Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 1
Lecture · Justin Wagner ·
2006-05-25 · 1:45:23 · 15,883 words
psychoanalysisideologycapitalismhistoryphilosophy-generalpoliticscinema-art-culturelanguagesubjectivityethics
Žižek argues that the Lacanian Real is not concrete reality but a purely virtual, empty point of failure or absence that structures symbolic fields. He illustrates this through magnetic focal points, the Left-Right political divide, and Schumann's 'music for the eyes,' where a missing theme generates the variations. He further demonstrates this retroactive logic using his anecdote about Billy Bathgate and Khrushchev's 'return to Lenin,' showing how a third, imaginary ideal is produced by the failure of repetitions. Žižek analyzes the Lacanian concept of the Big Other, defining it not as a substantial entity but as a virtual, symbolic network of rules and meta-rules that governs social interaction. He illustrates this through examples of political hypocrisy (Japan, Singapore, Yugoslavia), the necessity of a 'third' witness for enjoyment, and the creative, anonymous nature of jokes. He argues that the Big Other is sustained by our subjective belief and action, linking this to Hegel's concept of Spirit and Lacan's idea of the 'unsent letter' as a symptom. Žižek analyzes Lacan’s concept of the symbolic order as rooted in 'empty gestures' and 'useless gifts' that establish social bonds rather than transmit content. He illustrates this through examples like the wooden horse, romantic courting rituals, and Soviet Stalinist discourse, arguing that language inherently carries a 'declaratory' meta-message about the speaker's relation to the listener. The excerpt concludes by examining the Stalinist Big Other, where every action is read as a hidden sign, and introduces Agamben’s concept of profanation as a way to empty gestures of their sacred or symbolic weight. Žižek critiques Agamben’s concept of profanation, arguing instead that profanation is the primordial act of the symbolic order, emerging from the de-contextualization of everyday gestures. He engages in a Q&A defending Lacan’s return to a radical Cartesianism, positing that the Cogito is founded on an excess of madness rather than its repression. Finally, he uses a computer programming analogy to argue that reality itself is ontologically incomplete ('non-all'), creating the space for subjectivity. Žižek contrasts Freud’s repetition with Deleuze’s pure difference, arguing that repression stems from an inability to repeat rather than vice versa. He analyzes Patricia Highsmith’s novels (This Sweet Sickness, The Talented Mr. Ripley) to illustrate the role of the Big Other in masochism and psychopathy, critiquing Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation for reducing Ripley to a vulgar hysterical figure. He then critiques the 'transgressive model' of touching the Real, defending masochistic ritual and Lacan’s ethics of autonomy against Stalinist reliance on the Big Other, concluding with examples of the 'sacred fool' and the cynical incorporation of transgression into the symbolic order.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 41
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Lacan's term for an 'organ without a body' or partial object, which Lacan describes as 'irreal' (no longer in reality), illustrating the Real's non-substantiality.
The Real is not substantial reality but an empty, virtual point (like a magnetic focal point) that structures the field without existing itself.
Capitalism is Real not as a concrete civilization but as an abstract, 'worldless' matrix that operates across all cultural horizons.
The structural difference (e.g., Left vs. Right) exists prior to and determines the identities of the terms it separates.
as “variations without the theme”
A Schumann musical structure where variations exist without an audible theme, serving as an example of pure difference/virtuality.
The Real is the void or empty third term retroactively produced by the failure of repetitions (e.g., the imagined 'good' novel).
as “elementary Real”
The asymmetry or gap between the external view and the internal experience, rather than a substantial reality behind the symbolic.
Hegel's concept of the social/ethical substance, interpreted by Žižek as the virtual space created by concrete individuals, not a mega-subject.
Hegel's interpretation of the post-Christ God as purely virtual, the symbolic Other that exists only through our belief and action.
A Lacanian concept where a message is preserved and 'sent' to the Big Other (fantasy) rather than the empirical addressee, exemplified by symptoms.
A psychoanalytic concept treated as an 'unsent letter', a message addressed purely to the Big Other, not an empirical individual.
The creative aspect of the Big Other, exemplified by the spontaneous emergence of jokes, which are not invented by individuals but emerge from the collective.
The notion that language is a 'dangerous gift' that colonizes the subject once accepted, neutralizing its content to establish the symbolic pact.
as “phatic dimension”
The 'phatic dimension' of communication, referring to the self-referential aspect of speech that establishes a link rather than transmitting information.
The reflexivity of human communication where the act of saying something simultaneously symbolizes the fact of communication itself.
A gift or message that is useless or superfluous in its content, serving only to establish a social link or pact between giver and receiver.
A social pathology where an individual cannot engage in meta-communication or empty gestures, taking every statement literally and missing the social pact.
as “fake freedom”
The asymmetrical hypocrisy of offering 'fake freedom' by claiming to accept any choice while implicitly threatening the other if they refuse.
as “Stalinist discourse”
The phenomenon in Stalinist discourse where every action or statement is read as a hidden political sign, creating a semantically saturated space where nothing is neutral.
The meta-communicative layer of speech that signals the speaker's attitude or the social relation, distinct from the literal content of the message.
as “repression and the return of the repressed are one and the same process”
The idea that repression and the return of the repressed are identical; the act of hiding something draws attention to it, thereby fulfilling its function.
The idea that necessity (obligation to give) must be masked as freedom (a free gift) to function as a social pact.
The process of undermining the sacred not by refunctionalizing it (secularization) but by using it in a perverted, non-utility way (profanation).
as “subject of the unconscious”
Lacan’s term for the subject, which Žižek identifies as literally the Cartesian subject, defined by the gap or void in being.
The core, founding gesture of philosophy and the Cogito; not an external force to be repressed, but the internal explosion of negativity that constitutes the subject.
Hegel’s concept that natural nature is already stabilized by habits; Žižek uses this to argue that nature itself is not a balanced system but is already 'crazy' or habituated.
as “lazy programmer God”
A humorous metaphor for the creator of reality, who, like a game developer, leaves parts of the universe unrendered (undetermined) because they are not functionally necessary for the 'game' of existence.
as “non-all of reality”
The ontological claim that reality is not fully constructed or determined (like a computer program with unrendered interiors), creating gaps that allow for subjectivity.
as “Big Other”
The symbolic order or network of rules that coordinates interaction, existing only as a virtual presupposition sustained by subjects.
as “reification of the Big Other”
The reification of the Big Other, where even the rulers (Stalin, Molotov) are subject to the same symbolic logic and paranoia as the commoners.
Deleuze's concept interpreted by Žižek as the Real: a difference where positive qualities remain identical, but the absent reference point changes.
as “mana, zero signifier”
A Lacanian concept referring to the phallic signifier as a void or lack that structures reality, oscillating between 'non-all' and central focus.
The idea that authenticity requires ripping through the fake universe of exchanges to touch the Real; Žižek rejects this as a defensive gesture.
A label for modern art’s self-referential gestures (breaking the fourth wall) which Žižek argues are not progressive but escape the Real.
The Stalinist hermeneutic category where the meaning of acts is independent of subjective intent, judged by the Big Other (History).
as “Kantian autonomy”
The ethical responsibility to determine one's own duty without external guarantee; Žižek contrasts this with Eichmann’s 'following orders' and Stalinist instrumentalization.
as “meta-rule”
The implicit, often unconscious rule that dictates how explicit rules are to be applied, violated, or interpreted in practice.
Lacan's term for the symbolic order, which emerges not from content but from the ritualized, empty exchange that establishes a pact between subjects.
as “One”
The anonymous, reified agency of social norms ('One does it'), distinct from a mere majority, which structures ethical and social judgment.
as “cynical system”
A social order where everyone knows the 'emperor is naked' (the ideology is false) but continues to act as if it is true, incorporating transgression.
Speaking through others; Žižek uses this to describe the analyst’s role in transforming the patient's passionate words into a cynical, symbolic form.
Stories he reaches for 7
Boris Groys reveals that Bakhtin’s model for the 'carnival' (suspension of rules) was actually the Stalinist Purges, where the nomenclature becomes the Gulag, showing how transgression is incorporated into the system.
“It was a very concrete model for Bakhtin for a carnival. It was called the Stalinist Purges. This was the true carnival.”
Žižek saw the movie Billy Bathgate and thought the novel must be better; he read the novel and found it worse than the movie. The 'good novel' is a retroactive, imaginary third term produced by the failure of both versions.
“You take a bad novel, you get a bad movie, but in between, the movie generates a third specter of some imagined good novel, you know, as if retroactively.”
God is described as a 'lazy programmer' who left reality 'non-all' (incomplete) not out of ignorance, but because it is ontologically undetermined, allowing for the gap of subjectivity.
“God was also a little bit of a lazy programmer, too lazy to... non-all.”
Iron filings converge toward a focal point that has no substantiality; the point is real only as a failure to reach it, illustrating the Real as an empty virtual center.
“When you have a magnetic field and you throw the pieces of iron, and they form, converge towards a certain point. But that point doesn't exist in itself.”
Khrushchev's 'return to true Leninist origins' was a retroactive construction; the 'authentic' Lenin was an imaginary third term created by the failure of Stalinism, not a historical reality.
“What Khrushchev and his critics of Stalinism, his comrades, were returning to was again, it's exactly the same as that imagined Billy Bathgate. It was retroactively constructed.”
Stalin extracts a confession from Kamenev and asks the NKVD interrogator, 'What is the weight of the Soviet Union...?' Žižek uses this to show Stalinism's reliance on the Big Other (History) as judge.
“When Stalin could get a confession out of Kamenev... 'What is the weight of the Soviet Union...?' Was he unconsciously invoking the Big Other?”
Schumann's piano piece has a third 'music for the eyes' line (a missing theme) that the player must convey without hearing it; variations exist without the audible theme, illustrating pure virtual difference.
“Schumann then adds something very mysterious, a third line that he refers to as Augenmusik, music for the eyes only.”
Works invoked 18
Billy Bathgate film
A 'bad movie' that generates the desire for an imagined 'good novel,' illustrating retroactive production of the Real.
Logic of Sense book
Deleuze’s book; cited in a question regarding how structure circulates through empty terms.
Écrits book
Lacan’s collection of essays, specifically Rapport de Rome, is quoted extensively to define the symbolic order and empty gestures.
History of Madness book
Foucault’s book; Žižek uses it to illustrate the debate on whether the Cogito excludes madness.
Lacan’s seminar criticized for promoting the 'transgressive model' of ripping through the fake universe to touch the Real, which Žižek rejects.
Alexei Yurchak’s book, used to illustrate the double meaning and semantic saturation of Stalinist discourse.
Guernica artwork
Picasso’s painting, covered by the US delegation during Colin Powell’s speech, used to illustrate the declaratory dimension and the return of the repressed.
Jokester other
Isaac Asimov's short story about linguists trying to find the 'primordial zero-level joke,' used to illustrate the creative, anonymous nature of the Big Other.
The Purloined Letter book
Lacan's seminar cited for the idea that 'a letter always arrives at its destination,' specifically the unsent letter.
Encyclopedia book
Hegel’s Encyclopedia; specifically the Philosophy of Spirit/Anthology section on madness and habit.
Pravda journal
The Soviet newspaper, cited as the medium where the 'death list' of the Bukharin trial was published, serving as a criminological signal.
Profanations book
Giorgio Agamben’s book, cited for its distinction between secularization and profanation, which Žižek uses to discuss emptying gestures.
Rabelais book
Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais is the subject of Groys’s revelation that the 'carnival' model was based on Stalinist Purges.
Ripley's Game film
Mentioned briefly as a film Žižek reviewed, but the focus is on The Talented Mr. Ripley.
The Silent Woman book
Janet Malcolm's book defending Ted Hughes; Žižek cites a quote from it but states he does not agree with its thesis.
Minghella’s film adaptation criticized for turning Ripley into a 'vulgar ordinary hysterical guy' and losing the novel's psychopathic depth regarding the Big Other.
The Thing film
Used as an example of the 'horrible Real' (terror/monster).
This Sweet Sickness book
Highsmith’s novel used as a classic example of masochism and the Big Other, where the protagonist’s happiness comes from writing letters not meant for the recipient.
People invoked 53
Kuznetsov positive
Russian formalist mentioned by the audience/interrupter for his work on the 'architectural spatialization of the Real.'
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as 'the best French philosopher who deals with catastrophes,' cited for his work on the spontaneous reification of election results.
Cited for the example of two tribes drawing images, used to illustrate the symbolic order.
Jacques Derrida positive
Žižek agrees with Derrida that the Cogito is based on an excess of madness, which is the core of philosophy.
Khadija positive
Identified as Muhammad’s 'Big Other' who validated his experience.
Vyacheslav Molotov positive
Used in the anecdote about the Bukharin trial list to illustrate the reification of the Big Other and the paranoia of Stalinist nomenclature.
Mentioned in the context of Janet Malcolm's book The Silent Woman, which defends Ted Hughes against Plath.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Referenced in the context of 'Leninism' as a Stalinist retroactive invention.
Colin Powell positive
Used as an example of US political hypocrisy, specifically covering Picasso's Guernica during his UN speech to advocate for the Iraq war.
Referenced in the question regarding the 'phoneme zero'.
Pierre Bourdieu positive
Cited as the first to notice the class analysis of the potlatch, though Žižek implies Bourdieu’s explanation is incomplete.
A Soviet figure from whom Stalin extracted a confession, used as an example of Stalinism's reliance on the Big Other.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited as the source of the term 'lamella' and the concept of the Real; Žižek claims to interpret Lacan's 'irreal' correctly against others.
Referenced via the term 'trucs-en-machins' (things-that-things) in the context of Lévi-Strauss.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Cited as an evolutionist who shows that nature is already 'crazy' and not a balanced system.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Žižek claims Deleuze is 'much worse than he seems' as a Lacanian/Hegelian, but uses Deleuze's concept of 'pure difference' to illustrate his point about the Real.
Mikhail Bakhtin positive
Žižek agrees with Boris Groys’s reading that Bakhtin’s 'carnival' was modeled on the Stalinist Purges, showing how transgression is incorporated into the system.
Referenced as part of the 'Bukharin-Trotskyite group' in the show trial anecdote.
Anthony Minghella negative
Žižek critiques Minghella’s film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley for turning Ripley into a 'vulgar ordinary hysterical guy' and losing the novel's psychopathic depth.
John Brown positive
Admired as a 'consequent white fighter' against slavery who followed the explicit rule of equality without the sub-rules of liberal delay.
Used as the model for the 'primitive farmer' joke, representing the object of enjoyment.
Georges Bataille negative
Žižek admits he may not have given Bataille a 'proper fair hearing' in his trial against Bataille, implying a disagreement with Bataille’s transgressive model.
Patricia Highsmith positive
Žižek explicitly states 'I also like her' and uses her novels (This Sweet Sickness, The Talented Mr. Ripley) as primary examples of the Big Other and masochism.
Mentioned as the subject of Janet Malcolm's defense in The Silent Woman.
Adolf Eichmann negative
Žižek calls it an 'obscene misunderstanding' to take Eichmann's claim of being a 'good Kantian' seriously, as Kantian autonomy forbids outsourcing responsibility to an external authority.
Alexei Yurchak positive
Cited as the author of Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, which provides the example of Soviet bureaucratic language regarding burial formulas.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited for the critical formulation that 'capitalism is a worldless phenomenon.'
Giorgio Agamben positive
Cited for his book Profanations, which distinguishes profanation from secularization, a concept Žižek finds useful for understanding how to 'empty' gestures.
Charles Taylor negative
Criticized for reading Hegel as a spiritualist with a 'mega-subject' called Spirit, which Žižek rejects as a mistake.
Author of Billy Bathgate; Žižek mentions failing to meet him due to the anecdote.
Marshall Sahlins positive
Cited as the anthropologist who answered Bourdieu, arguing that direct exchange turns into a logic of revenge, necessitating the 'illusion' of free gift.
Disliked as a writer, but his short story Jokester is cited for its premise about isolating the 'primordial zero-level joke'.
Nikita Khrushchev positive
Cited for his 'return to true Leninist origins,' which Žižek argues was a retroactive construction.
Actor in the movie adaptation of Billy Bathgate.
Žižek calls modern art’s self-referential gestures 'pseudo-Brechtian,' noting Brecht’s relationship to this is more complicated.
Actor in the movie adaptation of Billy Bathgate.
Maximilien Robespierre positive
Cited as a revolutionary figure who enacted equality directly, ignoring the sub-rules that excluded women and others.
Michel Foucault negative
Cited for his reading in History of Madness that the Cogito excludes madness; Žižek appreciates Foucault’s reply to Derrida but ultimately sides with Derrida.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Opposes Žižek's idea that capitalism is Real, claiming Žižek confuses it with the symbolic; Žižek disagrees.
Martin Heidegger positive
Cited for the concept of 'world' as a horizon of meaning.
Cited for a quote in The Silent Woman about unsent letters, though Žižek states he does not agree with the book's thesis defending Ted Hughes.
Homer positive
Referenced as the source of the term 'Danaoi' for the Greeks, used by Lacan to explain the symbolic nature of the Trojan Horse.
Boris Groys positive
A Russian literary critic/art theorist who told Žižek about the manuscript revealing Bakhtin’s carnival was modeled on the Stalinist Purges.
Robert Schumann positive
Cited for his musical piece featuring 'Augenmusik' (music for the eyes), used as a structural example of the Real.
Mentioned in the context of the alleged plot to assassinate Soviet leaders using his music at the Opera.
The messenger who appeared to Muhammad, initially thought to be a demon.
Joseph Stalin negative
Referenced as the figure who elevated Lenin into a sacred figure and whose deviation Khrushchev critiqued.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for his liking of the idea that exchange should not appear as exchange, supporting the analysis of the potlatch.
Cited as the origin of the Cogito; Žižek argues that the Cogito is not just rationalism but is based on an excess of madness.
Sigmund Freud positive
Žižek contrasts Freud's view (we repeat what we don't memorize/repress) with Deleuze's reversal, using Freud as a baseline for the discussion on repetition.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Referenced as a lens for understanding capitalism ('Heideggerian way even, a horizon of meaning') and for the concept of retroactivity.
Immanuel Kant positive
Žižek redeems Kantian ethics as 'real autonomy' where one is fully responsible for determining duty, contrasting it with Eichmann's 'following orders' and Stalinism.
Referenced in the anecdote about receiving the revelation from Archangel Gabriel.
