Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 3
Lecture · Justin Wagner ·
published 2018-11-28 · 1:55:54 · 16,245 words
the date above is when the video was uploaded, no recording date was found
cinema-art-culturepsychoanalysisideologyphilosophy-generalcapitalismreligion-theologyhegel-dialecticssubjectivityfascism-populismhistory
Žižek analyzes Hitchcock’s Vertigo to illustrate Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts, arguing that the film’s formal errors reveal the structure of the subject. He examines the restaurant scene to distinguish between objective and subjective shots, proposing that the most intense fantasy appears as a 'pure pre-subjective phenomenon' that the subject cannot directly confront. He then uses the underwear scene to argue for the existence of the Big Other through censorship, and the narrative coincidences to show the intervention of the author/fantasy. Finally, he analyzes Judy’s split face as the ontological status of the subject as a void or 'stain,' contrasting the complete face (person) with the divided subject. Žižek clarifies Lacan’s concepts of the super-ego and ego-ideal, arguing that the super-ego is the punitive truth of the ego-ideal’s betrayal of desire. He applies this to modern atheism, positing that 'God is unconscious' rather than dead, resulting in a prohibitive super-ego that sabotages enjoyment. Using a joke about a 'permissive father,' he critiques the neo-conservative view of consumer society, arguing we live in a society where we must 'have it without paying the price.' Finally, he begins a defense of Hegel against common criticisms, reinterpreting 'Absolute Knowing' as the acceptance of finite historical closure rather than omniscience. Žižek argues that Deleuze’s concept of the 'virtual' and 'pure past' is structurally Hegelian, demonstrating how the past is retroactively altered by the present through examples from T.S. Eliot, Borges, and Kafka. He then pivots to the dialectic of necessity and contingency, critiquing Rousseau’s Social Contract for failing to recognize the performative nature of voting, and concludes by citing Jean-Pierre Dupuy on the retroactive inscription of catastrophe. Žižek argues that historical necessity is retroactively created by contingent events, using examples from French politics, the Bush presidency, and the October Revolution. He contrasts Western predestination with Eastern reincarnation to highlight the dialectical reversal of contingency into necessity. He then applies this logic to Hegel and Deleuze, reinterpreting 'concrete universality' as a fundamental antagonism (capitalism) that specific modernities (fascism, liberalism, Stalinism) attempt to resolve. Žižek clarifies Hegel's 'cunning of reason' as a tragic, non-teleological process where historical outcomes are byproducts of failure rather than divine justification, explicitly rejecting any moral redemption of atrocities like Auschwitz. He argues that universality requires a contingent, irrational 'zero point' (the monarch) and that all subjects are constituted by a 'symptom' linking them to an empirical remainder. In a Q&A, he analyzes the 'virtual' affective layer of ideology, arguing that oppressive regimes (like Nazism) incorporate the very element they oppose (e.g., homosexuality or the 'Jewish' enemy) to sustain their structure, using film examples like The Sound of Music and Short Cuts to illustrate this paradox.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 40
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “subjectivized without being attributed to a subject”
A state where desire/investment is present in the image, but no specific subject is looking; the image exists as pure fantasmatic appearance.
A phenomenon that is too intense or subjective to be assumed by the subject, appearing 'behind your back' as a hallucinatory vision rather than an objective reality.
as “Big Other”
The symbolic order or omnipotent gaze that guarantees the consistency of reality; illustrated here by the censorship apparatus protecting a non-existent detail (underwear) that viewers assume exists.
as “Lacanian divided subject”
The subject is not a positive entity but a void, gap, or 'half' (Zeno's paradox of infinite divisibility ending in 'nothing'); illustrated by Judy's split face.
The idea that to truly grasp another subject, one must see them not as a complete face (person) but as an incomplete stain or void; the subject is a 'half-monster'.
as “theoretical anti-humanism / practical humanism”
Louis Althusser's formula: theoretically, we are determined by unconscious structures (anti-humanism); practically, we must act as if we are free subjects (humanism).
as “indefinite judgment”
Kant's distinction between denying a predicate (negative: 'is not mortal') and affirming a non-predicate (indefinite: 'is non-mortal'); used to distinguish 'not dead' (alive) from 'undead' (a third state).
The German idealist concept of the core of subjectivity as void/darkness, contrasting with the Enlightenment's 'light of reason.'
as “super-ego”
For Lacan, not moral conscience but the anti-ethical agency and obscene punishment for betraying one's desire.
as “ego-ideal”
The seemingly benevolent agency that forces us to betray the law of desire by adopting socio-symbolic norms.
as “law of desire”
Lacan's injunction 'do not compromise your desire'; betraying this law incurs the super-ego's guilt.
as “true formula of atheism”
Lacan's formulation that 'God is unconscious,' meaning modern atheists unconsciously believe in God and are thus more prohibited, not liberated.
as “decaf coffee”
A motif/example used to illustrate the desire for enjoyment without the negative effects (the 'price').
Žižek's characterization of modern consumer society, where the goal is enjoyment without the full surrender or cost of true engagement.
Žižek's description of Derrida's lingering reliance on a utopian horizon of justice despite claiming to deconstruct it.
Reinterpreted by Žižek not as omniscience but as the acceptance of the finitude and closure of one's historical horizon.
The Hegelian process of sublation/supersession; Žižek notes it does not always occur (e.g., Arab civilizations ruined by Mongols) and is not guaranteed.
The Hegelian notion that universal content is fully developed through particular instances, which Žižek critiques as potentially 'idealist madness' if it implies all particularities are deducible from the universal form.
The Hegelian idea that history uses human passions and apparent catastrophes to achieve a higher rational purpose, which Žižek rejects as obscene when applied to events like Auschwitz.
Deleuze’s starting point that actual objects are supplemented by a hidden virtual dimension; Žižek uses this to bridge Deleuze and Hegel.
Not merely canceled possibility, but a dimension that continues to haunt actuality; understanding what happens requires including the echo of possibilities that failed to actualize.
Deleuze’s term for a genesis without dynamism, where virtual conditions are co-present in a static superposition, which Žižek links to a deterministic, Hegelian closure.
Deleuze’s concept of an absolute, atemporal past where all events are stored; Žižek argues this functions like Hegel’s 'absolute knowing' or a static, complete network.
Žižek’s coinage for the paradox that we are totally determined by a complete past, yet possess the freedom to retroactively change the entire totality of that past through new acts.
Hegel’s characteristic that the process of discovering or penetrating a ground actually creates that ground, rather than merely revealing a pre-existing truth.
The process by which a contingent event, once it occurs, creates the preceding chain of causes that makes it appear inevitable.
Rousseau’s concept which Žižek critiques as a substantialization that short-circuits the performative act of voting, treating the outcome as a pre-existing truth to be guessed rather than created.
The distinction between stating a fact (constative) and creating a reality through speech/action (performative); Žižek argues Rousseau fails to see voting as performative.
as “dialectical genesis”
The proper historical method of opening the past by including thwarted hopes and virtualities, rather than closing it as a necessary evolution.
Deleuze's distinction where signs directly represent the problem, while representations only show the answers (objects), obscuring the problem.
Deleuze's framework where the 'idea' is a problem inscribed in reality, and empirical objects are partial, failing solutions to that problem.
The ideological dream of having modernization and development without the inherent class antagonisms of capitalism.
as “alternate modernities”
The ideological notion that different cultures can have modernity without capitalist antagonisms, which Žižek rejects as a fantasy.
as “absolute contradiction”
Hegel's view that the Absolute/God is not harmony but the contradiction itself, with particulars attempting to pacify it.
The false idea that a divine agency (like God judging history) justifies suffering in advance; Žižek argues Hegel rejects this in favor of retroactive rationalization.
A metaphor for Hegel's view that understanding/rationality only emerges retrospectively after events have occurred, not in advance.
The minimal positive element that links the universal subject to an empirical remainder; Žižek argues 'no subject without symptom' because universality requires a contingent anchor.
as “contingent idiot”
Žižek's description of the Hegelian monarch: a contingent, irrational figure who serves as the 'zero point of contingency' necessary to actualize the state as a rational totality.
The underlying, often obscene or contradictory, affective texture of an ideological text that undermines its explicit, official message (e.g., the 'virtual' anti-Semitism in The Sound of Music).
The idea that oppressive regimes must incorporate the very element they fight against (the poison/medicine) to sustain themselves.
Stories he reaches for 5
A traditional father commands a child to visit his grandmother; a 'postmodern permissive' father tells him to go only if he wants to, which creates a stronger injunction: he must visit with love and freely. This illustrates how permissive authority generates a more oppressive super-ego.
“What would he have told this child? You know how your grandmother loves you. But nonetheless you should visit her only if you really want to.”
Žižek argues that justifying Auschwitz as having 'historical meaning' (e.g., leading to human rights) is an obscenity and theoretically wrong for Hegel, as it implies a divine external teleology that does not exist.
“This would be an obscenity for Hegel. Not only an obscenity but also theoretically wrong.”
Žižek uses the Kantian distinction between negative and indefinite judgment to distinguish 'not dead' (alive) from 'undead' (a third, monstrous state), linking it to horror fiction like Stephen King.
“The indefinite judgment is not the same as if you say about somebody he isn't dead... If you say as you know he is undead, it means a living dead, it means a third”
Borges’ idea that Kafka creates his own precursors: Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in earlier writers, but only becomes perceptible because Kafka wrote. Each writer modifies our conception of the past.
“Each writer creates his precursors. His works modifies our conception of the past as it will modify the future.”
Žižek quotes T.S. Eliot’s 'Tradition and Individual Talent' to show that the past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past, illustrating the retroactive change of the 'pure past.'
“The existing order is complete before the new work arrives... the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”
Works invoked 24
Vertigo film
The primary case study for the talk. Žižek uses it to illustrate Lacanian concepts, praising its formal errors and narrative coincidences as revealing the structure of the subject and the Big Other.
The Matrix film
Used as a visual metaphor for the 'Master of Matrix of our reality' to illustrate the absurdity of external teleology.
The Sound of Music film
Used to illustrate the 'virtual affectual dimension' where the film's texture inverts its explicit anti-fascist message.
T.S. Eliot’s text quoted to illustrate that the past is altered by the present, supporting the Deleuzian-Hegelian view of retroactive change.
Short Cuts film
Praised for its 'open ontology' and optimistic texture, contrasting with its pessimistic storyline.
G.K. Chesterton's novel used to illustrate that God is the contradiction itself.
Deleuze’s work containing the notion of 'pure past'; used by Žižek to argue that Deleuze’s static genesis aligns with Hegelian closure.
Lacan's work from which Žižek quotes the definition of the super-ego.
The Ticklish Subject book
Žižek's own book where he previously used the 'permissive father' joke.
Cited for its 'marching chants' which reveal the inherent obscenity required by totalitarian institutions.
Hegel's work, cited for his comments on the US and Russia as 'lands of the future.'
Source for Lacan's 'true formula of atheism' and the reading of the Father.
