontology, rejecting the primacy of partial objects in favor of the symbolic cut, and addresses the crisis of private property and capitalism through Wolfgang Streeck’s analysis of disintegration. He concludes by framing contemporary politics as a need to remain faithful to the legacy of the French Revolution and Communism despite their failures, necessitating risky, unknown future actions.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 47
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “obsessional neurotic”
A psychoanalytic stance where the subject causes catastrophe but remains 'nowhere to be seen,' finding satisfaction in this hidden, untraceable agency.
A figure who causes a catastrophe or change but remains unseen/untraceable, identified by Žižek with the obsessional neurotic's satisfaction in causing harm without being held responsible.
Bruno Latour’s concept, which Žižek uses to explain ecological inaction by including material constraints (media, economics) alongside ideological processes, though he critiques its 'flat ontology'.
Levi Bryant’s view that there are no ontologically privileged agents; human subjects are just one among disparate objects, which Žižek partially sympathizes with but ultimately rejects for ignoring the specific negativity of the subject.
Jacques Rancière’s term for Man with a Movie Camera, describing a practice that presents a multiplicity of life forms (washing hair, cleaning streets) at the same level, suspending hierarchies.
The assertion in Man with a Movie Camera that all displayed phenomena are equalized and hierarchies are suspended, which Žižek finds beautiful but insufficient because it misses the 'twisted order' of the subject.
Graham Harman’s hypothesis that objects have an 'inner life' or 'psychism' inaccessible to science, which Žižek sympathizes with regarding the 'more' in objects but rejects as unnecessary.
Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould’s evolutionary concept where organisms use redundant/excess traits (like the appendix or male nipples) for new, non-teleological functions, which Žižek uses to explain the contingent origin of language without functionalist necessity.
Spinoza’s argument in Tractatus Politicus that women have less natural right/power than men, which Žižek uses to criticize Spinoza’s equation of power and right, and to agree with Harman’s critique of Spinoza’s substantialism.
Jean-Claude Milner’s project, which Žižek supports, to remove Spinoza’s status as a sacred, untouchable thinker by highlighting his reactionary passages (like the one on women).
as “inherent antagonism”
The view of Latour and De Landa that new potentials arise not from objects' inner substantiality, but from the contradictory, antagonistic nature of relations when entities are thrown into new constellations.
The process where historical antagonisms open possibilities that are simultaneously crushed, creating a relative opening that defines the tragedy and hope of capitalism.
The argument that formal relations (like the declaration of rights) precede and open up new properties, rather than properties determining relations.
The claim that a consistent ontology requires an exception; one cannot have a flat ontology without an exception (like the 'a' in the Triple O critique).
as “Badiou’s event”
Badiou's concept where something emerges when there is no formal condition for it, which Žižek critiques as oscillating between genuine ontological duality and mere 'twists' in the order of being.
as “retro causality”
The idea that an event becomes possible only through its actualization; actualization precedes possibility, meaning something not considered possible happens and thereby makes itself possible.
as “transcendental change”
A change not in mystical essence but in the 'diagram' of what one's potentials are; the crucial revolution is changing the diagram of possibilities, not just gaining actual rights.
A non-essentialist notion of essence where a thing's potentialities are defined by its network of relations and circumstances (e.g., coffee's potentialities in a Starbucks network).
The process where a subject discovers new potentials in themselves through mediation, which are retroactively experienced as their own immediate desires, rather than being taught something external.
as “mediation of immediacy”
The Hegelian idea that mediation does not just stand between two immediacies but produces a new immediacy; the subject is 'absolute mediation elevated to a new immediacy.'
Lacan’s revision of Freud: the primordial father is not a historical predecessor to the Oedipus complex but a retroactive myth constructed to cover a gap in the symbolic order.
The Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) claim (Harman, Bryant, Levi) that objects have a hidden, inaccessible depth, which Žižek critiques for ignoring the relational nature of the subject.
Freud’s concept where the unconscious is the 'invisible depth side' of a person, contrasted with the ego/consciousness which is the visible, relational side.
Žižek’s concept (and book title) describing a substantial entity that retroactively posits its own cause through its effects, reversing the standard causal direction.
as “Subject as failed object”
The subject is 'less than an object'; it is a 'plus' or void that cannot be ontologically grasped as a thing.
as “plus as identity”
The 'plus' in LGBTQ+ is not just an open-ended placeholder for future identities but a specific, rigid identity in itself, a structural placeholder for the failure of any total classification.
as “M plus”
Lacan’s minimal formula for sexual difference: 'M' (masculine identity) plus 'plus' (the hysterical questioning of that identity), where the 'plus' signals subjectivity.
as “Asiatic mode of production as lack”
A dialectical placeholder meaning not a positive category, but the element that does not fit, subjectivizing the series by embodying the lack.
as “Hysterical questioning”
The fundamental structure of subjectivity; the impossibility of recognizing oneself in one's substantial identity, manifesting as 'why am I what the big Other says I am?'
Hysteria is not confusion but the basic form of ideological critique, questioning the symbolic identity imposed by the social order.
The condition of men who fail to be 'hystericalized,' believing they simply are their identity without self-questioning.
The originally lost object is not an external thing but the subject itself, which never gains access to itself as an object.
as “Sexuality as failure”
Sexuality is not a mystery of content but a mystery of form; it is the failure to be defined that sexualizes a situation, distinguishing human coupling from animal instinct.
The element that has no place in society (e.g., proletarians, rebel pöbel) but embodies the negativity of society, standing for universality through exclusion, distinct from the hegemonic exception.
as “object-oriented ontology”
The philosophy of Levi Bryant and Graham Harman, which Žižek critiques for returning to a 'traditional realist ontology' where objects have an impenetrable inner life, ignoring the irreducible totality of symbolic practice.
as “Appearance of nothing”
The specificity of the subject: it is not the appearance of something (substance) but appearance itself, existing only in its activity (Tathandlung).
The subject appears to itself not as a hidden depth, but as the appearance of the veil itself; the ultimate illusion is that there is something deep behind the appearance.
as “Darkness of the World”
The metaphor for subject from Kant onwards: the subject is not the light of reason but the point of madness/darkness within a rational world.
as “Madness as background of spirituality”
Human spirituality is a refined way to avoid madness; the threat of madness must remain in the background to constitute the human.
Humanity is not a derailed nature but nature itself that is 'sick up to death'; madness is already present in nature (e.g., quantum physics).
as “Death drive / Negativity”
A radical self-destructive negativity that is neither the order of being nor the event, yet is the background for any event.
A state of anxiety where the retroactive effect of an event has not yet occurred, leaving the subject in uncertainty.
as “negative positivity”
A paradoxical ontology where something is 'less than nothing' yet nonetheless exists, forming the basis of his argument in Recoil and Less than Nothing.
A mystical/speculative formulation describing the genesis of the symbolic order from void and plus, culminating in object a.
Lacan’s crucial discovery that one cannot rely on the Big Other for wholeness; the Big Other lacks and is itself subject to castration.
The 'answer of the real,' referring to the traumatic, unavoidable intrusion of reality when symbolic frameworks fail, necessitating risky political decisions.
The political task of accepting the horrors of past revolutionary failures (like the Gulag) without renouncing the emancipatory legacy itself, akin to Hegel’s view of the French Revolution.
Stories he reaches for 6
Žižek analyzes Antigone, arguing her greatness lies not in her conservative content but in the form of her public gesture, which broke the boundaries of feminine identity in ancient times.
“the greatness of Antigone is not what she wants but that she wants it in the public space as a public gesture.”
Žižek quotes Spinoza’s argument that women’s natural inferiority is proven by their historical subordination, using this to 'desacralize' Spinoza and agree with Harman that Spinoza reduces potentiality to actuality, though Žižek rejects Harman’s substantialist solution.
“If by nature women were equal to men... surely among nations so many and different some would be found where both sexes rule alike... And since this is nowhere the case, one may assert... that women have not by nature equal right with men.”
Two Greek painters compete: one paints grapes so real birds peck them; the other paints a veil. The winner is the one who paints the veil, tricking the viewer into wanting to 'unveil' what isn't there.
“He painted a veil... unveil it so that I see what is behind.”
Marx’s hesitation regarding the 'Asiatic mode of production' (Egypt, China, India) is compared to the 'plus' in LGBTQ+: a placeholder for the failure of a totalizing theory (capitalism/communism).
“there is a problem with Asiatic mode of production... Marx was very cautious with it”
Freud’s book on Moses is 'ruined' because his teleological, genetic positivism cannot accommodate the idea that Moses is an exceptional element triggering a new order, whereas Lacan’s retroactive logic handles it better.
“Freud's official myth in Totem and Taboo... Lacan does something quite convincing here he turns it around.”
The famous scene where Hugh Grant’s character fails to deliver his love declaration to Andie MacDowell, illustrating that 'something is absolutely co-existent with its failure', the subject is defined by its failure to be a substance.
“I'm ashamed to tell its failure to be. Something is absolutely co-existent with its failure.”
Works invoked 21
Vertigo film
Noted as the current highest-voted film in polls, surpassing Citizen Kane and Potemkin, used to pivot to a discussion of cinema’s value.
Hegel’s work cited for the metaphor of the soul as a veil.
Less Than Nothing book
Mentioned as the predecessor to 'Absolute Recoil,' which Žižek felt he missed the crucial thing in, leading to the 'recoil' of the new book.
Philosophy of Right book
Hegel’s work, which Žižek argues describes a social system whose time has already passed, yet whose legacy (French Revolution) must be reactivated.
Grundrisse book
Marx’s work cited for the concept of modes of production.
What is Sex? book
Alenka Zupančič’s book; praised for its definition of sexual difference (M plus) and its ironic title.
Absolute Recoil book
Žižek’s own book, which he recommends as the one to read if forced to choose, dealing with the concept of retroactive causation.
Described as 'the most stupid Hugh Grant movie' but used as a brilliant example of the subject as failure (the love declaration scene).
Citizen Kane film
Previously voted greatest film, now surpassed by Vertigo in polls; used as a benchmark for film history.
Disparities book
Mentioned as another book where Žižek felt he missed the crucial thing, part of the chain of 'Absolute Recoil'.
Hegel’s work cited for the anthropology of spirit and the relationship between madness and humanity.
Totem and Taboo book
Žižek argues Freud’s official myth in this book (primordial father killed by sons) is less convincing than Lacan’s retroactive interpretation.
Gulliver's Travels book
Used to recount a 'comical' naive theory of language origin (carrying models of objects), illustrating the circularity of functionalist explanations.
Battleship Potemkin film
Eisenstein’s film, previously voted greatest; Žižek contrasts it with Vertov’s work, preferring Vertov’s 'cinematic communism'.
Oresteia play
Badiou’s positive reading of this work is rejected by Žižek as representing an 'early decadence' compared to Sophocles.
Genesis other
Referenced as a 'mystical speculations' source for developing the logic of void, plus, and symbolic order.
Vertov’s documentary, called a 'mega film' by Žižek; praised for its 'cinematic communism' and 'radical univocity of being' which suspends hierarchies.
Freud’s reading of Schreber’s case used to illustrate the nature of paranoia and madness.
The Painted Veil book
Maugham’s novel mentioned as a 'kitschy' reference to the veil painting anecdote.
Recoil book
Žižek’s own book where he elaborates a 'paradoxical ontology' beginning with the void and plus.
Tractatus Politicus book
Spinoza’s work, cited by Žižek for its passage on the 'natural inferiority of women', which he uses to criticize Spinoza’s equation of power and right.
People invoked 51
Melanie Klein negative
Represented by the 'Kleinian mother' who controls/castrates, which Lacan moves beyond by showing the Big Other is also lacking.
Mary Wollstonecraft positive
Cited as an early example of claiming human rights ('why not also us?') following the proclamation of men's rights.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte positive
Cited for the concept of Tathandlung (act/activity) as the subject.
Mentioned as having spoken about Moses and monotheism, prompting Žižek’s response regarding Freud’s failure.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Collaborator and friend; praises her book What is Sex? and her definition of sexual difference (M plus).
Robert Pippin positive
Described as a 'conservative liberal Hegelian' who made a 'wonderful observation' about Hegel’s Owl of Minerva.
Colleague who does not follow Zupančič and Žižek’s radical reading of madness.
Mentioned as author of 'The Painted Veil', referenced in the Zeuxis/Parrhasius anecdote.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Used as a metaphor for making 'very risky decisions' in the face of the real.
Mentioned in the context of 'Wagner versus Nietzsche' and enigmatic traces.
Freud’s famous case of paranoia used to illustrate the relationship between madness and symptom.
Jacques Lacan positive
Studied with him and his follower Jacques-Alain Miller in Paris; foundational influence on Žižek's psychoanalytic framework.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Evolutionary biologist who developed 'exaptation'; Žižek praises his theory that language emerged contingently from excess, not direct adaptation.
Mentioned as one who elevated Spinoza to a 'sacred untouchable name', which Žižek disputes.
Mentioned as one who elevated Spinoza to a 'sacred untouchable name', which Žižek disputes.
Greek painter who painted grapes so real birds pecked them.
Donald Trump positive
Used as a contemporary example of the 'primordial father' figure, specifically his vulgar boasting and comments about his daughter, which Žižek analyzes as a deliberate embrace of this role.
Wolfgang Streeck positive
A 'German guy who is a little bit simple naive' but has 'something to say'; his thesis on capitalism’s disintegration is used by Žižek.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited for his etymological play on 'imbecile' to illustrate the Hegelian formula of immediacy as negated mediation.
Graham Harman negative
Criticized for 'object-oriented ontology' and 'panpsychism'; Žižek agrees with Harman’s critique of Spinoza but rejects his substantialist view of objects’ 'inner wealth', preferring a relational account.
Jacqueline Rose positive
Cited for the observation 'men kill women, women laugh at men' to illustrate gender dynamics.
Jean-Claude Milner positive
Philosopher who 'desacralizes Spinoza'; Žižek agrees with Milner on this point despite having 'many critical points' against him otherwise.
Friedrich Engels negative
Criticized for a 'naive circular theory' of language origin in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, where language developed directly from the need for collaboration.
Bruno Latour negative
Cited for 'politics of things'; Žižek agrees with his account of material processes but rejects his 'flat ontology' as insufficient.
Benedictus de Spinoza negative
Desacralized by Žižek, who cites Spinoza’s passage on the 'natural inferiority of women' to argue that Spinoza reduces potentiality to actuality, agreeing with Harman’s critique but rejecting his solution.
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Cited for his comment on austerity, distinguishing the West's 'austerity' from Greece's real suffering.
Aeschylus negative
Badiou reads Aeschylus positively as an 'event' against decadence; Žižek disagrees, preferring Sophocles.
Carl Jung negative
Contrasted with Lacan; Jung thought the unconscious was deep psychic content, which Lacan rejected.
Called 'one of the really disgusting anti-feminists' and a 'neocon icon,' used to illustrate the contradiction between conservative content and formal appearance.
Hegel is described as 'more Foucauldian than Foucault' regarding the relationship between madness and spirituality.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Critiqued for having only 'hegemony' and missing the 'zero point' exception (the excluded).
Jacques Rancière positive
Gave a 'wonderful paper' on Man with a Movie Camera as 'cinematic communism'; Žižek agrees with Rancière’s analysis of the film’s suspension of hierarchies.
Martin Heidegger negative
Contrasted with Lacan; Lacan’s subjectivity is not Cartesian/Heideggerian but rooted in 'madness' and passivity.
Jacques-Alain Miller positive
French psychoanalyst and Lacan’s son; Žižek studied with him in Paris and stayed in his apartment.
Dziga Vertov positive
Director of Man with a Movie Camera, which Žižek calls a 'mega film' and praises for its 'cinematic communism' and 'radical univocity of being'.
Manuel DeLanda positive
Assemblage theorist whose account of 'inherent antagonism' in relations Žižek finds 'much more productive' than Harman’s substantialism.
Greek painter who won the competition by painting a veil.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited for the theory that God created the world to escape his own madness.
Levi Bryant negative
Criticized for 'flat ontology' and 'politics of things'; Žižek has 'sympathy' for the view but rejects it for ignoring the subject's negativity and the irreducibility of language.
Richard Lewontin positive
Evolutionary biologist whose concept of 'exaptation' Žižek praises as the 'only correct theory' for explaining the contingent origin of language.
Sophocles positive
Žižek is 'pro Sophocles,' arguing that the darkness/anxiety in Sophocles is necessary for an event.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Director of Vertigo, which Žižek notes has become the highest-voted film in polls, using it to pivot to his discussion of cinema.
Sergei Eisenstein positive
Director of Potemkin, previously voted greatest film; Žižek contrasts him with Vertov, favoring Vertov’s 'cinematic communism'.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for his caution regarding the 'Asiatic mode of production,' which Žižek uses as an analogy for the structural 'plus' in LGBTQ+.
Referenced in the context of 'the point with which Moses was trying' to explain the castration of the father.
Described as 'the well-known writer who got a big prize from Pinochet,' used to illustrate hypocrisy.
Sigmund Freud negative
Žižek argues Freud’s book on Moses is 'ruined' because his genetic/teleological framework cannot accommodate the exceptional nature of the founder, whereas Lacan’s retroactive approach is more convincing.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for 'substance as subject', the 'pöbel' (rabble) as zero point, and madness as the background of spirituality.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for the shift in metaphor from 'light' to 'darkness' as the subject.