Transcript 43 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Reality... Yeah, and then it goes to another comment that I had in mind when I was saying what I'm saying. I mean, I just—Yes, virtuality. I think Real is purely virtual. Yes, it's—you know what's so interesting that Lacan at some crucial point, I don't want to repeat too much myself, I quote it in the book, I think when he introduces the term lamella as that organ without the body, as it were, partial object, he uses the term irreal. Irreal in the sense of no longer in reality. And I claim that that's precisely the paradox: that for Lacan, Real is not real in the sense of reality. Real is purely—for example, you know what would be maybe, I use it in my Deleuze book, an example of this real? Like in—in chaos theory or in magnetism and so on. When you have a magnetic field and you throw the pieces of iron, and they form, converge towards a certain point. But that point doesn't exist in itself. All it—you know, it's a focal point. It's real in the sense that they all try to approach it, they never get there, but this central point has—has no substantiality. It's just—you know what's the paradox? I put it more precisely. The paradox is that it's not that there is something, an obstacle, positive, which then causes failure. Paradoxically, failure comes first. You fail, and then in order to account for this failure, you substantialize it. You say, "Oh, it—" So what—where for you here—because this—this is crucial that we debate it because I think that the first two notions of the Real are easy to get. On the one hand, Real as this horrible Real, terror, horror movies. The Thing—is even the title—even more than the early version, you know that John Carpenter's version of *The Thing*, the remake, where you have this Real as the horrible monster. That's clear. Real, mathematical Real, I think it's clear: it's just meaningless formulas. No, but where do you see—and here I have a big conflict with Ernesto Laclau now, maybe we can debate it later, where he opposes my idea that capitalism is Real, the core of the logic of the capital. He claims I confuse it, I don't understand Lacan, it's clearly symbolic. But my point here is again very precise. It's real in the sense that, as I develop it in my book—I will not develop it now—that like you don't have a capitalist civilization. I think all this topic of trying to point it down, origins of capitalism, I don't know, in Protestantism or this—that's a secondary. The—the magic, if you want to put it, of capitalism for me is that it's an abstract matrix which works in all cultures. You can have—is—okay, there are some problems, but even they will invent it, I think. You can have Islamic capitalism, Christian capitalism, Buddhist capitalism. The magic is that, as Badiou puts it in a critical way, capitalism is a worldless phenomenon. By world, I mean in a very Heideggerian way even, a horizon of meaning which sustains a civilization. And I think it's crucial to see that capitalism is global precisely in the sense that it can operate in all possible worlds, precisely to put this—it returns as the same in all possible worlds. In this very precise sense, I'm claiming capitalism—or the logic of capital—is Real. But to give you an example of this other, what would be—and maybe then you will say to me, tell me it's still counterintuitive. I'm repeating myself a little bit, but it's crucial that we get it clear. For example, political—stupid example, but to make it clear. Political difference, when it still existed today, some people claim it doesn't: Left, Right. Why is it Real? Because every way, anyway—how to put it—there—because there is no meta-language. What do I mean by this? Something very simple. Any way that you try to define this difference will already be either from the Left or from the Right. You know what I mean? Like, the difference Left-Right is not only a difference within a given social field where some people are on the Left, some people are on the Right. The catch is always that if you ask somebody from the Left not what he is, but how does he see the very difference between him and the Right, he will give you a different global image than the Rightist. So it—it's that—how to put it—it's in a way, difference precedes what it is a difference of. The paradox is that it is a difference between Left and Right, but the Left and Right are already both an attempt, a failed attempt, to formulate the difference. The difference—the difference comes first. Or another example, which is why I claim in my crazy claim that Deleuze is much worse than he seems—a Lacanian and a Hegelian—that the Real would have been a pure difference, which is purely virtual difference in the sense of—and I want to return this if you will have time at the end—that nothing changes in reality. Sorry, an old story, but I will be faithful to me, I will give a new reading to it, because I used it as a way to function, to as a way to do ideology—sorry, how ideology functions in its obscene dimension. My old example that I used, I know, many times: Schumann. A famous—my god, I even know forgot which piece it will come to me later, of Schumann where you have something nicely very paradoxical. You have a piece of—you have a piece of piano piece, of course, you have notes, two—two series of notes, for left hand, for right hand, it's a piano piece. Then Schumann was specialized in something which I find very interesting. He—this is this romantic reflexivity, and I'm not losing my thread, I will come back to the Real. Sorry? I'm—I'm following you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I'm sometimes not following myself, so. You are my Big—you are my Big Other here, so we—yeah, okay. Schumann then adds something very mysterious, a third line that he refers to as Augenmusik, music for the eyes only. You have a third melodic line which is—which is a kind of a presupposed absent. The idea is that it should give to the piano player a kind of a—sometimes it works like this—as if both what you play with left hand and with right hand are variations, but you don't hear when you listen to it, the—the main melody. The main melody is given there just to the eyes. And of course, the art of playing is to play it in this way that somehow this absent point of reference would be—so, you know, to put it—to cut a long story short, if in Beethoven and those, you still get theme with variations, like Diabelli, 20—I don't know how many, variations from the theme. What you get with Schumann is variations without the theme. The theme is only—okay, I'm ashamed to use this old-fashioned—present—present in its absence, as we used to say years ago when I was young. But then something mysterious happens. In this—then Schumann repeats the same—I think it's about one minute and a half passage—the same notes, left and right hand, but without this invisible third line. So the difference is purely virtual because the paradox is that the piano player has to play exactly the same notes. But he has to play them—that's the magic of the great piano player—so that this absence will no longer resonate in them. The difference must be somehow purely—purely virtual. This is, I think, the best example of what Deleuze—this idea came to me when I was recently rereading Deleuze—what Deleuze means by pure difference. It's not a qualitative difference in the sense of you have two phenomena which repeat themselves and then you can say they are almost the same but here in this tiny—no, as to their positive qualities, properties, in repetition nothing changes, it's the same, but the absent point of reference disappears. That's what—it's absent. In other words, this would be the pure repetition as the Real. The Real would be here that third place in between every symbolic repetition. Which is why—now I will give you a nice example—how then does this Real get imagined? I will use another from my early works, which I think functions here nicely, example. And I told this—I wanted to make long ago an interview in New York with or to meet him, that Edgar Doctorow, of the writer. You know, *Billy Bathgate* and so on. Then I told to his secretary this story, and as you will see immediately why, I didn't get a chance to meet him there. Like, because you—you know *Billy Bathgate*, maybe you saw the movie later with Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, and so on. Okay. First I saw—this is I think a nice example of how repetition works as Real. First I saw the movie. And the impression of the movie with me was that it's a—it must have been a good novel, that as if it's a—as if you can still feel how much better the novel is, but that the movie is a failure. So it generated in me a desire to see the original, I mean the—the—then now comes the surprise, you may guess what it is. Then I went to read the novel. It was even worse than the movie. So you see the paradox? You take a—that's why I didn't get the interview with Doctorow—you take a bad novel, you get a bad movie, but in between, the movie generates a third specter of some imagined good novel, you know, as if retroactively. This is repetition at its purest. Which—which is why you can understand nicely from this, but these are the later theological Deleuzian-Hegelian mysteries, why, in what sense, Deleuze means that something really new emerges only through repetition. We have a repetition, two failures, but the new emerges, the idea of a really good novel, really good novel, which was nowhere. And I think that this is the essence of historicity, that we—in every historical repetition or development, we never have two. Within repetition, a third is retroactively produced. Let me give you another simple example. Now I'm reading stuff on Lenin. Did you notice how when the Stalinists did a little bit of self-critique, Khrushchev and later, they always referred to the catchphrase—common phrase, if I remember it correctly, even from my youth, was, "Let's return from Stalinist deviation to the true Leninist origins," to the authentic Leninist origins. Now the catch is that—but if you look then back, what they meant by it had nothing to do with what Lenin really was before Stalinism. Here I agree even with some right-wingers who claim that Lenin was not a Leninist. Leninism is a Stalinist retroactive invention. And now comes my catch: not only in the sense that Stalin elevated Lenin into this kind of a sacred whatever figure with dogma, no, even in the sense of criticism, the very critical model which basically meant a little bit more of democratic centralism, no more irrational purges and so on. What—what Khrushchev and his critics of Stalinism, his comrades, were returning to was again, it's exactly the same as that imagined *Billy Bathgate*. It was retroactively constructed. So to return—to return to my point, here we have an example of what I meant by this Real: Real as this empty third place. In every repetition, you need a third, but it's just a void—a void which is then in an imagined way filled—filled in. Now does this make it any clearer, a little bit? Very much so, and I wonder whether or not you had thought of—the Russian formalist Kuznetsov, for instance, when he talks about the architectural spatialization of the Real. Like he's actually—I thought it was very interesting because he's actually saying we can conceptualize space, the space of work as being underground and the space of life itself or enjoyment as above. Yeah, but my problem is that I blush here, I mean with architecture. I—I don't know
Reality... Yeah, and then it goes to another comment that I had in mind when I was saying what I'm saying. I mean, I just—Yes, virtuality. I think Real is purely virtual. Yes, it's—you know what's so interesting that Lacan at some crucial point, I don't want to repeat too much myself, I quote it in the book, I think when he introduces the term lamella as that organ without the body, as it were, partial object, he uses the term irreal. Irreal in the sense of no longer in reality. And I claim that that's precisely the paradox: that for Lacan, Real is not real in the sense of reality. Real is purely—for example, you know what would be maybe, I use it in my Deleuze book, an example of this real? Like in—in chaos theory or in magnetism and so on. When you have a magnetic field and you throw the pieces of iron, and they form, converge towards a certain point. But that point doesn't exist in itself. All it—you know, it's a focal point. It's real in the sense that they all try to approach it, they never get there, but this central point has—has no substantiality. It's just—you know what's the paradox? I put it more precisely. The paradox is that it's not that there is something, an obstacle, positive, which then causes failure. Paradoxically, failure comes first. You fail, and then in order to account for this failure, you substantialize it. You say, "Oh, it—" So what—where for you here—because this—this is crucial that we debate it because I think that the first two notions of the Real are easy to get. On the one hand, Real as this horrible Real, terror, horror movies. The Thing—is even the title—even more than the early version, you know that John Carpenter's version of *The Thing*, the remake, where you have this Real as the horrible monster. That's clear. Real, mathematical Real, I think it's clear: it's just meaningless formulas. No, but where do you see—and here I have a big conflict with Ernesto Laclau now, maybe we can debate it later, where he opposes my idea that capitalism is Real, the core of the logic of the capital. He claims I confuse it, I don't understand Lacan, it's clearly symbolic. But my point here is again very precise. It's real in the sense that, as I develop it in my book—I will not develop it now—that like you don't have a capitalist civilization. I think all this topic of trying to point it down, origins of capitalism, I don't know, in Protestantism or this—that's a secondary. The—the magic, if you want to put it, of capitalism for me is that it's an abstract matrix which works in all cultures. You can have—is—okay, there are some problems, but even they will invent it, I think. You can have Islamic capitalism, Christian capitalism, Buddhist capitalism. The magic is that, as Badiou puts it in a critical way, capitalism is a worldless phenomenon. By world, I mean in a very Heideggerian way even, a horizon of meaning which sustains a civilization. And I think it's crucial to see that capitalism is global precisely in the sense that it can operate in all possible worlds, precisely to put this—it returns as the same in all possible worlds. In this very precise sense, I'm claiming capitalism—or the logic of capital—is Real. But to give you an example of this other, what would be—and maybe then you will say to me, tell me it's still counterintuitive. I'm repeating myself a little bit, but it's crucial that we get it clear. For example, political—stupid example, but to make it clear. Political difference, when it still existed today, some people claim it doesn't: Left, Right. Why is it Real? Because every way, anyway—how to put it—there—because there is no meta-language. What do I mean by this? Something very simple. Any way that you try to define this difference will already be either from the Left or from the Right. You know what I mean? Like, the difference Left-Right is not only a difference within a given social field where some people are on the Left, some people are on the Right. The catch is always that if you ask somebody from the Left not what he is, but how does he see the very difference between him and the Right, he will give you a different global image than the Rightist. So it—it's that—how to put it—it's in a way, difference precedes what it is a difference of. The paradox is that it is a difference between Left and Right, but the Left and Right are already both an attempt, a failed attempt, to formulate the difference. The difference—the difference comes first. Or another example, which is why I claim in my crazy claim that Deleuze is much worse than he seems—a Lacanian and a Hegelian—that the Real would have been a pure difference, which is purely virtual difference in the sense of—and I want to return this if you will have time at the end—that nothing changes in reality. Sorry, an old story, but I will be faithful to me, I will give a new reading to it, because I used it as a way to function, to as a way to do ideology—sorry, how ideology functions in its obscene dimension. My old example that I used, I know, many times: Schumann. A famous—my god, I even know forgot which piece it will come to me later, of Schumann where you have something nicely very paradoxical. You have a piece of—you have a piece of piano piece, of course, you have notes, two—two series of notes, for left hand, for right hand, it's a piano piece. Then Schumann was specialized in something which I find very interesting. He—this is this romantic reflexivity, and I'm not losing my thread, I will come back to the Real. Sorry? I'm—I'm following you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I'm sometimes not following myself, so. You are my Big—you are my Big Other here, so we—yeah, okay. Schumann then adds something very mysterious, a third line that he refers to as Augenmusik, music for the eyes only. You have a third melodic line which is—which is a kind of a presupposed absent. The idea is that it should give to the piano player a kind of a—sometimes it works like this—as if both what you play with left hand and with right hand are variations, but you don't hear when you listen to it, the—the main melody. The main melody is given there just to the eyes. And of course, the art of playing is to play it in this way that somehow this absent point of reference would be—so, you know, to put it—to cut a long story short, if in Beethoven and those, you still get theme with variations, like Diabelli, 20—I don't know how many, variations from the theme. What you get with Schumann is variations without the theme. The theme is only—okay, I'm ashamed to use this old-fashioned—present—present in its absence, as we used to say years ago when I was young. But then something mysterious happens. In this—then Schumann repeats the same—I think it's about one minute and a half passage—the same notes, left and right hand, but without this invisible third line. So the difference is purely virtual because the paradox is that the piano player has to play exactly the same notes. But he has to play them—that's the magic of the great piano player—so that this absence will no longer resonate in them. The difference must be somehow purely—purely virtual. This is, I think, the best example of what Deleuze—this idea came to me when I was recently rereading Deleuze—what Deleuze means by pure difference. It's not a qualitative difference in the sense of you have two phenomena which repeat themselves and then you can say they are almost the same but here in this tiny—no, as to their positive qualities, properties, in repetition nothing changes, it's the same, but the absent point of reference disappears. That's what—it's absent. In other words, this would be the pure repetition as the Real. The Real would be here that third place in between every symbolic repetition. Which is why—now I will give you a nice example—how then does this Real get imagined? I will use another from my early works, which I think functions here nicely, example. And I told this—I wanted to make long ago an interview in New York with or to meet him, that Edgar Doctorow, of the writer. You know, *Billy Bathgate* and so on. Then I told to his secretary this story, and as you will see immediately why, I didn't get a chance to meet him there. Like, because you—you know *Billy Bathgate*, maybe you saw the movie later with Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, and so on. Okay. First I saw—this is I think a nice example of how repetition works as Real. First I saw the movie. And the impression of the movie with me was that it's a—it must have been a good novel, that as if it's a—as if you can still feel how much better the novel is, but that the movie is a failure. So it generated in me a desire to see the original, I mean the—the—then now comes the surprise, you may guess what it is. Then I went to read the novel. It was even worse than the movie. So you see the paradox? You take a—that's why I didn't get the interview with Doctorow—you take a bad novel, you get a bad movie, but in between, the movie generates a third specter of some imagined good novel, you know, as if retroactively. This is repetition at its purest. Which—which is why you can understand nicely from this, but these are the later theological Deleuzian-Hegelian mysteries, why, in what sense, Deleuze means that something really new emerges only through repetition. We have a repetition, two failures, but the new emerges, the idea of a really good novel, really good novel, which was nowhere. And I think that this is the essence of historicity, that we—in every historical repetition or development, we never have two. Within repetition, a third is retroactively produced. Let me give you another simple example. Now I'm reading stuff on Lenin. Did you notice how when the Stalinists did a little bit of self-critique, Khrushchev and later, they always referred to the catchphrase—common phrase, if I remember it correctly, even from my youth, was, "Let's return from Stalinist deviation to the true Leninist origins," to the authentic Leninist origins. Now the catch is that—but if you look then back, what they meant by it had nothing to do with what Lenin really was before Stalinism. Here I agree even with some right-wingers who claim that Lenin was not a Leninist. Leninism is a Stalinist retroactive invention. And now comes my catch: not only in the sense that Stalin elevated Lenin into this kind of a sacred whatever figure with dogma, no, even in the sense of criticism, the very critical model which basically meant a little bit more of democratic centralism, no more irrational purges and so on. What—what Khrushchev and his critics of Stalinism, his comrades, were returning to was again, it's exactly the same as that imagined *Billy Bathgate*. It was retroactively constructed. So to return—to return to my point, here we have an example of what I meant by this Real: Real as this empty third place. In every repetition, you need a third, but it's just a void—a void which is then in an imagined way filled—filled in. Now does this make it any clearer, a little bit? Very much so, and I wonder whether or not you had thought of—the Russian formalist Kuznetsov, for instance, when he talks about the architectural spatialization of the Real. Like he's actually—I thought it was very interesting because he's actually saying we can conceptualize space, the space of work as being underground and the space of life itself or enjoyment as above. Yeah, but my problem is that I blush here, I mean with architecture. I—I don't know
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idea where I see some kind of architectural real is—but it's purely subjectively—is these mysterious buildings that you find somehow which from the outside look smaller than from the inside, you know, where this spatiality is broken. I think Real in architecture for me is somewhere on the border precisely between, for example, inside and outside. It often happens to me even with cars, especially this—now they went bankrupt, how was—were they called? Leland or what? These small British cars. A friend of
idea where I see some kind of architectural real is—but it's purely subjectively—is these mysterious buildings that you find somehow which from the outside look smaller than from the inside, you know, where this spatiality is broken. I think Real in architecture for me is somewhere on the border precisely between, for example, inside and outside. It often happens to me even with cars, especially this—now they went bankrupt, how was—were they called? Leland or what? These small British cars. A friend of
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mine had it years
mine had it years
Slavoj Žižek