Hegel's work, cited to show Hegel's openness to new discoveries and rejection of closed systems.
Walter Benjamin’s work used to illustrate the inclusion of 'virtualities' (betrayed hopes) in historical events like the French Revolution.
Raymond Durgnat's book, cited for its factual error regarding the setting of Vertigo, which Žižek uses to discuss theoretical projection.
Billy Budd film
The film adaptation (likely Peter Ustinov's) is used in a joke to illustrate retroactive necessity.
Point Blank film
Mentioned as a film with narrative ambiguities where the hero's imagination intersects with reality, similar to Vertigo.
The Social Contract book
Cited as Rousseau’s 'Stalinist' error, where he fails to see voting as a performative act and instead treats the general will as a pre-existing substantial truth.
Tristan and Isolde opera
Referenced as the 'myth of Tristan sacrifice' representing the unconditional death drive in sexuality.
Deleuze book book
Žižek's own book on Deleuze, referenced as containing material he is now presenting via Vertigo.
Lacan's seminar used to support the reading of the Father/Karamazov.
Fredric Jameson's book providing a definitive criticism of 'alternate modernities'.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s book cited to explain how catastrophic events are inscribed in the future as both destiny and contingency.
Waverley book
Walter Scott's novel used to illustrate how the transition to modernity retroactively changes the meaning of the past.
People invoked 47
Alexander Pope negative
Described as writing 'one of the most boring poems', representing the 'pagan New Age view' that struggle is just harmony.
Inferred from 'president's brother is the local boss', used in the anecdote about the South African commentator's view of the US as a banana republic.
Raymond Durgnat positive
Cited as an example of a scholar who made factual errors (claiming Vertigo is set in LA), which Žižek uses to illustrate how theorists project their fantasy onto the text.
Mentioned as one of the 'big names' who mistakenly describe the restaurant profile shot as a subjective point of view.
Actor playing Scottie in Vertigo; mentioned in the context of the censorship scene involving his character.
Mentioned as a predecessor Hegel critiques.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as 'the guy whom I really appreciate'; cited for his analysis of how catastrophic events are retroactively inscribed as destiny.
French presidential candidate used in a polling example to illustrate retroactive necessity.
Jacques Derrida negative
Žižek argues Derrida remains 'metaphysical' because his deconstruction of justice still relies on a utopian horizon (Big Other) that never arrives.
Zeno of Elea positive
Cited for his paradox of infinite divisibility, which Žižek uses to explain how the subject emerges as 'nothing' or a void.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Cited for recognizing the October Revolution depended on chance, which later appeared necessary.
Richard Wagner positive
Mentioned in a question as a conservative figure associated with the 'virtual ingredient' of Nazism.
Georg Lukács positive
Žižek shares Lukács's taste for Walter Scott and early 19th-century English literature.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited as right that intense enjoyment is difficult in consumer society, supporting Žižek's critique of neo-conservative hedonism.
Henri Rousseau negative
Cited as not seeing that necessity is contingently created; he sees the law as necessary but misses the retroactive creation.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek uses Lacanian concepts (objet petit a, the Real, the subject as void) to interpret Vertigo, calling his approach a 'Lacanian phenomenology.'
G. K. Chesterton positive
Cited for The Man Who Was Thursday, which illustrates that God is the contradiction itself.
Louis Althusser positive
Cited for the formula of 'theoretical anti-humanism' supplemented by 'practical humanism,' which Žižek uses to frame the tension between structural determination and subjective experience.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Žižek calls Deleuze the 'ultimate anti-Hegelian' but argues he is 'close to Hegel' in his concepts of virtuality and pure past, using Deleuze to clarify Hegel.
Mentioned as one of the 'big names' who mistakenly describe the restaurant profile shot as a subjective point of view.
Used as an example of a contingent event (cheating in Florida) that retroactively created a 'necessary' neoconservative shift.
Actress playing Madeleine/Judy in Vertigo; mentioned in the context of the censorship scene.
Karl Wilhelm Leopold Krug negative
A critic whose argument that Hegel deduces trivial things (like a pen) 'pisses me off' and is a 'stupid argument.'
Inferred from 'next May the date of elections' context, though not explicitly named, the 'Balladur' example is from the 1995 French election, but the prompt implies a general example. Actually, the text says 'Balladur'. I will stick to Balladur.
Alain Badiou positive
Mentioned as an 'old pro-Maoist' who provided the anecdote about the Chinese phrase regarding Mongol control.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Noted as having an 'Italian problem with Hegel' but correct in rehabilitating possibility; his work is used to support the idea that actuality requires grasping inherent possibilities.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited for his definitive criticism of 'alternate modernities' in his book on singular modernity.
Adolf Hitler negative
Inferred from 'fascism' discussion, representing the attempt to have modernity without class struggle.
T. S. Eliot positive
Žižek states 'I like Eliot' and quotes him extensively to illustrate the paradoxical link between the completeness of the past and its retroactive change by the present.
Mentioned as a horror fiction writer whose distinction between 'not dead' and 'undead' parallels Kant's logical distinction.
Henri Bergson positive
Cited as a source Deleuze likes, specifically for the idea that we can 'insert new possibilities into the past' without traveling in time.
Mentioned only to contrast with Hegel regarding Germanocentrism.
Robert Altman positive
Praised for Short Cuts for its optimistic, Deleuzian texture.
Charles Dickens positive
Praised as 'great' alongside Walter Scott.
Mentioned as a predecessor Hegel critiques.
Walter Benjamin positive
Used as a Marxist historiographer who illustrates the inclusion of 'virtualities' (betrayed hopes) in historical events, supporting the idea of retroactive redemption.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau negative
Žižek calls Rousseau 'Stalinist' and says 'my heart is with him here' ironically, but ultimately disagrees with him for failing to grasp the performative dimension of voting and substantializing the general will.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Žižek analyzes Hitchcock's films (specifically Vertigo) to demonstrate psychoanalytic truths, praising Hitchcock's formal manipulation.
Actor in 'Point Blank', mentioned as another film with narrative ambiguities similar to Vertigo.
Walter Scott positive
Praised by Žižek (and Lukács) as 'great', specifically for Waverley's depiction of the retroactive change of tribal life.
Cited as another form of 'alternate modernity' attempting to resolve the deadlock of modernity.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek argues Marx should be reread to see that the 'excess' of the French Revolution (disappointed ideals) continues to haunt history, rather than being merely bourgeois illusion.
Jorge Luis Borges positive
Žižek admits 'I always found him boring' but uses Borges’ formulation of Kafka and his precursors as a 'good example' of retroactive historical change.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited as the originator of the paradox of the super-ego; Lacan's reading of Freud's dreams and the father figure is central.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The primary philosophical reference, reinterpreted by Žižek to emphasize contingency, retroactivity, and concrete universality as antagonism.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for the distinction between negative and indefinite judgment, which Žižek uses to explain the ontological status of the 'undead'.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky positive
Referenced via the character Ivan Karamazov, whose statement 'If God doesn't exist, everything is permitted' is used to launch Lacan's critique.
Transcript 32 turns
Slavoj Žižek
But I’m not
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going to abuse you
going to abuse you
Slavoj Žižek
like that and [unintelligible] at
like that and [unintelligible] at
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the end of the show somewhere solitary, I don’t know. Okay, Slavoj, you
the end of the show somewhere solitary, I don’t know. Okay, Slavoj, you
Slavoj Žižek
want to start? If you have some more deep thoughts than I. I cannot compete with you too much. Okay. Today I will do as I promised, we go onto Hegel, but nonetheless, the first hour I would like nonetheless to first to clarify some points. I’m sorry, I was bit a little bit confused, I think, two days ago. But even before that, I cannot resist of presenting to you some stuff which I already developed in some of my, I think in the Deleuze book, but nonetheless if you see it, it works much better. Why don’t I do just a little bit, namely to illustrate a couple of points through, of course as you can see, Hitchcock’s Vertigo. So I hope you should excuse me if for a couple of seconds I will be looking for the right clip. It’s about Vertigo. What always fascinated me about books on Hitchcock is the amount of errors which are very interesting errors. You know, elementary errors like when you read books on Alfred Hitchcock, so many times there are such unbelievable breathtaking mistakes in factual description. For example, this film, Vertigo. If there is one association to Vertigo is Vertigo takes place in San Francisco. The guy who wasn’t an idiot, who unfortunately recently died, you probably know, Raymond Durgnat, wrote that one of the big books on Hitchcock, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock. He has a detailed pages analysis claiming that Vertigo takes place in Los Angeles and so on. I mean, it’s breathtaking. But the most interesting thing about these mistakes is, first, how they usually involved a passionate engagement by the theorist. It’s as if they imitate what is part of Hitchcock’s universe itself where the agent, hero in the film, often because of his engagement, investment into what he sees, he as it were projects his own fantasy, sees more in it than it is. And it’s as if again, theorists themselves get caught in this game. The second interesting thing is how often the mistakes concern not only matters of content but precise theoretical, sorry, formal descriptions. Like whenever you read an analysis like we have this shot then a fast cut to that shot, change subjective point of view, objective shot, be sure that there is a mistake when you... And this here I would like now to provide you with an example. One of the great examples of the mistake. Let me go just I hope again I plead mercy to the scene, I hope this will work. Not okay, this is Hitchcock, we know this. Ah here, yes, perfect. Is the scene where... You know the scene, Scottie is hired by his friend, the evil guy we learn at the end Gavin Elster, to follow the beautiful Madeleine. This is the restaurant Ernie’s in San Francisco. I went there a couple of years ago, the ultimate proof of American barbarism, now it’s a pizza place. It’s no longer this great... Okay but just look carefully at this scene, especially at what is supposed to be the point of view shot or subjective shot or objective shot, the movement of the camera, the cutting. Just look carefully at it. It’s all about him, Scottie, of course being already fascinated by Madeleine, identifying Madeleine. Be careful about something. Look. I’m sorry. Scottie. Ah. I hope you noticed this, that when the camera was approaching in a tracking shot Madeleine at the end, that this wasn’t Scottie’s point of view shot. And I hope you noticed now that this famous profile that we see, overblown as if fantasmatic profile of a beauty, I hope you noticed that it wasn’t a point of view shot. That he was as it were his desire was there but he was not looking at her. Only now. Okay, so what’s the point here? The ambiguity of subjective-objective shots is crucial. Of course the fascinating shot, the object fascination here is the profile of Madeleine. And here I come to the first mistake. It’s unbelievable how all, practically all, the big names describe this shot as a subjective point of view shot. I think it’s crucial that it’s not. You saw the inner dynamics of the scene. Madeleine is standing behind Scottie. He dares not to look at her as if her presence is too strong, too burning. It’s only when she Madeleine moves towards the exit door that we get the standard suture, however you call it, exchange of point of view subjective and objective shot. So precisely in so far as Madeleine’s profile is not Scottie’s point of view, the shot of her profile is totally subjectivized, depicting in a way not what Scottie effectively sees but what he imagines, his hallucinatory inner vision of Madeleine. This is also