John Maynard Keynes negative
Keynesianism is deemed 'out' because throwing money into the economy no longer triggers development.
Friedrich Nietzsche negative
Described as 'a brutal racist' who praised ancient India's estates and was 'ferociously against' certain things.
Transcript 35 turns
Slavoj Žižek
When I was young, we still had those simple black box phones and it was primitive in the sense that when somebody called you and it was a missed call, no way to trace where it come from. So, okay, once in my apartment phone rang. I picked it up and a voice said, is, I think the name was Christina, I’m not sure. Is Christina there? There was no Christina in my apartment at no point, so it was clear that it was a missed call. I didn’t do it, but immediately I was tempted to say something like, oh, sorry, this is medical urgency service, Christina just had a heart attack, she will probably die, and put it off. You know the idea? Like, I’m purely neutral. I cause catastrophe, but I am, that’s the obsessional neurotic stance. I cause catastrophe, but I am nowhere to be seen. Nobody can trace it back to me. And from, I don't know when I identified with this role of, you know, you’re just this lit, quite literally, vanishing mediator. You know, you cause a catastrophe but you are nowhere to be and you don’t know it. This I considered my, never in my life almost did I feel as satisfied. You probably don’t know this story, it’s one of my early books. When I was in Paris studying with Miller and so on, I was pretty poor so I simply stayed with a friend of mine, French psychoanalyst, and I was sleeping in his analytic room with the couch and so on. No, but anyway, the trick was in this one that he and two of his other friends had an apartment where there were three rooms, each room was the room for an analyst. So once I returned home, I knew that my friend will not have patients and I heard some rumors, so I knew that I must be very silent because the analysis was going on in the other two rooms. So I entered this room, just silently. I put off because I bought some book, my books, I changed my jacket and left. Where was the catastrophe? Ah. Then, turning out to leave the room, I noticed, I’m an obsessional neurotic, a book on the table there. Sorry, yes, on the table. And I immediately knew it, this book doesn't fit there. I couldn’t resist my sense of order. I picked up the book and put it on the bookshelf where it belonged. This almost caused madness. You know why? Because in the next room was a friend of my friend. And later I learned what I caused by this. He was, he didn’t hear anything. He was absolutely sure that nobody was in the apartment. But this is what happened. He, that analyst next room, borrowed that book from my friend in whose room I was sleeping. And uh, just before I entered the apartment, he put the room there on the table and wanted to put it into a bookshelf, but uh, since his patient arrived, he wasn’t able to finish it, so he left there. After a short session, he came back. That's how it appeared to him. What happened? I know clearly that I left the book there, the room, sorry, the book is on the bookshelf there. The guy who had some other traumatic experiences, love breakdown, he was very nervous. He thought he is losing his mind. You know? How did I learn this? The same evening I was having dinner with my friend whose room that was, and my friend told me, if you meet that guy, please be careful how you deal with him, he is on the edge of a nervous breakdown, losing, losing sense of reality. I said what happened, and he said, you know this guy, he already has visions, you know, puts book there, then it’s [unintelligible], he is crazy. Uh, okay, I explained it and so on, no, but I felt so good, you know. It was my ideal role. I just intervened, nobody knew, you know. You see the parallel between this and that phone conversation. This is freedom. You are in this free space, you can do whatever you want, it will be not attributed to you, you know. That’s, sorry, that’s the closest I can come to, to freedom. But let's go on, sorry for that phone call. So Bryant's point is that if we widen our focus and include other actants, other processes in social reality that influence our decisions, like biased media reports, economic pressure on workers, threat of losing, threats of losing employment, material limitations and so on, the absence of ecological engagement becomes much more understanding. This would have been a very simple example of what Latour calls politics of things. Again, if you look at it as a pure ideological process, of course you can say, we know there is danger of global warming and so on, how come that we don't act? And then you have to go through this pseudo-complex, pseudo-Marxist theories, ideological mystification, whatever, but if you simply take into account the politics of things, all other material and so on processes which define your situation, in a minute it becomes much more understandable. So uh, again, assemblage, which features of assemblage did I forget to mention before? One is, and it's very nicely deployed by Levi Bryant, what he calls flat ontology, as opposed to hierarchy of beings. There are no ontologically privileged agents which can totalize reality. Human subjects are just one in the series of disparate objects. And I have a certain sympathy for this view. You know which is an ideal example? I hope you know it, it's even raising on the stock market of best films of all times. You know, it's very interesting to follow how, like in fifties, it was the time of Eisenstein, Potemkin. It was usually voted by critics the greatest film of all times. Then it was for some years, I think, it was the time of Citizen Kane. Now it's Hitchcock, Vertigo. We will see it will remain, but, sorry? Which one? Vertigo. Vertigo is now. It was a couple of years ago. Let's see if to voted whatever this means. But what I'm trying to tell you is that, and I think there is justice in this second feature. The highest Russian film of Russian silent classics is no longer, is no longer Eisenstein, it's now Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, the documentary. And I think it deserves to be, it's a mega film. Why? This is not all about this film. Just one feature, Jacques Rancière once I was with him at some seminar in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and he gave a wonderful paper on Man with a Movie Camera as a practice of cinematic communism. He gave a wonderful simple rhythm of how the point of this film is that, uh, it's not communist at all in the sense of official propaganda, you see no parades, nothing. It just presents this multiplicity of life forms in everyday life. I think it takes place in Odessa, which ironically is the city of Potemkin, Eisenstein, you know that famous scene on the stairs. Okay, what happens is that, uh, you see, for example, washing the hair, wrapping packages, playing piano, connecting phone wires, dancing ballet, cleaning the streets, whatever. All these activities are entangled through echoing different formal motives, circular motives and so on and so on. And according to Rancière, what makes this cinematic practice communist is the underlying assertion of the radical univocity of being. All the displayed phenomena are somehow equalized. All the usual hierarchies and oppositions, inclusive of the official communist opposition between the old and the new, are magically suspended. And I think it really works in that way. That's the beauty of it. Again, that's for me much closer to the actual communism. You have a worker working in a steel factory, you have a hairdresser lady washing somebody's hair and so on and so on, and all this is put at the same level. So that, uh, we, the only problem I have with univocity of being is that, as I will try to develop later, of course in principle I am for it at this level. That there is no hierarchy of beings, higher beings, God on the top and so on, but where I oppose it is that nonetheless, I think there is a certain twisted order of beings where within a certain form of life there is something which stands for its negativity, if I may put it like this. This is where subject enters, and this is what I miss with, with the in the flat ontology of Levi Bryant, Harman and so on and so on. I will come later to this. Then the next feature is that I maybe forgot to emphasize but I mentioned yesterday, is material versus expressive aspect of elements. That is to say, apart from acting as bearers of meaning, objects in our universe also matter and are active on account of their direct materiality. The moment we abandon anthropocentrism and locate humanity as one of the agents, although a privileged one, into the assemblage of things, the distinction between material and expressive levels becomes necessary, since expressive level pertains only to human beings and even in their case it is not exclusive. Say, human production is organized and kept functioning through symbolic exchanges, but it also involves material processes of tremendous importance, exploiting natural resources and so on and so on. So that's Bryant's big point that traditional Marxist critique of ideology focuses on just ideological meaning of processes, but it neglects not only material weight, but even ideological weight of material processes as such. This here, uh, I again, as I already pointed out, I have no problem with this insight. I even agree with me, even if it's formulated critically, it's against me. But yesterday I improvised in a clumsy way I remember, I already gave you the big counter-argument. It's very simple one. It's easy to say that we should think language, we should link our social practice in the unity of material and expressive aspects. For example, the production of process is, of course, an expression of our creative capacities and so on, but it's also a very material process on our Earth which can throw off balance the entire circulation of life and so on and so on. So how to think the two together? I think this, simple, it's easy to say we should think them together, it's much more difficult, I claim, to do it. Because I claim, as I already pointed out yesterday in my, I remember confused, clumsy improvisations, that precisely at its most radical, language, symbolic practice cannot ever be simply reduced to one among the elements of the social totality. They are never really at the same level. Why? Of course it is language, symbolic exchange, it's always part of general social exchange, it's enchained, linked to our, to our productive and destructive abilities and so on and so on. But at the same time it always, it's a totality. You cannot step out of meaning. You know, it is part of life but at the same time for us humans, it's the horizon of how we perceive life. And it’s the ultimate illusion that you can step out of yourself and as it were, observe reality outside your horizon of meaning, your symbolic practice and so on and so on. Uh, here we now come upon the crucial moment. I hope I will have time to develop it. Where I, it's my main reproach towards object-oriented ontology. Uh, especially Levi Bryant and Graham Harman. They try to return to some, I claim even very traditional, realist ontology where their point is simply that objects are ultimately impenetrable. We, we only see the external relational aspect of objects. You see how a thing appears to you. You perceive properties which have a certain practical significance for you. For example, when you have a hammer in your hand, your perception of it is always overdetermined by its potential use or uses. Even if you are a murderer and wants to break someone's head with it. But it's always this practical use. So, uh, Harman claims that objects have an inner wealth, a hidden side which goes well beyond properties than we can, that we can perceive when we relate to objects, and that he even goes at some points, although he is not sure there, the last time I met him I questioned him, I gave him a third degree on this point. Because in one of his books he even went up to the hypothesis of pan, how do you call it in English, psychism, psychism, how do you pronounce pan-psyche? Psyche. Psychism. Psychism. How do you make a ism work? Psychism. Panpsychism. Yes. Panpsychism. That object has an inner life which cannot be accessed by sciences, by objective sciences and so on and so on. Here, uh, I up to a point, I sympathize with him. Of course there is more in objects than their use. But I don't see any necessity to supplement or to ground this potential openness of certain objects. I'm even actively for it, like, uh, I think the only serious biology today, the intelligent version of Darwinism has wonderful theorization of it and I was shocked when I asked him that Harman didn't know about it. You know this beautiful notion in evolutionary biology developed by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould of exaptation. Not adaptation but exaptation. That together pro, that our organisms are not simply adapted. We always have too many organs. Like how is it called this, the redundant stupid organ that’s usually. Appendix. Yeah, yeah, appendix. That all our body is basically like that. And that progress, the typical way of progress is a non-teleological one. It's that there is a new situation and body in its spontaneous adaptation doesn't know what to do and exapts. That is to say, transfunctionalizes, uses an object which is just there, automatically reproduced like male breasts or whatever nipples and so on, and uses it for a totally different, different, for a totally different function. And the beauty, I think it’s the only correct theory, of Gould is that he even thinks our greatest achievement maybe of humanity, language, emerged like this. That something happened at the level of adaptation with standing upwards our brain, tongue and so on. And all of a sudden, there was an excess of tongue or brain whatever which in a totally contingent way become the base of language. So that's the beauty that I like of his theory. Language did not develop in a direct functional way, as even such a basically good guy like Friedrich Engels claims. He puts in his short essay on the origin of true work, true labor of man out of apes, how when there was the need of collaboration, people simply found that they have something to say to each other, so they developed language. I think this is the most naive circular theory. It’s the same one which you find a comical way of it in, I don't know which one, not Lilliputian, one of the four Gulliver books where it gives a wonderfully naive theory of the origin of language. That first person people communicated so that you had to carry on your back small models of objects, like if you wanted to say house. You put the model house, you know. And then, and I love this absolute naivety. And then one of the people said, again the enigma, how did he say it? No, said, but it's getting so heavy to carry all these objects, why don't we replace them with words? It's true but you see what I mean, you already must be in language. So, uh, the beautiful idea here is that adaptation does not mean, Lamarck thought this, doesn't mean this direct teleological process, social life gets complicated, so you need something like language you invent it. No, no. It's always an excess, you don't know how to use it and the use is always a priori secondary. So again, uh, at this level, I disagree with Harman because I don't think it's necessary at all this duality of the way we relate to things and the way things are in themselves. Harman emphasizes this distinction because he claims that, uh, this is the wealth of things. Like certain things are constrained to their actual use but in themselves they contain potentials for different uses and so on and so on. It may sound a harsh substantialist theory. Substantialist in the sense that outside, and this is Harman's position, outside network of relations, things exist in themselves with many more potentials and then it depends on circumstances if these potential uses will be actualized or not. What's my problem here? Again, in at some level, I agree with him and to the great furor of some of my Spinozoan friends, I referred to Harman to criticize Spinoza. Which part? Uh, people usually celebrate this as Spinoza's non-essentialism, how Spinoza equates power and right. For Spinoza justice means that every entity, every object is allowed to freely deploy its inherent power potentials. That is, the amount of justice owed to me equals my power. If I have certain substantial potentials to do something in a just society, I will be able to actualize these potentials. A right is for Spinoza always a right to do something, to act upon things according to your nature. Not the judicial abstract right to possess thing and so on. But, uh, unfortunately Spinoza himself uses an example at the very end of his Tractatus Politicus where he, based on this equation of right and power, he argues for the natural inferiority of women. I quote Spinoza. If by nature women were equal to men and were equally distinguished by force of character and ability in which human power and therefore human right chiefly consist, surely among nations so many and different some would be found where both sexes rule alike and others where men are ruled by women and so brought up that they can make less use of their abilities. And since this is nowhere the case, one may assert with perfect propriety that women have not by nature equal right with men. Now, uh, I must tell you that, uh, when I presented in a conference, at a Spinoza conference in LA more than years ago, when I read this passage, a Spinoza partisan exploded and said that he is aware of this passage but that he thinks that this is like a, he even made a paranoiac hypothesis that maybe some evil followers Spinoza falsified it and put this in because it's so against the nature of Spinozoan thought. No, I don't think it is. I think that here I agree with Jean-Claude Milner, who will visit us hopefully in October. I have many critical points against Milner but, uh, he is right in desacralizing Spinoza. It's for me a big enigma why in the last decades Spinoza was almost elevated to the, not only by Deleuze by Althusser and so on, to the sacred untouchable name and so on. And here, I think Harman is right. In Spinoza's notion of women, the potentiality of women to act in a different way, not as inferior to men, disappears since he reduces women to the actuality of their social relations where they are or rather were in his time subordinate to men. But what I think nonetheless, here I disagree with Harman, is that it's not necessary to substantialize or naturalize this excess in the sense of in deep in myself as an autonomous thing I have much higher potentials and so on which are not allowed fully to actualize themselves in concrete relations, determinate particular relations in which I live. I think that, that, uh, other partisans of assemblage theory like, uh, Latour and De Landa are, uh, much more productive here when they try to account for this gap by the inherent antagonism, antagonistic nations or nature of relations themselves. Often an entity which has, which is thrown in a new constellation, finds itself in a contradictory situation that a possibility opens up for this entity to develop to deploy new potentials but at the same time these potentials are blocked, are sabotaged. So, uh, I claim that, uh, we can also account for new possibilities, different use a certain object can be put to, through precisely in a purely relational way. This is why I don't agree with Harman again, who claims that relations are constraining but properties are much wider. His idea is that, for example, if he were to be a feminist, I'm not so sure, that women have properties, reason, abilities, which allow for much greater equal to men social role activity and so on but the social relations in which they live constrains them, does not allow the use of these relations. I don't like this simplistic logic. I would have said that the least we can say is that the opposite also holds. That we have certain properties and, uh, but we are not constrained by our properties because these limited properties can be expanded when we are or enter a new set of relations. To give you an idea of this which I often use, this example, let me evoke human rights. As you know, I'm a little bit sick and tired of that old example, Marxist, of how human rights are abstract human rights which de facto privilege just the rights of certain strata, white men of property and so on. It's true but from the very beginning the antagonism was there. Which is why, as you know maybe better than me, immediately afterwards, after proclamation of the rights of men, women, Mary Wollstonecraft said, Wollstonecraft and others said, why not also us? Slaves in Haiti said, why not also us? And so on and so on. That's what I mean how, I think we can explain this without any reference to raw naturalization, human nature and so on and so on. I think that that's the dialectic of historical development that, uh, it opens up possibilities but at the same time it crushes them. And then we live in this relative opening. That's, that's the tragedy but also the hope of capitalism. Although it limits our freedom, alienation, work and so on, we should never forget that immediately, just a minute, we should never forget that the very, and Marx is very clear on this. Yes, capitalism is wage slavery, blah blah blah, but the very horizon from which we can see how capitalism limits our freedoms is opened up by capitalism itself. You, yes? So just clarification, so you're saying human rights as a mode of relation between the revolutionary moment and ancien regime opens up the possibility for further claims yes in the name of human rights. Not even French Revolution, you had it in the air before, no, to be exact. But you’re saying you’re reproaching Triple O the dualism of properties and relations, you’re saying that kind of dualistic approach there is more properties than relations or more relations than properties. No, for them properties are more. Right, but but De Landa would be the other way around. Yeah, and I’m on Latour’s side here. And you’re reproaching that dualism as such. Right and you’re saying that it’s the relation that opens up the possibility for the emergent properties. Yes. So human rights is the relation between the revolutionary moment and ancien regime, yes, which then opens up the possibilities for women's rights, for head for right slaves and so on and so forth. Because form matters, that's my first Hegelian moment. Marx is usually totally misunderstood when he criticizes formal democracy. Marx is a Hegelian, which means form. For Marx, in the tension between form and content, the moment of truth is always on the side of form. And this is not just with human rights. Remember how Marx develops capital. Sorry, but finish, I interrupted you. No, I just want to I just want to make sure that we're following you correctly. Yes. So it's in crude form this is an argument for the priority of formal relation. Yes absolutely. Against the background of an emergent formal relation further relations can emerge that over time time can become fixed properties like women's rights, human rights and so on and so forth but we but this sequence is not reversible. So it's again it's an argument against flatness, this is what you’re doing, right. The argument against flatness. And the basic reproach to Triple O is that you cannot have a consistent ontology without an exception and that exception is a. That would be a more complex argument I don't want to come back. No but this is what this is where you're going. Yes. No but again as you said my problem would be not only with human rights but also at other level. Okay I will put it this way. Just an example, just to clarify conceptually so. When for example I will return to the example which I used probably only this year in this class two three times that unfortunate eternally repeated I know that you also wanted to. Sorry to say this, I cannot resist it, I’m so evil you wanted to put your finger and mess with Ben’s business. So I humiliate myself, do it now. No, it’s just where would you put Badiou’s event Cantorian infinity which suggests that something can emerge when there is no condition for it formally or in terms of properties. Badiou Badiou’s event when some some kind of you touch such a crucial difficult problem here. Because you know first Badiou is a very refined thinker and he would not just said when there is no simply no condition for it. He would have said, he uses a very ambiguous term, ontologically ambiguous but he has to use it, he speaks of, of even how, pre-evental evental situation or what. Where, when the situation is chaotic, contradictory, that's an opening for the event. But the big problem is this one and I appeal to you here because this is my eternal struggle with Badiou. To put it very simply, and I hope because I repeat so much myself my old stuff that I can, I can count on you knowing the purest elementary basic features of Badiou's ontology. When Badiou has this duality of the order of being and then from time to time it's cut short or interrupted by an event. Okay, I ask you a stupid question as stupid as possible. Is, is this a genuine ontological duality or is all there is nonetheless ultimately the multitude of beings? Badiou oscillates here, he admitted this to me. Because at some point he says we are not idealists or that there is is the order of being, multiplicity of being and he says he uses this very twisted and once I reproached him I was evil Deleuzian expression, that an event is just a, how do you call it, a, a detour reversal whatever a twist in the order of being. Fold. Sorry? Like a fold. Like a fold yes, in the order of being. But nonetheless he absolutely prohibits the deduction, this he would never have done, the deduction of the event from the order of being. Retro causality is here always retroactive. His formula would have been this one. An event becomes possible only through its actualization. In the ordinary state of things we have possibilities some of them are actualized some of them are not but an event is something which where actualization precedes possibility. It's not there are many possibilities some of them actualize themselves is that something of course not impossible in the physical sense but impossible in the more ideological sense. Something that was not considered possible happens and through happening it