ago and I noticed how from outside it looks small, once you are inside it magically looks like how can it be, no? In this—that would be the elementary Real. It's not we are in symbolic imaginary space and some substantial reality behind. No, it's simply—how to put it—it's this gap of asymmetry, like if you look from outside, you have a certain view, from the inside, you know, this that you cannot bring together the two perspectives. I don't want to repeat myself too much. Sorry? Yeah, yeah, we all—because my point is that the example here would have been that—which I quote in all of my books—that Lévi-Strauss, those two tribes, draw image, blah-blah, let's go on. Okay. So much about symbolic as part of this triad, the Real and so on and so on and so on. So the Big Other operates at a symbolic level. So what is the symbolic order composed of? When we speak or listen, we never only interact with others, of course. Everybody knows that our speech activity is always grounded on our accepting of and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions. This is the common idea of the Big Other, no? We never just talk, there must be a background of rules which coordinates, regulates, provides the horizon of how we can—within which we can interact. First there are the grammatical rules I have to master blindly and spontaneously. That's already the first interesting things to note: that with grammatical and other rules, it's not only that you have to know them and then when you know them you use them blindly. In order for language to function, it has to be mechanized, you have to use them blindly. If you think all the time about what words mean, you never get to—to say anything. Then of course, there is the background of participating in the same life world and so on and so on. But my point here is that the rules that I follow, the Big Other, are marked by a deep split. There are rules and meanings that I follow blindly out of custom, but of which upon reflection I can become at least partially aware. I mean, there is no mystery: grammatical rules, I follow them blindly, if I think about it, no problem, and I can enunciate them, bring them out, no problem. But then there are rules that I follow, meanings that haunt me, but that I even don't know that I obey them, like unconscious prohibitions. Then there are rules and meanings that I am aware of, but I have to act from the outside as if I'm not aware of them—dirty obscene innuendos and so on and so on. And this is what interests me: this inner gap or even reflexivity—I will explain immediately what I mean—in the Big Other. What do I mean by it? For example, let's imagine the Big Other at its purest as a legal order. Once we have a legal order, every legal order once it functions, has to rely on a complex network of informal rules which tells you how you are to relate to explicit norms, how you are to apply them. I think that's the—the mystery of language. Somebody tells you, "Don't do that," or "Do that." Don't you know that in a living community, it's never clear what this really means? To what extent are you to take this literally? Or when are you allowed, solicited even, to disregard the rule? You know what I mean? For example, sometimes something is prohibited, but the true message is: "Do it." It's just a provocation. Sometimes it's prohibited, and the true message is: "Do it but discreetly." The message is: "Do it but don't pronounce it publicly." Again, sometimes it's allowed, but the true message is: "Don't do it." Like, are you—sorry—Korea or Japan? Singapore. See, oh—that's—sorry, Western imperialist racism. Okay, sorry. No, because—I spoke with a Japanese guy recently, journalist, who told me a nice story of how in Japan today you do have as a worker the right to—40 days holiday every year. That's the law. But the catch is: it's expected that you use maximum half of it. So then I told them, "Okay, why don't they simply say, 'Okay, you have days,' and then at least you can—" "No, no, no, that's the whole point of politeness rules and so on and so on." You know? So this—this is a nice example of how again, it's not only that often something is prohibited, but prohibited in a way that it's meant to be violated. You have also the opposite example where something is explicitly allowed with the implicit meta-rule which prohibits it, which effectively prohibits it to you. And this is I think why you need habits, habits in the sense of these meta-rules, rules which tell you how to relate to explicit rules. So to be effectively a member of a community, you need to know this meta-rule. Otherwise, you are what? You are—otherwise you are either—you are either an idiot or a revolutionary. Because I think that one way to—to—one way to define a really subversive political act is precisely to follow the rule but consciously violate or ignore the sub-rule which tells you—which tells you how to—how to apply the rule. Isn't a way, for example—we are all—we are all humanitarians. But the whole point of usual or, for example, with the blacks, aren't people like John Brown, who I admire, the only consequent white fighter for—against slavery in the United States? What was his problem? That he explicitly accepted what all white liberals accepted: blacks are equal and so on and so on. But he didn't obey the usual sub-rules which are, "Yes, in principle we are for it, but we need time, blah-blah, all that." No, he simply directly enacted the rule. The same thing was with Robespierre. Equality meant equality for him, not an excuse with a whole set of sub-rules, "Yes, but not women, yes, but not this, but not that." So in a way, one can say that revolutionary egalitarian figures are in a way figures without habits, rules without this sub—which is why they are usually dismissed as dogmatic. Because what people—I'm here totally for dogmatism, no? Because what the opposite of dogmatism is here what we call the sense of real life, like you cannot simply mechanically apply rules, you—you must look at the concrete situation and so on and so on. Now some people think that they say something very deep when they say this. But for me, this is just a compromise excuse. Or to give you another old example of how you can just by obeying the rules—how you can by violating, by obeying the rules more literally than they were meant, how you can undermine the system. It's again an old story, I'm sorry to repeat myself. When I was young in early '80s, even earlier I think, there was a half—I was part of it—a half-dissident student weekly newspaper in Ex-Yugoslavia, and we wanted to do something. There were elections on a certain day. And they were in Yugoslavia not too bad, like they were of course the usual real socialist elections, you know—you knew in advance who will win. But it wasn't like in Soviet Union, percent. It was always, no? The catch was then we decided: now how to make it clear that the elections are a fake? The naive idea was, "Let's say it. Let's simply publish it: no, these elections are a fake, they are not really true elections." But it immediately became clear to us that this would be either—the journal would have been either immediately prohibited, or we would be then attacked that we don't understand socialist democracy and so on—it wouldn't be effective. We found a way which was provocative, much more effective, embarrassing for the regime, which was what? What was here—the appearance was these are free elections. But of course the meta-rule was: we all know blah-blah what. Okay. We said, "Why don't we treat them as what they pretend to be?" So—this was a nice idea. We published an extra edition of the journal on the evening of elections with big—you know, big letters on the front page saying, "Latest results, it looks that communists will remain in power" or something like this. We just treated it as a surprise, like, "Latest result, communists will remain in power" and so on. And it was a wonderful effect because then we were immediately called to some political guy who said, "Guys, I have enough of you, I don't want to be—" And then we asked him, "But what did we do wrong?" and so on. And it was very interesting how the guy, because he would have to spill out—you know, wasn't able to say—he told us, "Don't provoke me, you know very well what I mean. Just don't fuck me with it." But we said, "What? What?" He wasn't able to say. This is—okay, here you have this nice difference, I think, between rule and meta-rule. This—so the Big Other, the lesson from this one now: the Big Other is not only a rule, not only a rule but always this reflexivity, rule with a meta-rule, rule inclusive of rules how you use rules. I mean, every adolescent knows this. I don't know, these times today are much more confused, but when I was young, you still had fathers who told you, "Don't mess with girls," but the true message was, "Do it with pride, I want to be with you an earlier—" you know, all this stuff. Paternal authority was always hypocritical at this level of rule, meta-rule. Let's go on. Then at the same time, the symbolic space acts like a standard against which I can measure myself. This is why the Big Other can be personified in a single agent, like God who watches over me from beyond, or the Cause, the Communist cause, freedom, nation, whatever. So this brings us to the next thing that—and this is the fundamental tension of the Lacanian Big Other—it's always in this opposition between an anonymous agency, just a system, a set of rules, and the personification of this agency. This agency is always minimally reified, like it's the Cause what moves us, or somebody is watching over us. It's the third—the Big Other is the third in the sense of a—in the sense of a witness, that for whose gaze you are doing it. My only elementary example again from one—from one of my books, you know that old dirty but not too dirty joke when a—a primitive farmer gets stranded on an island after a shipwreck with, I don't know, when I was young the model was Cindy Crawford or whoever you want, and finally they make love. And then the farmer afterwards says to Cindy Crawford, "Listen, I want just now I'm happy, but I just want one thing for you to do. Can you dress as my—friend as a man and put some—put some mustaches on and man's hat?" And the guy says—Cindy Crawford said, "What's wrong? Are you—pervert, transvestite?" He said, "You will see immediately." Okay, she says why not, she dresses in this guy and then the guy—the farmer—approaches this guy and says, "Ah, you know what just happened? I just screwed Cindy Crawford." You need—you need—you need the third has to be there in order to function. Nonetheless, next now come—we now come to more crucial features. With all this, the Big Other is fragile, insubstantial, properly virtual. In the sense that it's purely a subjective presupposition. It exists only insofar as subjects act as if it exists. You know, it's like a cause, Communism, Nation. Of course we relate to it as if it exists out there. The Cause is the Cause, we are ready to die for it, to fight for it, it's the meaning of our life. But at the same time it's clear that the Cause exists only insofar as we treat it as existing. Only insofar as we—as we believe in it. We subjects are the only element that keeps it alive. And since you asked before that question about Hegel, Hegelian spirit, I think that that's crucial for Hegelian spirit: that Hegelian spirit, what Hegel calls even objective spirit, it's not—this is I think the mistake of otherwise very well known, good book Charles Taylor on Hegel, where Hegel is read as kind of a spiritualist, as if behind us, concrete individuals, there is some mega-subject called Ghost or Spirit, Absolute Idea, which is moving, pulling the strings. There is nothing behind. As Hegel puts it, we will quote this later very nicely, that the finite concrete individuals are the only site of Idea. Ideas rule, but they rule literally insofar as we allow them to rule. We keep them alive. The work of us, and this is how Hegel incidentally—that's why I claim his reading is materialist—interprets Christianity. This is for Hegel Holy Spirit. What happens through Christ's death is that we pass from God the Father, who is still the illusion of a substantial divinity really up there, through this God who is purely virtual. Holy Spirit means God as our virtual presupposition, as precisely only the symbolic other. And it is because of this virtual character of the Big Other that, as Lacan puts it at the beginning of his seminar on *The Purloined Letter*, "A letter always arrives at its destination." And one can even say that the only letter which really arrives at its destination is the unsent letter. Why? Here is a nice quote from a book—and I don't really agree with this book, I mean with the thesis which is a defense of Ted Hughes against Sylvia Plath, Janet Malcolm with *The Silent Woman*. But it's a nice quote. "The preservation of the unsent letter is its arresting feature. Neither the writing nor the sending is remarkable. We often make drafts of letters and discard them. But the gesture of keeping the message when we have no intention of sending it... by saving the letter, we are in some sense sending it after all. We are not relinquishing our idea or dismissing it as foolish or unworthy. On the contrary, we are giving it an extra vote of confidence. We are in effect saying that our idea is too precious to be entrusted to the gaze of the actual addressee who may not grasp its worth. So we send it to his equivalent in fantasy on whom we can absolutely count for an understanding and appreciative reading" and so on and so on. So get this idea: that this situation where you write a letter but find it too precious to send it, the unsent letter, it's precisely because although the real others didn't get it, the Big Other, this imagined, virtual Big Other, got it. And I claim that we have in psychoanalysis a supreme example of such unsent letters: they are called symptoms. Symptoms are messages but precisely addressed only to the Big Other. That is to say, even you don't know what if you produce symptoms, what is their meaning. It's a—it's a message but again, no empirical individual is the addressee of this message. It's a message, symptom is a message but purely directed purely at the—this virtual Big Other. So okay, we now have the Big Other with a couple of its features. So the next point of question that we should raise, now the crucial one is: how is it that when individuals exchange symbols, that they do not simply interact with each other? Why do we always have to have the Big Other, the third agency? For example, when I talk about other people's opinions, it is never only a matter of what me, you or other individuals think, but also a matter of what the impersonal "One" thinks. When I violate a certain rule of decency, I never simply do something that the majority of others do not do. I do what "One" doesn't do. This is the key moment for Lacan, the Big Other: this necessity of a minimal reification. You get my point? Like, I do something in this—it's not enough for you to say most of the people don't do this. You must say "One" doesn't do this. And again, the mystery is that this "One" is a pure virtual illusion. It doesn't exist anywhere. It's only me, you and so on. But nonetheless there is a key difference between "a majority doesn't do it" and "One doesn't do it." Because one can even imagine a situation where a majority does do it, but still you can say "One" doesn't do it. And—we will return to it later apropos Hegel—of how this minimal logic of reification works. And there are wonderful examples here. My source here is a very intelligent, I think the best French philosopher who deals with catastrophes, called Jean-Pierre Dupuy, where he drew attention to how this spontaneous reification works even at such an ordinary level like the reading of election results. Like, remember, let's say that—here in the last general elections here, well, the Labor still won but a little bit, barely. How was this usually interpreted? That the voters sent a signal to the government: "We give you a chance, but with a warning." But sorry, this subject is totally mythical. It's simply that some people were for, others were against. You know how it's reified into—it's reified into image. Okay, so now this is maybe the nicest example dimension of the Big Other: that it's this anonymous "One does it." Now you will say if you are the—the naive spontaneous leftist, "Yes, that's not so bad, oppressive about language, that we should break out of this 'One does it,' that it is the force of custom, of habit and so on." No, I think that I have a nice counter-argument which precisely allows me to defend the creative aspect of this "One." Jokes. Don't be afraid, I will not bore you with new jokes and so on. I just want you to focus on something very naive, a naive dimension of jokes: how by definition, okay, we can imagine inventing jokes. But isn't the whole point of jokes that you tell them? It's not part of the mythology of jokes that you invent a joke. It's you somehow—jokes emerge. It's pure this anonymous creativity. There is a joke and somehow the joke is magically here. And I think that this would be, again, the Big Other in its creative side. Because I think the ultimate paranoiac idea would have been precisely to imagine that beneath this spontaneous emergence of jokes, there must be an origin. And there is a wonderful—by I—I don't like him as a writer—nonetheless, Isaac Asimov wrote, you know, a wonderful short story, *Jokester*, where the premise is exactly this. It's a wonderful paranoiac story: is that some linguist-linguist scientists try to isolate the primordial zero-level joke. Their idea is that we were stupid apes and then God humanized us by telling us the first joke. So they try to somehow to get at it, the original joke. Okay, it's a good story, but I think the disappointment is that it doesn't tell a joke. But I think we have some—like the first joke: "We don't eat from the apple of knowledge" or "from the tree of knowledge, the apple." No, that would be for me a good joke, obviously meant. But what I'm saying is that so this is the next—next aspect of the Big Other. Again, this anonymous "One," which again, it's not only the one of the habit and so on, it's a creative one. Like think about jokes, which even in—under Communism, there was a paranoia that since the Communists know that jokes against those in power help to ease tension, there was always this dream that there is some special agency of the secret police where they themselves manufacture jokes. That's the desperate attempt to, as it were, control it. Some people claim it's even true, but I claim even if it is true, what they were really doing were just—how to put it—reapplying the jokes with new—for example, with us in Slovenia, now it's interesting how, of course, there is a decline of jokes. Everybody knows that the—the biggest loss of the fall of Communism was good political jokes. They are now slowly resuscitating political jokes in Slovenia, but at a primitive level and simply reapplying to some stupid right-wing conservatives old jokes about stupid communists. Like, I don't know, now about a right-wing peasant's party politician, the joke is he—he takes a special tour to—to inspect some farms with a helicopter and then complains, "Isn't it cold enough, why do you turn—stop that fan up there?" No, it's cold enough and so on. Okay. So we have this "One." Then now we come—ah-ah—to the crucial question, which is: Lacan asks here a further question: how does this order emerge? Lacan even proposes a very naive theory of what is the gesture which institutes, opens up the dimension of the Big Other. It is for—he gives a kind of a account of the genesis of the Big Other. Let me quote you—let me read you this quote. It's a long quote from—from *Rapport de Rome*, function and speech, function and role of speech and so on, it's from *Ecrits*, page the English translation. Here it is. I quote: "It is with the gifts of Danaoi, like the Greeks, or with the passwords that give them their salutary nonsense, that language with the law begins. For these gifts are already symbols, in the sense that symbol means pact and that they are first and foremost signifiers of the pact that they constitute as signified, as is plainly seen in the fact that the objects of symbolic exchange—pots made to remain empty, shields too heavy to be carried, sheaves of wheat that wither, lances stuck into the ground—all are destined to be useless, if not simply superfluous by their very abundance. It is this neutralization of the signifier—it is this neutralization of the signifier the whole of the nature of language, on this assessment, one could see the beginning of it among sea swallows, for instance, during the mating parade, materialized in the fish they pass between each other from beak to beak. And if the ethologists are right in seeing in this the instrument of an activation of the group that might be called the equivalent of a festival, they would be completely justified in recognizing it as a symbol." So what is Lacan claiming here? Danaoi, of course, as you know, is the term used by Homer to designate the Greeks who were laying siege to Troy. Their gift was the famous wooden horse which, after it was received by the Trojans, allowed the Greeks to penetrate and destroy Troy. For Lacan, language is such a dangerous gift. It offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us. The symbolic order, symbolic order emerges from a gift, an offering which neutralizes its content in order to declare itself as a gift. When a gift is offered, what matters is not its content but the link between the giver and the receiver established when the other accepts the gift. Lacan even engages here, as you saw, in a little bit of speculation about animal ethology. The sea swallows who pass a caught fish from beak to beak as if to make it clear that the link established in this way is more important than who will finally keep and eat the fish, this effectively engages us in a kind of symbolic communication. So this would be again for Lacan the symbolic communication. When precisely—this is why for Lacan, you know, the famous dance of the bees where they can tell each other how far away are the best flowers with honey, this is for Lacan not communication because it lacks this dimension, this phatic dimension of self-referentiality. I say something but what matters is the reference, backward reference to the act of saying. And what's the only way to signal this, that what matters is not the message but the delivery of the message? It's either—either to—to—to make an empty message or to make a message or a gift which has to be returned and so on and so on. Now let me explain this a little bit. Everyone who is in love, I think, knows this. A present to the beloved, if it is to symbolize my love, should be useless, superfluous in its very abundance. Only as such, with its use value suspended, can it symbolize my love. Like, if you give to your beloved, I don't know, pairs of socks, it wouldn't work. It has to have this useless aspect to it. This is where we find the reflexivity of human communication. Every act of communication simultaneously symbolizes the fact, the very fact of communication. Which is why for Lacan, the elementary gesture of symbolic exchange is a so-called empty gesture, an offer made to be rejected. Okay, I will not quote here—my old example from Brecht, but another old example, just to get it clear to you. I don't know if you have the same rule here in England. In my country when I was young, we have this rule that if you are, for example, engaged in a fierce competition for a job promotion with your closest friend, and if you win, the proper thing to do is to offer to retract, to tell to your friend, "Listen, I know that you really deserve it, why don't I withdraw and you get the job?" But then, of course, the proper thing of your friend to do is to—say no, thanks. So you see, this is for Lacan the symbolic communication at its purest. Because nothing happened, but the pact was established. This is communication for Lacan. Now you will say, what happens if I do accept the friend's offer? It's a catastrophe. Precisely communication breaks down, you must say, "Okay, then, fuck off, I will get the job." And—and okay, we could go on here with—with further examples. Like you know, don't you have this rule if somebody who is obviously more wealthy than you invites you to dinner or lunch, and it's clear, it's absolutely clear from the very beginning, it's absolutely clear that you will—that he will pay for dinner. But nonetheless, isn't it a polite ritual that you insist a little bit, "No, no, let me pay," two, three times, then okay, you pay? But you know what I mean, this I must go through the empty gesture. This is it. Okay, it's an old story, unfortunately true. You can imagine what happened to me. Why do I always think like this happened to me? That when I was young, I insisted once, but a little bit too much, so the guy said, "Okay, you pay, you—" Now I think that from here we can also define in a very nice way the notion of social pathology. A sociopath is precisely the guy who cannot engage in this meta-communication. For him, there are no empty gestures. He means what he says. He is not really engaged—engaged in it. Because of this dimension, every choice is never simply a choice. You always make an additional choice. What do I mean by this? Let me recall another everyday situation in which my partner—sexual, political, financial, whatever you want—wants me to make a deal with him. What he or she tells me is something like, "Please, I really love you. If we come together here, I will be totally dedicated to you. But if you reject me, I may lose my control and make your life a misery." Now the catch here of course is that I'm not simply confronted with a clear choice. The second part of the message, "If you don't agree with me, I will make life a misery," undermines the first part. Somebody who is ready to ruin me if I say no to him cannot really love me and be dedicated to my happiness. So the reality of the choice offered to me belies its terms. Hatred or at least a cold indifference towards me underlies both terms of the choice. And there is, of course, asymmetrical hypocrisy which consists in saying, "I love you and will accept whatever your choice will be. So even if you know that your refusal will ruin me, please choose what you really want, do not take into consideration how it will affect me." This is clear manipulation, as everybody knows. Because the message is, "How could you refuse me when I love you so totally?" Don't you know this in intense intersubjective situation, no? One way to put extreme pressure on the other is precisely to offer him a choice. "You know this is the end, but you do whatever you want." This is fake freedom. At the meta-level of communication, it's—it's a false choice. So—again, the reason I like the mysteries of Soviet Stalinist discourse is how it was a discourse where everything had a double meaning. I think that this is why Stalinism is an extremely interesting linguistic phenomenon. There—how to put it—the two levels all the time clashed and in a totally irrational way—irrational with regard to the usual use of language—the Stalinist—Stalinist opts for this meta-communicational level. Like to give you one example from a recent, very funny book, Alexei Yurchak's *Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More*, about how—a wonderful adventure, how—you know, for many years when the Soviet media announce the funeral ceremonies of a member of high nomenclature, they used a cliché formulation: "Buried on Red Square, close to by the Kremlin wall." The point is that from the early sixties onwards, they—no longer really buried them there, there was no place. But somewhere near the wall, in the wall—no, not there. So a group of Soviet of fifteen members from the Russian Language Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences wrote a letter to the Central Committee and proposed—they simply proposed an alternate—formulation, like "The urn with ashes was placed in the Kremlin wall." They said, "This is embarrassing. You are using one formula but what's really doing is this. Why don't you use this formulation?" And it was very mysterious, it several weeks later, a representative of the Central Committee phoned the Institute, informing them that the Central Committee has discussed their suggestion in detail but decided to keep the old