want to start? If you have some more deep thoughts than I. I cannot compete with you too much. Okay. Today I will do as I promised, we go onto Hegel, but nonetheless, the first hour I would like nonetheless to first to clarify some points. I’m sorry, I was bit a little bit confused, I think, two days ago. But even before that, I cannot resist of presenting to you some stuff which I already developed in some of my, I think in the Deleuze book, but nonetheless if you see it, it works much better. Why don’t I do just a little bit, namely to illustrate a couple of points through, of course as you can see, Hitchcock’s Vertigo. So I hope you should excuse me if for a couple of seconds I will be looking for the right clip. It’s about Vertigo. What always fascinated me about books on Hitchcock is the amount of errors which are very interesting errors. You know, elementary errors like when you read books on Alfred Hitchcock, so many times there are such unbelievable breathtaking mistakes in factual description. For example, this film, Vertigo. If there is one association to Vertigo is Vertigo takes place in San Francisco. The guy who wasn’t an idiot, who unfortunately recently died, you probably know, Raymond Durgnat, wrote that one of the big books on Hitchcock, The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock. He has a detailed pages analysis claiming that Vertigo takes place in Los Angeles and so on. I mean, it’s breathtaking. But the most interesting thing about these mistakes is, first, how they usually involved a passionate engagement by the theorist. It’s as if they imitate what is part of Hitchcock’s universe itself where the agent, hero in the film, often because of his engagement, investment into what he sees, he as it were projects his own fantasy, sees more in it than it is. And it’s as if again, theorists themselves get caught in this game. The second interesting thing is how often the mistakes concern not only matters of content but precise theoretical, sorry, formal descriptions. Like whenever you read an analysis like we have this shot then a fast cut to that shot, change subjective point of view, objective shot, be sure that there is a mistake when you... And this here I would like now to provide you with an example. One of the great examples of the mistake. Let me go just I hope again I plead mercy to the scene, I hope this will work. Not okay, this is Hitchcock, we know this. Ah here, yes, perfect. Is the scene where... You know the scene, Scottie is hired by his friend, the evil guy we learn at the end Gavin Elster, to follow the beautiful Madeleine. This is the restaurant Ernie’s in San Francisco. I went there a couple of years ago, the ultimate proof of American barbarism, now it’s a pizza place. It’s no longer this great... Okay but just look carefully at this scene, especially at what is supposed to be the point of view shot or subjective shot or objective shot, the movement of the camera, the cutting. Just look carefully at it. It’s all about him, Scottie, of course being already fascinated by Madeleine, identifying Madeleine. Be careful about something. Look. I’m sorry. Scottie. Ah. I hope you noticed this, that when the camera was approaching in a tracking shot Madeleine at the end, that this wasn’t Scottie’s point of view shot. And I hope you noticed now that this famous profile that we see, overblown as if fantasmatic profile of a beauty, I hope you noticed that it wasn’t a point of view shot. That he was as it were his desire was there but he was not looking at her. Only now. Okay, so what’s the point here? The ambiguity of subjective-objective shots is crucial. Of course the fascinating shot, the object fascination here is the profile of Madeleine. And here I come to the first mistake. It’s unbelievable how all, practically all, the big names describe this shot as a subjective point of view shot. I think it’s crucial that it’s not. You saw the inner dynamics of the scene. Madeleine is standing behind Scottie. He dares not to look at her as if her presence is too strong, too burning. It’s only when she Madeleine moves towards the exit door that we get the standard suture, however you call it, exchange of point of view subjective and objective shot. So precisely in so far as Madeleine’s profile is not Scottie’s point of view, the shot of her profile is totally subjectivized, depicting in a way not what Scottie effectively sees but what he imagines, his hallucinatory inner vision of Madeleine. This is also
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signaled by, remember how the
signaled by, remember how the
Slavoj Žižek
red background turns, Hitchcock of course manipulated this, turns a little bit yellowish as if catching fire. No wonder then that although Scottie does not see Madeleine’s profile, he acts as if he is mysteriously captivated by this profile, deeply affected by it. So what we get here is a shot which is subjectivized, it’s clearly not objective Madeleine. It’s subjectivized without being attributed to a subject. It’s not it’s subjectivized but not a point of view. This is what I’m tempted to call a pure pre-subjective phenomenon. It’s a pure appearance Madeleine that you see in profile, permitted by an excessive libidinal investment. I hope you got the paradox. It’s this is precisely I think what we debated the last time when I emphasized how certain at a certain most radical level a fantasy cannot be subjectivized precisely because it affects us too much, it’s too too much in the very heart of our being. This is why because it’s too subjective it cannot be assumed by the subject. And this would be in a way another Lacanian phenomenology, that we have phenomena which are phenomena but which appear not for the subject. The subject can hallucinate them but cannot confront them. And what again what I like is how only when as it were the danger passes when the object is not too close that Scottie can look at Madeleine and we get the standard exchange subjective objective point of view shot objective shot. So only when the presence of the woman is as it were domesticated at a safe distance can it be assumed, do we get a subjective shot. And again as if to avoid this point, we are surprised to what extent practically all books from Donald Spoto to Robin Wood at least in the first edition of his Hitchcock’s Films describe this profile as subjective, as point of view shot. This is I think what we should develop again as an outline of Lacanian phenomenology, phenomenon, that profile would have been a pure fantasmatic phenomenon. Something imagined but it is and that’s crucial it is behind your back. You cannot directly confront it. You cannot that would be phenomenon as real if you want. Okay now we will return to this scene later because there is an echo of other... Okay now let's jump a little bit forward. Sorry for this but that’s life. Yeah, yeah, ah now comes a miracle. Two things will happen here. First if you read my book you know the joke. This was after Madeleine’s fake suicide, Scottie dragged her out of water, put her into his bedroom and the implication being that he undressed her because we will see above the kitchen sink her underwear. But look closely what we will effectively see. Look at it, there is no underwear. You think it is, there is not. It’s unbelievable, you know that I read in a book on Vertigo that this shot was the greatest problem with censorship. We are still in the last years of Hays Office. So they insisted if you effectively see underwear here, this meant in the narrative logic that James Stewart effectively saw Kim Novak naked. That shouldn’t happen. But you see this is for me the ontological proof that the Big Other exists. Because of whom was the American censorship trying to protect? Not us viewers, because just casually looking at it we all automatically assume that this is underwear. It’s as if there is another omnipotent gaze which sees all the details. And that nonexistent gaze should be protected. Nobody notices it. Then another thing, if we go a little bit forward, when after she awakens there is the conversation between the two. And this conversation is crucial because it’s a nice example of a inherent dialogue of two levels in Vertigo. How every good book about Vertigo will tell you that the film can be read at two levels. It’s at the same time a story about a realistic story, a guy falling in love with a woman, losing her, looking for her, blah blah. But it can also be read as, if you know the film you know what I’m talking about, you remember how the first image in the car ends up with Scottie hanging above the precipice, roof of the house as if as his imagination, that that as his the his fast fantasizing, imagining at the moment of his death, so that all that we effectively see is his imagination. There are films who have this nice ambiguities in them, like the other one would have been Point Blank with Lee Marvin and so on. But what I’m saying is that the magic moments of Vertigo are then the moments where the two levels intersect, where in the sense that there are such strong coincidences at the narrative level that they are simply too ridiculous to accept them, that you should the only way to get it is to remember to accept it is to remember it to read it as if the author who is fantasizing him the hero intervenes at the right moment. There is the scene here you will see how the two of them talk, erotic tension is slowly growing up and at the very moment when Scottie makes a move touching using as an excuse do you want more coffee to touch her hand, the phone rings and of course it’s her husband. How things happen this is as if the scenarist directly intervenes. It’s the same, I will not bore you with that it would take too much time, in the very final scene of the film you remember at the church tower up there that how the Mother Superior who pushes Madeleine to death appears exactly at the right moment. If she were to appear later there would have been the happy ending. They reconciled themselves they would have walked down. Earlier it would have no meaning. It’s and maybe you know the story, it’s a wonderful story. This was my illusion when I first for all I first saw Vertigo when I was twelve. In very bad conditions in a cinematheque in ex-Yugoslavia and there was a very bad copy, these are pre-digital times, real reels, where simply the last minute was missing. So for ten years I thought that Vertigo is a movie with a happy ending. They reconcile they embrace yes we love each other blah blah. And then you have the Mother Superior popping up. But the shock is how well it functions. No problem. Okay so again the other moment even better of magic intervention is this one. Now we’ll go a little bit faster. Sorry to interrupt. Sorry to Madeleine. Whatever, but you got the point how exactly at the right moment the paternal prohibition intervenes and so on and so on. Okay now comes the big point that I want to make if you allow me another ten seconds to whatever. That’s all. Okay, now let's bridge this last scene. Okay now at least things can no longer go wrong. Okay thanks. Thanks for your patience. So what’s about this last scene? It’s in the so Empire Hotel where Judy the poor girl... In this scene first after they enter we you saw remember the black profile of Judy. And I think that this has to be read as the exact counterpoint to the fascinating image at the beginning, the beautiful Madeleine. This is the clue about man’s subjectivity using woman, what she needs of the real woman is just the black screen to project his fantasy. That’s to what she is reduced. It’s as if we see here the negative, the black negative the counterpoint of what we see at the beginning, the wonderful profile of Madeleine projected onto the black profile of poor Judy. Then you remember the next time we see Judy, it’s much more mysterious. We pass to not kind of a not quite front but from the side her face, the left half completely dark, the right half in this weird in a weird green color of course from the neon light outside the room. How are we to read this shot? I think if there is one crucial shot of Vertigo is this one. Instead of reading it as simply designating Judy’s inner conflict her inner split, I think one should confer to this shot its full ontological ambiguity. As in some versions of Gnosticism, Judy is depicted here as a kind of proto-entity not yet ontologically fully constituted. It is as if in order to fully exist her dark half waits to be filled in with the ethereal image of Madeleine. And I think that at this point moment when Judy is reduced to even less than object a kind of a [unintelligible] unfinished object to a formless pre-ontological stain that she is subjectivized. This anguished half face that we see totally unsure of itself designates the birth of the subject. Namely, recall the proverbial imaginary resolution of Zeno’s paradox of infinite divisibility. If we continue the division long enough we will finally stumble, you know like you can endlessly divide a quantity into half half half and so on. But the idea is that if you divide it long enough you will get a half of which the other half will be simply nothing. You don’t get a part and a part but a part and nothing. And okay to cut a long story short this