When I was young, we still had those simple black box phones and it was primitive in the sense that when somebody called you and it was a missed call, no way to trace where it come from. So, okay, once in my apartment phone rang. I picked it up and a voice said, is, I think the name was Christina, I’m not sure. Is Christina there? There was no Christina in my apartment at no point, so it was clear that it was a missed call. I didn’t do it, but immediately I was tempted to say something like, oh, sorry, this is medical urgency service, Christina just had a heart attack, she will probably die, and put it off. You know the idea? Like, I’m purely neutral. I cause catastrophe, but I am, that’s the obsessional neurotic stance. I cause catastrophe, but I am nowhere to be seen. Nobody can trace it back to me. And from, I don't know when I identified with this role of, you know, you’re just this lit, quite literally, vanishing mediator. You know, you cause a catastrophe but you are nowhere to be and you don’t know it. This I considered my, never in my life almost did I feel as satisfied. You probably don’t know this story, it’s one of my early books. When I was in Paris studying with Miller and so on, I was pretty poor so I simply stayed with a friend of mine, French psychoanalyst, and I was sleeping in his analytic room with the couch and so on. No, but anyway, the trick was in this one that he and two of his other friends had an apartment where there were three rooms, each room was the room for an analyst. So once I returned home, I knew that my friend will not have patients and I heard some rumors, so I knew that I must be very silent because the analysis was going on in the other two rooms. So I entered this room, just silently. I put off because I bought some book, my books, I changed my jacket and left. Where was the catastrophe? Ah. Then, turning out to leave the room, I noticed, I’m an obsessional neurotic, a book on the table there. Sorry, yes, on the table. And I immediately knew it, this book doesn't fit there. I couldn’t resist my sense of order. I picked up the book and put it on the bookshelf where it belonged. This almost caused madness. You know why? Because in the next room was a friend of my friend. And later I learned what I caused by this. He was, he didn’t hear anything. He was absolutely sure that nobody was in the apartment. But this is what happened. He, that analyst next room, borrowed that book from my friend in whose room I was sleeping. And uh, just before I entered the apartment, he put the room there on the table and wanted to put it into a bookshelf, but uh, since his patient arrived, he wasn’t able to finish it, so he left there. After a short session, he came back. That's how it appeared to him. What happened? I know clearly that I left the book there, the room, sorry, the book is on the bookshelf there. The guy who had some other traumatic experiences, love breakdown, he was very nervous. He thought he is losing his mind. You know? How did I learn this? The same evening I was having dinner with my friend whose room that was, and my friend told me, if you meet that guy, please be careful how you deal with him, he is on the edge of a nervous breakdown, losing, losing sense of reality. I said what happened, and he said, you know this guy, he already has visions, you know, puts book there, then it’s [unintelligible], he is crazy. Uh, okay, I explained it and so on, no, but I felt so good, you know. It was my ideal role. I just intervened, nobody knew, you know. You see the parallel between this and that phone conversation. This is freedom. You are in this free space, you can do whatever you want, it will be not attributed to you, you know. That’s, sorry, that’s the closest I can come to, to freedom. But let's go on, sorry for that phone call. So Bryant's point is that if we widen our focus and include other actants, other processes in social reality that influence our decisions, like biased media reports, economic pressure on workers, threat of losing, threats of losing employment, material limitations and so on, the absence of ecological engagement becomes much more understanding. This would have been a very simple example of what Latour calls politics of things. Again, if you look at it as a pure ideological process, of course you can say, we know there is danger of global warming and so on, how come that we don't act? And then you have to go through this pseudo-complex, pseudo-Marxist theories, ideological mystification, whatever, but if you simply take into account the politics of things, all other material and so on processes which define your situation, in a minute it becomes much more understandable. So uh, again, assemblage, which features of assemblage did I forget to mention before? One is, and it's very nicely deployed by Levi Bryant, what he calls flat ontology, as opposed to hierarchy of beings. There are no ontologically privileged agents which can totalize reality. Human subjects are just one in the series of disparate objects. And I have a certain sympathy for this view. You know which is an ideal example? I hope you know it, it's even raising on the stock market of best films of all times. You know, it's very interesting to follow how, like in fifties, it was the time of Eisenstein, Potemkin. It was usually voted by critics the greatest film of all times. Then it was for some years, I think, it was the time of Citizen Kane. Now it's Hitchcock, Vertigo. We will see it will remain, but, sorry? Which one? Vertigo. Vertigo is now. It was a couple of years ago. Let's see if to voted whatever this means. But what I'm trying to tell you is that, and I think there is justice in this second feature. The highest Russian film of Russian silent classics is no longer, is no longer Eisenstein, it's now Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, the documentary. And I think it deserves to be, it's a mega film. Why? This is not all about this film. Just one feature, Jacques Rancière once I was with him at some seminar in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and he gave a wonderful paper on Man with a Movie Camera as a practice of cinematic communism. He gave a wonderful simple rhythm of how the point of this film is that, uh, it's not communist at all in the sense of official propaganda, you see no parades, nothing. It just presents this multiplicity of life forms in everyday life. I think it takes place in Odessa, which ironically is the city of Potemkin, Eisenstein, you know that famous scene on the stairs. Okay, what happens is that, uh, you see, for example, washing the hair, wrapping packages, playing piano, connecting phone wires, dancing ballet, cleaning the streets, whatever. All these activities are entangled through echoing different formal motives, circular motives and so on and so on. And according to Rancière, what makes this cinematic practice communist is the underlying assertion of the radical univocity of being. All the displayed phenomena are somehow equalized. All the usual hierarchies and oppositions, inclusive of the official communist opposition between the old and the new, are magically suspended. And I think it really works in that way. That's the beauty of it. Again, that's for me much closer to the actual communism. You have a worker working in a steel factory, you have a hairdresser lady washing somebody's hair and so on and so on, and all this is put at the same level. So that, uh, we, the only problem I have with univocity of being is that, as I will try to develop later, of course in principle I am for it at this level. That there is no hierarchy of beings, higher beings, God on the top and so on, but where I oppose it is that nonetheless, I think there is a certain twisted order of beings where within a certain form of life there is something which stands for its negativity, if I may put it like this. This is where subject enters, and this is what I miss with, with the in the flat ontology of Levi Bryant, Harman and so on and so on. I will come later to this. Then the next feature is that I maybe forgot to emphasize but I mentioned yesterday, is material versus expressive aspect of elements. That is to say, apart from acting as bearers of meaning, objects in our universe also matter and are active on account of their direct materiality. The moment we abandon anthropocentrism and locate humanity as one of the agents, although a privileged one, into the assemblage of things, the distinction between material and expressive levels becomes necessary, since expressive level pertains only to human beings and even in their case it is not exclusive. Say, human production is organized and kept functioning through symbolic exchanges, but it also involves material processes of tremendous importance, exploiting natural resources and so on and so on. So that's Bryant's big point that traditional Marxist critique of ideology focuses on just ideological meaning of processes, but it neglects not only material weight, but even ideological weight of material processes as such. This here, uh, I again, as I already pointed out, I have no problem with this insight. I even agree with me, even if it's formulated critically, it's against me. But yesterday I improvised in a clumsy way I remember, I already gave you the big counter-argument. It's very simple one. It's easy to say that we should think language, we should link our social practice in the unity of material and expressive aspects. For example, the production of process is, of course, an expression of our creative capacities and so on, but it's also a very material process on our Earth which can throw off balance the entire circulation of life and so on and so on. So how to think the two together? I think this, simple, it's easy to say we should think them together, it's much more difficult, I claim, to do it. Because I claim, as I already pointed out yesterday in my, I remember confused, clumsy improvisations, that precisely at its most radical, language, symbolic practice cannot ever be simply reduced to one among the elements of the social totality. They are never really at the same level. Why? Of course it is language, symbolic exchange, it's always part of general social exchange, it's enchained, linked to our, to our productive and destructive abilities and so on and so on. But at the same time it always, it's a totality. You cannot step out of meaning. You know, it is part of life but at the same time for us humans, it's the horizon of how we perceive life. And it’s the ultimate illusion that you can step out of yourself and as it were, observe reality outside your horizon of meaning, your symbolic practice and so on and so on. Uh, here we now come upon the crucial moment. I hope I will have time to develop it. Where I, it's my main reproach towards object-oriented ontology. Uh, especially Levi Bryant and Graham Harman. They try to return to some, I claim even very traditional, realist ontology where their point is simply that objects are ultimately impenetrable. We, we only see the external relational aspect of objects. You see how a thing appears to you. You perceive properties which have a certain practical significance for you. For example, when you have a hammer in your hand, your perception of it is always overdetermined by its potential use or uses. Even if you are a murderer and wants to break someone's head with it. But it's always this practical use. So, uh, Harman claims that objects have an inner wealth, a hidden side which goes well beyond properties than we can, that we can perceive when we relate to objects, and that he even goes at some points, although he is not sure there, the last time I met him I questioned him, I gave him a third degree on this point. Because in one of his books he even went up to the hypothesis of pan, how do you call it in English, psychism, psychism, how do you pronounce pan-psyche? Psyche. Psychism. Psychism. How do you make a ism work? Psychism. Panpsychism. Yes. Panpsychism. That object has an inner life which cannot be accessed by sciences, by objective sciences and so on and so on. Here, uh, I up to a point, I sympathize with him. Of course there is more in objects than their use. But I don't see any necessity to supplement or to ground this potential openness of certain objects. I'm even actively for it, like, uh, I think the only serious biology today, the intelligent version of Darwinism has wonderful theorization of it and I was shocked when I asked him that Harman didn't know about it. You know this beautiful notion in evolutionary biology developed by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould of exaptation. Not adaptation but exaptation. That together pro, that our organisms are not simply adapted. We always have too many organs. Like how is it called this, the redundant stupid organ that’s usually. Appendix. Yeah, yeah, appendix. That all our body is basically like that. And that progress, the typical way of progress is a non-teleological one. It's that there is a new situation and body in its spontaneous adaptation doesn't know what to do and exapts. That is to say, transfunctionalizes, uses an object which is just there, automatically reproduced like male breasts or whatever nipples and so on, and uses it for a totally different, different, for a totally different function. And the beauty, I think it’s the only correct theory, of Gould is that he even thinks our greatest achievement maybe of humanity, language, emerged like this. That something happened at the level of adaptation with standing upwards our brain, tongue and so on. And all of a sudden, there was an excess of tongue or brain whatever which in a totally contingent way become the base of language. So that's the beauty that I like of his theory. Language did not develop in a direct functional way, as even such a basically good guy like Friedrich Engels claims. He puts in his short essay on the origin of true work, true labor of man out of apes, how when there was the need of collaboration, people simply found that they have something to say to each other, so they developed language. I think this is the most naive circular theory. It’s the same one which you find a comical way of it in, I don't know which one, not Lilliputian, one of the four Gulliver books where it gives a wonderfully naive theory of the origin of language. That first person people communicated so that you had to carry on your back small models of objects, like if you wanted to say house. You put the model house, you know. And then, and I love this absolute naivety. And then one of the people said, again the enigma, how did he say it? No, said, but it's getting so heavy to carry all these objects, why don't we replace them with words? It's true but you see what I mean, you already must be in language. So, uh, the beautiful idea here is that adaptation does not mean, Lamarck thought this, doesn't mean this direct teleological process, social life gets complicated, so you need something like language you invent it. No, no. It's always an excess, you don't know how to use it and the use is always a priori secondary. So again, uh, at this level, I disagree with Harman because I don't think it's necessary at all this duality of the way we relate to things and the way things are in themselves. Harman emphasizes this distinction because he claims that, uh, this is the wealth of things. Like certain things are constrained to their actual use but in themselves they contain potentials for different uses and so on and so on. It may sound a harsh substantialist theory. Substantialist in the sense that outside, and this is Harman's position, outside network of relations, things exist in themselves with many more potentials and then it depends on circumstances if these potential uses will be actualized or not. What's my problem here? Again, in at some level, I agree with him and to the great furor of some of my Spinozoan friends, I referred to Harman to criticize Spinoza. Which part? Uh, people usually celebrate this as Spinoza's non-essentialism, how Spinoza equates power and right. For Spinoza justice means that every entity, every object is allowed to freely deploy its inherent power potentials. That is, the amount of justice owed to me equals my power. If I have certain substantial potentials to do something in a just society, I will be able to actualize these potentials. A right is for Spinoza always a right to do something, to act upon things according to your nature. Not the judicial abstract right to possess thing and so on. But, uh, unfortunately Spinoza himself uses an example at the very end of his Tractatus Politicus where he, based on this equation of right and power, he argues for the natural inferiority of women. I quote Spinoza. If by nature women were equal to men and were equally distinguished by force of character and ability in which human power and therefore human right chiefly consist, surely among nations so many and different some would be found where both sexes rule alike and others where men are ruled by women and so brought up that they can make less use of their abilities. And since this is nowhere the case, one may assert with perfect propriety that women have not by nature equal right with men. Now, uh, I must tell you that, uh, when I presented in a conference, at a Spinoza conference in LA more than years ago, when I read this passage, a Spinoza partisan exploded and said that he is aware of this passage but that he thinks that this is like a, he even made a paranoiac hypothesis that maybe some evil followers Spinoza falsified it and put this in because it's so against the nature of Spinozoan thought. No, I don't think it is. I think that here I agree with Jean-Claude Milner, who will visit us hopefully in October. I have many critical points against Milner but, uh, he is right in desacralizing Spinoza. It's for me a big enigma why in the last decades Spinoza was almost elevated to the, not only by Deleuze by Althusser and so on, to the sacred untouchable name and so on. And here, I think Harman is right. In Spinoza's notion of women, the potentiality of women to act in a different way, not as inferior to men, disappears since he reduces women to the actuality of their social relations where they are or rather were in his time subordinate to men. But what I think nonetheless, here I disagree with Harman, is that it's not necessary to substantialize or naturalize this excess in the sense of in deep in myself as an autonomous thing I have much higher potentials and so on which are not allowed fully to actualize themselves in concrete relations, determinate particular relations in which I live. I think that, that, uh, other partisans of assemblage theory like, uh, Latour and De Landa are, uh, much more productive here when they try to account for this gap by the inherent antagonism, antagonistic nations or nature of relations themselves. Often an entity which has, which is thrown in a new constellation, finds itself in a contradictory situation that a possibility opens up for this entity to develop to deploy new potentials but at the same time these potentials are blocked, are sabotaged. So, uh, I claim that, uh, we can also account for new possibilities, different use a certain object can be put to, through precisely in a purely relational way. This is why I don't agree with Harman again, who claims that relations are constraining but properties are much wider. His idea is that, for example, if he were to be a feminist, I'm not so sure, that women have properties, reason, abilities, which allow for much greater equal to men social role activity and so on but the social relations in which they live constrains them, does not allow the use of these relations. I don't like this simplistic logic. I would have said that the least we can say is that the opposite also holds. That we have certain properties and, uh, but we are not constrained by our properties because these limited properties can be expanded when we are or enter a new set of relations. To give you an idea of this which I often use, this example, let me evoke human rights. As you know, I'm a little bit sick and tired of that old example, Marxist, of how human rights are abstract human rights which de facto privilege just the rights of certain strata, white men of property and so on. It's true but from the very beginning the antagonism was there. Which is why, as you know maybe better than me, immediately afterwards, after proclamation of the rights of men, women, Mary Wollstonecraft said, Wollstonecraft and others said, why not also us? Slaves in Haiti said, why not also us? And so on and so on. That's what I mean how, I think we can explain this without any reference to raw naturalization, human nature and so on and so on. I think that that's the dialectic of historical development that, uh, it opens up possibilities but at the same time it crushes them. And then we live in this relative opening. That's, that's the tragedy but also the hope of capitalism. Although it limits our freedom, alienation, work and so on, we should never forget that immediately, just a minute, we should never forget that the very, and Marx is very clear on this. Yes, capitalism is wage slavery, blah blah blah, but the very horizon from which we can see how capitalism limits our freedoms is opened up by capitalism itself. You, yes? So just clarification, so you're saying human rights as a mode of relation between the revolutionary moment and ancien regime opens up the possibility for further claims yes in the name of human rights. Not even French Revolution, you had it in the air before, no, to be exact. But you’re saying you’re reproaching Triple O the dualism of properties and relations, you’re saying that kind of dualistic approach there is more properties than relations or more relations than properties. No, for them properties are more. Right, but but De Landa would be the other way around. Yeah, and I’m on Latour’s side here. And you’re reproaching that dualism as such. Right and you’re saying that it’s the relation that opens up the possibility for the emergent properties. Yes. So human rights is the relation between the revolutionary moment and ancien regime, yes, which then opens up the possibilities for women's rights, for head for right slaves and so on and so forth. Because form matters, that's my first Hegelian moment. Marx is usually totally misunderstood when he criticizes formal democracy. Marx is a Hegelian, which means form. For Marx, in the tension between form and content, the moment of truth is always on the side of form. And this is not just with human rights. Remember how Marx develops capital. Sorry, but finish, I interrupted you. No, I just want to I just want to make sure that we're following you correctly. Yes. So it's in crude form this is an argument for the priority of formal relation. Yes absolutely. Against the background of an emergent formal relation further relations can emerge that over time time can become fixed properties like women's rights, human rights and so on and so forth but we but this sequence is not reversible. So it's again it's an argument against flatness, this is what you’re doing, right. The argument against flatness. And the basic reproach to Triple O is that you cannot have a consistent ontology without an exception and that exception is a. That would be a more complex argument I don't want to come back. No but this is what this is where you're going. Yes. No but again as you said my problem would be not only with human rights but also at other level. Okay I will put it this way. Just an example, just to clarify conceptually so. When for example I will return to the example which I used probably only this year in this class two three times that unfortunate eternally repeated I know that you also wanted to. Sorry to say this, I cannot resist it, I’m so evil you wanted to put your finger and mess with Ben’s business. So I humiliate myself, do it now. No, it’s just where would you put Badiou’s event Cantorian infinity which suggests that something can emerge when there is no condition for it formally or in terms of properties. Badiou Badiou’s event when some some kind of you touch such a crucial difficult problem here. Because you know first Badiou is a very refined thinker and he would not just said when there is no simply no condition for it. He would have said, he uses a very ambiguous term, ontologically ambiguous but he has to use it, he speaks of, of even how, pre-evental evental situation or what. Where, when the situation is chaotic, contradictory, that's an opening for the event. But the big problem is this one and I appeal to you here because this is my eternal struggle with Badiou. To put it very simply, and I hope because I repeat so much myself my old stuff that I can, I can count on you knowing the purest elementary basic features of Badiou's ontology. When Badiou has this duality of the order of being and then from time to time it's cut short or interrupted by an event. Okay, I ask you a stupid question as stupid as possible. Is, is this a genuine ontological duality or is all there is nonetheless ultimately the multitude of beings? Badiou oscillates here, he admitted this to me. Because at some point he says we are not idealists or that there is is the order of being, multiplicity of being and he says he uses this very twisted and once I reproached him I was evil Deleuzian expression, that an event is just a, how do you call it, a, a detour reversal whatever a twist in the order of being. Fold. Sorry? Like a fold. Like a fold yes, in the order of being. But nonetheless he absolutely prohibits the deduction, this he would never have done, the deduction of the event from the order of being. Retro causality is here always retroactive. His formula would have been this one. An event becomes possible only through its actualization. In the ordinary state of things we have possibilities some of them are actualized some of them are not but an event is something which where actualization precedes possibility. It's not there are many possibilities some of them actualize themselves is that something of course not impossible in the physical sense but impossible in the more ideological sense. Something that was not considered possible happens and through happening it