formulation. And I think the bureaucrats were right. Because what were they afraid of is that if they change a formulation, that everybody—nobody would accept that it's simply for the facts. Everybody would look for a hidden meaning. Is that those who are buried here means more and so on? Then the debate went on, because then the linguists suggested—a Russian friend told me—"Why don't you simply say, 'It means nothing'?" and then the Communist Central Committee, they exploded: "This makes it even more mysterious. Then the reading is, 'It means something, but we will not even tell you what it means in its hide,'" and so on. So you see, that's what I like about Stalinism, is this semantically totally saturated space. Whatever you do is read in this criminological way as—as a sign of something else. So if you don't—so the only way—how to put it—whatever you do you cannot—nothing is simply counted, read as a positive message. For example, I read a wonderful book about Polish-Soviet relations where they said the Polish newspaper, there was a note saying in the late fifties or when there were some problems with building a new Soviet—a new Soviet-Polish railway because of the marshes, too much water. Nobody read this as an information on this. It was "What does it mean? The Poles don't want this railway, political—" Everything is immediately translated into meaning. And now the mysteries go even deeper here, and here you have Big Other at its purest. Namely, the original idea was that then those who are inside nomenclature, they know that this is only the way this criminological reading, you know, you read everything as a sign like, "Oh, this year Molotov was two chairs behind Stalin, what does this mean? The year ago he was near—" that those inside know it. But recently—I sorry, forgot the reference—I read another wonderful—sorry, I forgot the reference—text which claims that it can be proven that there was no inner nomenclature. Even Stalin, Molotov, they functioned in the same way. This is wonderful example of this reification of the Big Other. It's not that Stalin, Molotov, a couple of them knew everything and talked directly while for us commoners we need this—criminological reading of signs. And there is a—a wonderful example—quoted by—about Molotov, who was the second guy in the committee there, I mean the second guy after Stalin in thirty-six. And it's a nice example of crimino—he was again second guy, the top guy, and he got into a total panic in thirty-seven or thirty-eight. What happened? You know that at that time there was the last big show trial against Bukharin's group. And they published in *Pravda* two, three times, the accusation was that this Bukharin-Trotskyite group wants to kill the entire Soviet leadership. The plan is very interesting one. The idea is that they wanted to use Shostakovich so that when they would be in Opera, some sniper would have shot them—originally the plan of the plot was even to include Shostakovich. But the point is the following one: that so who were listed—the accusation was the Trotskyite group, Bukharinist group, wants to kill, plant a murder of these Soviet leaders. Now, it was crucial, this became an ultra-criminological signal, to be on that list to be killed. This was the sign that you are IT. Now the third time when the final accusation was published, Molotov almost got a heart attack. He wasn't in. And he knew, and then he looked into it, he was right. It was a signal from Stalin because his wife of Molotov who was Jewish did some remarks that Stalin didn't like. And it was—look, but you see the irony of it, that you read there and you are not on the death list—it's a sign! Total. But my point is that there is something in—how to put it—there is something Stalinist in language as such. This would fit the Big Other, no? In the—in the sense that language never simply transmits a content but simultaneously it always renders how we relate to this content. This minimal reflexivity, this is what Lacan means by the not so much performative as declaratory dimension of symbolic interaction. Let me give you another everyday example. Let's imagine a couple with a tacit agreement that they can lead discrete extramarital affairs. You don't talk about it but you accept it silently and so on. If all of a sudden the husband openly tells his wife about an ongoing affair, she will have good reasons to be in panic. "If it's just an affair, why are you telling me this?" You get the point that the act of telling is—this is what Lacan means by the declaratory dimension. "Why are—why are you telling me it?" Or—or—the same, I think, even goes into a—works in a negative—okay, another positive way here. I use it already, I think, in some of my texts for *London Review of Books* is—this is I think what I find so mysterious in these recent debates in the United States about public use of torture, no? I mean, when French tell me, "Let's be realistic, but all regimes torture suspected prisoners, terrorists, what's the big fuss?" I said, "The big fuss is not that they are doing it, I know that they are all—why are they telling us publicly today?" It's the act alone, the act of telling it is never neutral. Like, another of my old jokes to make it clear, I'm sure I'm repeating myself now. You know how if you find my talk boring, what's the polite codified way in academia to say? You tell me simply—if I ask you afterward, "Did I do a good talk?"—if you tell me "It's interesting," at least in the United States it means it was stupid and boring. It's a polite way to say. So you see my point. My point is if some of you tells me afterwards, "It was stupid and boring," I would have the full right to stay. But if you really only meant that it's stupid and boring, then why didn't you tell me that it's interesting? I would get—you know what I mean? If you say it literally, it's more. It's personal attack and so on. So again, this is my problem with this torture. What is this "more," no? If they really only torture, why don't they simply say that they don't torture? How should I put it? What? It's—and that's—and yes, it works also in a—in a negative way. I remember in February Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Assembly in order to advocate the attack on Iraq. And it was wonderful, I remember it, that how the US delegation asked the large reproduction of Picasso's *Guernica* on the wall behind the speaker's podium to be covered with a different visual ornament. Now the official explanation was that *Guernica* did not provide the adequate optical background for the televised transmission of Colin Powell's speech. But it was clear to everyone that what the US delegation was afraid of is that *Guernica*, the painting supposed to be depicting the catastrophic results of the German aerial bombing on the Spanish city in the Civil War, would give rise to the wrong associations, like "You're talking about the peace, that's what really American attack on Iraq will do." But the irony, I think, and this is what Lacan means when he claims that repression and the return of the repressed are one and the same process. I claim that if the US were to ignore this, maybe people would not even associate it. The very act of demanding that image to be withdrawn drew attention to it. It again—it added this declaratory, this declaratory dimension. Okay, so let's go nonetheless a little bit further to conclude. So we have now the Big Other with all these qualities, the main among them being that the Big Other is a virtual order, that the Big Other is this anonymous minimally reified order and order grounded in empty gestures. That is to say that there always is a gap between what you are saying and the declaratory dimension of why are you saying this. Maybe the best—another example for this is, you know, this old ritual of potlatch. Which is we all know it, but I think there is another aspect which is not covered by Lévi-Strauss, which you know what's that, so-called primitive groups: I invite you with like pigs, you invite me—okay. We know Lévi-Straussian interpretation, classical one, which is the point is not the gifts as such which are exchanged but the point is to establish a link, solidarity, communication as such, to establish a social link. But one thing is not covered by—not Lévi-Strauss, very mysteriously. Namely, if it is just—the idea is just to establish a link, I give it to you, you give it to me, I invite you, you invite me—and it's just—the point is just to establish a link—why then don't we do it directly? It's in a nice way that Marx liked. The mystery is not what is behind the true meaning. The mystery is appearance as such. Why does it have to appear as not as a direct exchange of gifts, but as a consecutive exchange of—how should I put it—not exchange, but like it's not "I invite you, you invite me," it's "Out of a pure gift, I invite you," and then later "Out of a pure goodness gift, you invite me." You know what I mean? Exchange should not appear as exchange. It has to appear as two symmetrical gifts. Why? And I think this is a nice debate. The first who noticed this, as far as I know, was Pierre Bourdieu, who gave a kind of a class analysis, in pressed, it doesn't work. I think that that American well-known anthropologist Marshall Sahlins who did the answer, which is that if you do it directly, as a direct exchange, it turns into a logic of revenge of tip for—tip for tat of—of punishment. That—that it has to be to signal social pact, it has to be—it has to have this illusory dimension of—again, we are back at that empty gesture that something that you are obliged to do, you pretend as if you are giving it as a free gesture. So that necessity is masked as freedom. This would have been for Lacan also another way to put what is this zero level of communication. So next step: how then, how do we, if communication always involves a—an empty gesture, like giving an unnecessary gift or gift which is useless, making an offer which is meant to be rejected or whatever, how do we empty a gesture? The elementary answer of course is through the act of repetition. And here I think that we should be very precise. I don't think it's already translated into English, I like it's a short book, the last book by Giorgio Agamben on *Profanations*, where he tries to celebrate profanation, but profanation as precisely opposed to secularization. That's of course the interest. For Agamben, secularization is just the other side of the sacred, they support each other. It's not a true undermining of the sacred. For example, secularization—to give you a simple example: if the sacred is a mass, a ritual, then secularization would have been simply a ruthless political use of this. You secularize it in—but you don't really undermine it from between. Undermining it from between would have been to use it in a different way, in a kind of perverted non-utility, but—but not to simply refunctionalize—like profanation would have been, I don't know, a Black Mass, to establish kind of an obscene ritual. So again, for Agamben, the space of freedom that we can build is the space of profanation, which means putting the sacred text or practice into a different context, context. Subtracting it—subtracting it from its proper context and functioning. So I think here again that the Japanese culture is close to this logic of propagation. Namely, I'm referring here to the wonderful inventions, I have a couple of books of them—on them, photos: the so-called Shindogu. You know, the objects which are meant to be over—they are useless by their very over-usefulness. These are the—the rules are the following: these are objects which must be possible, can be made, but they are so ridiculously utilitarian that they undermine themselves. Like, I don't know, you have sunglasses, but with those wind wipers so that if you walk—or you have butter in a lipstick case so that you can do butter like lipstick, more practical. Or if you want fresh water you can an umbre—get an umbrella which is turned around up and the water collects here, the idea is if you walk in the rain you can always drink fresh water and so on. This would be, I think, a nice example of what Agamben means by profanation. But unfortunately, at one level I don't agree with him, which is that he thinks that the profanation can be done only with regard to something sacred. You de-contextualize something sacred. But what I claim is that profanation in a way is—comes first. Why? Because I think that you can profanate something which is not sacred, which is just part of our everyday functioning mode. And I think that this is how even poetry begins and so on. Poetry, eroticism, whatever you want. For example, to be vulgar: I shake your hand. This is functional, I wish to signal... What happens if instead of dropping, letting your hand go, I just repeat the gesture squeezing it three, four times? You would probably thought that I'm making some covert erotic advances or whatever. So that's my idea. My idea is that—you know what I mean—that profanation comes first, that the sacred or the properly human symbolic emerges through profanation in the sense of this de-contextualization, that something which originally is a pragmatic act is allowed to run empty, as it were. It's the—it's out of its—torn out of its context of utility. And I think this is the symbolic universe as such when you allow, as it were, when you allow the machine to run empty. And we can see in Stalinism how empty it can run, that it doesn't even matter—matter the literal meaning. Isn't this poetry at its most elementary? When—isn't the birth of poetry when a phrase or group of words is de-contextualized and gets caught into an autonomous repetitive insistence? So, for example, it's bad poetry, I know, but when instead of "come here," I say "come, come here," you would suspect me, "Am I getting crazy, am I trying to say something poetic or whatever?" So again, at this level, I think we should locate profanation as the primordial act of the symbolic order. And I hope you also see the link between profanation and between profanation and this—how should I call it—empty—empty, empty gesture, the de-contextualized—the de-contextualized gesture. Yes? By undermining the autonomy of the ontological determination of being itself, was Lacan trying to reverse Cartesianism? Sorry, of what determination? Of—ontological determination. What do you mean by ontological? Well, being as it proceeds logically and by being from Heidegger. Aha. Do you think Lacan was trying to reverse Cartesianism? Sorry, do you think—do you think Lacan was trying to reverse—trying to reverse Cartesianism? That's a—that's a good question because first, how to—you know things here get so complicated for me, in what sense? Because first, no, I think that if anything, that's my old thesis which for—which is for many people very problematic. But I think that Lacan was precisely in a way returning to—returning even to a very strange Cartesianism. But nonetheless, I think that Lacan says literally the subject of the unconscious is the Cartesian subject. And okay, we can go a little bit into it now because I wanted to do this later. Namely what? The topic of Cogito, madness, religion. I mean, usually—and this is the Michel Foucault line, no—Cogito is associated with modern rationalism as Cogito, I think I am, the island of my normal rational thinking, which is according to Foucault's reading in his *History of Madness*, based on the minimal repression, or rather externalization, rejection of madness. So as you probably know, maybe even better than me, when in his *History of Madness*, in his close readings of those couple of pages of Descartes—Descartes about radical doubt, when Foucault there confronts that radical hypothesis of universal doubt, the Evil Genius, Evil Spirit controlling all my thoughts, there is no reality and so on. This is a fake experiment for Foucault. This is a rational experiment, Descartes cannot really confront madness. Madness is excluded. You probably know that Derrida's answer to it is that no, that Cogito, Cogito itself is based on this excess of madness. That Cogito—that to arrive at Cogito, you must accept this utter madness. Of course this moment of mad explosion is then immediately masked—the moment Descartes starts to talk about *res cogitans*, the thinking substance and so on and so on. I think it's—I think it's a crucial debate. And although I appreciate the finesse of Foucault's—of Foucault's reply to—to—of Foucault's reply to Derrida, I nonetheless think that—think that Derrida was right here. That is to say that—how should I put it—of course Cogito later turns into this normalizing agency of rational thought and so on and so on. But it's in—in a reaction, in reacting to an excess—excess which is nonetheless its own excess. You know, when people attack—when people say philosophy is all a defense against certain excess, we should not forget that that excess is not simply outside philosophy, that that excess is the gesture of philosophy as such. So of course philosophy reacts against certain excess, explosion of madness. But this madness is the core, the founding gesture of philosophy. It's a little bit like in Islam, where it's easy to complain how controlling Islam is with regard to women, covering them up and so on, controlling women. But what interests me is doesn't that prior to that you have to have an image of a woman as threatening and so on, to have them and I think that is also part of Islam. My god, woman is not threatening by nature. You know, both—both are products of Islam. And if you approach Islam in this way, you discover something much more interesting. That for example—how strong, crucial the role of women is in Islam. We know—but if we are talking about Big Other today—Khadija was, my god, Muhammad's Big Other, you know the story, the official Islam story, that when Archangel Gabriel first appeared to Muhammad, he thought he is crazy and so on. And it's through Khadija, through his wife—only through her did he take seriously himself, did he believe that it's not—not the bad demon—not demon but the Archangel Gabriel and so on and so on. So to return—to return to your point, I think that paradoxically—paradoxically, if anything, Lacan is in a way returning here even to—to the Cartesian Cogito. And again, here surprisingly Lacan is close to Derrida who also perceived this excess of madness in the Cartesian Cogito. Or to put it in another way—of course I didn't want to talk about it today—it's interesting how in German Idealism, where Cogito is then formulated at its purest as the transcendental subject, the metaphor for the subject is no longer light but night of the world, darkness. This idea that you also find in mysticism, no, of—of the very heart of subjectivity is this abyss—abyss of madness. So this I think are—if you want to put it in this way, the origins of—the origins of modern subjectivity. Do you have maybe—I can conclude, but nonetheless if you want, do you have maybe some other—maybe some other questions here if anything was not... Please. How about the progression from the animal, you know, instinctive knowledge, the animal coupling to the, you know, human internalized desire, which at its core has been this inevitability of collapse? Why is it so problematic for Lacan, since he was able to formulate such a clear conception of subjectivity? Sorry—can you—I'm not absolutely sure that I got it. Can you just specify your question a little bit? Well, for example, why the progression from animal coupling with its instinctive knowledge as a—ritualized natural rhythm to human desire which is internalized and itself has this inevitability of collapse? Why is it so problematic given the fact that we have a concrete notion of subjectivity? In what sense do you think, that's what I don't get it, that it's problematic for Lacan? Well, I think it's very problematic. I mean at the same time, how are we not—given nineteenth-century naturalism—how are we not in essence, you know, a rational animal? Why does there have to be an extra complication to have a clear grasp of what we are in ourselves? No, again, I'm—I'm not quite sure that I'm getting the point of the question, but let me—sorry, please. Sorry, I was coming back to my earlier point. It seems to me that—the Big Other or whatever, you know, we say that behind—like you say in your book—behind the appearance, there is meant to be, you know, the interiority of the self and the void. I mean, is that precisely what we are, the inexplicable void? I can give you here an answer. Why did you ask the—why did you say inexplicable? I mean, a void—you know what I mean. Okay, now we're coming to the crucial point. First, let me say something first. If your—if your remark was meant as critical towards Lacan, I agree to a point, up to a degree, in what sense? In the sense that Lacan does sometimes mobilize when he tries to elaborate what distinguishes man from animal, etc., certain very traditional philosophical motives which are precisely this one: that nature is in itself balanced, regulated through instincts while man is excess, madness, all this. From Kierkegaard, even Hegel, man is an—human being is an animal sick unto death and so on and so on. I mean, if we can really learn something from intelligent—evolutionists like Stephen Jay Gould and so on, is that nature is already crazy in herself, how should I put it? That there is no natural—nature is not a balanced system and then man through this explosion of negativity undermines it. I wanted to come to this later, namely, to what extent is this true at all for Hegel? Because if you read in Hegel's *Encyclopedia*, the first—the first part of the third part—third part is Philosophy of Spirit—the first part is Anthropology: spirit awakening out of nature. You find there incredible, breathtaking reflections on madness and habit. Basically Hegel's thesis is that every nature is a second nature. Natural nature already is a second nature. It's a kind of a—you know, an organism had to stabilize its borders with the outside through habits. That nature itself is a habituated nature. And then a wonderful theory of the—but okay, about this later. But what I—when you mentioned that—sorry, I got lost. When you mentioned that—the other point, the—sorry, what was the final point? Confused. Oh well, it was the first point, not the second one. Sorry of—was it the first question or the second? The first question, the way you recapitulated it at the end. Oh, well with my first question is—to undermine the autonomy of the ontological determination of being itself, was Lacan trying to reverse Cartesianism? Ah no, sorry, now I got what—when you said that are we only that gap, incompletion and so on? In your book, you say that behind phenomenal appearance, there is meant to be this void, which is ourselves, the interiority of the self which hides behind phenomenal appearance. But doesn't that seem to be extremely symmetrical, very convenient for understanding ourselves? What do I mean by—okay, let me give you an example: what do I mean by this? Let's move on here. Yeah, but I'm moving on, I'm moving on. And this will answer it in a way, because this also brings us to the topic of—to the topic of—to the topic of repetition and so on. Look, recently I read in some introduction to philosophy a wonderful idea which explains what kind of ontology I want to bring you into. It's based on this idea. You know when you make a computer program for a certain PC-CD ROM game, for example, and you construct a virtual reality? You never construct it to the end. No? For example, if you play these stupid PC-CD ROM games—I sometimes do with my small son—you see a house, for example. But there is no program for inside the house, because simply it's presupposed in the game that you will not enter the house or you are not allowed. Or for example, even if it's a war game where you kill each other, although we—we presuppose that the persons there in cyberspace are like us, but there is no program for what is beneath, you know, for—there is no program for—they don't have really bones, blood and so on. Why? Because this is not part of the rules of the game, how should I put it? Or even if you have that, the way it's usually programmed, it is that when you do an unexpected gesture, like enter a house, then some general program is instantly activated on the spot, constructing the inside of the house. It's a little bit like—you remember when you move a text downward or upward, a book, a longer text, on your PC screen? It's as if it's moving down, but it's not, it's instantly constructed. So the idea we get here is that a virtual universe is in this sense a fake universe. It's not completely constructed. It's a house, but it's just externally. If you penetrate it, it's nothing. It's—gets fuzzy, it stops. Which you can incidentally find in some early games which are still constructed in a bad way where what you get is—like if you move too close to a human face, it's almost disgusting, embarrassing, because you see that it's only half-formed, that it's not even really constructed as a face. What's the point here? Ah, this is the nice short-circuit jump. You know in—common knowledge I know, but nonetheless—you know in quantum physics, uncertainty principle, which means it's not only epistemological that we cannot determine at the same time the velocity and the position of a particle, but it's in itself undetermined. Only through measure—okay. Now you can guess what's the nice idea. The nice idea is: what if quantum physics, when it encounters uncertainty, encounters in exactly the same way as in a—PC-CD ROM game the—that our in the same way, although at a much deeper level, that the virtual universe, digital universe is not fully constructed? That the same holds for our reality. That when we approach the—this quantum level, it's open, you don't know what it is, because it's the same as when you approach a house that you were not expected to enter. The idea, that is to