nothing is for Lacan the subject. This is literally if you want a kind of a primitive Hitchcockian exemplification of the Lacanian divided subject. This is it. Half of this greenish stain, the other half darkness. The void. In this sense for Lacan subjects are literally holes, gaps in the positive order of being. They dwell in those places where as it were the job of creation was not done to the end. Or to put it in Gnostic terms, the very existence of a subject is a proof that God was an idiot who bungled the job of creation. I said I don’t know if there are some country countries where I get the same impression, did some of you visit for example Island Iceland? Not Reykjavik, that’s for tourists, but if you go in, it’s all those sulfur barren earth where not even the grass grows, it’s as if again it’s unfinished you know God forgot to paint it green it’s not the creation is not finished. I think that’s the site the site of subjectivity. And my point is that at that point precisely when you see Judy as this half monster this greenish freakish half, the other half darkness, this is for Lacan the subject. Person is for Lacan imaginary. A person emerges when you through your fantasy fill in the other half so that you make a complete face. But the truth is in this cut. So in order to truly grasp another subject, this is what I meant when I was talking two days ago about the monstrosity of the subject. It’s this, it’s not I see only part of you, I want to see more. The problem is that we always see too much. We see complete faces. The difficulty is to see this, to see the other as just the stain incomplete stain and darkness. That is to say to see, okay to put it in bombastic terms, to see the void. Okay to go even a step further here. This, the way we see Judy, this is for me subjectivity at its purest. In this sense I think that it’s all too simple to say how Vertigo is a film about a male gaze objectifying a woman, no, the problem is that Hitchcock goes a step further here and shows how the failure of
red background turns, Hitchcock of course manipulated this, turns a little bit yellowish as if catching fire. No wonder then that although Scottie does not see Madeleine’s profile, he acts as if he is mysteriously captivated by this profile, deeply affected by it. So what we get here is a shot which is subjectivized, it’s clearly not objective Madeleine. It’s subjectivized without being attributed to a subject. It’s not it’s subjectivized but not a point of view. This is what I’m tempted to call a pure pre-subjective phenomenon. It’s a pure appearance Madeleine that you see in profile, permitted by an excessive libidinal investment. I hope you got the paradox. It’s this is precisely I think what we debated the last time when I emphasized how certain at a certain most radical level a fantasy cannot be subjectivized precisely because it affects us too much, it’s too too much in the very heart of our being. This is why because it’s too subjective it cannot be assumed by the subject. And this would be in a way another Lacanian phenomenology, that we have phenomena which are phenomena but which appear not for the subject. The subject can hallucinate them but cannot confront them. And what again what I like is how only when as it were the danger passes when the object is not too close that Scottie can look at Madeleine and we get the standard exchange subjective objective point of view shot objective shot. So only when the presence of the woman is as it were domesticated at a safe distance can it be assumed, do we get a subjective shot. And again as if to avoid this point, we are surprised to what extent practically all books from Donald Spoto to Robin Wood at least in the first edition of his Hitchcock’s Films describe this profile as subjective, as point of view shot. This is I think what we should develop again as an outline of Lacanian phenomenology, phenomenon, that profile would have been a pure fantasmatic phenomenon. Something imagined but it is and that’s crucial it is behind your back. You cannot directly confront it. You cannot that would be phenomenon as real if you want. Okay now we will return to this scene later because there is an echo of other... Okay now let's jump a little bit forward. Sorry for this but that’s life. Yeah, yeah, ah now comes a miracle. Two things will happen here. First if you read my book you know the joke. This was after Madeleine’s fake suicide, Scottie dragged her out of water, put her into his bedroom and the implication being that he undressed her because we will see above the kitchen sink her underwear. But look closely what we will effectively see. Look at it, there is no underwear. You think it is, there is not. It’s unbelievable, you know that I read in a book on Vertigo that this shot was the greatest problem with censorship. We are still in the last years of Hays Office. So they insisted if you effectively see underwear here, this meant in the narrative logic that James Stewart effectively saw Kim Novak naked. That shouldn’t happen. But you see this is for me the ontological proof that the Big Other exists. Because of whom was the American censorship trying to protect? Not us viewers, because just casually looking at it we all automatically assume that this is underwear. It’s as if there is another omnipotent gaze which sees all the details. And that nonexistent gaze should be protected. Nobody notices it. Then another thing, if we go a little bit forward, when after she awakens there is the conversation between the two. And this conversation is crucial because it’s a nice example of a inherent dialogue of two levels in Vertigo. How every good book about Vertigo will tell you that the film can be read at two levels. It’s at the same time a story about a realistic story, a guy falling in love with a woman, losing her, looking for her, blah blah. But it can also be read as, if you know the film you know what I’m talking about, you remember how the first image in the car ends up with Scottie hanging above the precipice, roof of the house as if as his imagination, that that as his the his fast fantasizing, imagining at the moment of his death, so that all that we effectively see is his imagination. There are films who have this nice ambiguities in them, like the other one would have been Point Blank with Lee Marvin and so on. But what I’m saying is that the magic moments of Vertigo are then the moments where the two levels intersect, where in the sense that there are such strong coincidences at the narrative level that they are simply too ridiculous to accept them, that you should the only way to get it is to remember to accept it is to remember it to read it as if the author who is fantasizing him the hero intervenes at the right moment. There is the scene here you will see how the two of them talk, erotic tension is slowly growing up and at the very moment when Scottie makes a move touching using as an excuse do you want more coffee to touch her hand, the phone rings and of course it’s her husband. How things happen this is as if the scenarist directly intervenes. It’s the same, I will not bore you with that it would take too much time, in the very final scene of the film you remember at the church tower up there that how the Mother Superior who pushes Madeleine to death appears exactly at the right moment. If she were to appear later there would have been the happy ending. They reconciled themselves they would have walked down. Earlier it would have no meaning. It’s and maybe you know the story, it’s a wonderful story. This was my illusion when I first for all I first saw Vertigo when I was twelve. In very bad conditions in a cinematheque in ex-Yugoslavia and there was a very bad copy, these are pre-digital times, real reels, where simply the last minute was missing. So for ten years I thought that Vertigo is a movie with a happy ending. They reconcile they embrace yes we love each other blah blah. And then you have the Mother Superior popping up. But the shock is how well it functions. No problem. Okay so again the other moment even better of magic intervention is this one. Now we’ll go a little bit faster. Sorry to interrupt. Sorry to Madeleine. Whatever, but you got the point how exactly at the right moment the paternal prohibition intervenes and so on and so on. Okay now comes the big point that I want to make if you allow me another ten seconds to whatever. That’s all. Okay, now let's bridge this last scene. Okay now at least things can no longer go wrong. Okay thanks. Thanks for your patience. So what’s about this last scene? It’s in the so Empire Hotel where Judy the poor girl... In this scene first after they enter we you saw remember the black profile of Judy. And I think that this has to be read as the exact counterpoint to the fascinating image at the beginning, the beautiful Madeleine. This is the clue about man’s subjectivity using woman, what she needs of the real woman is just the black screen to project his fantasy. That’s to what she is reduced. It’s as if we see here the negative, the black negative the counterpoint of what we see at the beginning, the wonderful profile of Madeleine projected onto the black profile of poor Judy. Then you remember the next time we see Judy, it’s much more mysterious. We pass to not kind of a not quite front but from the side her face, the left half completely dark, the right half in this weird in a weird green color of course from the neon light outside the room. How are we to read this shot? I think if there is one crucial shot of Vertigo is this one. Instead of reading it as simply designating Judy’s inner conflict her inner split, I think one should confer to this shot its full ontological ambiguity. As in some versions of Gnosticism, Judy is depicted here as a kind of proto-entity not yet ontologically fully constituted. It is as if in order to fully exist her dark half waits to be filled in with the ethereal image of Madeleine. And I think that at this point moment when Judy is reduced to even less than object a kind of a [unintelligible] unfinished object to a formless pre-ontological stain that she is subjectivized. This anguished half face that we see totally unsure of itself designates the birth of the subject. Namely, recall the proverbial imaginary resolution of Zeno’s paradox of infinite divisibility. If we continue the division long enough we will finally stumble, you know like you can endlessly divide a quantity into half half half and so on. But the idea is that if you divide it long enough you will get a half of which the other half will be simply nothing. You don’t get a part and a part but a part and nothing. And okay to cut a long story short this nothing is for Lacan the subject. This is literally if you want a kind of a primitive Hitchcockian exemplification of the Lacanian divided subject. This is it. Half of this greenish stain, the other half darkness. The void. In this sense for Lacan subjects are literally holes, gaps in the positive order of being. They dwell in those places where as it were the job of creation was not done to the end. Or to put it in Gnostic terms, the very existence of a subject is a proof that God was an idiot who bungled the job of creation. I said I don’t know if there are some country countries where I get the same impression, did some of you visit for example Island Iceland? Not Reykjavik, that’s for tourists, but if you go in, it’s all those sulfur barren earth where not even the grass grows, it’s as if again it’s unfinished you know God forgot to paint it green it’s not the creation is not finished. I think that’s the site the site of subjectivity. And my point is that at that point precisely when you see Judy as this half monster this greenish freakish half, the other half darkness, this is for Lacan the subject. Person is for Lacan imaginary. A person emerges when you through your fantasy fill in the other half so that you make a complete face. But the truth is in this cut. So in order to truly grasp another subject, this is what I meant when I was talking two days ago about the monstrosity of the subject. It’s this, it’s not I see only part of you, I want to see more. The problem is that we always see too much. We see complete faces. The difficulty is to see this, to see the other as just the stain incomplete stain and darkness. That is to say to see, okay to put it in bombastic terms, to see the void. Okay to go even a step further here. This, the way we see Judy, this is for me subjectivity at its purest. In this sense I think that it’s all too simple to say how Vertigo is a film about a male gaze objectifying a woman, no, the problem is that Hitchcock goes a step further here and shows how the failure of
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objectivization if you want. What is the status of the one who is objectified by male gaze? How this division subjectivization of the object. This film I think tells quite a lot about the birth of subjectivity. But again there is definitely something monstrous in this subjectivity. What do I mean by this?
objectivization if you want. What is the status of the one who is objectified by male gaze? How this division subjectivization of the object. This film I think tells quite a lot about the birth of subjectivity. But again there is definitely something monstrous in this subjectivity. What do I mean by this?