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retroactively creates its own possibility. I will now consciously repeat myself my old example but just to make it plastic for you. I think great example here is my God, Borges. You know Borges. Now I’m just
retroactively creates its own possibility. I will now consciously repeat myself my old example but just to make it plastic for you. I think great example here is my God, Borges. You know Borges. Now I’m just
Slavoj Žižek
evil the well-known writer who got a big prize from Pinochet
evil the well-known writer who got a big prize from Pinochet
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you know. You will always get this from me. And you know what Ernesto Laclau told me that he was at one of the last talks when he was already blind by Borges and you know Borges said I cannot see could somebody tell me are there any N. Okay I still have some politically correct decency. I don't like the word N for black people but he used this word because they should leave it I don't want to give a classes for them and so on. You know what I like so much and incidentally if you think that I'm brutal look at that guy. What I want to say is this, this shocked me. How Ernesto Laclau who reproaches me often for my vulgarities he reproached me and so on. There all of a sudden
you know. You will always get this from me. And you know what Ernesto Laclau told me that he was at one of the last talks when he was already blind by Borges and you know Borges said I cannot see could somebody tell me are there any N. Okay I still have some politically correct decency. I don't like the word N for black people but he used this word because they should leave it I don't want to give a classes for them and so on. You know what I like so much and incidentally if you think that I'm brutal look at that guy. What I want to say is this, this shocked me. How Ernesto Laclau who reproaches me often for my vulgarities he reproached me and so on. There all of a sudden
Slavoj Žižek
because Borges is Borges he said, oh what a wonderful irony of the old master and so on and so on. It's incredible how we are at some point hypocritical. Another point that I have of this is Wagner versus Nietzsche. Are we aware nonetheless what a brutal racist Nietzsche was? He praised ancient India where you know different estates were totally that was okay all you remember how he was ferociously against
because Borges is Borges he said, oh what a wonderful irony of the old master and so on and so on. It's incredible how we are at some point hypocritical. Another point that I have of this is Wagner versus Nietzsche. Are we aware nonetheless what a brutal racist Nietzsche was? He praised ancient India where you know different estates were totally that was okay all you remember how he was ferociously against
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Paris Commune. He heard a rumor which was a false one that communards burned some museums and he exploded like this is Sklavenrebellion the revolt of slaves kill them all and so on. But what I find so interesting is that if you read these post-modern leftist readings of Nietzsche they reduce Nietzsche to his abstract logical analysis, all this political background is totally obliterated. I know I'm not bluffing. For example go through both books by Deleuze on Nietzsche, you would never have guessed what Nietzsche was politically from Deleuze. On the other hand Wagner is overanalyzed you know. Even if he appears to be clean, oh look the way that actor laughs it’s really imitation it’s cynical imitation of Jews and so on and
Paris Commune. He heard a rumor which was a false one that communards burned some museums and he exploded like this is Sklavenrebellion the revolt of slaves kill them all and so on. But what I find so interesting is that if you read these post-modern leftist readings of Nietzsche they reduce Nietzsche to his abstract logical analysis, all this political background is totally obliterated. I know I'm not bluffing. For example go through both books by Deleuze on Nietzsche, you would never have guessed what Nietzsche was politically from Deleuze. On the other hand Wagner is overanalyzed you know. Even if he appears to be clean, oh look the way that actor laughs it’s really imitation it’s cynical imitation of Jews and so on and
Slavoj Žižek
so on, you look for all the traces so these are very enigmatic things. But let me go on what what we were what we were talking about. What I want to say is that that old example that I used coffee you know coffee without cream without blah blah. Look as Harman would have put it and here I also refer to De Landa who provides I think a nice answer, correct one, Harman wouldn't agree with it, non-essentialist answer to if there is an essence of the thing we clearly fall too flat if we just talk about fluid properties of things. There are some type of essences which
so on, you look for all the traces so these are very enigmatic things. But let me go on what what we were what we were talking about. What I want to say is that that old example that I used coffee you know coffee without cream without blah blah. Look as Harman would have put it and here I also refer to De Landa who provides I think a nice answer, correct one, Harman wouldn't agree with it, non-essentialist answer to if there is an essence of the thing we clearly fall too flat if we just talk about fluid properties of things. There are some type of essences which
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make things what they are and De Landa proposes a nice term diagram of things. Diagram in the sense, in the sense of the space of all potentials, what a thing can be can become and so on. And I would say that precisely this is what Harman doesn't take into
make things what they are and De Landa proposes a nice term diagram of things. Diagram in the sense, in the sense of the space of all potentials, what a thing can be can become and so on. And I would say that precisely this is what Harman doesn't take into
Slavoj Žižek
account, that a diagram of a thing all its possible permutations and so on this is a term you already find in Deleuze and Guattari that a diagram of things all the potentialities of a thing are precisely linked to circumstances. For example since, very vulgar example, since where does coffee coffee come from? It does from Latin America no? Where am I stupid? It does no? Yeah okay I doubt it as far as I know no but I'm not sure. They probably didn't drink it with coffee or with cream sorry with cream or with milk. So today only in our network of relationship coffee has this diagram Frappuccino milk and so on. It's a very simple example but you see what I'm aiming at. What I'm aiming at is to claim against that there is a relatively stable essence of things. But this essence is precisely the network of potentialities. Uh, what do I mean by so that again only in certain set of relations like our culture maybe also others I don't know but in our coffee has all these potentialities you can see them when you walk to Starbucks and you have a long list there whatever. And I would also say another example that I will give you, uh, it's a slightly pathetic one. You also want now I will be cynical. Are you asking a question or just stretching your hair your hair? Um, probably both. No, a network of possibilities only in the actualization. No, no, a network is precisely overactualized. Overactualization in this sense that for example with modernity being equal talking engaging engage politically become part of a diagram of women. Even if it's not actualized it's there as a diagram it exerts but okay but isn't it that if if with early modernity women being free having political rights right to public space appearances if these were not to be perceived as part of the diagram of being woman a woman woman would not have demanded these rights. Isn't it that somehow and that was the true revolution of modernity. In ancient times this was simply not part of feminine identity. Okay we can argue now did already Antigone because the beauty of Antigone is that although she is for conservative values like family right the crucial tension of Antigone is between content and form. The greatness of Antigone is not what she wants but that she wants it in the public space as a public gesture. And that's the beauty of Antigone although as to the content of what she wants she's just the old right conservative the form the way she does it. You know who was now I will be absolutely evil towards Americans here. One of the really disgusting anti-feminists. If you are old enough you must remember her. That American neocon icon when I was young years ago does the name ring a bell to you Phyllis Schlafly. Oh yeah. Yeah we discovered. You know what was so ironic? She was aware of this that although she was radically neoconservative but nonetheless by the very form of her appearance she was acting slightly in contrast with her views and you know what was the ridiculous way that she tried to counteract it? I saw it on video years ago when before she gave public speech she always thanked her husband for allowing her to quit home and appear there. But in a way it was arrogance because it was absolutely perceived as ironic and so on. You know but you know so sorry I hope I made it clear now it is in this sense that the true revolution is not actual rights gaining actual okay it's very important my God to get them. But the true revolution is to change the diagram the possibilities. That something your essence changes not your essence in the essentialist thing but like already and this is how it works these are beautiful stories how even at the most radical point of French Revolution they still wanted to limit women's role and then in some demonstrations some women died and if some of you know better French history than me you must know because then some woman famously said and it convinced all the true democrats leftists like sorry but if we are good enough to die for you for our freedom shouldn't we also have the right and so on. You see you see what I mean? The crucial changes in this sense a the crucial change is a transcendental change. Not transcendental in any mystical sense but the change in your diagram in what are your potentials. That's the most difficult change. Once you get this the battle is in itself already won. Then it's just a matter of how how do you how do you go on and so on and so on. This is why in modernity all the conservative modernists had great problem because they had to admit these potentials you know but how to nonetheless justify the fact that as conservative liberals like to say with black freedom and so on with feminism in principle you are right but we should do it carefully not so fast and so on and so on. For example one of the most disgusting strategies in the United States just before the Civil War was to say yes blacks deserve freedom but this for freedom you have to be educated and if we just give directly freedom to the blacks they will not be able to use it because they don't have enough of a cultural background so they will just regress into some kind of barbarism and so on so and this is the trick the claim was that in the interest of the long-term freedom of black people they should be still kept under control to be properly educated for the right moment when they will be able to be free. This was a more twisted strategy than the classical conservative one the most disgusting which was look at black people if they are properly taken care of by a good master they are really happy you know this crazy idea that black people are happy as slaves if they have a good master that if you plant into their heads ideas of freedom politics you just confuse them they become unhappy or whatever and so on and so on. But so again another and here why do I use do I prefer this notion of diagram of possibilities as essence? Because essence here is not the point is I think to elaborate a non-essentialist notion of essence. Essence is this ambiguity
account, that a diagram of a thing all its possible permutations and so on this is a term you already find in Deleuze and Guattari that a diagram of things all the potentialities of a thing are precisely linked to circumstances. For example since, very vulgar example, since where does coffee coffee come from? It does from Latin America no? Where am I stupid? It does no? Yeah okay I doubt it as far as I know no but I'm not sure. They probably didn't drink it with coffee or with cream sorry with cream or with milk. So today only in our network of relationship coffee has this diagram Frappuccino milk and so on. It's a very simple example but you see what I'm aiming at. What I'm aiming at is to claim against that there is a relatively stable essence of things. But this essence is precisely the network of potentialities. Uh, what do I mean by so that again only in certain set of relations like our culture maybe also others I don't know but in our coffee has all these potentialities you can see them when you walk to Starbucks and you have a long list there whatever. And I would also say another example that I will give you, uh, it's a slightly pathetic one. You also want now I will be cynical. Are you asking a question or just stretching your hair your hair? Um, probably both. No, a network of possibilities only in the actualization. No, no, a network is precisely overactualized. Overactualization in this sense that for example with modernity being equal talking engaging engage politically become part of a diagram of women. Even if it's not actualized it's there as a diagram it exerts but okay but isn't it that if if with early modernity women being free having political rights right to public space appearances if these were not to be perceived as part of the diagram of being woman a woman woman would not have demanded these rights. Isn't it that somehow and that was the true revolution of modernity. In ancient times this was simply not part of feminine identity. Okay we can argue now did already Antigone because the beauty of Antigone is that although she is for conservative values like family right the crucial tension of Antigone is between content and form. The greatness of Antigone is not what she wants but that she wants it in the public space as a public gesture. And that's the beauty of Antigone although as to the content of what she wants she's just the old right conservative the form the way she does it. You know who was now I will be absolutely evil towards Americans here. One of the really disgusting anti-feminists. If you are old enough you must remember her. That American neocon icon when I was young years ago does the name ring a bell to you Phyllis Schlafly. Oh yeah. Yeah we discovered. You know what was so ironic? She was aware of this that although she was radically neoconservative but nonetheless by the very form of her appearance she was acting slightly in contrast with her views and you know what was the ridiculous way that she tried to counteract it? I saw it on video years ago when before she gave public speech she always thanked her husband for allowing her to quit home and appear there. But in a way it was arrogance because it was absolutely perceived as ironic and so on. You know but you know so sorry I hope I made it clear now it is in this sense that the true revolution is not actual rights gaining actual okay it's very important my God to get them. But the true revolution is to change the diagram the possibilities. That something your essence changes not your essence in the essentialist thing but like already and this is how it works these are beautiful stories how even at the most radical point of French Revolution they still wanted to limit women's role and then in some demonstrations some women died and if some of you know better French history than me you must know because then some woman famously said and it convinced all the true democrats leftists like sorry but if we are good enough to die for you for our freedom shouldn't we also have the right and so on. You see you see what I mean? The crucial changes in this sense a the crucial change is a transcendental change. Not transcendental in any mystical sense but the change in your diagram in what are your potentials. That's the most difficult change. Once you get this the battle is in itself already won. Then it's just a matter of how how do you how do you go on and so on and so on. This is why in modernity all the conservative modernists had great problem because they had to admit these potentials you know but how to nonetheless justify the fact that as conservative liberals like to say with black freedom and so on with feminism in principle you are right but we should do it carefully not so fast and so on and so on. For example one of the most disgusting strategies in the United States just before the Civil War was to say yes blacks deserve freedom but this for freedom you have to be educated and if we just give directly freedom to the blacks they will not be able to use it because they don't have enough of a cultural background so they will just regress into some kind of barbarism and so on so and this is the trick the claim was that in the interest of the long-term freedom of black people they should be still kept under control to be properly educated for the right moment when they will be able to be free. This was a more twisted strategy than the classical conservative one the most disgusting which was look at black people if they are properly taken care of by a good master they are really happy you know this crazy idea that black people are happy as slaves if they have a good master that if you plant into their heads ideas of freedom politics you just confuse them they become unhappy or whatever and so on and so on. But so again another and here why do I use do I prefer this notion of diagram of possibilities as essence? Because essence here is not the point is I think to elaborate a non-essentialist notion of essence. Essence is this ambiguity
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like
like
Slavoj Žižek