ago and I noticed how from outside it looks small, once you are inside it magically looks like how can it be, no? In this—that would be the elementary Real. It's not we are in symbolic imaginary space and some substantial reality behind. No, it's simply—how to put it—it's this gap of asymmetry, like if you look from outside, you have a certain view, from the inside, you know, this that you cannot bring together the two perspectives. I don't want to repeat myself too much. Sorry? Yeah, yeah, we all—because my point is that the example here would have been that—which I quote in all of my books—that Lévi-Strauss, those two tribes, draw image, blah-blah, let's go on. Okay. So much about symbolic as part of this triad, the Real and so on and so on and so on. So the Big Other operates at a symbolic level. So what is the symbolic order composed of? When we speak or listen, we never only interact with others, of course. Everybody knows that our speech activity is always grounded on our accepting of and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions. This is the common idea of the Big Other, no? We never just talk, there must be a background of rules which coordinates, regulates, provides the horizon of how we can—within which we can interact. First there are the grammatical rules I have to master blindly and spontaneously. That's already the first interesting things to note: that with grammatical and other rules, it's not only that you have to know them and then when you know them you use them blindly. In order for language to function, it has to be mechanized, you have to use them blindly. If you think all the time about what words mean, you never get to—to say anything. Then of course, there is the background of participating in the same life world and so on and so on. But my point here is that the rules that I follow, the Big Other, are marked by a deep split. There are rules and meanings that I follow blindly out of custom, but of which upon reflection I can become at least partially aware. I mean, there is no mystery: grammatical rules, I follow them blindly, if I think about it, no problem, and I can enunciate them, bring them out, no problem. But then there are rules that I follow, meanings that haunt me, but that I even don't know that I obey them, like unconscious prohibitions. Then there are rules and meanings that I am aware of, but I have to act from the outside as if I'm not aware of them—dirty obscene innuendos and so on and so on. And this is what interests me: this inner gap or even reflexivity—I will explain immediately what I mean—in the Big Other. What do I mean by it? For example, let's imagine the Big Other at its purest as a legal order. Once we have a legal order, every legal order once it functions, has to rely on a complex network of informal rules which tells you how you are to relate to explicit norms, how you are to apply them. I think that's the—the mystery of language. Somebody tells you, "Don't do that," or "Do that." Don't you know that in a living community, it's never clear what this really means? To what extent are you to take this literally? Or when are you allowed, solicited even, to disregard the rule? You know what I mean? For example, sometimes something is prohibited, but the true message is: "Do it." It's just a provocation. Sometimes it's prohibited, and the true message is: "Do it but discreetly." The message is: "Do it but don't pronounce it publicly." Again, sometimes it's allowed, but the true message is: "Don't do it." Like, are you—sorry—Korea or Japan? Singapore. See, oh—that's—sorry, Western imperialist racism. Okay, sorry. No, because—I spoke with a Japanese guy recently, journalist, who told me a nice story of how in Japan today you do have as a worker the right to—40 days holiday every year. That's the law. But the catch is: it's expected that you use maximum half of it. So then I told them, "Okay, why don't they simply say, 'Okay, you have days,' and then at least you can—" "No, no, no, that's the whole point of politeness rules and so on and so on." You know? So this—this is a nice example of how again, it's not only that often something is prohibited, but prohibited in a way that it's meant to be violated. You have also the opposite example where something is explicitly allowed with the implicit meta-rule which prohibits it, which effectively prohibits it to you. And this is I think why you need habits, habits in the sense of these meta-rules, rules which tell you how to relate to explicit rules. So to be effectively a member of a community, you need to know this meta-rule. Otherwise, you are what? You are—otherwise you are either—you are either an idiot or a revolutionary. Because I think that one way to—to—one way to define a really subversive political act is precisely to follow the rule but consciously violate or ignore the sub-rule which tells you—which tells you how to—how to apply the rule. Isn't a way, for example—we are all—we are all humanitarians. But the whole point of usual or, for example, with the blacks, aren't people like John Brown, who I admire, the only consequent white fighter for—against slavery in the United States? What was his problem? That he explicitly accepted what all white liberals accepted: blacks are equal and so on and so on. But he didn't obey the usual sub-rules which are, "Yes, in principle we are for it, but we need time, blah-blah, all that." No, he simply directly enacted the rule. The same thing was with Robespierre. Equality meant equality for him, not an excuse with a whole set of sub-rules, "Yes, but not women, yes, but not this, but not that." So in a way, one can say that revolutionary egalitarian figures are in a way figures without habits, rules without this sub—which is why they are usually dismissed as dogmatic. Because what people—I'm here totally for dogmatism, no? Because what the opposite of dogmatism is here what we call the sense of real life, like you cannot simply mechanically apply rules, you—you must look at the concrete situation and so on and so on. Now some people think that they say something very deep when they say this. But for me, this is just a compromise excuse. Or to give you another old example of how you can just by obeying the rules—how you can by violating, by obeying the rules more literally than they were meant, how you can undermine the system. It's again an old story, I'm sorry to repeat myself. When I was young in early '80s, even earlier I think, there was a half—I was part of it—a half-dissident student weekly newspaper in Ex-Yugoslavia, and we wanted to do something. There were elections on a certain day. And they were in Yugoslavia not too bad, like they were of course the usual real socialist elections, you know—you knew in advance who will win. But it wasn't like in Soviet Union, percent. It was always, no? The catch was then we decided: now how to make it clear that the elections are a fake? The naive idea was, "Let's say it. Let's simply publish it: no, these elections are a fake, they are not really true elections." But it immediately became clear to us that this would be either—the journal would have been either immediately prohibited, or we would be then attacked that we don't understand socialist democracy and so on—it wouldn't be effective. We found a way which was provocative, much more effective, embarrassing for the regime, which was what? What was here—the appearance was these are free elections. But of course the meta-rule was: we all know blah-blah what. Okay. We said, "Why don't we treat them as what they pretend to be?" So—this was a nice idea. We published an extra edition of the journal on the evening of elections with big—you know, big letters on the front page saying, "Latest results, it looks that communists will remain in power" or something like this. We just treated it as a surprise, like, "Latest result, communists will remain in power" and so on. And it was a wonderful effect because then we were immediately called to some political guy who said, "Guys, I have enough of you, I don't want to be—" And then we asked him, "But what did we do wrong?" and so on. And it was very interesting how the guy, because he would have to spill out—you know, wasn't able to say—he told us, "Don't provoke me, you know very well what I mean. Just don't fuck me with it." But we said, "What? What?" He wasn't able to say. This is—okay, here you have this nice difference, I think, between rule and meta-rule. This—so the Big Other, the lesson from this one now: the Big Other is not only a rule, not only a rule but always this reflexivity, rule with a meta-rule, rule inclusive of rules how you use rules. I mean, every adolescent knows this. I don't know, these times today are much more confused, but when I was young, you still had fathers who told you, "Don't mess with girls," but the true message was, "Do it with pride, I want to be with you an earlier—" you know, all this stuff. Paternal authority was always hypocritical at this level of rule, meta-rule. Let's go on. Then at the same time, the symbolic space acts like a standard against which I can measure myself. This is why the Big Other can be personified in a single agent, like God who watches over me from beyond, or the Cause, the Communist cause, freedom, nation, whatever. So this brings us to the next thing that—and this is the fundamental tension of the Lacanian Big Other—it's always in this opposition between an anonymous agency, just a system, a set of rules, and the personification of this agency. This agency is always minimally reified, like it's the Cause what moves us, or somebody is watching over us. It's the third—the Big Other is the third in the sense of a—in the sense of a witness, that for whose gaze you are doing it. My only elementary example again from one—from one of my books, you know that old dirty but not too dirty joke when a—a primitive farmer gets stranded on an island after a shipwreck with, I don't know, when I was young the model was Cindy Crawford or whoever you want, and finally they make love. And then the farmer afterwards says to Cindy Crawford, "Listen, I want just now I'm happy, but I just want one thing for you to do. Can you dress as my—friend as a man and put some—put some mustaches on and man's hat?" And the guy says—Cindy Crawford said, "What's wrong? Are you—pervert, transvestite?" He said, "You will see immediately." Okay, she says why not, she dresses in this guy and then the guy—the farmer—approaches this guy and says, "Ah, you know what just happened? I just screwed Cindy Crawford." You need—you need—you need the third has to be there in order to function. Nonetheless, next now come—we now come to more crucial features. With all this, the Big Other is fragile, insubstantial, properly virtual. In the sense that it's purely a subjective presupposition. It exists only insofar as subjects act as if it exists. You know, it's like a cause, Communism, Nation. Of course we relate to it as if it exists out there. The Cause is the Cause, we are ready to die for it, to fight for it, it's the meaning of our life. But at the same time it's clear that the Cause exists only insofar as we treat it as existing. Only insofar as we—as we believe in it. We subjects are the only element that keeps it alive. And since you asked before that question about Hegel, Hegelian spirit, I think that that's crucial for Hegelian spirit: that Hegelian spirit, what Hegel calls even objective spirit, it's not—this is I think the mistake of otherwise very well known, good book Charles Taylor on Hegel, where Hegel is read as kind of a spiritualist, as if behind us, concrete individuals, there is some mega-subject called Ghost or Spirit, Absolute Idea, which is moving, pulling the strings. There is nothing behind. As Hegel puts it, we will quote this later very nicely, that the finite concrete individuals are the only site of Idea. Ideas rule, but they rule literally insofar as we allow them to rule. We keep them alive. The work of us, and this is how Hegel incidentally—that's why I claim his reading is materialist—interprets Christianity. This is for Hegel Holy Spirit. What happens through Christ's death is that we pass from God the Father, who is still the illusion of a substantial divinity really up there, through this God who is purely virtual. Holy Spirit means God as our virtual presupposition, as precisely only the symbolic other. And it is because of this virtual character of the Big Other that, as Lacan puts it at the beginning of his seminar on *The Purloined Letter*, "A letter always arrives at its destination." And one can even say that the only letter which really arrives at its destination is the unsent letter. Why? Here is a nice quote from a book—and I don't really agree with this book, I mean with the thesis which is a defense of Ted Hughes against Sylvia Plath, Janet Malcolm with *The Silent Woman*. But it's a nice quote. "The preservation of the unsent letter is its arresting feature. Neither the writing nor the sending is remarkable. We often make drafts of letters and discard them. But the gesture of keeping the message when we have no intention of sending it... by saving the letter, we are in some sense sending it after all. We are not relinquishing our idea or dismissing it as foolish or unworthy. On the contrary, we are giving it an extra vote of confidence. We are in effect saying that our idea is too precious to be entrusted to the gaze of the actual addressee who may not grasp its worth. So we send it to his equivalent in fantasy on whom we can absolutely count for an understanding and appreciative reading" and so on and so on. So get this idea: that this situation where you write a letter but find it too precious to send it, the unsent letter, it's precisely because although the real others didn't get it, the Big Other, this imagined, virtual Big Other, got it. And I claim that we have in psychoanalysis a supreme example of such unsent letters: they are called symptoms. Symptoms are messages but precisely addressed only to the Big Other. That is to say, even you don't know what if you produce symptoms, what is their meaning. It's a—it's a message but again, no empirical individual is the addressee of this message. It's a message, symptom is a message but purely directed purely at the—this virtual Big Other. So okay, we now have the Big Other with a couple of its features. So the next point of question that we should raise, now the crucial one is: how is it that when individuals exchange symbols, that they do not simply interact with each other? Why do we always have to have the Big Other, the third agency? For example, when I talk about other people's opinions, it is never only a matter of what me, you or other individuals think, but also a matter of what the impersonal "One" thinks. When I violate a certain rule of decency, I never simply do something that the majority of others do not do. I do what "One" doesn't do. This is the key moment for Lacan, the Big Other: this necessity of a minimal reification. You get my point? Like, I do something in this—it's not enough for you to say most of the people don't do this. You must say "One" doesn't do this. And again, the mystery is that this "One" is a pure virtual illusion. It doesn't exist anywhere. It's only me, you and so on. But nonetheless there is a key difference between "a majority doesn't do it" and "One doesn't do it." Because one can even imagine a situation where a majority does do it, but still you can say "One" doesn't do it. And—we will return to it later apropos Hegel—of how this minimal logic of reification works. And there are wonderful examples here. My source here is a very intelligent, I think the best French philosopher who deals with catastrophes, called Jean-Pierre Dupuy, where he drew attention to how this spontaneous reification works even at such an ordinary level like the reading of election results. Like, remember, let's say that—here in the last general elections here, well, the Labor still won but a little bit, barely. How was this usually interpreted? That the voters sent a signal to the government: "We give you a chance, but with a warning." But sorry, this subject is totally mythical. It's simply that some people were for, others were against. You know how it's reified into—it's reified into image. Okay, so now this is maybe the nicest example dimension of the Big Other: that it's this anonymous "One does it." Now you will say if you are the—the naive spontaneous leftist, "Yes, that's not so bad, oppressive about language, that we should break out of this 'One does it,' that it is the force of custom, of habit and so on." No, I think that I have a nice counter-argument which precisely allows me to defend the creative aspect of this "One." Jokes. Don't be afraid, I will not bore you with new jokes and so on. I just want you to focus on something very naive, a naive dimension of jokes: how by definition, okay, we can imagine inventing jokes. But isn't the whole point of jokes that you tell them? It's not part of the mythology of jokes that you invent a joke. It's you somehow—jokes emerge. It's pure this anonymous creativity. There is a joke and somehow the joke is magically here. And I think that this would be, again, the Big Other in its creative side. Because I think the ultimate paranoiac idea would have been precisely to imagine that beneath this spontaneous emergence of jokes, there must be an origin. And there is a wonderful—by I—I don't like him as a writer—nonetheless, Isaac Asimov wrote, you know, a wonderful short story, *Jokester*, where the premise is exactly this. It's a wonderful paranoiac story: is that some linguist-linguist scientists try to isolate the primordial zero-level joke. Their idea is that we were stupid apes and then God humanized us by telling us the first joke. So they try to somehow to get at it, the original joke. Okay, it's a good story, but I think the disappointment is that it doesn't tell a joke. But I think we have some—like the first joke: "We don't eat from the apple of knowledge" or "from the tree of knowledge, the apple." No, that would be for me a good joke, obviously meant. But what I'm saying is that so this is the next—next aspect of the Big Other. Again, this anonymous "One," which again, it's not only the one of the habit and so on, it's a creative one. Like think about jokes, which even in—under Communism, there was a paranoia that since the Communists know that jokes against those in power help to ease tension, there was always this dream that there is some special agency of the secret police where they themselves manufacture jokes. That's the desperate attempt to, as it were, control it. Some people claim it's even true, but I claim even if it is true, what they were really doing were just—how to put it—reapplying the jokes with new—for example, with us in Slovenia, now it's interesting how, of course, there is a decline of jokes. Everybody knows that the—the biggest loss of the fall of Communism was good political jokes. They are now slowly resuscitating political jokes in Slovenia, but at a primitive level and simply reapplying to some stupid right-wing conservatives old jokes about stupid communists. Like, I don't know, now about a right-wing peasant's party politician, the joke is he—he takes a special tour to—to inspect some farms with a helicopter and then complains, "Isn't it cold enough, why do you turn—stop that fan up there?" No, it's cold enough and so on. Okay. So we have this "One." Then now we come—ah-ah—to the crucial question, which is: Lacan asks here a further question: how does this order emerge? Lacan even proposes a very naive theory of what is the gesture which institutes, opens up the dimension of the Big Other. It is for—he gives a kind of a account of the genesis of the Big Other. Let me quote you—let me read you this quote. It's a long quote from—from *Rapport de Rome*, function and speech, function and role of speech and so on, it's from *Ecrits*, page the English translation. Here it is. I quote: "It is with the gifts of Danaoi, like the Greeks, or with the passwords that give them their salutary nonsense, that language with the law begins. For these gifts are already symbols, in the sense that symbol means pact and that they are first and foremost signifiers of the pact that they constitute as signified, as is plainly seen in the fact that the objects of symbolic exchange—pots made to remain empty, shields too heavy to be carried, sheaves of wheat that wither, lances stuck into the ground—all are destined to be useless, if not simply superfluous by their very abundance. It is this neutralization of the signifier—it is this neutralization of the signifier the whole of the nature of language, on this assessment, one could see the beginning of it among sea swallows, for instance, during the mating parade, materialized in the fish they pass between each other from beak to beak. And if the ethologists are right in seeing in this the instrument of an activation of the group that might be called the equivalent of a festival, they would be completely justified in recognizing it as a symbol." So what is Lacan claiming here? Danaoi, of course, as you know, is the term used by Homer to designate the Greeks who were laying siege to Troy. Their gift was the famous wooden horse which, after it was received by the Trojans, allowed the Greeks to penetrate and destroy Troy. For Lacan, language is such a dangerous gift. It offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us. The symbolic order, symbolic order emerges from a gift, an offering which neutralizes its content in order to declare itself as a gift. When a gift is offered, what matters is not its content but the link between the giver and the receiver established when the other accepts the gift. Lacan even engages here, as you saw, in a little bit of speculation about animal ethology. The sea swallows who pass a caught fish from beak to beak as if to make it clear that the link established in this way is more important than who will finally keep and eat the fish, this effectively engages us in a kind of symbolic communication. So this would be again for Lacan the symbolic communication. When precisely—this is why for Lacan, you know, the famous dance of the bees where they can tell each other how far away are the best flowers with honey, this is for Lacan not communication because it lacks this dimension, this phatic dimension of self-referentiality. I say something but what matters is the reference, backward reference to the act of saying. And what's the only way to signal this, that what matters is not the message but the delivery of the message? It's either—either to—to—to make an empty message or to make a message or a gift which has to be returned and so on and so on. Now let me explain this a little bit. Everyone who is in love, I think, knows this. A present to the beloved, if it is to symbolize my love, should be useless, superfluous in its very abundance. Only as such, with its use value suspended, can it symbolize my love. Like, if you give to your beloved, I don't know, pairs of socks, it wouldn't work. It has to have this useless aspect to it. This is where we find the reflexivity of human communication. Every act of communication simultaneously symbolizes the fact, the very fact of communication. Which is why for Lacan, the elementary gesture of symbolic exchange is a so-called empty gesture, an offer made to be rejected. Okay, I will not quote here—my old example from Brecht, but another old example, just to get it clear to you. I don't know if you have the same rule here in England. In my country when I was young, we have this rule that if you are, for example, engaged in a fierce competition for a job promotion with your closest friend, and if you win, the proper thing to do is to offer to retract, to tell to your friend, "Listen, I know that you really deserve it, why don't I withdraw and you get the job?" But then, of course, the proper thing of your friend to do is to—say no, thanks. So you see, this is for Lacan the symbolic communication at its purest. Because nothing happened, but the pact was established. This is communication for Lacan. Now you will say, what happens if I do accept the friend's offer? It's a catastrophe. Precisely communication breaks down, you must say, "Okay, then, fuck off, I will get the job." And—and okay, we could go on here with—with further examples. Like you know, don't you have this rule if somebody who is obviously more wealthy than you invites you to dinner or lunch, and it's clear, it's absolutely clear from the very beginning, it's absolutely clear that you will—that he will pay for dinner. But nonetheless, isn't it a polite ritual that you insist a little bit, "No, no, let me pay," two, three times, then okay, you pay? But you know what I mean, this I must go through the empty gesture. This is it. Okay, it's an old story, unfortunately true. You can imagine what happened to me. Why do I always think like this happened to me? That when I was young, I insisted once, but a little bit too much, so the guy said, "Okay, you pay, you—" Now I think that from here we can also define in a very nice way the notion of social pathology. A sociopath is precisely the guy who cannot engage in this meta-communication. For him, there are no empty gestures. He means what he says. He is not really engaged—engaged in it. Because of this dimension, every choice is never simply a choice. You always make an additional choice. What do I mean by this? Let me recall another everyday situation in which my partner—sexual, political, financial, whatever you want—wants me to make a deal with him. What he or she tells me is something like, "Please, I really love you. If we come together here, I will be totally dedicated to you. But if you reject me, I may lose my control and make your life a misery." Now the catch here of course is that I'm not simply confronted with a clear choice. The second part of the message, "If you don't agree with me, I will make life a misery," undermines the first part. Somebody who is ready to ruin me if I say no to him cannot really love me and be dedicated to my happiness. So the reality of the choice offered to me belies its terms. Hatred or at least a cold indifference towards me underlies both terms of the choice. And there is, of course, asymmetrical hypocrisy which consists in saying, "I love you and will accept whatever your choice will be. So even if you know that your refusal will ruin me, please choose what you really want, do not take into consideration how it will affect me." This is clear manipulation, as everybody knows. Because the message is, "How could you refuse me when I love you so totally?" Don't you know this in intense