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Maybe some of you remember, not a lot of you, how back in the sixties in the era of structuralism, theories based on the notion that all human activity is regulated
Maybe some of you remember, not a lot of you, how back in the sixties in the era of structuralism, theories based on the notion that all human activity is regulated
Slavoj Žižek
by unconscious symbolic mechanisms, Louis Althusser launched the notorious formula of theoretical anti-humanism. But he added that it should be supplemented by practical humanism. What he meant is that in theory we can study
by unconscious symbolic mechanisms, Louis Althusser launched the notorious formula of theoretical anti-humanism. But he added that it should be supplemented by practical humanism. What he meant is that in theory we can study
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the structural overdetermination and so on, while in our
the structural overdetermination and so on, while in our
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practice we should act as humanists. Respecting others treating them as free persons with full dignity,
practice we should act as humanists. Respecting others treating them as free persons with full dignity,
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treating them as creators
treating them as creators
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of their own world and so on and so on. Only in theory we should always bear in mind that humanism is
of their own world and so on and so on. Only in theory we should always bear in mind that humanism is
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an ideology. But I think Lacan wants to go here a step further, not accepting this split between objective scientific anti-humanism, theoretical anti-humanism and practical humanism. Lacan demands practical anti-humanism. Of course not in the vulgar sense of torture people do whatever you want, but precisely in the sense of moving beyond of what Nietzsche called the human-all-too-human to confront the let's call it inhuman core of human subjectivity. This involves
an ideology. But I think Lacan wants to go here a step further, not accepting this split between objective scientific anti-humanism, theoretical anti-humanism and practical humanism. Lacan demands practical anti-humanism. Of course not in the vulgar sense of torture people do whatever you want, but precisely in the sense of moving beyond of what Nietzsche called the human-all-too-human to confront the let's call it inhuman core of human subjectivity. This involves
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an ethics which takes into account the latent monstrosity of being human, the diabolic dimension at the very core of human being. What is this dimension? Let me again repeat an old line of thought some of you to known, but it's
an ethics which takes into account the latent monstrosity of being human, the diabolic dimension at the very core of human being. What is this dimension? Let me again repeat an old line of thought some of you to known, but it's
Slavoj Žižek
crucial here to get the point. It’s the well-known which I always use this example line of thought about I even mentioned it here I think the distinction Kantian distinction between negative and indefinite judgment. You know for example the positive judgment: the soul is mortal, can be negated in two ways. We either deny a predicate: the soul isn't mortal, or we affirm a non-predicate: the soul is non-mortal. My point of course known to some of you I'm sure is that this difference is exactly the same as the one known to every reader of horror fiction of Stephen King and so on between: he is not dead and he is undead. The indefinite judgment is not the same as if you say about somebody he isn't dead, that's nothing, it means he is alive. If you say as you know he is undead, it means he is a living dead, it means a third
crucial here to get the point. It’s the well-known which I always use this example line of thought about I even mentioned it here I think the distinction Kantian distinction between negative and indefinite judgment. You know for example the positive judgment: the soul is mortal, can be negated in two ways. We either deny a predicate: the soul isn't mortal, or we affirm a non-predicate: the soul is non-mortal. My point of course known to some of you I'm sure is that this difference is exactly the same as the one known to every reader of horror fiction of Stephen King and so on between: he is not dead and he is undead. The indefinite judgment is not the same as if you say about somebody he isn't dead, that's nothing, it means he is alive. If you say as you know he is undead, it means he is a living dead, it means a third
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obscene
obscene
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domain opens. And
domain opens. And
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my point is simply that the same goes for:
my point is simply that the same goes for:
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he is human. If you negate it, he is inhuman,
he is human. If you negate it, he is inhuman,
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it means simply he is whatever you want animal,
it means simply he is whatever you want animal,
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divine and so on. But if you do not say he isn't human, if you say he is
divine and so on. But if you do not say he isn't human, if you say he is
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in-human. It's a third domain. It's the inhuman core but inherent to humanity
in-human. It's a third domain. It's the inhuman core but inherent to humanity
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itself. Which is why and this inhuman core is the very core of modern
itself. Which is why and this inhuman core is the very core of modern
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subjectivity. You find it already in Descartes in the moment of doubt, you find it in Kant in German idealism. Which is why
subjectivity. You find it already in Descartes in the moment of doubt, you find it in Kant in German idealism. Which is why
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as every good history of philosophy will tell you, it's crucial how the very metaphor for the core of subjectivity turned,
as every good history of philosophy will tell you, it's crucial how the very metaphor for the core of subjectivity turned,
Slavoj Žižek
shifted, in the shift from enlightenment to German idealism, from light to night, to darkness. For German idealism who we the German idealist resuscitates here the old mystical tradition, the core of subjectivity is what they call the night of the world, darkness, madness if you want. So it's no longer that we the core of our subjectivity is the light of reason threatened around by onslaughts of divine madness of natural bestiality whatever. No, the very core of subjectivity is void, darkness. In pre-Kantian universe we are simply humans, beings of reason, while with Kant the excess to be fought is immanent, it’s the inhuman core of our subjectivity itself. Okay so in order before even we go to Hegel, in order to clarify the status of it of this subjectivity I want to develop further to put a better formulation on two three things that I mentioned the last time but I think I wasn't quite clear about it. First because some of you that I met afterwards told me I was confused. Okay let me clarify them. First okay this is nothing new okay but first super-ego. What did I exactly mean by super-ego? For Lacan, let me repeat it, super-ego has nothing to do with moral conscience as far as this is a quote from Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Super-ego has nothing to do with moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are concerned. Super-ego is on the contrary for Lacan the anti-ethical agency, the stigmatization, the proof, the trace of an ethical betrayal. So we cannot, as some psychoanalysts like to do, oppose the good ego-ideal, rational, moderate, caring, and the bad irrational excessive cruel anxiety provoking super-ego. Then with of course the psychoanalytic goal to treat the patient haunted by the evil excessive super-ego and its dits so that no you should treating the patient in such a way that this bad super-ego transforms itself into a good caring ego-ideal. Lacan opposes this way out. Why? For him the ego-ideal this seemingly benevolent agency which leads us to moral growth and maturity, the ego-ideal forces us to betray what Lacan calls the law of desire, do not compromise your desire, by way of adopting reasonable demands on of the existing socio-symbolic order. The super-ego with its excessive feeling of guilt is only the necessary obverse of the ego-ideal. It exerts its unbearable pressure upon us on behalf of our betrayal of the ethics of desire. In short for Lacan the guilt we experience under the super-ego pressure is not illusory, it's actual. As Lacan put it, I quoted him two days ago, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire. And again the moment you identify with subordinate yourself to the ego-ideal, you give up you compromise your desire. And super-ego is just an obscene punishment for it. This is how Lacan very elegantly accounts for the basic paradox of super-ego noted already by Freud, that the more you obey its commands the more you are guilty. Precisely because you are guilty, you are guilty for... So again the basic message from all this: we cannot it’s as if the super-ego is in a properly dialectical way the truth of the ego-ideal. We cannot simply oppose them and say let's fight this bad irrational guilt feeling super-ego and let's reconstruct our normativity so that it will be the benevolent caring ego-ideal soliciting you to become more gentle, better and so on and so on. No, in super-ego you are paying the price for the ego-ideal, the price for betraying your desire. Another thing I want to clarify is that I think wasn't put in clear enough way is that formula that I quoted the last time for Lacan the true formula of atheism. Quote again: the true formula of atheism is not God is dead, even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder. This is quote from Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts, page English translation. Freud protects the father. The true formula of atheism is God is unconscious. What does Lacan mean by this? I think that in order to properly understand this passage, one has to read it together with another thesis of Lacan. I will quote it. And even with some of okay Lacan’s reading of some of the dreams of Freud. But here is another version. It’s from it’s from it’s from seminar seminar I think seminar The Ego in Freud's Theory. As you know, quote from Lacan, the father Karamazov's son Ivan leads the later latter into those audacious avenues taken by the thought of the cultivated man and in particular he says Ivan the son if God doesn't exist... If God doesn't exist the father says then everything is permitted. Then Lacan comments on it: quite evidently a naive notion for we analysts know full well that if God doesn't exist then nothing at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove that to us every day. End of quote. Why what does Lacan mean by it? The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead. What he doesn't know is that unconsciously he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and then engages in transgressive fantasies. Today we have on the contrary a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness and whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions. What is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures but prohibitions themselves. If God doesn't exist then everything is prohibited means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment. And of course one should also not forget to supplement this thesis with its opposite: if God exists then everything is permitted. And this is I think the most succinct definition of what we call today at least what the media call religious fundamentalism. For a fundamentalist God fully exists. He perceives himself as God's instrument. Which is why he can do whatever he wants. His acts are in advance redeemed since they express the divine will. Okay, or to put this opposition between conscious normativity and unconscious prohibitions in the terms of the opposition between a ego-ideal and super-ego. It is as if a modern atheist no longer needs God or some divine normativity as ego-ideal. The price he pays is all the stronger super-ego super-ego pressure. And again permit me to quote an old joke of mine, but it makes perfectly the point to explain to you what I mean by this. It's the story that I used already in my Ticklish Subject. I mean you I think you know of the unfortunate child who on Sunday afternoon has to visit his grandmother and it his father is a traditional ego-ideal father, good old-fashioned oppressive father. I love them. He he will tell the boy: I don't care how you feel. Shut up, behave properly, let's visit grandmother. I can guarantee you he will survive normally this child. He will it will be easy for him to rebel to the father he will just externally obey it no problem. But let's now imagine the true super-ego monster called the postmodern caring permissive father. Mine was like this. This is why he is dead and it's a good thing that he is dead, how should I put it. What would he and he did once tell this to me. What would he have told the child? You know the trick. His message would have been: you know how your grandmother loves you. But nonetheless you should visit her only if you really want to. Now every idiot and children are not idiots knows what this means. Beneath the appearance of the free choice, there is an even stronger injunction. The true message is: not only you have to visit your grandmother, but you have to do it with love. You have to do it freely. That's the trick. And okay we can play with all these games about how this is the trick of totalitarianism and so on and so on. What this simple story and there are numerous other like how choices function together and so on nicely illustrates I think is precisely how the problem today is not hedonism as neoconservatives try to convince us. Good old Adorno was right when he says precisely today in so longer consumer society a simple intense enjoyment is maybe the most difficult thing to achieve. Which is why I always use those example of mine of decaf coffee, chocolate laxative whatever. I don't think we live in a consumerist society. I think the rule is rather have it without paying the price for it. Which is why although I am the only idiot in my generation as far as I know who haven't now some of you will not even want to talk with me after saying this, but you know that I am the only one that I know in my generation who hasn't tested even a marijuana, no drugs. But I must admit that the true people who are true subject of the society of consumation are for me drug addicts. They go to the end. What and the reason marijuana is so popular it's this kind of a decaffeinated drug no the dream is you can have it without really paying the price for it. No I think that at the level of consumption you want to cheat you want to have it without paying the price of it. It’s so again I don't think we really live in I think that the whole neo-conservative diagnosis is is wrong here. That