it was not yet there before it was discovered but once it is discovered it's discovered as if it already was there. Okay let me give you I'm sorry a slightly obscene but very benevolent example from sexuality. When you have a couple exploring their love relationship and so on and so on isn't it that I'm sorry now I sound romantic I I myself don't believe in it but maybe you can put it in this way that a truly good lover oh I'm ashamed ashamed of myself because I never was there but a truly good lover does not only satisfy you, he awakens even new ways new desires of what you want, of how to be satisfied. You know it's not just I will do what you want no you must not tell me that's the beauty. Good lover is not a master who tells you you really want this. Good lover is someone who the way he she interacts with you makes you discover into yourself new potentials of sexual satisfaction. And I think it's the same for a true teacher, master in the sense of teacher. He does not just teach you but he as it were enables you to discover what you really want, your freedom. You know that's even the function of a good political revolutionary leader. He is a master. But not a Stalinist master who knows better than you what you really want. It's only through him or her that you discover what you really want. That's the true function of of the let's call it naively positive master. And this goes to the end in the sense that you can discover that you don't need him and you chop off his or her head I don't have any problems with this. But you still need him in this intermediary role. So you see what I'm aiming at. In this sense I claim we should I wanted sorry I wanted to focus on this refined ambiguity. You discover what you want. In a way it is a substantial self-discovery. It's not just for example let me return to that slightly tasteless example of a lover. It's not simply that he or she teaches me new ways to enjoy no in a way you discover new potentials in yourself. But it's so it's not simply that he taught you something new or she. But at the same time it's wrong to say that it was already there before. It was and it wasn't. It was as an abstract potential you know. It was there in the same way that for example coffee with or without milk is already in the notion of coffee. But it's in a totally abstract way. You want to say something please. I mean isn't it in the mediation, the mediation impacts on the potential that you discover in yourself that mediation. Yeah but mediation yes but but nonetheless what I want to say is that this mediation is also a mediation of in Hegelian terms of the immediacy itself. In the sense of once in this immediate way you discover what you are or what you want you perceive this once you discover your political potentials your erotic potentials your productive potentials you immediately experience them as yours. Whether they are yours or not. They are yours or not yes. That's so in no in what sense? In the sense that uh you know this is very that's the big Hegelian motive. It's not only that all immediacy is mediated but that all but that all mediation ends up in a new immediacy. Like that's why I quoted Badiou he asks this question and it's a beautiful question maybe you can help me. Like im usually designates negation like immediacy means negated mediation no? Or immortality negated mortality. Okay Badiou takes this wonderful example imbecile. Who is the becile or what? You know nobody knows. I tried to look it up in some uh thesaurus or whatever they don't like that's why I think this is the sub- one of my subchapters in the Hegel book that this book is dedicated to all beciles or what imbeciles whatever. I try even to construct becile as the notion my triad is totally artificial is laughing is the lowest I'm sorry it's a racist term we use it mongoloids and imbeciles but in between are beciles as this forget about it. So again but what I so you know the big formula of Hegel is that again mediation is always sorry immediacy is always mediated immediacy. That it's not that things begin with immediacy and then get mediated no every immediacy and in this sense ah I will give you a super example of this uh subject. Subject is precisely absolute mediation elevated to a new immediacy. Immediacy of me being immediately myself yes. Just very briefly because Stephen Frosh was talking about Moses and monotheism. Yeah. It seems like the Freud struggle with the figure of Moses as the founder of the of the Jewish people and the emergence of a new historical subject through Exodus it seems it could be useful to illustrate this these dynamic in this bizarre idea that he must be an exception that that relational element like let's say human rights that that triggers the installation of a new order of relationality has also to be an exceptional element. Do you see what I mean? Just as Moses is an exceptional element to the Jewish people that's the force of Freud's insight and and it's something that his frame of thinking which is teleological genetic positivist cannot accommodate and thus the book is so ruined because three times he tries to make this argument but his kind of genetic his teleological cannot accommodate. No I agree totally here with you because I also think that this is why precisely when Freud in the ultimate result ruins everything he is usually at his best but then cannot do it. Because I prefer here I like here Lacan's reasoning which is that how the ruin begins with Oedipus complex. First Lacan elaborated Oedipus complex then obviously it's circular it doesn't work. So already to account for Totem and Taboo primordial father it's basically a reaction to Oedipus. And Lacan points out here in a beautiful way that it's not that but then here he also gets caught. Because Freud's official myth in Totem and Taboo his version is that first we have this brutal primordial father. Having all women and so on then the sons get together kill him the dead father returns as symbolic authority we are in Oedipal order. Lacan does something quite convincing here he turns it around. Not only primordial father never existed primordial father is a retroactive myth to cover up a gap in the symbolic father. So primordial father comes afterwards. I claim even symbolically like today we are getting paternal figure in so far as it disappears the standard one then it I claim it is split now into two figures. One would be really elements like even with Trump you have something of this primitive primordial father and so on. On the other hand it's like one of us in the sense of no fraternal no paternal dignity but a vulgar guy who wants to compete with us in vulgarity and so on and so on. So fathers today are at the same time competitors like elder brothers and and more primordial fathers. I think primordial father is a post-Oedipal appearance. So but isn't Trump the moment where he specifically plays that figure when he makes the comment about his daughter I would date her if she was not my daughter. So we're going to now not simply him appearing as such a father but explicitly embracing the role of the primal father. No no I agree with you also I think this is also the the point of all those even for me a well-known person of bad taste I didn't like it you remember that infamous interview which was not interview conversation recorded where Trump was boasting how he can I will not go into vulgar details touch women and so on and so on. These are elements of primordial father yes. Deployed deliberately. Do you mind finishing the point about the subject when. Oh I go into this now very good. Because uh yeah yeah yeah sorry I got lost here I admit it dirty guy you applauded her brutal attack on me you are on my black list sorry sorry. Yeah yeah yeah it's just because you were interrupted the whole time. Yeah but I was unfortunately self-critically I must say I was also interrupting myself my own life with my improvisations. So let's go on. Uh where does here subjectivity enter? Uh before I tell you where I enter I will check the hour. Eh oh no we have time everything is okay don't worry. Yes uh my the result of all this of what okay let me improvise a little bit it will be dense I warn you but I will keep my word I will send you this stuff to Madison tonight so address her because I really feel bad. Again for object-oriented guys especially this substantialist line Harman Bryant Levi who believe in an impenetrability of every object and you can guess already from that you know every object has a hidden side impenetrable is much more wealthy than it appears to us and so on and so on. Uh and Levi Bryant tries to introduce in this way psychoanalysis into object-oriented theory. He claim
it was not yet there before it was discovered but once it is discovered it's discovered as if it already was there. Okay let me give you I'm sorry a slightly obscene but very benevolent example from sexuality. When you have a couple exploring their love relationship and so on and so on isn't it that I'm sorry now I sound romantic I I myself don't believe in it but maybe you can put it in this way that a truly good lover oh I'm ashamed ashamed of myself because I never was there but a truly good lover does not only satisfy you, he awakens even new ways new desires of what you want, of how to be satisfied. You know it's not just I will do what you want no you must not tell me that's the beauty. Good lover is not a master who tells you you really want this. Good lover is someone who the way he she interacts with you makes you discover into yourself new potentials of sexual satisfaction. And I think it's the same for a true teacher, master in the sense of teacher. He does not just teach you but he as it were enables you to discover what you really want, your freedom. You know that's even the function of a good political revolutionary leader. He is a master. But not a Stalinist master who knows better than you what you really want. It's only through him or her that you discover what you really want. That's the true function of of the let's call it naively positive master. And this goes to the end in the sense that you can discover that you don't need him and you chop off his or her head I don't have any problems with this. But you still need him in this intermediary role. So you see what I'm aiming at. In this sense I claim we should I wanted sorry I wanted to focus on this refined ambiguity. You discover what you want. In a way it is a substantial self-discovery. It's not just for example let me return to that slightly tasteless example of a lover. It's not simply that he or she teaches me new ways to enjoy no in a way you discover new potentials in yourself. But it's so it's not simply that he taught you something new or she. But at the same time it's wrong to say that it was already there before. It was and it wasn't. It was as an abstract potential you know. It was there in the same way that for example coffee with or without milk is already in the notion of coffee. But it's in a totally abstract way. You want to say something please. I mean isn't it in the mediation, the mediation impacts on the potential that you discover in yourself that mediation. Yeah but mediation yes but but nonetheless what I want to say is that this mediation is also a mediation of in Hegelian terms of the immediacy itself. In the sense of once in this immediate way you discover what you are or what you want you perceive this once you discover your political potentials your erotic potentials your productive potentials you immediately experience them as yours. Whether they are yours or not. They are yours or not yes. That's so in no in what sense? In the sense that uh you know this is very that's the big Hegelian motive. It's not only that all immediacy is mediated but that all but that all mediation ends up in a new immediacy. Like that's why I quoted Badiou he asks this question and it's a beautiful question maybe you can help me. Like im usually designates negation like immediacy means negated mediation no? Or immortality negated mortality. Okay Badiou takes this wonderful example imbecile. Who is the becile or what? You know nobody knows. I tried to look it up in some uh thesaurus or whatever they don't like that's why I think this is the sub- one of my subchapters in the Hegel book that this book is dedicated to all beciles or what imbeciles whatever. I try even to construct becile as the notion my triad is totally artificial is laughing is the lowest I'm sorry it's a racist term we use it mongoloids and imbeciles but in between are beciles as this forget about it. So again but what I so you know the big formula of Hegel is that again mediation is always sorry immediacy is always mediated immediacy. That it's not that things begin with immediacy and then get mediated no every immediacy and in this sense ah I will give you a super example of this uh subject. Subject is precisely absolute mediation elevated to a new immediacy. Immediacy of me being immediately myself yes. Just very briefly because Stephen Frosh was talking about Moses and monotheism. Yeah. It seems like the Freud struggle with the figure of Moses as the founder of the of the Jewish people and the emergence of a new historical subject through Exodus it seems it could be useful to illustrate this these dynamic in this bizarre idea that he must be an exception that that relational element like let's say human rights that that triggers the installation of a new order of relationality has also to be an exceptional element. Do you see what I mean? Just as Moses is an exceptional element to the Jewish people that's the force of Freud's insight and and it's something that his frame of thinking which is teleological genetic positivist cannot accommodate and thus the book is so ruined because three times he tries to make this argument but his kind of genetic his teleological cannot accommodate. No I agree totally here with you because I also think that this is why precisely when Freud in the ultimate result ruins everything he is usually at his best but then cannot do it. Because I prefer here I like here Lacan's reasoning which is that how the ruin begins with Oedipus complex. First Lacan elaborated Oedipus complex then obviously it's circular it doesn't work. So already to account for Totem and Taboo primordial father it's basically a reaction to Oedipus. And Lacan points out here in a beautiful way that it's not that but then here he also gets caught. Because Freud's official myth in Totem and Taboo his version is that first we have this brutal primordial father. Having all women and so on then the sons get together kill him the dead father returns as symbolic authority we are in Oedipal order. Lacan does something quite convincing here he turns it around. Not only primordial father never existed primordial father is a retroactive myth to cover up a gap in the symbolic father. So primordial father comes afterwards. I claim even symbolically like today we are getting paternal figure in so far as it disappears the standard one then it I claim it is split now into two figures. One would be really elements like even with Trump you have something of this primitive primordial father and so on. On the other hand it's like one of us in the sense of no fraternal no paternal dignity but a vulgar guy who wants to compete with us in vulgarity and so on and so on. So fathers today are at the same time competitors like elder brothers and and more primordial fathers. I think primordial father is a post-Oedipal appearance. So but isn't Trump the moment where he specifically plays that figure when he makes the comment about his daughter I would date her if she was not my daughter. So we're going to now not simply him appearing as such a father but explicitly embracing the role of the primal father. No no I agree with you also I think this is also the the point of all those even for me a well-known person of bad taste I didn't like it you remember that infamous interview which was not interview conversation recorded where Trump was boasting how he can I will not go into vulgar details touch women and so on and so on. These are elements of primordial father yes. Deployed deliberately. Do you mind finishing the point about the subject when. Oh I go into this now very good. Because uh yeah yeah yeah sorry I got lost here I admit it dirty guy you applauded her brutal attack on me you are on my black list sorry sorry. Yeah yeah yeah it's just because you were interrupted the whole time. Yeah but I was unfortunately self-critically I must say I was also interrupting myself my own life with my improvisations. So let's go on. Uh where does here subjectivity enter? Uh before I tell you where I enter I will check the hour. Eh oh no we have time everything is okay don't worry. Yes uh my the result of all this of what okay let me improvise a little bit it will be dense I warn you but I will keep my word I will send you this stuff to Madison tonight so address her because I really feel bad. Again for object-oriented guys especially this substantialist line Harman Bryant Levi who believe in an impenetrability of every object and you can guess already from that you know every object has a hidden side impenetrable is much more wealthy than it appears to us and so on and so on. Uh and Levi Bryant tries to introduce in this way psychoanalysis into object-oriented theory. He claim
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that since
that since
Slavoj Žižek
we as subjects are also
we as subjects are also
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another
another
Slavoj Žižek
version of objects what Freud calls unconscious is precisely this invisible depth side of a human person. Ego is the visible side the way we appear to ourselves and so on and so on but the invisible deeper side is our the unconscious part of our psyche. In other words ego consciousness is relational how I relate to others symbolic communication, unconscious is more autistic deep in me. Now if there is
version of objects what Freud calls unconscious is precisely this invisible depth side of a human person. Ego is the visible side the way we appear to ourselves and so on and so on but the invisible deeper side is our the unconscious part of our psyche. In other words ego consciousness is relational how I relate to others symbolic communication, unconscious is more autistic deep in me. Now if there is
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something
something
Slavoj Žižek
that Lacan opposes it is this. For him subject is purely relational. In the in what sense? Uh my book which I already celebrate but I really mean if some of you are so stupid as to be minimally interested in one of my books if you want to read one do I really think if somebody were to ask me with at a gunpoint one book of you which one I should read I would say uh uh uh Absolute Recoil. Because I struggle precisely with this Absolute Recoil is a book of post-coital depression after Less than Nothing. After writing pages I discovered I missed the crucial thing you know and I tried to put it there. Okay the story goes on. Then I discover that I miss the crucial thing there it's in Disparities and goes on. But okay very seriously. You know what's the idea of Absolute Recoil? Very simply. Imagine a substantial entity which expresses actualizes itself in its effects. But for Hegel already you get at the point of I simplify it very much of absolute reflection where it's not only that a thing which somehow at least logically pre-exists its effects expresses itself causes them and so on but it's when this reflection in causes becomes absolute in the sense that it retroactively posits their own cause. And like okay I will give you maybe already mentioned it I hate the movie nonetheless the most stupid Hugh Grant movie it was a hit years ago maybe you saw it Four Weddings and a Funeral. Yes. Bah. Okay but do you remember that famous scene when Hugh Grant makes a love declaration to Andie MacDowell and he gets confused cannot say it properly and of course it's so primitive that I'm ashamed to tell
that Lacan opposes it is this. For him subject is purely relational. In the in what sense? Uh my book which I already celebrate but I really mean if some of you are so stupid as to be minimally interested in one of my books if you want to read one do I really think if somebody were to ask me with at a gunpoint one book of you which one I should read I would say uh uh uh Absolute Recoil. Because I struggle precisely with this Absolute Recoil is a book of post-coital depression after Less than Nothing. After writing pages I discovered I missed the crucial thing you know and I tried to put it there. Okay the story goes on. Then I discover that I miss the crucial thing there it's in Disparities and goes on. But okay very seriously. You know what's the idea of Absolute Recoil? Very simply. Imagine a substantial entity which expresses actualizes itself in its effects. But for Hegel already you get at the point of I simplify it very much of absolute reflection where it's not only that a thing which somehow at least logically pre-exists its effects expresses itself causes them and so on but it's when this reflection in causes becomes absolute in the sense that it retroactively posits their own cause. And like okay I will give you maybe already mentioned it I hate the movie nonetheless the most stupid Hugh Grant movie it was a hit years ago maybe you saw it Four Weddings and a Funeral. Yes. Bah. Okay but do you remember that famous scene when Hugh Grant makes a love declaration to Andie MacDowell and he gets confused cannot say it properly and of course it's so primitive that I'm ashamed to tell
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you but the point is that precisely through all these failures and his true charming love comes through and so on you know. So you see the paradox is this closed circle. Something tries to express itself. It fails. Through this failure it retroactively becomes what it is. In a direct expression it would dissolve itself. In even Adorno mentions sometimes this paradox in a very nice way I think that somewhere in a beautiful you know better Adorno than me but doesn't he say something of how old recordings
you but the point is that precisely through all these failures and his true charming love comes through and so on you know. So you see the paradox is this closed circle. Something tries to express itself. It fails. Through this failure it retroactively becomes what it is. In a direct expression it would dissolve itself. In even Adorno mentions sometimes this paradox in a very nice way I think that somewhere in a beautiful you know better Adorno than me but doesn't he say something of how old recordings
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with all their scratches and so on give a much more realist effect that there was really a singer there singing than these more modern perfect stereo whatever recordings. In other words this would be absolute recoil. Something fails to express itself but it doesn't pre- something exists only through
with all their scratches and so on give a much more realist effect that there was really a singer there singing than these more modern perfect stereo whatever recordings. In other words this would be absolute recoil. Something fails to express itself but it doesn't pre- something exists only through
Slavoj Žižek
its failure to be. Something is absolutely co-existent with its failure. If it succeeds to be it no longer is. And that would be for me the minimal Hegelian even definition of subject. Subject is a failure. If it's not a failure it becomes simply a substance. Now let me go on I will come to it to give you another example. And I mean it in all sincerity I hope you will not explode. Uh LGBTQ plus. No now it's more no pun intended LGBTQ whatever they add a plus at the end. And I'm not making fun of them in quite honorable way. The idea is that when we propose a when we propose a classification of all possible sexual identities the list is never perfect so is this endless maybe there will be another identity we did not take into account all of them and so on. Now the big logical problem for me here is is this plus just a sign of possible additions like plus means I cannot the list would be too long or I cannot because we don't know them yet or I cannot because we didn't yet even constitute them but like an ersatz signaling a possible but never actualized full list or and that comes here here comes the beauty or is plus an identity of its own? And that would be my Lacanian solution. You have LGBTQ plus. The right to say I'm plus. I'm just that plus. But I'm not that plus in some post-modern dynamic sense of I have no definitive identity I'm plastic today I'm this tomorrow I'm that but I'm plus as a perfect specific identity. And I even claim that's the beauty of it I even claim that sorry I'm trying to find where I enumerated them I claim that if you look closely at LGBTQ plus classifications you can find those or whatever identities I found two even three sometimes contenders for this plus. In the strict sense that they add a category which is a placeholder of the lack for the failure of
its failure to be. Something is absolutely co-existent with its failure. If it succeeds to be it no longer is. And that would be for me the minimal Hegelian even definition of subject. Subject is a failure. If it's not a failure it becomes simply a substance. Now let me go on I will come to it to give you another example. And I mean it in all sincerity I hope you will not explode. Uh LGBTQ plus. No now it's more no pun intended LGBTQ whatever they add a plus at the end. And I'm not making fun of them in quite honorable way. The idea is that when we propose a when we propose a classification of all possible sexual identities the list is never perfect so is this endless maybe there will be another identity we did not take into account all of them and so on. Now the big logical problem for me here is is this plus just a sign of possible additions like plus means I cannot the list would be too long or I cannot because we don't know them yet or I cannot because we didn't yet even constitute them but like an ersatz signaling a possible but never actualized full list or and that comes here here comes the beauty or is plus an identity of its own? And that would be my Lacanian solution. You have LGBTQ plus. The right to say I'm plus. I'm just that plus. But I'm not that plus in some post-modern dynamic sense of I have no definitive identity I'm plastic today I'm this tomorrow I'm that but I'm plus as a perfect specific identity. And I even claim that's the beauty of it I even claim that sorry I'm trying to find where I enumerated them I claim that if you look closely at LGBTQ plus classifications you can find those or whatever identities I found two even three sometimes contenders for this plus. In the strict sense that they add a category which is a placeholder of the lack for the failure of
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classification. You know I use here my old examples for example I'm sorry if I repeat myself to many of you Marx where he cheats in his classification of modes of production. It's primitive societies so-called pre-class societies Asiatic mode of production slavery feudalism
classification. You know I use here my old examples for example I'm sorry if I repeat myself to many of you Marx where he cheats in his classification of modes of production. It's primitive societies so-called pre-class societies Asiatic mode of production slavery feudalism
Slavoj Žižek
capitalism and whatever shit Stalinism communism you see coming later. It's clear if you read Marx closely that there is a problem with Asiatic mode of production. It's clear Marx was very cautious with it and to simplify the logic I would have said this. First came the definition of mode of production which perfectly fits just the five
capitalism and whatever shit Stalinism communism you see coming later. It's clear if you read Marx closely that there is a problem with Asiatic mode of production. It's clear Marx was very cautious with it and to simplify the logic I would have said this. First came the definition of mode of production which perfectly fits just the five
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modes.