intersubjective situation, no? One way to put extreme pressure on the other is precisely to offer him a choice. "You know this is the end, but you do whatever you want." This is fake freedom. At the meta-level of communication, it's—it's a false choice. So—again, the reason I like the mysteries of Soviet Stalinist discourse is how it was a discourse where everything had a double meaning. I think that this is why Stalinism is an extremely interesting linguistic phenomenon. There—how to put it—the two levels all the time clashed and in a totally irrational way—irrational with regard to the usual use of language—the Stalinist—Stalinist opts for this meta-communicational level. Like to give you one example from a recent, very funny book, Alexei Yurchak's *Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More*, about how—a wonderful adventure, how—you know, for many years when the Soviet media announce the funeral ceremonies of a member of high nomenclature, they used a cliché formulation: "Buried on Red Square, close to by the Kremlin wall." The point is that from the early sixties onwards, they—no longer really buried them there, there was no place. But somewhere near the wall, in the wall—no, not there. So a group of Soviet of fifteen members from the Russian Language Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences wrote a letter to the Central Committee and proposed—they simply proposed an alternate—formulation, like "The urn with ashes was placed in the Kremlin wall." They said, "This is embarrassing. You are using one formula but what's really doing is this. Why don't you use this formulation?" And it was very mysterious, it several weeks later, a representative of the Central Committee phoned the Institute, informing them that the Central Committee has discussed their suggestion in detail but decided to keep the old formulation. And I think the bureaucrats were right. Because what were they afraid of is that if they change a formulation, that everybody—nobody would accept that it's simply for the facts. Everybody would look for a hidden meaning. Is that those who are buried here means more and so on? Then the debate went on, because then the linguists suggested—a Russian friend told me—"Why don't you simply say, 'It means nothing'?" and then the Communist Central Committee, they exploded: "This makes it even more mysterious. Then the reading is, 'It means something, but we will not even tell you what it means in its hide,'" and so on. So you see, that's what I like about Stalinism, is this semantically totally saturated space. Whatever you do is read in this criminological way as—as a sign of something else. So if you don't—so the only way—how to put it—whatever you do you cannot—nothing is simply counted, read as a positive message. For example, I read a wonderful book about Polish-Soviet relations where they said the Polish newspaper, there was a note saying in the late fifties or when there were some problems with building a new Soviet—a new Soviet-Polish railway because of the marshes, too much water. Nobody read this as an information on this. It was "What does it mean? The Poles don't want this railway, political—" Everything is immediately translated into meaning. And now the mysteries go even deeper here, and here you have Big Other at its purest. Namely, the original idea was that then those who are inside nomenclature, they know that this is only the way this criminological reading, you know, you read everything as a sign like, "Oh, this year Molotov was two chairs behind Stalin, what does this mean? The year ago he was near—" that those inside know it. But recently—I sorry, forgot the reference—I read another wonderful—sorry, I forgot the reference—text which claims that it can be proven that there was no inner nomenclature. Even Stalin, Molotov, they functioned in the same way. This is wonderful example of this reification of the Big Other. It's not that Stalin, Molotov, a couple of them knew everything and talked directly while for us commoners we need this—criminological reading of signs. And there is a—a wonderful example—quoted by—about Molotov, who was the second guy in the committee there, I mean the second guy after Stalin in thirty-six. And it's a nice example of crimino—he was again second guy, the top guy, and he got into a total panic in thirty-seven or thirty-eight. What happened? You know that at that time there was the last big show trial against Bukharin's group. And they published in *Pravda* two, three times, the accusation was that this Bukharin-Trotskyite group wants to kill the entire Soviet leadership. The plan is very interesting one. The idea is that they wanted to use Shostakovich so that when they would be in Opera, some sniper would have shot them—originally the plan of the plot was even to include Shostakovich. But the point is the following one: that so who were listed—the accusation was the Trotskyite group, Bukharinist group, wants to kill, plant a murder of these Soviet leaders. Now, it was crucial, this became an ultra-criminological signal, to be on that list to be killed. This was the sign that you are IT. Now the third time when the final accusation was published, Molotov almost got a heart attack. He wasn't in. And he knew, and then he looked into it, he was right. It was a signal from Stalin because his wife of Molotov who was Jewish did some remarks that Stalin didn't like. And it was—look, but you see the irony of it, that you read there and you are not on the death list—it's a sign! Total. But my point is that there is something in—how to put it—there is something Stalinist in language as such. This would fit the Big Other, no? In the—in the sense that language never simply transmits a content but simultaneously it always renders how we relate to this content. This minimal reflexivity, this is what Lacan means by the not so much performative as declaratory dimension of symbolic interaction. Let me give you another everyday example. Let's imagine a couple with a tacit agreement that they can lead discrete extramarital affairs. You don't talk about it but you accept it silently and so on. If all of a sudden the husband openly tells his wife about an ongoing affair, she will have good reasons to be in panic. "If it's just an affair, why are you telling me this?" You get the point that the act of telling is—this is what Lacan means by the declaratory dimension. "Why are—why are you telling me it?" Or—or—the same, I think, even goes into a—works in a negative—okay, another positive way here. I use it already, I think, in some of my texts for *London Review of Books* is—this is I think what I find so mysterious in these recent debates in the United States about public use of torture, no? I mean, when French tell me, "Let's be realistic, but all regimes torture suspected prisoners, terrorists, what's the big fuss?" I said, "The big fuss is not that they are doing it, I know that they are all—why are they telling us publicly today?" It's the act alone, the act of telling it is never neutral. Like, another of my old jokes to make it clear, I'm sure I'm repeating myself now. You know how if you find my talk boring, what's the polite codified way in academia to say? You tell me simply—if I ask you afterward, "Did I do a good talk?"—if you tell me "It's interesting," at least in the United States it means it was stupid and boring. It's a polite way to say. So you see my point. My point is if some of you tells me afterwards, "It was stupid and boring," I would have the full right to stay. But if you really only meant that it's stupid and boring, then why didn't you tell me that it's interesting? I would get—you know what I mean? If you say it literally, it's more. It's personal attack and so on. So again, this is my problem with this torture. What is this "more," no? If they really only torture, why don't they simply say that they don't torture? How should I put it? What? It's—and that's—and yes, it works also in a—in a negative way. I remember in February Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Assembly in order to advocate the attack on Iraq. And it was wonderful, I remember it, that how the US delegation asked the large reproduction of Picasso's *Guernica* on the wall behind the speaker's podium to be covered with a different visual ornament. Now the official explanation was that *Guernica* did not provide the adequate optical background for the televised transmission of Colin Powell's speech. But it was clear to everyone that what the US delegation was afraid of is that *Guernica*, the painting supposed to be depicting the catastrophic results of the German aerial bombing on the Spanish city in the Civil War, would give rise to the wrong associations, like "You're talking about the peace, that's what really American attack on Iraq will do." But the irony, I think, and this is what Lacan means when he claims that repression and the return of the repressed are one and the same process. I claim that if the US were to ignore this, maybe people would not even associate it. The very act of demanding that image to be withdrawn drew attention to it. It again—it added this declaratory, this declaratory dimension. Okay, so let's go nonetheless a little bit further to conclude. So we have now the Big Other with all these qualities, the main among them being that the Big Other is a virtual order, that the Big Other is this anonymous minimally reified order and order grounded in empty gestures. That is to say that there always is a gap between what you are saying and the declaratory dimension of why are you saying this. Maybe the best—another example for this is, you know, this old ritual of potlatch. Which is we all know it, but I think there is another aspect which is not covered by Lévi-Strauss, which you know what's that, so-called primitive groups: I invite you with like pigs, you invite me—okay. We know Lévi-Straussian interpretation, classical one, which is the point is not the gifts as such which are exchanged but the point is to establish a link, solidarity, communication as such, to establish a social link. But one thing is not covered by—not Lévi-Strauss, very mysteriously. Namely, if it is just—the idea is just to establish a link, I give it to you, you give it to me, I invite you, you invite me—and it's just—the point is just to establish a link—why then don't we do it directly? It's in a nice way that Marx liked. The mystery is not what is behind the true meaning. The mystery is appearance as such. Why does it have to appear as not as a direct exchange of gifts, but as a consecutive exchange of—how should I put it—not exchange, but like it's not "I invite you, you invite me," it's "Out of a pure gift, I invite you," and then later "Out of a pure goodness gift, you invite me." You know what I mean? Exchange should not appear as exchange. It has to appear as two symmetrical gifts. Why? And I think this is a nice debate. The first who noticed this, as far as I know, was Pierre Bourdieu, who gave a kind of a class analysis, in pressed, it doesn't work. I think that that American well-known anthropologist Marshall Sahlins who did the answer, which is that if you do it directly, as a direct exchange, it turns into a logic of revenge of tip for—tip for tat of—of punishment. That—that it has to be to signal social pact, it has to be—it has to have this illusory dimension of—again, we are back at that empty gesture that something that you are obliged to do, you pretend as if you are giving it as a free gesture. So that necessity is masked as freedom. This would have been for Lacan also another way to put what is this zero level of communication. So next step: how then, how do we, if communication always involves a—an empty gesture, like giving an unnecessary gift or gift which is useless, making an offer which is meant to be rejected or whatever, how do we empty a gesture? The elementary answer of course is through the act of repetition. And here I think that we should be very precise. I don't think it's already translated into English, I like it's a short book, the last book by Giorgio Agamben on *Profanations*, where he tries to celebrate profanation, but profanation as precisely opposed to secularization. That's of course the interest. For Agamben, secularization is just the other side of the sacred, they support each other. It's not a true undermining of the sacred. For example, secularization—to give you a simple example: if the sacred is a mass, a ritual, then secularization would have been simply a ruthless political use of this. You secularize it in—but you don't really undermine it from between. Undermining it from between would have been to use it in a different way, in a kind of perverted non-utility, but—but not to simply refunctionalize—like profanation would have been, I don't know, a Black Mass, to establish kind of an obscene ritual. So again, for Agamben, the space of freedom that we can build is the space of profanation, which means putting the sacred text or practice into a different context, context. Subtracting it—subtracting it from its proper context and functioning. So I think here again that the Japanese culture is close to this logic of propagation. Namely, I'm referring here to the wonderful inventions, I have a couple of books of them—on them, photos: the so-called Shindogu. You know, the objects which are meant to be over—they are useless by their very over-usefulness. These are the—the rules are the following: these are objects which must be possible, can be made, but they are so ridiculously utilitarian that they undermine themselves. Like, I don't know, you have sunglasses, but with those wind wipers so that if you walk—or you have butter in a lipstick case so that you can do butter like lipstick, more practical. Or if you want fresh water you can an umbre—get an umbrella which is turned around up and the water collects here, the idea is if you walk in the rain you can always drink fresh water and so on. This would be, I think, a nice example of what Agamben means by profanation. But unfortunately, at one level I don't agree with him, which is that he thinks that the profanation can be done only with regard to something sacred. You de-contextualize something sacred. But what I claim is that profanation in a way is—comes first. Why? Because I think that you can profanate something which is not sacred, which is just part of our everyday functioning mode. And I think that this is how even poetry begins and so on. Poetry, eroticism, whatever you want. For example, to be vulgar: I shake your hand. This is functional, I wish to signal... What happens if instead of dropping, letting your hand go, I just repeat the gesture squeezing it three, four times? You would probably thought that I'm making some covert erotic advances or whatever. So that's my idea. My idea is that—you know what I mean—that profanation comes first, that the sacred or the properly human symbolic emerges through profanation in the sense of this de-contextualization, that something which originally is a pragmatic act is allowed to run empty, as it were. It's the—it's out of its—torn out of its context of utility. And I think this is the symbolic universe as such when you allow, as it were, when you allow the machine to run empty. And we can see in Stalinism how empty it can run, that it doesn't even matter—matter the literal meaning. Isn't this poetry at its most elementary? When—isn't the birth of poetry when a phrase or group of words is de-contextualized and gets caught into an autonomous repetitive insistence? So, for example, it's bad poetry, I know, but when instead of "come here," I say "come, come here," you would suspect me, "Am I getting crazy, am I trying to say something poetic or whatever?" So again, at this level, I think we should locate profanation as the primordial act of the symbolic order. And I hope you also see the link between profanation and between profanation and this—how should I call it—empty—empty, empty gesture, the de-contextualized—the de-contextualized gesture. Yes? By undermining the autonomy of the ontological determination of being itself, was Lacan trying to reverse Cartesianism? Sorry, of what determination? Of—ontological determination. What do you mean by ontological? Well, being as it proceeds logically and by being from Heidegger. Aha. Do you think Lacan was trying to reverse Cartesianism? Sorry, do you think—do you think Lacan was trying to reverse—trying to reverse Cartesianism? That's a—that's a good question because first, how to—you know things here get so complicated for me, in what sense? Because first, no, I think that if anything, that's my old thesis which for—which is for many people very problematic. But I think that Lacan was precisely in a way returning to—returning even to a very strange Cartesianism. But nonetheless, I think that Lacan says literally the subject of the unconscious is the Cartesian subject. And okay, we can go a little bit into it now because I wanted to do this later. Namely what? The topic of Cogito, madness, religion. I mean, usually—and this is the Michel Foucault line, no—Cogito is associated with modern rationalism as Cogito, I think I am, the island of my normal rational thinking, which is according to Foucault's reading in his *History of Madness*, based on the minimal repression, or rather externalization, rejection of madness. So as you probably know, maybe even better than me, when in his *History of Madness*, in his close readings of those couple of pages of Descartes—Descartes about radical doubt, when Foucault there confronts that radical hypothesis of universal doubt, the Evil Genius, Evil Spirit controlling all my thoughts, there is no reality and so on. This is a fake experiment for Foucault. This is a rational experiment, Descartes cannot really confront madness. Madness is excluded. You probably know that Derrida's answer to it is that no, that Cogito, Cogito itself is based on this excess of madness. That Cogito—that to arrive at Cogito, you must accept this utter madness. Of course this moment of mad explosion is then immediately masked—the moment Descartes starts to talk about *res cogitans*, the thinking substance and so on and so on. I think it's—I think it's a crucial debate. And although I appreciate the finesse of Foucault's—of Foucault's reply to—to—of Foucault's reply to Derrida, I nonetheless think that—think that Derrida was right here. That is to say that—how should I put it—of course Cogito later turns into this normalizing agency of rational thought and so on and so on. But it's in—in a reaction, in reacting to an excess—excess which is nonetheless its own excess. You know, when people attack—when people say philosophy is all a defense against certain excess, we should not forget that that excess is not simply outside philosophy, that that excess is the gesture of philosophy as such. So of course philosophy reacts against certain excess, explosion of madness. But this madness is the core, the founding gesture of philosophy. It's a little bit like in Islam, where it's easy to complain how controlling Islam is with regard to women, covering them up and so on, controlling women. But what interests me is doesn't that prior to that you have to have an image of a woman as threatening and so on, to have them and I think that is also part of Islam. My god, woman is not threatening by nature. You know, both—both are products of Islam. And if you approach Islam in this way, you discover something much more interesting. That for example—how strong, crucial the role of women is in Islam. We know—but if we are talking about Big Other today—Khadija was, my god, Muhammad's Big Other, you know the story, the official Islam story, that when Archangel Gabriel first appeared to Muhammad, he thought he is crazy and so on. And it's through Khadija, through his wife—only through her did he take seriously himself, did he believe that it's not—not the bad demon—not demon but the Archangel Gabriel and so on and so on. So to return—to return to your point, I think that paradoxically—paradoxically, if anything, Lacan is in a way returning here even to—to the Cartesian Cogito. And again, here surprisingly Lacan is close to Derrida who also perceived this excess of madness in the Cartesian Cogito. Or to put it in another way—of course I didn't want to talk about it today—it's interesting how in German Idealism, where Cogito is then formulated at its purest as the transcendental subject, the metaphor for the subject is no longer light but night of the world, darkness. This idea that you also find in mysticism, no, of—of the very heart of subjectivity is this abyss—abyss of madness. So this I think are—if you want to put it in this way, the origins of—the origins of modern subjectivity. Do you have maybe—I can conclude, but nonetheless if you want, do you have maybe some other—maybe some other questions here if anything was not... Please. How about the progression from the animal, you know, instinctive knowledge, the animal coupling to the, you know, human internalized desire, which at its core has been this inevitability of collapse? Why is it so problematic for Lacan, since he was able to formulate such a clear conception of subjectivity? Sorry—can you—I'm not absolutely sure that I got it. Can you just specify your question a little bit? Well, for example, why the progression from animal coupling with its instinctive knowledge as a—ritualized natural rhythm to human desire which is internalized and itself has this inevitability of collapse? Why is it so problematic given the fact that we have a concrete notion of subjectivity? In what sense do you think, that's what I don't get it, that it's problematic for Lacan? Well, I think it's very problematic. I mean at the same time, how are we not—given nineteenth-century naturalism—how are we not in essence, you know, a rational animal? Why does there have to be an extra complication to have a clear grasp of what we are in ourselves? No, again, I'm—I'm not quite sure that I'm getting the point of the question, but let me—sorry, please. Sorry, I was coming back to my earlier point. It seems to me that—the Big Other or whatever, you know, we say that behind—like you say in your book—behind the appearance, there is meant to be, you know, the interiority of the self and the void. I mean, is that precisely what we are, the inexplicable void? I can give you here an answer. Why did you ask the—why did you say inexplicable? I mean, a void—you know what I mean. Okay, now we're coming to the crucial point. First, let me say something first. If your—if your remark was meant as critical towards Lacan, I agree to a point, up to a degree, in what sense? In the sense that Lacan does sometimes mobilize when he tries to elaborate what distinguishes man from animal, etc., certain very traditional philosophical motives which are precisely this one: that nature is in itself balanced, regulated through instincts while man is excess, madness, all this. From Kierkegaard, even Hegel, man is an—human being is an animal sick unto death and so on and so on. I mean, if we can really learn something from intelligent—evolutionists like Stephen Jay Gould and so on, is that nature is already crazy in herself, how should I put it? That there is no natural—nature is not a balanced system and then man through this explosion of negativity undermines it. I wanted to come to this later, namely, to what extent is this true at all for Hegel? Because if you read in Hegel's *Encyclopedia*, the first—the first part of the third part—third part is Philosophy of Spirit—the first part is Anthropology: spirit awakening out of nature. You find there incredible, breathtaking reflections on madness and habit. Basically Hegel's thesis is that every nature is a second nature. Natural nature already is a second nature. It's a kind of a—you know, an organism had to stabilize its borders with the outside through habits. That nature itself is a habituated nature. And then a wonderful theory of the—but okay, about this later. But what I—when you mentioned that—sorry, I got lost. When you mentioned that—the other point, the—sorry, what was the final point? Confused. Oh well, it was the first point, not the second one. Sorry of—was it the first question or the second? The first question, the way you recapitulated it at the end. Oh, well with my first question is—to undermine the autonomy of the ontological determination of being itself, was Lacan trying to reverse Cartesianism? Ah no, sorry, now I got what—when you said that are we only that gap, incompletion and so on? In your book, you say that behind phenomenal appearance, there is meant to be this void, which is ourselves, the interiority of the self which hides behind phenomenal appearance. But doesn't that seem to be extremely symmetrical, very convenient for understanding ourselves? What do I mean by—okay, let me give you an example: what do I mean by this? Let's move on here. Yeah, but I'm moving on, I'm moving on. And this will answer it in a way, because this also brings us to the topic of—to the topic of—to the topic of repetition and so on. Look, recently I read in some introduction to philosophy a wonderful idea which explains what kind of ontology I want to bring you into. It's based on this idea. You know when you make a computer program for a certain PC-CD ROM game, for example, and you construct a virtual reality? You never construct it to the end. No? For example, if you play these stupid PC-CD ROM games—I sometimes do with my small son—you see a house, for example. But there is no program for inside the house, because simply it's presupposed in the game that you will not enter the house or you are not allowed. Or for example, even if it's a war game where you kill each other, although we—we presuppose that the persons there in cyberspace are like us, but there is no program for what is beneath, you know, for—there is no program for—they don't have really bones, blood and so on. Why? Because this is not part of the rules of the game, how should I put it? Or even if you have that, the way it's usually programmed, it is that when you do an unexpected gesture, like enter a house, then some general program is instantly activated on the spot, constructing the inside of the house. It's a little bit like—you remember when you move a text downward or upward, a book, a longer text, on your PC screen? It's as if it's moving down, but it's not, it's instantly constructed. So the idea we get here is that a virtual universe is in this sense a fake universe. It's not completely constructed. It's a house, but it's just externally. If you penetrate it, it's nothing. It's—gets fuzzy, it stops. Which you can incidentally find in some early games which are still constructed in a bad way where what you get is—like if you move too close to a human face, it's almost disgusting, embarrassing, because you see that it's only half-formed, that it's not even really constructed as a face. What's the point here? Ah, this is the nice short-circuit jump. You know in—common knowledge I know, but nonetheless—you know in quantum physics, uncertainty principle, which means it's not only epistemological that we cannot determine at the same time the velocity and the position of a particle, but it's in itself undetermined. Only through measure—okay. Now you can guess what's the nice idea. The nice idea is: what if quantum physics, when it encounters uncertainty, encounters in exactly the same way as in a—PC-CD ROM game the—that our in the same way, although at a much deeper level, that the virtual universe, digital universe is not fully constructed? That the same holds for our reality. That when we approach the—this quantum level, it's open, you don't know what it is, because it's the same as when you approach a house that you were not expected to enter. The idea, that is to