which is why we are so horrified by drugs by drugs today. Because they mean that you really surrender surrender yourself to it. Okay. The last thing I wanted to add but I already developed it even in my first talk I think is how so for Lacan you see now what’s the problem for Lacan’s ethics. It is: how is an ethics thinkable without the reference to Big Other? Now you will say but who believes in a Big Other today? Okay my reply will not only be: we believe secretly at Big Other at an unconscious level. But it's even explicitly. Let me give you some let me give you some a couple of simple examples. Even take somebody like Derrida. I claim that his notion that Derridean notion of deconstruction as justice still has it in a hidden way I claim still harbors this notion of a utopian hope of infinite justice. Of course Derrida knows it's always coming, it will never be here, but on the horizon as inaccessible there is still this idea that we should that deconstruction of justice. Although it will never come we are as it were acting with reference to a utopian point where all the symbolic accounts will be settled all the debts will be will be paid so even if this point of Last Judgment is indefinitely postponed, always to come, it remains the ultimate horizon of our activity. The we pro- so again I claim that here even Derrida remains for Lacan too metaphysical. Of course it's metaphysics under erasure how should I put it. You are aware it will never come but you need it as a point of reference. And the problem for Lacan is: is ethics possible without this reference? And again that’s what Lacan is trying to answer. How? Now Hegel. Slowly, slowly. I will try to do something very naive because I know that I think that Lacanian Hegelianism is an answer to it. Now here I’m entering very difficult waters. Why? Because as you all know your first association, and I would like to give full right to this association, is: my God of all people why Hegel? Isn't what are your first assu- this is what I will try to do today. It may be that it will be a little bit confused but something very simple and please if anything is not clear interrupt me. Okay if you take this literally means you should interrupt me all the time but nonetheless with moderation first. What are probably your first associations with Hegel? I hope you agree that this is a productive way to begin. There are four common topics which are usually associated with Hegel and which probably would have made you think that Hegel is the very opposite of this ethics or even ontology without reference to a Big Other. First, isn't Hegel the ultimate absolute how should I put it guy of the Big Other which even has a name: Absolute Knowing? The idea of a self-enclosed notional totality. So isn't the whole point of Lacan the Big Other doesn't exist precisely that we never can count on this utopian point where every element every injustice that we suffer will be accounted for in the sense of properly condemned properly judged that we have to renounce it? Again so isn't Hegel the exact opposite in the sense of not only he claims we need this reference to absolute point of symbolization where everything is notionally articulated he even pretends to embody to develop this absolute knowledge? Although my God, read Hegel please. Because here already things turn mysterious. Because you know the first problem is that in a first approach Hegel may appear an idiot. In the sense of there is something ridiculous in it. Look this guy, rather fat, not beautiful, born in Germany in he really thought he knows, you know there is something ridiculous, this pure stupid guy thought absolute knowledge, I know everything. It's not as simple as that. The first mystery is: read Hegel closely and you will discover how often he historicizes absolute knowing. For him this is not: I’m at the end of history. Basically his point is at every point precisely because we are finite we are thrown into the position of absolute knowing. Which simply means: absolute knowing is not for Hegel I know everything. It's the absolute closure. It means you have to accept that you are caught in a certain horizon. It's precisely what was it you who mentioned this yesterday Costas this owl of Minerva? I’m for Latin again against Greek. Minerva, okay sorry. But you know what I mean like that that it's our limitation. The idea is you have to accept the finite the finitude of your horizon. And all you can do is describe it. It's interesting how read the very end of Hegel's system, which is the last part of his the very conclusion of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, where of course in his usual arrogant way after Kant, Fichte, Schelling he talks about himself, no? Okay, but then he says: for the time being this is what till furth- twice he relativizes it. Clearly historicizing it. Not only this but for example people say how crazy Hegel was in his Philosophy of Nature he thought he can ded- no in many places in his Philosophy of Nature he openly he says: this is all we know now but there are many new things to be discovered and so on. Even in his when people say: okay but historically doesn't he claim the end of history? No, he claim his claim is simply that at every point we are at the end of history. In the simple sense that you see the trick? The teleology that critics attribute to Hegel, Hegel's critical point is that we live in this teleology. Which means we perceive our point as absolute and even when we pretend to transgress our situation we do it against the background of where we are. Read his again introductions to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History where he deals with United States and Russia. Not in the same passages but twice he repeats the same formula and at least admit he wasn't an idiot for a guy from early 19th century. He says: apropos United States and apropos Russia these are the lands of the future. Once he even says: in a letter of the next century. So he wasn't an idiot when he claimed in that America United States he meant and Russia he said: we cannot yet say. So again it's absolutely clear he doesn't mean: I am at the end. He means radical historicism in the sense of every epoch has to accept its closure. Another wonderful thing. People accuse Hegel of this German like Heidegger you know Germanocentrism, emphasizing German language, using all these play words like for example you know Aufhebung, to sublate to overcome, three meanings which the term has only in German: to negate, to preserve and to raise at the higher level. So isn't it nonetheless that somehow Hegel secretly privileges German? Ah, there is a triumphant proof in one of the letters that I found that it's not so. No Hegel's point is wonderful here if you read him closely. He says this Hegel's point is that language as such is against thought. You have to think against your language. Language is too contingent, too stupid and so on, you have to if you want to elaborate concepts you have to think against language. Language seduces you with its non-dialectical form shape. But now comes the genius. Hegel is not naive in claiming: yes of course this means we should move to pure thought above language. Hegel at the same time knows that you can do this only within language. How? By mobilizing the only resource that you have in language precisely the most contingent irrational elements in language. Which as Hegel emphasized it are totally contingent, there is no deeper deeper reason at work and specific to any language. Now comes the proof. I found the letter, I can quote it to you next time, I forgot, which is a letter to his Dutch friend. You know all this mythology Hegel accepted a post in Berlin because it's the central German university so that he could be a German philosopher. Fuck off, I mean. Read his letters. The only thing that interest him interested him is how much money. He oscillated to the end: do I get better conditions here, there and so on. Not only this. At the same time he was considering an invitation to Amsterdam. And it's so nice that he almost accepted it then the problem was money no that's philosophy I’m sorry no but what I want to say is that it's so nice that he already started to learn Dutch. And he in despair wrote to some to a Dutch friend of him: could you learn me tell me send me a list of Dutch workplace contingent jokes and so on? That was the way for him to approach a language. In this most so isn't this a nice paradox that: yes, you have to move above the stupid contingency of language to notional necessity, but since we think only in language, the only way to do it is not through this analytical dream of purify language of purely logical language. On the contrary, relying on what is the most contingent in language. Okay if we are talking about all this I cannot but mention another element which I like most in Hegel which is okay it's a joke but I like it as a joke superstitious joke. You know that the point where people usually make fun of Hegel is that okay it's a historical tragedy. I don't know when but a year or two after Neptune is the last the ninth planet of is it Neptune? No Poseidon. No that's now you are cheating now we're at that point Neptune the ninth planet... sorry Pluto yes. After Pluto was already discovered but Hegel didn't know it. So he thought still there are only eight. He deduced the necessity why there are eight only. Why they have to be eight. Now it's easy for idiots to laugh haha stupid Hegel. I had you can imagine an intellectual orgasm when two years ago I read the latest discovery, you know that scientists today think that Pluto is a satellite it's not really a planet. So Hegel... okay I know very well but it's nice to hear it you know I know it's not now... okay but let's go on more seriously. So there are four clichés about Hegel. All I want to do today in the remaining hour is just somehow to open up to you a different way to look at them. To see how what appears the most crazy idealist Hegel can be given a very rational materialist foundation, can be read in a different way. So the first feature is this but wait a minute, Hegel, absolute knowledge, the closed network of of reason rational edifice. Where is here the place for contingency and so on? Second thing connected with this one precisely necessity-contingency. Isn't it that in Hegel contingency is always ultimately subordinated to conceptual necessity? Isn't it that in Hegel at its best contingency is the mode of appearance of a deeper conceptual necessity? For a superficial view a process natural historical may appear contingent but as a philosopher you have to move penetrate the deeper logical notional necessity. So how is this? Third point: what about concrete universality? Isn't this the ultimate Hegelian madness? Doesn't concrete universality mean that we do not have really a gap between universal and particular, but all particular content of a notion can be deduced developed out of its universal form? Isn't this the ultimate idealist madness? Last feature: cunning of reason. Isn't this precisely the recapitulation of idealist madness? Isn't the idea that even when things appear to go wrong we just don't know but behind our backs some higher rational authority, reason in history, God ultimately, is pulling the strings so that doesn't cunning of reason mean: don't worry too much, at the end everything serves a higher purpose. What appears as a catastrophe is always a priori a blessing in disguise. And of course then we can play these cheap games. Hegel is for this reason not able to grasp a phenomenon like Auschwitz because it's obscene to claim that Auschwitz is a blessing in disguise and so on and so on. So let's do something. Let's start with absolute knowing as this complete network of notional determinations. I would like to begin here with Deleuze. Why Deleuze? Because Deleuze is of course the ultimate anti-Hegelian. And my joke will be that precisely Deleuze is here close to Hegel. Uh as you probably know some of you at least, the starting point of Deleuze’s what he calls, wonderful term, transcendental empiricism, is that there is always a hidden virtual aspect to any actual object or process. Actual things are not ontologically complete. In order to get a complete view of reality, we must supplement it with the virtual dimension. Uh what does he mean by this? Let me give you a example from Marxist historiography, not the orthodox one, but more Benjamin. What’s the whole point of Benjamin’s theses on history? It's basically the same, is that for example in order to grasp a French Revolution it's not enough to see what really happened there. You have as it were to include in it all the virtualities, all the emancipatory dreams which were betrayed. But you know like it is as if in order to grasp something which happened you should include in it the alternate histories what might have happened all the betrayed hopes and so on and so on because as you probably know ultimately Benjamin's view is that the final big proletarian revolution will precisely redeem retroactively these thwarted hopes. So that this is for Benjamin repetition in history. To repeat an event does not mean to repeat it the way it was. It means to repeat what failed in the original. To repeat it in a redemptive way. To repeat it by not missing what was failed. And in I think that even Marx should be reread in this way. We all like to quote from Marx this cynical acerbic remark on how French Revolution exploded in this Jacobining enthusiasm, human rights, freedom, but the truth was that they were just without being aware of it laying the foundation for the common market bourgeois vulgar life and so on. But it's not as simple as that. Marx's point is not those were only illusions whose truth was the bourgeois market economy. There was of course an excess there which was disappointed, but this excess is precisely what continues to haunt history. And it is as if the final revolution will redeem all that. Okay you got the basic idea. It is something a little bit, if I may be pretentious here, like in quantum physics where you have also this idea that what in order to grasp what actual- it's kind of open ontology. In order to grasp what actually happens you also have to grasp what might have happened. That is to say this is the proper sense for Deleuze of the term virtuality. Virtuality is possibility which is not simply canceled once it is not actualized. But it continues to haunt what happens so that in order to understand what happens you have to include as its echo that reverberates the possibilities. I mean to give you a simple moralistic example, and we are talking here about ethico-practical level, it’s as if remember when you are in a tight ethical position in the sense that dilemma you have to do something and you fail. Isn't it that your whole life will be haunted by what you should have done? You know it's in this sense that it's not enough to know what happened, what might have happened is part of what happened in order to get that's the idea. Agamben developed this although Agamben has as all Italians problem with Hegel how should I put it he thinks that Hegel doesn't get it but Agamben is right when he says that we should okay we should they did it already in medieval times some thinkers rehabilitate possibility in the sense that in the sense that to grasp the actuality you have to grasp again its inherent possibilities. So again back to Deleuze. This move from an actual given thing to its virtual conditions to this fantasmatic background of possibilities