modes.
Slavoj Žižek
Primitive societies an improper name of course slave society feudalism capitalism communism. Then Marx encountered here and there series of societies Ancient Egypt, Ancient China and India, old Latin American empires
Primitive societies an improper name of course slave society feudalism capitalism communism. Then Marx encountered here and there series of societies Ancient Egypt, Ancient China and India, old Latin American empires
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which
which
Slavoj Žižek
didn't fit all others. All the existing. And I claim Asiatic mode of production is this to use the difficult term placeholder of the lack. It appears to be one positive category among the others but it really just means all those who do not fit any of the previous elements. And the big dialectical thesis is that it's precisely this additional symptomatic element which subjectivizes subjectivizes the series. So again for me you know what would have been at its briefest I don't have time to go into it if you want better than in my next book Alenka Zupančič her book will be out in two months with MIT a book with a rather stupid title What is Sex. She was furious but MIT Press insisted on this title she wanted something more boring philosophic like Sex and Ontology. They said no What is Sex will be better. Then she said sorry if there is this is she said that was her defense I loved it she said but listen this is a confused theoretical book if there is something you will not learn in it if what is sex. They said no it will sell better. Then she wanted as a cover of the book she found a young Polish painter a lady maybe you know her maybe she's famous I don't know a wonderful portrait of Adam and Eve leaving Paradise but in a bag dragging a bag full of apples. Big mistake. They said no all of a sudden they said no it's too comic. But then she said Alenka she told she showed me correspondence she said but that's my thesis sex is ultimately a comedy. It's not a tragedy that's a romantic bullshit. No they insisted so nonetheless so it's What is Sex and then to appease her what a stupid solution the MIT put is in italic italics you know like What is Sex and she laughed so much like oh now we have a Heideggerian twist what is sex you know the essence of being of sex whatever you know. So okay let's go on so she developed this formula I envy her. You see these are the truly great philosophers. I did already write about this LGBTQ plus but I mumbled around in a confused way and she proposed the best definition I can imagine of Lacan's notion of sexual difference. She said that the usual political this LGBTQ classification is however and then plus because the list is not complete no? But she says Lacan's thesis is that it works with one. That the original ontological difference is not MF masculine versus feminine. If you do this you are in Yin Yang and all those primitive sexualized ontologies our universe is the struggle of maximum sorry masculine and feminine principle. That the minimal formula is M plus. M for masculine the only identity and plus for feminine. Wait a minute don't explode. The point is not we men are the only ones who are women are just that hap abandoned no no no. The name of that plus is hysterical questioning we don't know what. In other words the plus as a state for as a place signaling subjectivity that's why as Alenka shows in a wonderful way men are objective idiots who think they are what they are. Men who is not minimally hystericized and many of us unfortunately are not they simply think they are really men. Men who think that he is a man that's the closest you can come to stupidity I claim. That's why I'm so sad that the Jacqueline is not here because you know she said yesterday no the day before something wonderful when she said like do I remember it correctly men kill women women laugh at men. I wanted to elaborate this because it gets even more complex. The standard male formula of much violence against women is I want to kill her because she laughs at me. You know the male ultimate male chauvinist horror is I didn't really impress her she laughs at me at my impotence whatever you want and so on. But back to plus. M means a certain identity. Plus means am I really that identity. And that's for Lacan this impossibility to recognize yourself in your substantial identity is the basis of hysterical questioning. That's why for Lacan subjectivity as such is hysterical. This does not mean the male chauvinist wisdom you know we men know our duty women are confused hysterical no it means the stupidity of us men it means again as I already developed years ago here hysteria is the for Lacan the basic form of critique of ideology. Ideology the function of ideology in a society is to provide you or impose on you a certain symbolic identity. You are what you are what society says that you are master mother pupil worker whatever. The original hysterical questioning is why am I what you you the big other the social order why am I what you are saying that I am. So you see how this complicates the usual stupid doxa according to which object of desire is always lost and usually this is meant in this extremely stupid way we don't know what we want whatever we get it's always a disappointment and no no no for Lacan the originally lost object of desire is me myself as a subject. As a subject I never gain access to myself as an object. And this is this is the plus. Men are ontologically stupid. Women women's identity is based on self-questioning which means let's go a step further and that's crucial for Lacan sexuality does not simply mean the question is always open in an epistemological sense sexuality is a mystery we never know what it really is. No sexuality is a mystery not only for us but for itself in the sense of this failure to be defines sexualizes a situation. Sexuality without failure is not sexuality it's failure as such which sexualizes a situation. That's why for Lacan maybe he is wrong it's another topic animal coupling is not sexual in a specific human sense it's just you know you have this stupid call to mate for mating blah blah you do it it's just another instrumental activity but what you see my point it's not simply that human sexuality is failed in the sense that it cannot ever be fully symbolized it's always fails no it's that this failure itself sexualizes this situation. And here I don't have time to go into it you will get the paper now in two hours. Here subjectivity enters. And here I think the theory of ah sorry. Another point first about this Marx system production systems and so on. Uh where am I in a very I claim relatively not very I will not boast myself refined way critical of Laclau. Laclau only has this logic of hegemony. You have these freely floating ideological elements ecology production human rights femininity sexual identity then you build chain of equivalences through one element which is privileged which stands for it all. And Laclau's big example are political struggles. For example in a moment of mega tension like in communist countries the last moment when communist regimes were falling apart. No matter what you were, a conservative an anarchist a critical Marxist. We were all united against communists in power. Then of course the moment they stepped down everything get confused. But what I want to say is that on the one hand we get this hegemonic structure which means as I developed it there is no neutral you know Marx says this beautifully in his introduction to Grundrisse how in every mode of production a certain particular production colors the entire universal production. For example as he says in capitalism industrial production is one specific sphere of production but which as Marx puts it provides a specific color for all other modes like even agriculture gets organized like production, university research gets organized at another sphere of production. So we have this structure of hegemony. The exception is here the particular element which succeeds in imposing itself as hegemonic. Which stands for the all. But I claim even Marx was not aware that we have another exceptional element which is not the hegemonic one but the zero point one for example in Marxism it would have been proletarian proletarians or for Hegel it would have been rebel pöbel those who have no place in social hierarchy. They also are the exception they are the element which they are like Asiatic mode of production they are a part of society but they embody within society for what there is no place in society. They embody the negativity of society. And I claim what Laclau misses doesn't develop it as far as I know is that the ultimate antagonism is the antagonism between these two exceptions universalities. The ruling ideology means it imposes its own particular image of human being as universal. The counter-movement it's not just let's oppose it with our hegemony but let's focus on those who are nothing who are excluded from this universality but as such they stand for universality and so on and so on. Okay let's now let me nonetheless quickly return to subjectivity subjectivity and exception. So again for Hegel and Marx this is what Hegel meant when he says the point is not to grasp the absolute only as substance but also as subject. If I may translate it in my terms not only as M but also as plus. Plus is that surplus a void which is the dynamic element which introduces a gap which cannot be identified and again now I'm coming back to my concluding point about criticizing this object-oriented ontology idea of material of hidden side of objects. Maybe there is something for example let's take me if I am one I doubt sometimes as a human being person. Okay you can say there is a superficial side of me and then there is something deeper. But for Lacan and you don't have to be a Lacanian here it's for Kant for Hegel the specificity of subject is that it's not an appearance of something but it's an appearance of nothing. It's appearance itself which makes subject. Of course I as a subject have a material base. Some stupid brain processes or whatever but it's a classical depressive argument you know you cut open my brain you will see a shitty bad smelling piece of meat. The subject is not there. The subject is as Fichte put it Tathandlung act activity. It's a act which exists only in its activity. It doesn't have a substantial existence outside it. And for Lacan the unconscious strictly remains at this phenomenal level. Unconscious is not some deep biological or whatever even psychic content this is what Jung thought. For Lacan unconscious is like you remember yesterday I was improvising about the big other which is out there as a purely virtual point of reference. It exists only through my incessant activity. And so that would have been an idea of subject where I see a certain continuity between German idealism and then Lacan and so on. It's a self-relating zero in the sense that the subject appears to itself but not in the sense that something deeply hidden appears is in the subject. The subject is its own appearance which is why appearance is reflexively redoubled. What do I mean by this? As Lacan knew it but he didn't know I think that he referred to Hegel there. Appearance is for Lacan a deeply ambiguous term. Appearance is not simply appearance of something in the sense that this is how things appear but something deeper appears in appearances. The ultimate appearance is precisely the appearance that there is something behind the appearance. The ultimate illusion is the illusion that there is something deep behind the appearance. I think I didn't mention it here in but in Saas-Fee I didn't mention in this last three days that you will get this very clearly if I tell you that classical story Zeuxis Parrhasius you know two Greek painters who were competing who will do the better mimetic illusion. And the first one painted grapes so perfect that stupid birds hit the painting trying to eat them. But you know what the other guy did who won the competition? He painted a veil. And the first painter comes there just a curtain a veil and says okay now how do you call it what do you do with veil unveil unveil it so that I see what is behind. That was the trick nothing it was just the painting of the veil you know. Hegel uses this in phenomenology as even a metaphor for our soul and so on. Our soul is such a veil. It's just a veil painted veil. Isn't this a kitschy novel by Somerset Maugham that's another story. It's painted veil but so you see there is depth but it this illusory depth and even we should bring back here the example I think that I mentioned yesterday you remember of those those Catholic Darwinists who claimed that God created fossils directly and so on. So uh this idea that you know the problem with object-oriented ontology is that since for them everything that exist are objects so for them the only way to grasp subject is to make out of it a mega object. And then of course you have this common sense counterpoint but why should this object be endlessly important isn't it always one among the objects but again for Lacan and already for Hegel subject is in a way even less than an object. Subject is a failed object. Subject is like the plus. Something that cannot ontologically are you just do you want to ask a question or just sticking out. I'm I'm asking. Okay please then yes. Yes yes I'm wondering if I can follow your argument here. Yeah I'm wondering about relationship between subjectivity as an activity that is an activity of failure and in contrast to subjectivity as passivity when you mentioned two days ago Husserl's epoché and the Cartesian pure subject this withdrawal of the subject because of course I can see the resemblances negativity on both sides. I think that the second one is original in the sense that constitute at its deepest level subjectivity is not an activity. It is clear with Kant with Hegel Schelling saw this wonderfully. Subjectivity is at its utmost what mystics call Night of the World and so on. It's a kind of a proto-psychotic breakdown withdrawal to the zero point to nothing an abyss and then you know where you can find a nice example of this in his reading of Schreber one of his five most famous cases. Freud makes a wonderful remark where he says we usually take this paranoiac constructions as the sign of madness. But Freud says no the true madness is the catastrophe total psychic breakdown and these paranoiac symptoms they are precisely wild attempts to pull yourself out of madness. And of course then Lacan tries to radicalize it maybe he goes too fast too far and says that we should even here obliterate the distinction between normal construction and paranoia and claim that we are all as normal people just psychotics who try to pull ourselves out. But you know it's so interesting who is here the true genius who already the first one who formulated this. Oh my God this is a nice part. Hegel his Encyclopedia the first chapters of his anthropology and so on the beginning of philosophy of spirit where Hegel is in a way more Foucauldian I'm referring to Michel Foucault than Foucault himself. Hegel totally admits this that the only way to be human is that basically human spirituality is a way to avoid madness. How do you become human? By going and Hegel says in a very refined Foucauldian way it doesn't mean we all have to become madmen but you have to react at least to a potential threat of madness. Without the background of madness you don't have human spirituality. And Hegel is here not a primitive Hegelian where in some happy sublation Aufhebung all this disappears no Hegel says this threat of madness have to remain all the time in the background. So in this sense I'm tempted to say that and here I also try in a very more elaborate way to draw a distance between Heidegger and Lacan. Why in a strange way Lacan with all his reference to Heidegger why Lacan never wanted to abandon the notion of subjectivity. For Heideggerians this means Lacan is still part of modern imperialist Cartesian. No because precisely for Lacan subjectivity to which he sticks is not this Cartesian technological active object but it's this like that moment of complete madness when the world this zero level of subjectivity is that subjectivity originally is a passivity stepping out of the circle of life and so on. And is this madness then without self-reflection without self-consciousness or is it rather a kind of concentrated. Ah here you ask a nice question because you know what I would say here? It's a very interesting point first you know where you find this madness in German idealism at a very precise point. It's so interesting that till Kant the metaphor in classical rationalism for subject was always light was always like the light of reason. From Kant onwards the ultimate metaphor for subject is night darkness. The idea is not I am the light and then maybe there is chaos around me. It is that no the world can be perfectly rational but I'm I am the point of madness darkness of the world. I need externality to escape my madness which is why again I like Schelling he literally proposes I think the only convincing theory of why God created the world. To escape his own madness. It was if I may put it in ironic terms it was divine how do you call it labor therapy you know instead of what they do to you in these primitive psychiatric wards oh would you weave together that basket and so on so God did do it this bullshit in which we believe. But you are asking very precise questions here yes. And I think that all the problems we have today for example I didn't have time to develop it I will maybe when I come back in in October. The different ontology of video games these new obscene forms of immortality and so on they are all reactions to this point of madness. When you mention the problem of reflection here I am tempted to say that this madness is already a minimal form of reflexivity. That it not some kind of pure immediate breakdown and so on. And it's not and it's not substance either. No that's the that's crucial it's not substance. It's not substance. It's in a way again and again the big problem is this one but I'm now jumping very fast Alenka Zupančič tried to develop it I did then we have here problems because some of our colleagues like Aaron Schuster don't want to follow us. How then is this madness possible in our let's call it naively natural reality? What we want to avoid is this humanist ultimately humanist logic romantic that you know all these romantic descriptions men sorry I don't want to be sexist by men I mean human being. Human being is a point of madness of nature. That nature in itself is normal things live there and so on but when nature gets sick derailed this humanity is even early Hegel writes this is nature uh uh uh which gets sick up to death. This is an old romantic motive. But then this still involves a kind of a break. We have there substantial nature and then we humans are derailed nature nature out of joint. Me and Alenka and some others we are trying to read it in a more radical way. That there is what from our anthropocentric perspective appears as madness already in nature itself. That's the topic of quantum physics and all of them. Whatever quantum physics is talking about it's not nature in the usual sense of the world it's too crazy. And that what emerges in humanity is a certain let's call it like this in an anthropocentric way madness which was always already there in nature itself. It's a much more complex topic but this is the only way that and this would be also my approach to how is he called sorry forgot to Badiou. Badiou still thinks that there is out there the order of being then oh my God we don't know from where negativity event this order is interrupted and so on and so on. My correction to Badiou he doesn't buy it of course is that his what he calls the order of being. Order of being and event doesn't cover all the field. There is something that in German idealism they call negativity that Freud calls death drive which is neither one nor the other. That uh there must be some radical self-destructive aspect negativity and that an event is only possible at the background of this negativity. He himself comes close to it when he emphasizes that there is no event without anxiety. But for him anxiety is just a how should I put it a retroactive effect of event. Anxiety means that we are in a pre-evental situation. I mean if you want to see Badiou at his best let me