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say, is that if you give it a theological twist—but precisely I don't want to—that when God created us, he constructed a world for us. But in the same way that the PC-CD ROM game programmer thought,
say, is that if you give it a theological twist—but precisely I don't want to—that when God created us, he constructed a world for us. But in the same way that the PC-CD ROM game programmer thought,
Slavoj Žižek
"Oh, people will not want to enter that house, so let's leave it like this," so God thought, "People are so stupid,
"Oh, people will not want to enter that house, so let's leave it like this," so God thought, "People are so stupid,
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they will not reach to—to quantum level, so I don't even have to construct it to the end. We went too far." But now comes my crucial point. The idealist reading would be that of the *Matrix*, no? This means that in the same way that there is a programmer who constructed although in an imperfect way our virtual reality, there must be
they will not reach to—to quantum level, so I don't even have to construct it to the end. We went too far." But now comes my crucial point. The idealist reading would be that of the *Matrix*, no? This means that in the same way that there is a programmer who constructed although in an imperfect way our virtual reality, there must be
Slavoj Žižek
somebody who constructed real reality. God. God was also a little bit of a lazy programmer, too lazy to
somebody who constructed real reality. God. God was also a little bit of a lazy programmer, too lazy to
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do all the details. Now I think the properly materialist solution here is: why do we need God? Why cannot be reality in itself—and this is I think what Lacan means, but I want to keep—to keep to not yet give you till later this theological-Lacanian materialist insight—this is I think what Lacan means by
do all the details. Now I think the properly materialist solution here is: why do we need God? Why cannot be reality in itself—and this is I think what Lacan means, but I want to keep—to keep to not yet give you till later this theological-Lacanian materialist insight—this is I think what Lacan means by
Slavoj Žižek
"non-all." Also in this quite literal sense: that reality—think a bit about like in the computer program terms—is not perfectly fully constructed. That's, I
"non-all." Also in this quite literal sense: that reality—think a bit about like in the computer program terms—is not perfectly fully constructed. That's, I
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think, the true ontological abyss of the psychoanalytic—my god, I will use a horrible term—vision of the world. It's not
think, the true ontological abyss of the psychoanalytic—my god, I will use a horrible term—vision of the world. It's not
Slavoj Žižek
fully—and I think that only by way of accepting this—how should I put it—non-all of reality, that it's not because somebody didn't program it fully, it's in itself not fully determined. Like in quantum physics, it's in itself things are not fully ontologically realized. This I think opens up—here I'm coming back to you—a space for subjectivity. That there are in a way gaps in reality itself. Reality is not fully ontologically constituted. That's I think the—the move that we should do. It's not simply we don't know it fully, there is reality out there. Of course there is reality out there. But it's in itself not fully constituted, in a way. That would be—and which is why maybe I will do this next time if it—another—another image. So, shall we take a few questions? Sorry? Shall we take a few questions? Yeah, yeah, of course. Please. So shall we have a few questions but if possible, sticking with the Big Other and the—the—the topics that Slavoj covered today so that I will not escape again into too long answers. Okay, I got the point. Sorry. Okay, yes. Can I just ask—does this argument just reproduce the old argument by Lévi-Strauss when he talks about the phoneme zero in Jakobson, where language somehow is always grounded in this kind of term? He is talking about the mana. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The mana or *trucs-en-machins*. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then also Deleuze goes back in the *Logic of Sense*, talking how the structure somehow can always circulate and become alive, always there—there always is this kind of void, this kind of empty which allows all the structure to circulate. This kind of fuzzy term, this kind of empty term. Although the—yes and no. You know in what sense yes and no? Because you know that Deleuze basically
fully—and I think that only by way of accepting this—how should I put it—non-all of reality, that it's not because somebody didn't program it fully, it's in itself not fully determined. Like in quantum physics, it's in itself things are not fully ontologically realized. This I think opens up—here I'm coming back to you—a space for subjectivity. That there are in a way gaps in reality itself. Reality is not fully ontologically constituted. That's I think the—the move that we should do. It's not simply we don't know it fully, there is reality out there. Of course there is reality out there. But it's in itself not fully constituted, in a way. That would be—and which is why maybe I will do this next time if it—another—another image. So, shall we take a few questions? Sorry? Shall we take a few questions? Yeah, yeah, of course. Please. So shall we have a few questions but if possible, sticking with the Big Other and the—the—the topics that Slavoj covered today so that I will not escape again into too long answers. Okay, I got the point. Sorry. Okay, yes. Can I just ask—does this argument just reproduce the old argument by Lévi-Strauss when he talks about the phoneme zero in Jakobson, where language somehow is always grounded in this kind of term? He is talking about the mana. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The mana or *trucs-en-machins*. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then also Deleuze goes back in the *Logic of Sense*, talking how the structure somehow can always circulate and become alive, always there—there always is this kind of void, this kind of empty which allows all the structure to circulate. This kind of fuzzy term, this kind of empty term. Although the—yes and no. You know in what sense yes and no? Because you know that Deleuze basically
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oscillated
oscillated
Slavoj Žižek
here, the way I read him, and it's very interesting that you
here, the way I read him, and it's very interesting that you
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mentioned—you mentioned *Logic of Sense* and of course his masterwork I think, *Difference and Repetition*, because there the reference even to Freud, to psychoanalysis, even to
mentioned—you mentioned *Logic of Sense* and of course his masterwork I think, *Difference and Repetition*, because there the reference even to Freud, to psychoanalysis, even to
Slavoj Žižek
Lacan is more or less totally positive, how should I put it? It's so interesting how later he hated the very term "death drive." But the best explanation, articulation of
Lacan is more or less totally positive, how should I put it? It's so interesting how later he hated the very term "death drive." But the best explanation, articulation of
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what death drive is, the best formulas of repetition—*Wiederholungszwang*, compulsion to repeat—the best articulation of it is for me in Deleuze himself, much better and much clearer than in Lacan himself in *Difference and Repetition*, where he has
what death drive is, the best formulas of repetition—*Wiederholungszwang*, compulsion to repeat—the best articulation of it is for me in Deleuze himself, much better and much clearer than in Lacan himself in *Difference and Repetition*, where he has
Slavoj Žižek
these wonderful formulas which can be understood precisely against the background of what I was telling you today at the beginning about that Schumann repetition. How—I think it's a wonderful very deep reversal of Hegelian, I claim, reversal of Freud. When, you know, Freud's idea about—to put it in simple terms, at least superficially—Freud is meant to have said—the link between memory, memorization and repetition: we repeat what we don't memorize. It remains repressed in—so if you don't confront it openly by repeating it—it returns—sorry, by memorizing it—it returns, you repeat it. But as Deleuze nicely puts it, it's the other way around. We—it's not that we repeat what we cannot repress, it's we repress when what we are unable to repeat. So that even memorization is—that repetition is not simply this—how should I put it—bad transferential reactivation. The reason I'm telling you this is that the problem is the following one: we have this movement of, let's call it, what Deleuze would have called pure difference. Now the jump from here to that mana, zero signifier, is—zero signifier, basically we are here at the level of phallic signifier, in a way. And you know what I mean, Lacan is here oscillating: maybe we need too much. Maybe it's too much. In other words, when Lacan talks about "non-all," he tries to think this unfinished character of reality, dispersion, but not yet focused in one central—in one central void. Or—but I'm so sorry, we don't have time to go on because there is further theory here to be done. Yeah, I just wanted to ask you about Patricia Highsmith, actually, a couple of examples that occurred to me when you were—Oh, perfect, because I also like her. I think she is the one. She is the one. Yeah, I know. Yeah. The first one is—it's this week segment, it strikes me as the classic example of this thing about masochism and the Big Other. Yeah. Is—is—David, as you know—Sorry, which one was—*This Sweet Sickness*? It's a novel. No, I don't know it. Oh, it's a short story. It's a novel. Oh, *This Sweet Sickness*. Ah, yes, *Sweet Sickness*. Okay, sorry, sorry, I'm my—okay, I got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, because it's almost the reverse of the unsent message: it's messages that are actually sent, i.e., his letters to Annabel. But they're not meant for her at all, obviously. I mean, she's obviously explicitly and we—we pick up that she's a totally mediocre figure. And all the letters that he sends to her... are not intended for her at all, but nonetheless his whole happiness is—is—comes out of writing these letters. Because when he actually meets her—who we—we didn't really meet her much anyway—the whole love affair is—is a complete failure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It only works through the Big Other and it only comes to death when he actually tries to—to realize it. Um, the other classic example from Highsmith, I thought, with the Big Other would be *The Talented Mr. Ripley*. It strikes me—is—at its most psychopathic about Ripley is not that—he have no contact with the other but he only has a contact with the Big Other. So that—when his crime—it doesn't matter that specific individuals know that he committed a crime. It's this sort of general opinion... that i.e. the Big Other that becomes aware of it, that would be the catastrophe. So he is—in fact he is quite aware, isn't he, really? That—lots of people suspect that he's done something and committed a crime. He does—but it doesn't matter because, you know, the—the Big Other is kept... you know, the Big Other doesn't know. No, I totally—I totally agree with you. Okay, sorry, to start with the first example, no? But don't you think that—isn't there a general truth in the first constellation, that whenever we are engaged in this kind of letter of—isn't it that every real recipient is something that you get as it were by mistake, there is something wrong in it? I think that this is even up to a point a general—a general—a general that this situation far from being an exception in *Sweet Sickness* is almost a general situation, I think. And I totally agree with you apropos—apropos Ripley, of course. It's very—I even in one of the review of—*Ripley's Game*, not *Ripley's Game*, the other one, *The Talented Mr. Ripley*. I even—because again, I think—do you agree, did you see *The Talented Mr. Ripley*, the movie? I think that this dimension is precisely lost there. That in the film he is turned into a normal subject with nightmares and so on and so on. And I—I think that this is a nice example of what I was talking about before: of how the reading of Anthony Minghella—it's not a bad film—but the reading is that Patricia Highsmith, he said this in an interview, Patricia Highsmith in her time wasn't allowed openly to make a hero homosexual, so she compromised him, now we will say it all. But what you get with this saying it all is a much more vulgar—vulgar ordinary hysterical guy or whatever. I think that there is something much more monstrous in Ripley of the novels than in the Ripley of *The Talented Mr. Ripley*. Isn't—isn't part of what's involved with that is the displacement actually from class, which is in the novel implicitly... to—to sexuality? Yeah, yeah, you can also put it in this way. Although the irony is that Minghella thinks that he is making Patricia Highsmith more left, how should I put it, no? But he is—I agree with you because already with the first Ripley at the beginning, the whole point: he poor guy there, it's all—it's class element, of course. The whole point is that he is a fake lower class taking as—it's all about
these wonderful formulas which can be understood precisely against the background of what I was telling you today at the beginning about that Schumann repetition. How—I think it's a wonderful very deep reversal of Hegelian, I claim, reversal of Freud. When, you know, Freud's idea about—to put it in simple terms, at least superficially—Freud is meant to have said—the link between memory, memorization and repetition: we repeat what we don't memorize. It remains repressed in—so if you don't confront it openly by repeating it—it returns—sorry, by memorizing it—it returns, you repeat it. But as Deleuze nicely puts it, it's the other way around. We—it's not that we repeat what we cannot repress, it's we repress when what we are unable to repeat. So that even memorization is—that repetition is not simply this—how should I put it—bad transferential reactivation. The reason I'm telling you this is that the problem is the following one: we have this movement of, let's call it, what Deleuze would have called pure difference. Now the jump from here to that mana, zero signifier, is—zero signifier, basically we are here at the level of phallic signifier, in a way. And you know what I mean, Lacan is here oscillating: maybe we need too much. Maybe it's too much. In other words, when Lacan talks about "non-all," he tries to think this unfinished character of reality, dispersion, but not yet focused in one central—in one central void. Or—but I'm so sorry, we don't have time to go on because there is further theory here to be done. Yeah, I just wanted to ask you about Patricia Highsmith, actually, a couple of examples that occurred to me when you were—Oh, perfect, because I also like her. I think she is the one. She is the one. Yeah, I know. Yeah. The first one is—it's this week segment, it strikes me as the classic example of this thing about masochism and the Big Other. Yeah. Is—is—David, as you know—Sorry, which one was—*This Sweet Sickness*? It's a novel. No, I don't know it. Oh, it's a short story. It's a novel. Oh, *This Sweet Sickness*. Ah, yes, *Sweet Sickness*. Okay, sorry, sorry, I'm my—okay, I got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, because it's almost the reverse of the unsent message: it's messages that are actually sent, i.e., his letters to Annabel. But they're not meant for her at all, obviously. I mean, she's obviously explicitly and we—we pick up that she's a totally mediocre figure. And all the letters that he sends to her... are not intended for her at all, but nonetheless his whole happiness is—is—comes out of writing these letters. Because when he actually meets her—who we—we didn't really meet her much anyway—the whole love affair is—is a complete failure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It only works through the Big Other and it only comes to death when he actually tries to—to realize it. Um, the other classic example from Highsmith, I thought, with the Big Other would be *The Talented Mr. Ripley*. It strikes me—is—at its most psychopathic about Ripley is not that—he have no contact with the other but he only has a contact with the Big Other. So that—when his crime—it doesn't matter that specific individuals know that he committed a crime. It's this sort of general opinion... that i.e. the Big Other that becomes aware of it, that would be the catastrophe. So he is—in fact he is quite aware, isn't he, really? That—lots of people suspect that he's done something and committed a crime. He does—but it doesn't matter because, you know, the—the Big Other is kept... you know, the Big Other doesn't know. No, I totally—I totally agree with you. Okay, sorry, to start with the first example, no? But don't you think that—isn't there a general truth in the first constellation, that whenever we are engaged in this kind of letter of—isn't it that every real recipient is something that you get as it were by mistake, there is something wrong in it? I think that this is even up to a point a general—a general—a general that this situation far from being an exception in *Sweet Sickness* is almost a general situation, I think. And I totally agree with you apropos—apropos Ripley, of course. It's very—I even in one of the review of—*Ripley's Game*, not *Ripley's Game*, the other one, *The Talented Mr. Ripley*. I even—because again, I think—do you agree, did you see *The Talented Mr. Ripley*, the movie? I think that this dimension is precisely lost there. That in the film he is turned into a normal subject with nightmares and so on and so on. And I—I think that this is a nice example of what I was talking about before: of how the reading of Anthony Minghella—it's not a bad film—but the reading is that Patricia Highsmith, he said this in an interview, Patricia Highsmith in her time wasn't allowed openly to make a hero homosexual, so she compromised him, now we will say it all. But what you get with this saying it all is a much more vulgar—vulgar ordinary hysterical guy or whatever. I think that there is something much more monstrous in Ripley of the novels than in the Ripley of *The Talented Mr. Ripley*. Isn't—isn't part of what's involved with that is the displacement actually from class, which is in the novel implicitly... to—to sexuality? Yeah, yeah, you can also put it in this way. Although the irony is that Minghella thinks that he is making Patricia Highsmith more left, how should I put it, no? But he is—I agree with you because already with the first Ripley at the beginning, the whole point: he poor guy there, it's all—it's class element, of course. The whole point is that he is a fake lower class taking as—it's all about
unknown
class. I agree. Good. Any more questions? Why does class bother you? The Big Other notices it, you know. Stand up
class. I agree. Good. Any more questions? Why does class bother you? The Big Other notices it, you know. Stand up
Slavoj Žižek
please. Yeah. My question is about the
please. Yeah. My question is about the
unknown
potlatch. Sorry, about? The potlatch. Ah, potlatch, yeah. You left out the Bataille's agonistic flux, so I thought if you could comment—Sorry, what do you mean by this? Agonistic flux. Ah, Bataille. Oh, Bataille, the potlatch. The Bataillean agonistic—it's not community—that it's warfare. Georges Bataille. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. No, no, I see your—you know why I can tell you a very brief answer: the—my problem is that I have big problems with Bataille. Yeah,
potlatch. Sorry, about? The potlatch. Ah, potlatch, yeah. You left out the Bataille's agonistic flux, so I thought if you could comment—Sorry, what do you mean by this? Agonistic flux. Ah, Bataille. Oh, Bataille, the potlatch. The Bataillean agonistic—it's not community—that it's warfare. Georges Bataille. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. No, no, I see your—you know why I can tell you a very brief answer: the—my problem is that I have big problems with Bataille. Yeah,
Slavoj Žižek
no—you know in what sense? In the sense that—how should I put it—here I am on Deleuze's side. That I am always horrified with this idea of—of this transgressive model. And I think that this is why I more and more dislike even Lacan's *Seminar VII*. The idea there that you know—this model of: we live in a fake universe of exchanges, symmetry, and then somehow to be really authentic, to touch the Real, you have to rip through it and to go to it, the thing itself and so on. I—I—I am much closer to this Deleuzian idea in one of his best writings, I think, on coldness and cruelty, masochism, the true subversion is rather for me this masochistic ritual where the whole—okay, to put it in another way. And I okay, very briefly. That, you know, this is part of my other aversion: like I notice how in even now in some of the modern art, the idea is that there is something bad in getting caught in appearances and that the authentic gesture is as it were to go to the end, confront it. It must not only be authentic, you must have dead couch—cows, videos of your—of your colon or whatever inside, you know, like that you must see brutally the reality naked. Or another the same of the same strategies, that every illusion should be destroyed. In the sense of, like, if you simply follow a story, it's bad, it's meta—you have to have these self-referential gestures that the novel reminds you that it's only a novel, that in a movie actors look back at you. I think, now comes the thesis, that this precisely is what Lacan claims escape from the Real. What appears here as escape into the Real is precisely what you are afraid is that if you were to let yourself go to that imaginary captivation, you would encounter there some too much, some Real, virtual Real. And so I think this is pure defensive gesture. There is nothing progressive of it, this, you know, this pseudo-Brechtian—I say pseudo because with Brecht it's more complicated. And again, for me, maybe I am wrong here, maybe how do you put it in legal terms? You're a lawyer. I didn't give him in my trial against Bataille a proper fair hearing or what, no? You never do that with anyone
no—you know in what sense? In the sense that—how should I put it—here I am on Deleuze's side. That I am always horrified with this idea of—of this transgressive model. And I think that this is why I more and more dislike even Lacan's *Seminar VII*. The idea there that you know—this model of: we live in a fake universe of exchanges, symmetry, and then somehow to be really authentic, to touch the Real, you have to rip through it and to go to it, the thing itself and so on. I—I—I am much closer to this Deleuzian idea in one of his best writings, I think, on coldness and cruelty, masochism, the true subversion is rather for me this masochistic ritual where the whole—okay, to put it in another way. And I okay, very briefly. That, you know, this is part of my other aversion: like I notice how in even now in some of the modern art, the idea is that there is something bad in getting caught in appearances and that the authentic gesture is as it were to go to the end, confront it. It must not only be authentic, you must have dead couch—cows, videos of your—of your colon or whatever inside, you know, like that you must see brutally the reality naked. Or another the same of the same strategies, that every illusion should be destroyed. In the sense of, like, if you simply follow a story, it's bad, it's meta—you have to have these self-referential gestures that the novel reminds you that it's only a novel, that in a movie actors look back at you. I think, now comes the thesis, that this precisely is what Lacan claims escape from the Real. What appears here as escape into the Real is precisely what you are afraid is that if you were to let yourself go to that imaginary captivation, you would encounter there some too much, some Real, virtual Real. And so I think this is pure defensive gesture. There is nothing progressive of it, this, you know, this pseudo-Brechtian—I say pseudo because with Brecht it's more complicated. And again, for me, maybe I am wrong here, maybe how do you put it in legal terms? You're a lawyer. I didn't give him in my trial against Bataille a proper fair hearing or what, no? You never do that with anyone
unknown
anyway.
anyway.