is for Deleuze the transcendental move. The deployment of the transcendental conditions of the given. However what does this mean for Deleuze? It's not the usual transcendental genesis. It's what Deleuze calls a genesis without dynamism, a static genesis. What he simply means again is that when you grasp a thing as in kind of a static superposition all the virtual all the virtualities that sustain it are co-present. This static character of the virtual field finds its clearest expression in a wonderful a wonderful notion by Deleuze developed already in his Difference and Repetition: the notion of a pure past. Not the past into which things present pass but an absolute past. A past quote where all events including those that have sunk without trace are stored and remembered as their passing away. So a virtual past which already contains also things which are present. As Deleuze puts it: a present can become past because in a way it is already past. It can perceive itself as part of the past. We are now doing what will have been history. Another quote from Difference and Repetition: it is with respect to this pure element of the past understood as the past in general as an a priori past that a given former present is reproducible and the present itself is able to reflect itself. End of quote, page This means that this pure past does this mean that this pure past then involves a truly deterministic notion of the universe so that everything to happen all actual spatio-temporal deployment is already part of a immemorial atemporal virtual network? That would be the first association to what I just said no? Isn't Deleuze here aiming at something like, I'm sorry for this vulgar common references, but in relativity theory you know this Einsteinian vision of time as the fourth dimension of space in the sense that what we perceive as temporal development is really just another spatial dimension so that if we were able to see things like with a divine view objectively, we would see that the universe really is totally static contemporaneous and that what we perceive as time is just another dimension of space along which we move while we are in time. If this were the case now I hope you got my connection with Hegel, if this were the case then of course Deleuze would have been a Hegelian and Hegel would have been a Hegelian in this bad stupid sense. There is already a complete past in the sense that a complete network where everything that is is described in its truth allocated its proper place. So that in order to conceive ourselves what we are we have to locate ourselves into this past. But is this the truth? No, Deleuze adds something very precise. He says the pure past must be all the past but must also be amenable to change through the occurrence of any new present. So the paradox is that it is a complete past it is a totality which but this totality itself past present included can change how? Ah now comes my stupid surprise. I know you know the text but admit it okay maybe some of you are intelligent enough I wonder if you would have expected me to quote it here. I always have a respect for conservatives, intelligent conservatives. TS Eliot, you know his what's that big text my God Tradition and Individual Talent. I think he gave a very nice formulation there and I’m sorry to inform you but I like Eliot he in at the end of his Idea Towards a Christian Society he has a wonderful formula where he says that sometimes to be a sectarian is the only way to save the general idea and so on. There are formulas in okay. Let me now give you this longer quote and then read it in a Deleuzian Hegelian way. You all know it just to remind you. Tradition cannot be inherited and if you want it to inherit it you must obtain it by great labor. Tradition involves in the first place the historical sense which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his 25th year. And the historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence. The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together is what makes a writer traditional. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone, you must set him for contrast and comparison among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic not merely historical criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere is not one-sided. What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves which is modified by the introduction of the new work of art among them. The existing order is complete before this is Hegelian closure of absolute knowing. Listen: the existing order is complete before the new work arrives. For order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art to the whole are readjusted and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European or of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. End of quote. So when Eliot writes that judging a living poet you must set him among the dead, he I think formulates precisely a nice example of this Deleuzian pure past. And when he writes that the existing order is complete before the new work arrives for order to persist after the supervention of novelty the whole existing order must be altered and so on and so on, he no less clearly formulates the paradoxical link between the completeness of the past and our capacity to change it retroactively. Precisely because the past is complete each new work rearranges its entire balance. Another example: recall Borges, I always found him boring but that's another story it's a good example. Borges the precise formulation by Borges of the relationship between Kafka and the multitude of the precursors of Kafka from old Chinese authors to Robert Browning. As Borges put it: Kafka’s idiosyncrasy in greater or lesser degree is present in each of these writings, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it. That is to say it would not exist. Each writer creates his precursors. His works modifies our conception of the past as it will modify the future. End of quote. So the properly dialectical solution of the dilemma of: is it really there in the source or did we only read into it, is: it is there but we can only perceive and stay this retroactively. So you see the paradox: we are at the same time less free and more free than we think. We are passive, determined by the past, dependent on the past. But we have the freedom to define the scope of this determination. You know it's as if for this properly Hegelian Deleuzian I use with full consciousness the iron- consciousness of irony this term: Deleuzian Hegelian perspective, it's wrong to see the scope of freedom in I'm not totally determined by the past there is an opening. No, we are totally determined by the past, we are always part of a closed totality. We cannot but we can change the entire totality as such. Every true change changes also changes the past the past itself. So what this means now we come to more crucial points. What this means, and I will quote Bergson that I quote in almost all my books, is that of course we are not talking here about crazy temporal idealism. It's not that we can travel to the past and change it. But we can insert as Bergson put it and Deleuze likes to quote him: we can insert new possibilities into the past. For example after Kafka, of course Browning or those old idiots they remain factually the same, but the virtual dimension of possibilities changes. In other words, this is then another elegant Hegelian reversal of another commonplace. There is another commonplace which says: yes of course we have this existential opposition: on the one hand in so far as we are engaged in events, we perceive ourselves as free. You can do whatever you want, you are under the pressure to choose, but retroactively from afterwards we can perceive the necessity. You know you think you were free, when you look at the situation with the hindsight you see you really had no choice it was predetermined. From the Hegelian perspective it's rather the opposite: while you act immediately you think I cannot do it otherwise than I did it. It's only retroactively that you can introduce possibility into what appeared a necessity. In other words, now we come to the second point which will bring us back back to possibility: dialectical analysis is not simply the discovery of the underlying secret necessity which governs possibility. It's I’m tempted to say almost the opposite. First in the sense that it we should always remember that Hegel is a performative thinker. As he always repeats too, when we penetrate a deeper ground of something, the very movement of penetrating there creates this ground. You in the process of disc- for Hegel the basic hereticist illusion is the illusion of discovering something which in reality in the very process of discovering it you are creating it. So when Hegel speaks about the progress from contingency to deeper necessity, of course he talks about it, always bear in mind this is not a simple epistemological progress of discovering the true ground. This is a process of how necessity constitutes itself. And there is the catch: this process in itself is contingent. The true Hegelian so when we speak about Hegelian dialectic of necessity and contingency, it's much more complex than it may appear. It's not only things look contingent ah there is a deeper dialectical necessity. It's also the opposite: the true unity of necessity and contingency is contingency. That is to say the very the historical struggle is not simply contingent, we struggle we don't know what will be the result, but is a contingent struggle for which necessity will prevail. Let me give you a couple of nice examples. I really love this one because here unfortunately I have to disagree with Rousseau, I will read you a quote from why because this is Rousseau at his most Stalinist and I feel like betraying my mother father disagreeing, but it's a wonderful quote where in a truly dialectical Hegelian way we can show how where Rousseau goes wrong here is precisely by not getting this performative dimension by fetishizing the process. Rousseau in his social contract of course confronts this simple problem: after referendum voting general will is established, what happens with the minority? Why should minority obey the majority? And as a good Stalinist my heart is with him here he concludes absolutely they should obey it. None of this shit democratic minority blah blah. Why? Read it and wonder. I was shocked to find this paragraph. Apart from the primitive contract, the vote of the majority always binds all the rest. This follows from the contract social contract itself. But it is asked how a man can be both free and forced to conform to wills which are not his own. How are the opponents at once free and subject to laws they have not agreed to? I retort all quote from Rousseau: Rousseau Social Contract if you want Book Chapter subdivision on voting. I retort that the question is wrongly put. The citizen gives his consent to all the laws, including those which are passed in spite of his opposition and even those which punish him when he dares to break any of them. The constant will of all the members of the state is the general will. By virtue of it they are citizens and free. When in the popular assembly now comes madness: a law is proposed, what the people is asked is not exactly whether it approves or rejects the proposal, but whether it is in conformity this proposal with the general will which is their true will. Each man in giving his vote states his opinion on that point and the general will is found by counting votes. When therefore the opinion is contrary to my own the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken and that what I thought to be the general will was not so. If my particular opinion had carried the day I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will and it is in that case that I should not have been free. End of quote. You got the madness. The totalitarian catch here is the short circuit in Rousseau between let's call it by today's names, constative and performative dimension. Rousseau reads the voting procedure not as a performative act of decision. The question for him is not we will decide what is the general will. But as an act of expressing an opinion, of guessing what is the general will which is then automatically of course substantialized into something that precedes voting. So you get the point: for him when you are asked to vote for or against, you do not it's not a vote about what you want. It's kind of a opinion poll: you are asked what do you think that the majority thinks? And if you are in a minority it simply means that you were mistaken. So of course then you have to obey the majority. In other words again those who remain in the minority are not simply a minority, in learning the result of the vote which if it runs against their individual vote, they do not simply learn that they are a minority, what they learn is that they were mistaken about what is the general will and now you know you have to obey it. What I find here so interesting is the parallel between this substantialization of the general will and the religious notion of predestination. In the case of predestination, faith is also substantialized into a decision that precedes the process. So that the states of individual's activities is not to performatively constitute their faith but to discover or guess one's pre-existing state fate. What is obfuscated in both cases is the dialectical reversal of contingency into necessity. That is to say the way the outcome of a contingent process is the appearance of necessity. And the guy whom I really appreciate, I hope we'll have a chance to invite him here, the French theorist of rational choice Jean-Pierre Dupuy describes wonderfully this process apropos of catastrophes. This is a quote from his book The Small Metaphysics of Tsunamis. Quote from Dupuy: the catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as a destiny for sure but also as a contingent accident. It could not have taken place even if in futur anterieur it appears as necessary. If an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe for example, it could not not have taken place. Nonetheless in so far as it did not take place it is not inevitable. It is thus the event's actualization, the fact that it takes place, which retroactively creates its necessity. That's what precisely Rousseau doesn't see. That law is necessary but this necessity is contingently created. Dupuy provides a one a wonderful example from the French presidential elections of In the January forecast of the elections the one of the candidates at that point was Balladur, this is how the main polling institute wrote: this is a quote: if on next May the date of elections, Monsieur Balladur will be elected, if he will be elected, one can say that the presidential election was decided before it even took place. You get the point: if something contingent happened, retroactively fate is constituted. If accidentally an event takes place, it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable. This, not the commonplaces on how the underlying necessity expresses itself is in contingencies, is the Hegelian dialectics of contingency and necessity. And I think we have even the same this is how we perceive history. You know often what is imputed to Hegel is just Hegel's description of reality. Let's remember now Bush presidency. We all know it was the result of cheating Florida and so on and incidentally the best article that I read commentary on Bush elections the first