didn't fit all others. All the existing. And I claim Asiatic mode of production is this to use the difficult term placeholder of the lack. It appears to be one positive category among the others but it really just means all those who do not fit any of the previous elements. And the big dialectical thesis is that it's precisely this additional symptomatic element which subjectivizes subjectivizes the series. So again for me you know what would have been at its briefest I don't have time to go into it if you want better than in my next book Alenka Zupančič her book will be out in two months with MIT a book with a rather stupid title What is Sex. She was furious but MIT Press insisted on this title she wanted something more boring philosophic like Sex and Ontology. They said no What is Sex will be better. Then she said sorry if there is this is she said that was her defense I loved it she said but listen this is a confused theoretical book if there is something you will not learn in it if what is sex. They said no it will sell better. Then she wanted as a cover of the book she found a young Polish painter a lady maybe you know her maybe she's famous I don't know a wonderful portrait of Adam and Eve leaving Paradise but in a bag dragging a bag full of apples. Big mistake. They said no all of a sudden they said no it's too comic. But then she said Alenka she told she showed me correspondence she said but that's my thesis sex is ultimately a comedy. It's not a tragedy that's a romantic bullshit. No they insisted so nonetheless so it's What is Sex and then to appease her what a stupid solution the MIT put is in italic italics you know like What is Sex and she laughed so much like oh now we have a Heideggerian twist what is sex you know the essence of being of sex whatever you know. So okay let's go on so she developed this formula I envy her. You see these are the truly great philosophers. I did already write about this LGBTQ plus but I mumbled around in a confused way and she proposed the best definition I can imagine of Lacan's notion of sexual difference. She said that the usual political this LGBTQ classification is however and then plus because the list is not complete no? But she says Lacan's thesis is that it works with one. That the original ontological difference is not MF masculine versus feminine. If you do this you are in Yin Yang and all those primitive sexualized ontologies our universe is the struggle of maximum sorry masculine and feminine principle. That the minimal formula is M plus. M for masculine the only identity and plus for feminine. Wait a minute don't explode. The point is not we men are the only ones who are women are just that hap abandoned no no no. The name of that plus is hysterical questioning we don't know what. In other words the plus as a state for as a place signaling subjectivity that's why as Alenka shows in a wonderful way men are objective idiots who think they are what they are. Men who is not minimally hystericized and many of us unfortunately are not they simply think they are really men. Men who think that he is a man that's the closest you can come to stupidity I claim. That's why I'm so sad that the Jacqueline is not here because you know she said yesterday no the day before something wonderful when she said like do I remember it correctly men kill women women laugh at men. I wanted to elaborate this because it gets even more complex. The standard male formula of much violence against women is I want to kill her because she laughs at me. You know the male ultimate male chauvinist horror is I didn't really impress her she laughs at me at my impotence whatever you want and so on. But back to plus. M means a certain identity. Plus means am I really that identity. And that's for Lacan this impossibility to recognize yourself in your substantial identity is the basis of hysterical questioning. That's why for Lacan subjectivity as such is hysterical. This does not mean the male chauvinist wisdom you know we men know our duty women are confused hysterical no it means the stupidity of us men it means again as I already developed years ago here hysteria is the for Lacan the basic form of critique of ideology. Ideology the function of ideology in a society is to provide you or impose on you a certain symbolic identity. You are what you are what society says that you are master mother pupil worker whatever. The original hysterical questioning is why am I what you you the big other the social order why am I what you are saying that I am. So you see how this complicates the usual stupid doxa according to which object of desire is always lost and usually this is meant in this extremely stupid way we don't know what we want whatever we get it's always a disappointment and no no no for Lacan the originally lost object of desire is me myself as a subject. As a subject I never gain access to myself as an object. And this is this is the plus. Men are ontologically stupid. Women women's identity is based on self-questioning which means let's go a step further and that's crucial for Lacan sexuality does not simply mean the question is always open in an epistemological sense sexuality is a mystery we never know what it really is. No sexuality is a mystery not only for us but for itself in the sense of this failure to be defines sexualizes a situation. Sexuality without failure is not sexuality it's failure as such which sexualizes a situation. That's why for Lacan maybe he is wrong it's another topic animal coupling is not sexual in a specific human sense it's just you know you have this stupid call to mate for mating blah blah you do it it's just another instrumental activity but what you see my point it's not simply that human sexuality is failed in the sense that it cannot ever be fully symbolized it's always fails no it's that this failure itself sexualizes this situation. And here I don't have time to go into it you will get the paper now in two hours. Here subjectivity enters. And here I think the theory of ah sorry. Another point first about this Marx system production systems and so on. Uh where am I in a very I claim relatively not very I will not boast myself refined way critical of Laclau. Laclau only has this logic of hegemony. You have these freely floating ideological elements ecology production human rights femininity sexual identity then you build chain of equivalences through one element which is privileged which stands for it all. And Laclau's big example are political struggles. For example in a moment of mega tension like in communist countries the last moment when communist regimes were falling apart. No matter what you were, a conservative an anarchist a critical Marxist. We were all united against communists in power. Then of course the moment they stepped down everything get confused. But what I want to say is that on the one hand we get this hegemonic structure which means as I developed it there is no neutral you know Marx says this beautifully in his introduction to Grundrisse how in every mode of production a certain particular production colors the entire universal production. For example as he says in capitalism industrial production is one specific sphere of production but which as Marx puts it provides a specific color for all other modes like even agriculture gets organized like production, university research gets organized at another sphere of production. So we have this structure of hegemony. The exception is here the particular element which succeeds in imposing itself as hegemonic. Which stands for the all. But I claim even Marx was not aware that we have another exceptional element which is not the hegemonic one but the zero point one for example in Marxism it would have been proletarian proletarians or for Hegel it would have been rebel pöbel those who have no place in social hierarchy. They also are the exception they are the element which they are like Asiatic mode of production they are a part of society but they embody within society for what there is no place in society. They embody the negativity of society. And I claim what Laclau misses doesn't develop it as far as I know is that the ultimate antagonism is the antagonism between these two exceptions universalities. The ruling ideology means it imposes its own particular image of human being as universal. The counter-movement it's not just let's oppose it with our hegemony but let's focus on those who are nothing who are excluded from this universality but as such they stand for universality and so on and so on. Okay let's now let me nonetheless quickly return to subjectivity subjectivity and exception. So again for Hegel and Marx this is what Hegel meant when he says the point is not to grasp the absolute only as substance but also as subject. If I may translate it in my terms not only as M but also as plus. Plus is that surplus a void which is the dynamic element which introduces a gap which cannot be identified and again now I'm coming back to my concluding point about criticizing this object-oriented ontology idea of material of hidden side of objects. Maybe there is something for example let's take me if I am one I doubt sometimes as a human being person. Okay you can say there is a superficial side of me and then there is something deeper. But for Lacan and you don't have to be a Lacanian here it's for Kant for Hegel the specificity of subject is that it's not an appearance of something but it's an appearance of nothing. It's appearance itself which makes subject. Of course I as a subject have a material base. Some stupid brain processes or whatever but it's a classical depressive argument you know you cut open my brain you will see a shitty bad smelling piece of meat. The subject is not there. The subject is as Fichte put it Tathandlung act activity. It's a act which exists only in its activity. It doesn't have a substantial existence outside it. And for Lacan the unconscious strictly remains at this phenomenal level. Unconscious is not some deep biological or whatever even psychic content this is what Jung thought. For Lacan unconscious is like you remember yesterday I was improvising about the big other which is out there as a purely virtual point of reference. It exists only through my incessant activity. And so that would have been an idea of subject where I see a certain continuity between German idealism and then Lacan and so on. It's a self-relating zero in the sense that the subject appears to itself but not in the sense that something deeply hidden appears is in the subject. The subject is its own appearance which is why appearance is reflexively redoubled. What do I mean by this? As Lacan knew it but he didn't know I think that he referred to Hegel there. Appearance is for Lacan a deeply ambiguous term. Appearance is not simply appearance of something in the sense that this is how things appear but something deeper appears in appearances. The ultimate appearance is precisely the appearance that there is something behind the appearance. The ultimate illusion is the illusion that there is something deep behind the appearance. I think I didn't mention it here in but in Saas-Fee I didn't mention in this last three days that you will get this very clearly if I tell you that classical story Zeuxis Parrhasius you know two Greek painters who were competing who will do the better mimetic illusion. And the first one painted grapes so perfect that stupid birds hit the painting trying to eat them. But you know what the other guy did who won the competition? He painted a veil. And the first painter comes there just a curtain a veil and says okay now how do you call it what do you do with veil unveil unveil it so that I see what is behind. That was the trick nothing it was just the painting of the veil you know. Hegel uses this in phenomenology as even a metaphor for our soul and so on. Our soul is such a veil. It's just a veil painted veil. Isn't this a kitschy novel by Somerset Maugham that's another story. It's painted veil but so you see there is depth but it this illusory depth and even we should bring back here the example I think that I mentioned yesterday you remember of those those Catholic Darwinists who claimed that God created fossils directly and so on. So uh this idea that you know the problem with object-oriented ontology is that since for them everything that exist are objects so for them the only way to grasp subject is to make out of it a mega object. And then of course you have this common sense counterpoint but why should this object be endlessly important isn't it always one among the objects but again for Lacan and already for Hegel subject is in a way even less than an object. Subject is a failed object. Subject is like the plus. Something that cannot ontologically are you just do you want to ask a question or just sticking out. I'm I'm asking. Okay please then yes. Yes yes I'm wondering if I can follow your argument here. Yeah I'm wondering about relationship between subjectivity as an activity that is an activity of failure and in contrast to subjectivity as passivity when you mentioned two days ago Husserl's epoché and the Cartesian pure subject this withdrawal of the subject because of course I can see the resemblances negativity on both sides. I think that the second one is original in the sense that constitute at its deepest level subjectivity is not an activity. It is clear with Kant with Hegel Schelling saw this wonderfully. Subjectivity is at its utmost what mystics call Night of the World and so on. It's a kind of a proto-psychotic breakdown withdrawal to the zero point to nothing an abyss and then you know where you can find a nice example of this in his reading of Schreber one of his five most famous cases. Freud makes a wonderful remark where he says we usually take this paranoiac constructions as the sign of madness. But Freud says no the true madness is the catastrophe total psychic breakdown and these paranoiac symptoms they are precisely wild attempts to pull yourself out of madness. And of course then Lacan tries to radicalize it maybe he goes too fast too far and says that we should even here obliterate the distinction between normal construction and paranoia and claim that we are all as normal people just psychotics who try to pull ourselves out. But you know it's so interesting who is here the true genius who already the first one who formulated this. Oh my God this is a nice part. Hegel his Encyclopedia the first chapters of his anthropology and so on the beginning of philosophy of spirit where Hegel is in a way more Foucauldian I'm referring to Michel Foucault than Foucault himself. Hegel totally admits this that the only way to be human is that basically human spirituality is a way to avoid madness. How do you become human? By going and Hegel says in a very refined Foucauldian way it doesn't mean we all have to become madmen but you have to react at least to a potential threat of madness. Without the background of madness you don't have human spirituality. And Hegel is here not a primitive Hegelian where in some happy sublation Aufhebung all this disappears no Hegel says this threat of madness have to remain all the time in the background. So in this sense I'm tempted to say that and here I also try in a very more elaborate way to draw a distance between Heidegger and Lacan. Why in a strange way Lacan with all his reference to Heidegger why Lacan never wanted to abandon the notion of subjectivity. For Heideggerians this means Lacan is still part of modern imperialist Cartesian. No because precisely for Lacan subjectivity to which he sticks is not this Cartesian technological active object but it's this like that moment of complete madness when the world this zero level of subjectivity is that subjectivity originally is a passivity stepping out of the circle of life and so on. And is this madness then without self-reflection without self-consciousness or is it rather a kind of concentrated. Ah here you ask a nice question because you know what I would say here? It's a very interesting point first you know where you find this madness in German idealism at a very precise point. It's so interesting that till Kant the metaphor in classical rationalism for subject was always light was always like the light of reason. From Kant onwards the ultimate metaphor for subject is night darkness. The idea is not I am the light and then maybe there is chaos around me. It is that no the world can be perfectly rational but I'm I am the point of madness darkness of the world. I need externality to escape my madness which is why again I like Schelling he literally proposes I think the only convincing theory of why God created the world. To escape his own madness. It was if I may put it in ironic terms it was divine how do you call it labor therapy you know instead of what they do to you in these primitive psychiatric wards oh would you weave together that basket and so on so God did do it this bullshit in which we believe. But you are asking very precise questions here yes. And I think that all the problems we have today for example I didn't have time to develop it I will maybe when I come back in in October. The different ontology of video games these new obscene forms of immortality and so on they are all reactions to this point of madness. When you mention the problem of reflection here I am tempted to say that this madness is already a minimal form of reflexivity. That it not some kind of pure immediate breakdown and so on. And it's not and it's not substance either. No that's the that's crucial it's not substance. It's not substance. It's in a way again and again the big problem is this one but I'm now jumping very fast Alenka Zupančič tried to develop it I did then we have here problems because some of our colleagues like Aaron Schuster don't want to follow us. How then is this madness possible in our let's call it naively natural reality? What we want to avoid is this humanist ultimately humanist logic romantic that you know all these romantic descriptions men sorry I don't want to be sexist by men I mean human being. Human being is a point of madness of nature. That nature in itself is normal things live there and so on but when nature gets sick derailed this humanity is even early Hegel writes this is nature uh uh uh which gets sick up to death. This is an old romantic motive. But then this still involves a kind of a break. We have there substantial nature and then we humans are derailed nature nature out of joint. Me and Alenka and some others we are trying to read it in a more radical way. That there is what from our anthropocentric perspective appears as madness already in nature itself. That's the topic of quantum physics and all of them. Whatever quantum physics is talking about it's not nature in the usual sense of the world it's too crazy. And that what emerges in humanity is a certain let's call it like this in an anthropocentric way madness which was always already there in nature itself. It's a much more complex topic but this is the only way that and this would be also my approach to how is he called sorry forgot to Badiou. Badiou still thinks that there is out there the order of being then oh my God we don't know from where negativity event this order is interrupted and so on and so on. My correction to Badiou he doesn't buy it of course is that his what he calls the order of being. Order of being and event doesn't cover all the field. There is something that in German idealism they call negativity that Freud calls death drive which is neither one nor the other. That uh there must be some radical self-destructive aspect negativity and that an event is only possible at the background of this negativity. He himself comes close to it when he emphasizes that there is no event without anxiety. But for him anxiety is just a how should I put it a retroactive effect of event. Anxiety means that we are in a pre-evental situation. I mean if you want to see Badiou at his best let me
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finish with this advice. Read what I think is his best book Theory of Subject. I think that there it's his real breakthrough and then his big fat books Being and Event, Logics of Worlds
finish with this advice. Read what I think is his best book Theory of Subject. I think that there it's his real breakthrough and then his big fat books Being and Event, Logics of Worlds
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are just attempt to catch up with that one to systematize it and again and
are just attempt to catch up with that one to systematize it and again and
Slavoj Žižek
again he failed. This is why he is now writing the third book but as if in a confused way he went and the
again he failed. This is why he is now writing the third book but as if in a confused way he went and the
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most
most
Slavoj Žižek
fascinating part of that book is for me it's wonderful his reading of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Where he goes in this positive way for Aeschylus Oresteia positive event against this early decadence of Sophocles anxiety death. While I am more pro Sophocles here. I think that you need that darkness to get an an event. Like more confused. Sorry you know what I propose where are we now. Oh okay nonetheless I will keep my word and at least pretend bluntly lying to your face that we live in a kind of democracy so I will do two things. Sorry for the confusion you must have seen that I wildly improvised but you will get through Madison today now I go to the hotel and I will again discover this is my cynical self- remark I will again discover that fuck life that the air conditioner doesn't work you know. Try to but I will immediately send it to Madison a long text on assemblage and so on where you will get what I have at this stage. Just please promise you promise me something otherwise I will hire some mafiosi to come and cut your balls if you have them or what. No because years ago I don't know to whom I gave some texts and then I found them on the web and my God my publisher almost prosecuted me you know. So do whatever you want with them just don't put them on the web because they may prosecute me. But nonetheless to save our consciousness uh let's play democracy and if you have some short question let me try to answer because I okay. You and you. A short question. Uh this M plus is this plus uh like the Lacanian one of radical difference or is it. What is Lacanian one of radical difference? I don't get it really. Yeah I was not no no because Lacan here no no I was not I was not trying to make fun of you you know the catch is that Lacan is notorious for how even sometimes within the same seminar he changed his position. So uh I would say that no the true problem for me would be this one. Is this plus but I think it's not object a or not. Is this the one plus its shadow. I don't think so and the problem what okay what I try to elaborate in the last chapter of my