Slavoj Žižek
No, it's true. But okay, but what I mean is that
No, it's true. But okay, but what I mean is that
unknown
Bataille is for me too much part of this—too much part of this transgressive model. You
Bataille is for me too much part of this—too much part of this transgressive model. You
Slavoj Žižek
link Bataille with Foucault
link Bataille with Foucault
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in the same vein though, when you talk about Foucault and Deleuze book, you talk about fist-fucking as this sort of transgressive act? Not even transgressive, I just claim then very humbly as a Christian that—that something like this was going on in paradise if I remember. Because you know, but I'm serious here because the lesson in Saint Augustine you find it, is that in paradise there was sex, it was just totally controlled like raising your hand, you know that it was... and that's the closest we can... No, I see your point. But nonetheless, don't you think that although Foucault I think was struggling here terribly because on the one hand he—he was maybe not that kind of—he was always fascinated also by this transgressive model and so on. But don't you think that there is another aspect to Foucault? I'm not... Well, just starting I think paralogism in the Kantian sense, that precisely because he couldn't get past it suggested to me that there was something, you know, the paralogism, inconsistency. Yeah. So I think that's what's so good about Foucault, precisely that he didn't go past. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Okay. There was another—no. Yes, in the back. Um, when—we had—could
in the same vein though, when you talk about Foucault and Deleuze book, you talk about fist-fucking as this sort of transgressive act? Not even transgressive, I just claim then very humbly as a Christian that—that something like this was going on in paradise if I remember. Because you know, but I'm serious here because the lesson in Saint Augustine you find it, is that in paradise there was sex, it was just totally controlled like raising your hand, you know that it was... and that's the closest we can... No, I see your point. But nonetheless, don't you think that although Foucault I think was struggling here terribly because on the one hand he—he was maybe not that kind of—he was always fascinated also by this transgressive model and so on. But don't you think that there is another aspect to Foucault? I'm not... Well, just starting I think paralogism in the Kantian sense, that precisely because he couldn't get past it suggested to me that there was something, you know, the paralogism, inconsistency. Yeah. So I think that's what's so good about Foucault, precisely that he didn't go past. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Okay. There was another—no. Yes, in the back. Um, when—we had—could
Slavoj Žižek
we take someone else? Oh sorry, I thought... Oh, sorry. Any other questions? Go ahead then. Haha. When Stalin could get a confession out of Kamenev, and then he said—he told the NKVD interrogator, "What is the weight of the Soviet Union, with the army, the navy, the soil, and all the industry? Was he unconsciously invoking the Big Other?" I don't know what you mean by this concretely. But all I can tell you, yes, that that's for me the weakness of—the weakness, okay, even the theoretical weakness, that Stalinism always needs—still needs—which is why for me Stalinism is not a true materialism, blah-blah-blah—it needs the function of the Big Other always, always needs a reference to the Big Other. But you know at what level? I wrote a lot about it. At the level of this "history will be the judge." For—the basic category of Stalinist hermeneutics is objective meaning: independent of what you subjectively meant, the objective meaning of your acts and so on and so on. And I think that here Lacan is—okay, let me make you a brief—and then we can conclude—improvisation on this. Because I think that when Lacan asks, next week I wanted to talk about it, this ethical problem, what ethics for psychoanalysis, is precisely to get an ethics which does not have to rely on the Big Other. Stalinism fully still relies—has to rely on the Big Other. While I think that again, Lacan's idea is precisely how to act ethically without presupposing any agency in the sense of there's the guarantee, the standard or whatever, in whatever way. And that's how I am tempted to also read and redeem even somebody like Kant, for example. Because for me, as I always repeat it, the Kantian ethics is not—which is why I think it's an obscene misunderstanding to take Eichmann seriously when Adolph Eichmann said in Jerusalem, "Yeah, I was just a good Kantian, I was following orders." But the Kantian autonomy means that precisely you can never say that. You can never—very here the Big Other—Eichmann presupposed some external authority, Hitler's orders, that was my Big Other, I follow orders. Kantian autonomy means no, you cannot say I—you are responsible not only to do your duty, you are fully responsible to decide, determine what is your duty. You can never say, "Sorry, I have to do it, it's my duty." You know, you have to stand fully behind your duty. In this sense, Stalinists have this: the whole point of Stalinism is to change yourself into an instrument of the Big Other, "We are instruments of history" and so on. While I think that again, the great thing about Kantian ethics: Kant is the first one who tries to think this real autonomy. In the sense of—which is why Kantian categorical imperative is tautological. Here even Hegel was a little bit wrong, I think, when he explained, "But it doesn't allow you to deduce any norms, it's purely—" Of course it is, because *you* have to take responsibility for your norms. There is no Big Other, there is no guarantee for your norms. And that's I think—that's I think the problem here. I think that—now gently—that the only ethics which fits a little that it's close to Lacan here is at least some version of Buddhist ethics. I still have problems with it, but Buddhism I think is maybe the only other philosophy which would not be surprised also by this what I said before about quantum physics, unfinished character of reality and so on and so on, no? But there was something. You spoke about the meta-rules and the disturbance of meta-rules, that usually it must be idiots or revolutionaries to disturb these meta-rules. Yeah, yeah. But would you say that sometimes these meta-rules find ways of defending themselves by incorporating the people who disturb these meta-rules? I give a specific example. Yeah, that's what I want because when you say something like this, there is always an example, of course, yes. I'll give you three examples. Oh my god. In ancient Greece, the people who give—the oracles used to speak in crazy idioms when they speak with people in power, but they were completely respectful. In medieval Greece, we have a figure of a madman which is the *asylos*, which means a crazy person, a
we take someone else? Oh sorry, I thought... Oh, sorry. Any other questions? Go ahead then. Haha. When Stalin could get a confession out of Kamenev, and then he said—he told the NKVD interrogator, "What is the weight of the Soviet Union, with the army, the navy, the soil, and all the industry? Was he unconsciously invoking the Big Other?" I don't know what you mean by this concretely. But all I can tell you, yes, that that's for me the weakness of—the weakness, okay, even the theoretical weakness, that Stalinism always needs—still needs—which is why for me Stalinism is not a true materialism, blah-blah-blah—it needs the function of the Big Other always, always needs a reference to the Big Other. But you know at what level? I wrote a lot about it. At the level of this "history will be the judge." For—the basic category of Stalinist hermeneutics is objective meaning: independent of what you subjectively meant, the objective meaning of your acts and so on and so on. And I think that here Lacan is—okay, let me make you a brief—and then we can conclude—improvisation on this. Because I think that when Lacan asks, next week I wanted to talk about it, this ethical problem, what ethics for psychoanalysis, is precisely to get an ethics which does not have to rely on the Big Other. Stalinism fully still relies—has to rely on the Big Other. While I think that again, Lacan's idea is precisely how to act ethically without presupposing any agency in the sense of there's the guarantee, the standard or whatever, in whatever way. And that's how I am tempted to also read and redeem even somebody like Kant, for example. Because for me, as I always repeat it, the Kantian ethics is not—which is why I think it's an obscene misunderstanding to take Eichmann seriously when Adolph Eichmann said in Jerusalem, "Yeah, I was just a good Kantian, I was following orders." But the Kantian autonomy means that precisely you can never say that. You can never—very here the Big Other—Eichmann presupposed some external authority, Hitler's orders, that was my Big Other, I follow orders. Kantian autonomy means no, you cannot say I—you are responsible not only to do your duty, you are fully responsible to decide, determine what is your duty. You can never say, "Sorry, I have to do it, it's my duty." You know, you have to stand fully behind your duty. In this sense, Stalinists have this: the whole point of Stalinism is to change yourself into an instrument of the Big Other, "We are instruments of history" and so on. While I think that again, the great thing about Kantian ethics: Kant is the first one who tries to think this real autonomy. In the sense of—which is why Kantian categorical imperative is tautological. Here even Hegel was a little bit wrong, I think, when he explained, "But it doesn't allow you to deduce any norms, it's purely—" Of course it is, because *you* have to take responsibility for your norms. There is no Big Other, there is no guarantee for your norms. And that's I think—that's I think the problem here. I think that—now gently—that the only ethics which fits a little that it's close to Lacan here is at least some version of Buddhist ethics. I still have problems with it, but Buddhism I think is maybe the only other philosophy which would not be surprised also by this what I said before about quantum physics, unfinished character of reality and so on and so on, no? But there was something. You spoke about the meta-rules and the disturbance of meta-rules, that usually it must be idiots or revolutionaries to disturb these meta-rules. Yeah, yeah. But would you say that sometimes these meta-rules find ways of defending themselves by incorporating the people who disturb these meta-rules? I give a specific example. Yeah, that's what I want because when you say something like this, there is always an example, of course, yes. I'll give you three examples. Oh my god. In ancient Greece, the people who give—the oracles used to speak in crazy idioms when they speak with people in power, but they were completely respectful. In medieval Greece, we have a figure of a madman which is the *asylos*, which means a crazy person, a
unknown
crazy man who says things and do
crazy man who says things and do
Slavoj Žižek
unpredictable things, usually he slaps people or people in power, but nobody can touch him. So he is a respected person in the community but he does whatever he wants because he is the *asylos*. So nobody can touch him. And even today in Turkey, if someone is a madman, he is considered to be a saint personality. And at the end, there is a medieval—I'm not so sure if it's a Grimm tale—where a kid that says that the king is naked. And everybody respect—nobody can
unpredictable things, usually he slaps people or people in power, but nobody can touch him. So he is a respected person in the community but he does whatever he wants because he is the *asylos*. So nobody can touch him. And even today in Turkey, if someone is a madman, he is considered to be a saint personality. And at the end, there is a medieval—I'm not so sure if it's a Grimm tale—where a kid that says that the king is naked. And everybody respect—nobody can
unknown
touch the
touch the
Slavoj Žižek
kid who says, "You
kid who says, "You
unknown
know, this king is not wearing anything, he is naked." So would you say that today, nowadays, in avant-garde, in popular culture or even can we locate a respectful disturbance of
know, this king is not wearing anything, he is naked." So would you say that today, nowadays, in avant-garde, in popular culture or even can we locate a respectful disturbance of
Slavoj Žižek
the meta-rules of symbolic order what
the meta-rules of symbolic order what
unknown
cannot—no one
cannot—no one
Slavoj Žižek
can touch, no one can just say, and it's not idiot neither
can touch, no one can just say, and it's not idiot neither
unknown
revolutionary?
revolutionary?
Slavoj Žižek
You have even a Pope in front of you now, so! No, no, no, no, but—but this is very—because I think that all the examples, especially this last example, the "One" or this long Russian tradition also, the *yurodivy*, the sacred fool... Yeah, the one who can say... I—I always perceive this as a pretty—how should I put it—as a pretty conservative social-stabilizing function. I am for rules, you know? I—my problem is not how to violate rules and so on. My idea is precisely to brutally follow rules more or—because—for example, the example which I always like to quote: all this carnival idea, suspending and rules and—we know today at least the—the one who elaborated the theory of this, Mikhail Bakhtin. He was writing the book on Rabelais in the thirties. And a Russian friend who now works in Germany, that—literary critic or whatever, art theorist Boris Groys, he told me that now they found some manuscript blah-blah where it's clear that Bakhtin was not an idiot when he describes a carnival, it was not this liberating experience, now moment of freedom, king is down, we are up. There was a very concrete model for Bakhtin for a carnival. It was called the Stalinist Purges. This was the true carnival. It was a carnival: today nomenclature, Central Committee, tomorrow Gulag and so on and so on. And effectively, it would be a very productive reading of carnival of Bakhtin: not these nice examples that we all like, sacred orgies, people dancing—but what about sacred orgies of NKVD and you know, that purges and so on? So, you know what I mean? I totally—not only I agree with you in what sense, it's even maybe even worse than you said. I think that it's not only that these violation of meta-rules are allowed, but that—that this is at the deepest level the part of the system. I think that the truly transgressive thing would be... there is for me nothing shocking when—today especially, the whole system works like this because it's cynical. Today we live in a cynical system where we are all children who all say "emperor is naked," we write books about him and the emperor goes on. So today precisely we live in a system where everybody can say, is saying all the time, "emperor is naked," which means, let me give you a couple of further variations of "emperor
You have even a Pope in front of you now, so! No, no, no, no, but—but this is very—because I think that all the examples, especially this last example, the "One" or this long Russian tradition also, the *yurodivy*, the sacred fool... Yeah, the one who can say... I—I always perceive this as a pretty—how should I put it—as a pretty conservative social-stabilizing function. I am for rules, you know? I—my problem is not how to violate rules and so on. My idea is precisely to brutally follow rules more or—because—for example, the example which I always like to quote: all this carnival idea, suspending and rules and—we know today at least the—the one who elaborated the theory of this, Mikhail Bakhtin. He was writing the book on Rabelais in the thirties. And a Russian friend who now works in Germany, that—literary critic or whatever, art theorist Boris Groys, he told me that now they found some manuscript blah-blah where it's clear that Bakhtin was not an idiot when he describes a carnival, it was not this liberating experience, now moment of freedom, king is down, we are up. There was a very concrete model for Bakhtin for a carnival. It was called the Stalinist Purges. This was the true carnival. It was a carnival: today nomenclature, Central Committee, tomorrow Gulag and so on and so on. And effectively, it would be a very productive reading of carnival of Bakhtin: not these nice examples that we all like, sacred orgies, people dancing—but what about sacred orgies of NKVD and you know, that purges and so on? So, you know what I mean? I totally—not only I agree with you in what sense, it's even maybe even worse than you said. I think that it's not only that these violation of meta-rules are allowed, but that—that this is at the deepest level the part of the system. I think that the truly transgressive thing would be... there is for me nothing shocking when—today especially, the whole system works like this because it's cynical. Today we live in a cynical system where we are all children who all say "emperor is naked," we write books about him and the emperor goes on. So today precisely we live in a system where everybody can say, is saying all the time, "emperor is naked," which means, let me give you a couple of further variations of "emperor
unknown
is naked": it means "we all know it's about money," "United States torture," whatever. What's the problem? You can say it, but the system goes
is naked": it means "we all know it's about money," "United States torture," whatever. What's the problem? You can say it, but the system goes
Slavoj Žižek
on. The system functions. So
on. The system functions. So
unknown
I think that the crucial—the problem is not to say openly. The problem is again to—to disturb another—let's call it—I don't know how to put it—virtual obscene dimension, what Freud meant in *Traumdeutung* when he put as a motto this "Acheronta movebo," to move—to move the underground. That's much more difficult. For example, with—with this "emperor is naked" and so on, no? I'm almost tempted to say that today the truly subversive thing that would make people, children, shocked, actually, that would make a subversive act would be to say to a child who says the emperor is naked, "How dare you say it, aren't you ashamed?" and so on. Something—kind of a totally naive. For example, and then to conclude: a friend of mine was
I think that the crucial—the problem is not to say openly. The problem is again to—to disturb another—let's call it—I don't know how to put it—virtual obscene dimension, what Freud meant in *Traumdeutung* when he put as a motto this "Acheronta movebo," to move—to move the underground. That's much more difficult. For example, with—with this "emperor is naked" and so on, no? I'm almost tempted to say that today the truly subversive thing that would make people, children, shocked, actually, that would make a subversive act would be to say to a child who says the emperor is naked, "How dare you say it, aren't you ashamed?" and so on. Something—kind of a totally naive. For example, and then to conclude: a friend of mine was
Slavoj Žižek
years ago with a psychoanalyst. And a friend of mine was totally manipulating, he was a theorist, he told me this. So he told to the analyst, an old Slovene analyst who now died, he was the only good one, very wise old man. My friend told him some dreams, blah-blah, an accidents where the message was so clear, he wanted to kill his father, blah-blah. And he thought he would—my friend—he would seduce the analyst with you know what line—this Oedipal stuff, no? And you know what the analyst did? He played the total surface. He said, "Aren't you ashamed? All that your father did to you and you want to kill him! Aren't you ashamed? Shameful!" It worked perfectly. The fake was—you know how should I put it—it was immediately—how should I put it—the fake was, no? This is—this would be something close to why Lacan says that Socratic irony sometimes work. And about this I want to talk next week, about this magical procedure of—how do you call it? What's the term? Prosopopoeia. When you speak through others. How the very—isn't this the analyst at its most elementary? You come to the analyst, you talk passionately about your dreams and so on, and the very cynical or not smile look of the analyst makes your words into a prosopopoeia.
years ago with a psychoanalyst. And a friend of mine was totally manipulating, he was a theorist, he told me this. So he told to the analyst, an old Slovene analyst who now died, he was the only good one, very wise old man. My friend told him some dreams, blah-blah, an accidents where the message was so clear, he wanted to kill his father, blah-blah. And he thought he would—my friend—he would seduce the analyst with you know what line—this Oedipal stuff, no? And you know what the analyst did? He played the total surface. He said, "Aren't you ashamed? All that your father did to you and you want to kill him! Aren't you ashamed? Shameful!" It worked perfectly. The fake was—you know how should I put it—it was immediately—how should I put it—the fake was, no? This is—this would be something close to why Lacan says that Socratic irony sometimes work. And about this I want to talk next week, about this magical procedure of—how do you call it? What's the term? Prosopopoeia. When you speak through others. How the very—isn't this the analyst at its most elementary? You come to the analyst, you talk passionately about your dreams and so on, and the very cynical or not smile look of the analyst makes your words into a prosopopoeia.