fascinating part of that book is for me it's wonderful his reading of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Where he goes in this positive way for Aeschylus Oresteia positive event against this early decadence of Sophocles anxiety death. While I am more pro Sophocles here. I think that you need that darkness to get an an event. Like more confused. Sorry you know what I propose where are we now. Oh okay nonetheless I will keep my word and at least pretend bluntly lying to your face that we live in a kind of democracy so I will do two things. Sorry for the confusion you must have seen that I wildly improvised but you will get through Madison today now I go to the hotel and I will again discover this is my cynical self- remark I will again discover that fuck life that the air conditioner doesn't work you know. Try to but I will immediately send it to Madison a long text on assemblage and so on where you will get what I have at this stage. Just please promise you promise me something otherwise I will hire some mafiosi to come and cut your balls if you have them or what. No because years ago I don't know to whom I gave some texts and then I found them on the web and my God my publisher almost prosecuted me you know. So do whatever you want with them just don't put them on the web because they may prosecute me. But nonetheless to save our consciousness uh let's play democracy and if you have some short question let me try to answer because I okay. You and you. A short question. Uh this M plus is this plus uh like the Lacanian one of radical difference or is it. What is Lacanian one of radical difference? I don't get it really. Yeah I was not no no because Lacan here no no I was not I was not trying to make fun of you you know the catch is that Lacan is notorious for how even sometimes within the same seminar he changed his position. So uh I would say that no the true problem for me would be this one. Is this plus but I think it's not object a or not. Is this the one plus its shadow. I don't think so and the problem what okay what I try to elaborate in the last chapter of my
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Absolute
Absolute
Slavoj Žižek
Recoil is a much more paradoxical ontology where I begin with plus. And this is also what I call in Less than Nothing less than nothing. This negative positivity something that is less than nothing and can nonetheless exist. So for me we first have the void and the plus. Then through a certain symbolic process whatever you call it we get one plus X plus this. One plus. And then through symbolic order we get one plus one plus plus and this plus only when you have two and plus is the object a. So it gets I try in an almost mystical way you know all these mystical speculations Genesis I try to develop this. Fuck both of you what are you laughing at me here. I thought the way you turned at him you see I told you what an idiot this guy is no sorry. No I'm sorry I'm sorry bad taste. But what I want to say here really is that I try to develop this logic so you ask a very crucial question which are the primordial elements in Lacan. I don't think I don't like those who would like to build an ontology of objects a you know like you have void and then you have partial objects it's not as simple as that. Some it's closer to signifier some signifying cut must be here from the very beginning. I don't like this because it's fashionable in some radical Lacanian circles to claim the symbolic order is secondary and we just begin with some partial objects and so on. No because I think the beauty of Lacanian reading of Freud is that he demonstrate you know how even in the most primitive organization of this polymorphous perversity where you have multiple partial objects the cut of castration is already there retroactively like it's not that this genesis is totally false that you know first you have partial objects blah blah then out of nowhere oh my God horrible father castrating agency and so on. People usually totally miss the point here the point with which Moses was trying that you know this is what people don't get it the basic feature that the one who is castrated is fundamentally father himself for Lacan. If you just want your own castration some Kleinian mother is enough who controls you and so on. The big discovery which makes you dwelling in language is not that I have to accept my castration no it's that you cannot rely on any big other that the big other itself is castrating. You lack something but you will not find it in the big other. That's Lacan's crucial gesture which I claim maybe I'm wrong you find it also sorry that I don't collapse uh then maybe one of here because you know right wingers centrists where is the left okay let's go on. You talked yesterday a bit about digitalization which is also process of re-appropriation of public use of reason and the wider trend in capitalism a move from expropriation exploitation back to rent. My question is very naive where do you stand in relation to private property because even Hegel is ambiguous here and I think simple worker's ownership of capital is not going to work anymore especially because of Homo Sacer and the almost privileged position that workers have today of being exploited so how to rethink private property? First I agree with you I will not have a good direct answer so I bluff a little bit around. I will begin with what you said how ambiguous Hegel is. An observation that I always often made and I want to repeat it. You know Hegel is reproached that his vision is some kind of a even proto-fascist corporate system but Robert Pippin who is a conservative liberal Hegelian okay left liberal Hegelian he made this wonderful observation. You know Hegel developed his vision of a rational state in his philosophy of right. But do we forget what he says in the most famous part of the introduction to his philosophy of right. You know when he uses that metaphor of the owl of Minerva which takes off when there is dusk. And then he says it explicitly when we can develop its conceptual structure of a certain social system it means that its time has already passed. Philosophy cannot paint the future it can only render the conceptual structure of a social system let's call it epochal system when its time is past. Okay naive question raised by Pippin. Was Hegel really such an idiot that he wasn't aware that this should held also for his own philosophy of right? So I think it's totally wrong to read Hegel's outline of these three estates rational state as his own program that's how rational state no Hegel was aware fully aware that its time is past. Uh but nonetheless to go back to your to your question uh yes we are maybe over private property but still I think we should think radically. I think our goal should not be to say okay we went too far with communist dreams now we can be more modest and so on and so on. No that's I didn't have time I think to quote those passages. The one I like I'm sorry if I used it the last time that I was here a couple is you know a German guy who is a little bit simple naive but he has something to say he is very popular now more sociologist economist Wolfgang Streeck Verso published some of his texts his thesis is this one that capitalism obviously is is in deep crisis it is slowly disintegrating. But Marxism automatically assumed that when capitalism is disintegrating there is already a new more progressive power waiting to take over. You know like we socialists or whatever we are are here to take over. But what Marx couldn't imagine is that capitalism is just disintegrating you know and there is no clear feasible alternative that we can that we can think. And that's what makes me really depressed. On the one hand we have all this protest movement great. On the other hand we have this analysis of disintegrating capitalism. How difficult is to bring these two together. Many most of the radical left even mockingly avoid all these topics of capitalism is disintegrating it no longer functions and so on and so on. So uh so I think that if anything the changes will have to be more radical than we can imagine today. I don't think that these easy solutions will work like we have to keep some more modest capitalism and so on and so on. I think that precisely when you mentioned private property maybe not private property but I tend to agree with those up to a point this German guy Streeck himself who claim as already hinted I think that money is the big problem today this crazy fiction fictional capital circulation of money. Something will have to be found here to radically change the functioning of money. Maybe in the long term even in the interest of reproduction of society that we have now because as I already pointed out we live in crazy times today where billions are just thrown into economy and things don't start to move. Again Keynesianism here is out. Keynesianism in the sense of this belief if you risk in some inflation throw money into it you trigger set in motion a development. We are doing this in spite of austerity. And here Varoufakis put it nicely when he said in the West we talk about austerity let's be serious. Austerity for us means oh they cut for health care and so on Greece is the only real austerity and
Recoil is a much more paradoxical ontology where I begin with plus. And this is also what I call in Less than Nothing less than nothing. This negative positivity something that is less than nothing and can nonetheless exist. So for me we first have the void and the plus. Then through a certain symbolic process whatever you call it we get one plus X plus this. One plus. And then through symbolic order we get one plus one plus plus and this plus only when you have two and plus is the object a. So it gets I try in an almost mystical way you know all these mystical speculations Genesis I try to develop this. Fuck both of you what are you laughing at me here. I thought the way you turned at him you see I told you what an idiot this guy is no sorry. No I'm sorry I'm sorry bad taste. But what I want to say here really is that I try to develop this logic so you ask a very crucial question which are the primordial elements in Lacan. I don't think I don't like those who would like to build an ontology of objects a you know like you have void and then you have partial objects it's not as simple as that. Some it's closer to signifier some signifying cut must be here from the very beginning. I don't like this because it's fashionable in some radical Lacanian circles to claim the symbolic order is secondary and we just begin with some partial objects and so on. No because I think the beauty of Lacanian reading of Freud is that he demonstrate you know how even in the most primitive organization of this polymorphous perversity where you have multiple partial objects the cut of castration is already there retroactively like it's not that this genesis is totally false that you know first you have partial objects blah blah then out of nowhere oh my God horrible father castrating agency and so on. People usually totally miss the point here the point with which Moses was trying that you know this is what people don't get it the basic feature that the one who is castrated is fundamentally father himself for Lacan. If you just want your own castration some Kleinian mother is enough who controls you and so on. The big discovery which makes you dwelling in language is not that I have to accept my castration no it's that you cannot rely on any big other that the big other itself is castrating. You lack something but you will not find it in the big other. That's Lacan's crucial gesture which I claim maybe I'm wrong you find it also sorry that I don't collapse uh then maybe one of here because you know right wingers centrists where is the left okay let's go on. You talked yesterday a bit about digitalization which is also process of re-appropriation of public use of reason and the wider trend in capitalism a move from expropriation exploitation back to rent. My question is very naive where do you stand in relation to private property because even Hegel is ambiguous here and I think simple worker's ownership of capital is not going to work anymore especially because of Homo Sacer and the almost privileged position that workers have today of being exploited so how to rethink private property? First I agree with you I will not have a good direct answer so I bluff a little bit around. I will begin with what you said how ambiguous Hegel is. An observation that I always often made and I want to repeat it. You know Hegel is reproached that his vision is some kind of a even proto-fascist corporate system but Robert Pippin who is a conservative liberal Hegelian okay left liberal Hegelian he made this wonderful observation. You know Hegel developed his vision of a rational state in his philosophy of right. But do we forget what he says in the most famous part of the introduction to his philosophy of right. You know when he uses that metaphor of the owl of Minerva which takes off when there is dusk. And then he says it explicitly when we can develop its conceptual structure of a certain social system it means that its time has already passed. Philosophy cannot paint the future it can only render the conceptual structure of a social system let's call it epochal system when its time is past. Okay naive question raised by Pippin. Was Hegel really such an idiot that he wasn't aware that this should held also for his own philosophy of right? So I think it's totally wrong to read Hegel's outline of these three estates rational state as his own program that's how rational state no Hegel was aware fully aware that its time is past. Uh but nonetheless to go back to your to your question uh yes we are maybe over private property but still I think we should think radically. I think our goal should not be to say okay we went too far with communist dreams now we can be more modest and so on and so on. No that's I didn't have time I think to quote those passages. The one I like I'm sorry if I used it the last time that I was here a couple is you know a German guy who is a little bit simple naive but he has something to say he is very popular now more sociologist economist Wolfgang Streeck Verso published some of his texts his thesis is this one that capitalism obviously is is in deep crisis it is slowly disintegrating. But Marxism automatically assumed that when capitalism is disintegrating there is already a new more progressive power waiting to take over. You know like we socialists or whatever we are are here to take over. But what Marx couldn't imagine is that capitalism is just disintegrating you know and there is no clear feasible alternative that we can that we can think. And that's what makes me really depressed. On the one hand we have all this protest movement great. On the other hand we have this analysis of disintegrating capitalism. How difficult is to bring these two together. Many most of the radical left even mockingly avoid all these topics of capitalism is disintegrating it no longer functions and so on and so on. So uh so I think that if anything the changes will have to be more radical than we can imagine today. I don't think that these easy solutions will work like we have to keep some more modest capitalism and so on and so on. I think that precisely when you mentioned private property maybe not private property but I tend to agree with those up to a point this German guy Streeck himself who claim as already hinted I think that money is the big problem today this crazy fiction fictional capital circulation of money. Something will have to be found here to radically change the functioning of money. Maybe in the long term even in the interest of reproduction of society that we have now because as I already pointed out we live in crazy times today where billions are just thrown into economy and things don't start to move. Again Keynesianism here is out. Keynesianism in the sense of this belief if you risk in some inflation throw money into it you trigger set in motion a development. We are doing this in spite of austerity. And here Varoufakis put it nicely when he said in the West we talk about austerity let's be serious. Austerity for us means oh they cut for health care and so on Greece is the only real austerity and
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some other. Austerity means standard of living falls for my God you know. We we have we are not I think we in the West up to a point up to a point the crisis is real. But we still fake a crisis to avoid it. We talk a lot about crisis in the developed West but secretly we are still relatively
some other. Austerity means standard of living falls for my God you know. We we have we are not I think we in the West up to a point up to a point the crisis is real. But we still fake a crisis to avoid it. We talk a lot about crisis in the developed West but secretly we are still relatively
Slavoj Žižek
satisfied things go on let's hope they will go on like this they will not knock. So unfortunately I will be totally open here I think we will simply have to make very risky decisions. This is what we Lacanians call la réponse du réel the answer of the real and so on. So again I think we will have to like Lenin you know what I used in one of my books I love this metaphor maybe it's a fake one that we are more than in Marx in Hegel's what was Hegel's situation. There was first radical attempt the first one at liberation French Revolution. In his view I doubt it went too wrong French Revolution and Hegel's problem is not a conservative one his point is how to remain faithful to the legacy of French Revolution and do it again in a better way. Isn't this our predicament today? 20th century tried communism at least in that form it failed. The only legitimization of communism today it's very ironic one is that where communists are in power they are the best and most ruthless managers of global capitalism in China Vietnam and so on. But my problem is this one the task today is how fully admitting assuming all the horrors Gulag and so on nonetheless trying to remain faithful to that legacy not to renounce the legacy itself. And again I think we cannot any longer afford this simple logic of we know where we are going in some basic sense we don't know where we are going and again we will just have to make very risky decisions. Okay sorry don't kill me I'm getting tired if you want to ask me ask me tomorrow if we will come to that last boring moment at it's at two across the street I think. And again this I am myopic Madison you are there yes you remember sorry now I am this kind of terrorizing image interpolating you ah that would be nice for you to subjectify yourself in this way and say why am I why what you are saying I am and so on. Okay sorry so again I will send you a file and everyone of the students if he or she asks for it has the right to get it. Okay see you tomorrow and fuck life. Thank you.
satisfied things go on let's hope they will go on like this they will not knock. So unfortunately I will be totally open here I think we will simply have to make very risky decisions. This is what we Lacanians call la réponse du réel the answer of the real and so on. So again I think we will have to like Lenin you know what I used in one of my books I love this metaphor maybe it's a fake one that we are more than in Marx in Hegel's what was Hegel's situation. There was first radical attempt the first one at liberation French Revolution. In his view I doubt it went too wrong French Revolution and Hegel's problem is not a conservative one his point is how to remain faithful to the legacy of French Revolution and do it again in a better way. Isn't this our predicament today? 20th century tried communism at least in that form it failed. The only legitimization of communism today it's very ironic one is that where communists are in power they are the best and most ruthless managers of global capitalism in China Vietnam and so on. But my problem is this one the task today is how fully admitting assuming all the horrors Gulag and so on nonetheless trying to remain faithful to that legacy not to renounce the legacy itself. And again I think we cannot any longer afford this simple logic of we know where we are going in some basic sense we don't know where we are going and again we will just have to make very risky decisions. Okay sorry don't kill me I'm getting tired if you want to ask me ask me tomorrow if we will come to that last boring moment at it's at two across the street I think. And again this I am myopic Madison you are there yes you remember sorry now I am this kind of terrorizing image interpolating you ah that would be nice for you to subjectify yourself in this way and say why am I why what you are saying I am and so on. Okay sorry so again I will send you a file and everyone of the students if he or she asks for it has the right to get it. Okay see you tomorrow and fuck life. Thank you.