one Florida was by a South African guy who coming from some small country I think Burkina Faso or what adopted in a wonderful reversal of racism adopted the perspective as if he is coming from a civilized country, well maybe this was true, visiting a primitive country United States. You know he said you know this is a barbarian country where president's brother is the local boss who corrupts there you know describing as a banana republic where with a little bit of cheating and so on. But after Bush won through this contingent cheating, now we already write books about you know the deep necessity of the defeat of liberalism of the shift towards neoconservative- but you get my point. The point here is that it's not simply that this necessity is false, it is a necessity. But necessity which once it is contingently established it is retroactively a necessity. In this aspect if you permit me a little bit of brutal racist Western Western Eurocentrism, in this sense predestination is foreign to its Eastern counterpoint reincarnation. What they both share is the idea that my present state is predetermined. However in the first case it is predetermined by the contingent divine decision which precedes my existence. So that the state of individual's activities is not to performatively constitute their fate but to discover or guess one's pre-existing state fate. What is obfuscated in both cases is the dialectical reversal of contingency into necessity, that is to say the way the outcome of a contingent process is the appearance of necessity. What I find not so sympathetic with reincarnation is that it's the ethical character of your past acts which determines you. I prefer much more this Western inscrutability which means really that we retroactively constitute our fate you know it doesn't blame you it's God did it I don't know why it's not because in the past life I was screwing my mother or whatever you know it's I don't know what at least more open. Okay from here to make it clear I would like to return to the example which I already mentioned in the first talk, you remember that because that's what we're dealing with with that. You remember the Billy Buddgate example: a novel no first I saw the film I saw the film is bad must be based on a good novel then I read the novel even worse than the film. This is what I’m talking about: the film although coming after the novel retroactively inserted a new possibility into the novel. This is exactly exactly the same movement. Again this movement by means of which and again I don't like to repeat myself too much that is to say read my books when I quote that famous passage from Bergson when he says how we can reinsert possibilities into the past. But this is even nothing mysterious imagine how isn't it how something appears to you impossible, these are true political acts: you do something which appears impossible once you dare to do it of course there is always contingency if it comes out okay it retroactively it not only becomes actual but it even as it were retroactively creates its own necessity. Why not? The same goes I think for the October Revolution. Now it's easy to see how it had to explode. But it was very clear to Lenin that it depended on chance but once it is here it is here it reappears retroactively as necessary. So again I think that contrary to what may appear that is to say contrary to the idea that dialectical analysis discovers underlying necessity beneath contingencies, the appearance of contingencies. It's almost I would say the opposite. What a true dialectical analysis does is it takes a period a historical period which from our backward perspective appears just a necessary development. Let's say French Revolution we know the phrases first stage Jacobinism Napoleon and so on: necessary stages. But that's not the the whole truth about it. In order to grasp the concrete historical dynamics of the period, you have to include into it all the virtualities, the possibilities, the thwarted hopes and so on. You have to reinscribe possibility into necessity and not only to make a more plastic presentation but precisely how to put it: to grasp what happened what really happened you have to grasp what might have happened but failed. And this is dialectical analysis proper. It's precisely to it's not it's not to close the past in the sense of now we get a complete image. It's on the contrary to open the past, to see this is dialectical genesis proper. It's not necessary evolution, it's this outbreak of possibilities, outbreak of possibilities which was which was there. Okay, okay, let's make okay I wanted to go here a little bit further on but let's okay. What I will do is now to move to the other moment. Now I hope this covers a little bit the first two points: absolute knowledge how you saw the point absolute knowledge is still simply the finite historical closure and we are determined by it. But what Hegel allows for is a an even more radical intervention where what Eliot was talking about we can we can change all of it, the totality we can retroactively change the past every historical interventions doesn't only change doesn't only introduce a break between present and the past it retroactively changes the past itself radically. Here this is the proper dialectical moment. Uh to give you a simple example just to get the logic. Walter Scott and I always liked this here I share the taste of Lukács and this Marxist dogmatism. I think that wonderful things happened in English literature in early and mid 19th century. I think Dickens is great I think sorry to tell you this Walter Scott is great. Okay Walter Scott Waverley, you know it's not only the passage from primitive Highland authentic whatever pre-modern Scottish clan community to modern bourgeois community. It's how in this move the very meaning of pre-modern tribal life changes. What was this authentic free tribal life becomes common outlaw criminality. Here at some points I must say I think so Hegel is not radical enough with regard to himself and where unfortunately I must inform you precisely with regard to sexuality. With sexuality Hegel when he deals with sexuality remains too naive in the sense of treating sexuality as a natural substance which then animals simply practice it in an instinctual way they copulate while men eh elaborated it translated into a more cultural form. Instead of just raping a wife or whatever smelling her if her smell is good and then raping her whatever I eh these elaborate procedures of seduction and so on. So it is as if the natural substance remains the same but with humans it's cultivated. What Hegel doesn't get is that once you cultivate sexuality the very substance of sexuality retroactively changes. What you cultivate are not natural instincts but are what Freud would have called this unconditional death drive. You know what get my point? We don't have only again it's the same triple we don't when we pass from nature to culture this passage creates a third point of reference which would be something that is neither culture nor nature but is sexuality in its absolute passionate mortal dimension this death drive like the myth of Tristan sacrifice go to the end. This is what we are really trying to cultivate and this is not nature. You got my point: culturalization radically changes the very starting point. So this would be what I’m talking what I’m talking about. Okay so let’s go on now. Maybe we do have time for time for another sorry do I have it here or where? Yes. For another moment which again I will refer here to some of my works but what I already did say but it’s crucial to get it. Again I will try to develop it through Deleuze. Ironically now next point okay we covered now as I said necessity contingency absolute knowledge let’s go to the unfortunate concrete universality. What can be more crazy than that? Ah Hegel here or Deleuze a big Hegelian. In what sense? Uh you know that Deleuze ironically and I think this is the beauty of Deleuze even resuscitates the notion of idea. Deleuze is very Platonic here but how does he reinterpret in an anti-Platonic way the notion of idea? For Deleuze idea idea is not idea in the sense of fully elaborated concept but idea is to cut a long story short: the problem. Like the virtual open aspect and all empirical particular solutions are ways to solve but you always fail this problem. It’s a nice quote from Difference and Repetition: neither the problem nor the question is a subjective determination marking a moment of insufficiency in knowledge. Problematic structure is part of objects themselves allowing them to be grasped as signs. Because here we find a wonderful formulation in Deleuze which cannot but appear very strange where Deleuze opposes direct signs to indirect representations. Again Difference and Repetition a creative thought thought has to make a movement itself into a work without interpositions. He has to substitute direct signs for mediate representations. This sounds crazy because we think that representations of a thing are direct. You see a thing. Signs are mediate. For Deleuze signs are direct representations are mediate. What does he mean? Simply think about you are struggling with a certain problem you propose a series of solutions. So what is Deleuze’s point here? The first point that this is not just a feature of our knowledge it's inscribed into reality itself. Like in a wonderful rereading of Darwinian problematic of evolution for Deleuze the way nature experiments with organs it's for example eye is a reply particular reply of nature to a certain problem: problem of what to do with light and so on and so on. So in other words this tension between virtual problem and actual solutions what we actually see organs is not just in our knowledge it's inscribed into reality itself precisely in the guise of the opposition between between virtual and between virtual and actual. In this sense representations are indirect. Why? Because in representation we only see answers objects. What we don't see this is why they are indirect is the problem. The only way to grasp a thing concretely is to see the problem to which this thing is an answer. That is to say to conceive it as a sign of that problem. And here I claim Deleuze is as close as possible he no wonder he even uses the term to the Hegelian notion of concrete universality. Why? Let's think about it in these terms. For Hegel that what Deleuze calls idea, let's call it a problem, is universal and answers are particular actually existing proposals to solve the problem. And I’m sorry of quoting an old example of mine but it’s still the best one that I can think of, the example of and also at the same time the reason why I oppose as ideological this fashionable notion of alternate modernities. I think that Frederic Jameson in his book on singular modernity provided a definitive criticism of the notion of multiple alternate modernities. Why? What’s the idea of alternate modernities? The idea is that we here in the West have our own modernity: liberal capitalist one and so on. Why should we impose in a non-historical way our model to all other societies? Why shouldn't there be a Latin-American modernity, Hindu modernity, Asian modernity, African modernity, why can't they have alternate modernities? I agree with Jameson who claims that this is ideology at its purest. Why? Because let's be clear: modernity is another name for capitalism. So what alternate modernity means is that: why is it ideological? Because the dream of course is: we can have our own modernity which will avoid the deadlock of capitalist antagonisms and so on. But that, that is to say the idea that the deadlock of modernity doesn't belong to the very universal concept of modernity but is just the result of specific contingent local European conditions is ideology at its purest. Ideology is precisely the dream that you can have modernity without paying the price for it. In other words you can have capitalism without class antagonisms. No wonder then that that’s my reply to those who favor as liberating for Third World the notion of alternate modernities. Sorry but in Europe in first half of 20th century we did already have one big big big alternate modernity. If you don't know it was called fascism. Fascism is precisely an attempt of alternate modernity. How to have modernity, modern development science, futurism blah blah, without paying the price in class struggle, social- that’s the whole point. And one can even argue that at the different level Stalinism is a modernity. So back to my point: why is this ideology? Because it shifts or relocates the tension, the antagonistic tension from universality to particularity. It is as if antagonistic tension class struggle and so on is something that only belongs to our contingent experience. But the Hegelian-Deleuzian way to grasp it would have been the opposite one, would have been to say what defines modernity at its innermost is not an abstract idea of modernity but it’s a problem as Deleuze would have put it. That is to say an antagonism, the deadlock of modernity. Let's call it dialectic of enlightenment, class struggle, capitalist antagonism, a deadlock. And from here we can then grasp that’s the proper dialectic. All the point is not to claim that there are not alternate modernities. In so far as the advocates of alternate modernities want to say that we should not forget that European modernity or the predominant liberal capitalist modernity is just one of modernities. Here we should fully agree: what actually exists are just different modernities. These are answers. But answers to what? Different answers to the general universal problem. Modernity at its most fundamentalist, again, a problem, a contradiction, to put it in Hegel, problem which means antagonism of capitalist society. And from this perspective concrete examples, concrete models of modernity, fascist modernity, Stalinist modernity, Western liberal modernity, other possible Latin-American populist modernity, whatever you want, now I hope you will get the point are they are not simply they are not simply examples of modernity. There is a proper dialectical tension between universal as problem and particular as solution. They are at the same time attempts to resolve the tension inscribed into the universality. What is fascism as a concrete form of modernity if not an attempt to resolve the antagonism of modernity by saying: if we do it in the fascist way, that is to say private property strong state yes but not not too much market and especially not too much of this Jewish individual freedom, then we will avoid the deadlock of modernity. We will have modernization but the society will remain hierarchical, stable, organically linked and so on. What is the liberal dream if not another way of saying: if we stick to liberty, if we reduce state to night watchman and so on, we will also avoid antagonisms of modernity? What is Stalinism if not another attempt to resolve the deadlock of modernity? So you get my point: the paradox is that it is not that particular elements fight each other, there is a contradiction between fascism, liberalism, communism, against the background of the empty universal notion of modernity. No, the site of tension is universality itself. Imagine universality not as an empty container but as antagonism. And imagine particular forms not as simple examples of universality but as something which tries to mystify, obfuscate or rather resolve the tension of universality. And to cut a long story short this exactly is what Hegel means by concrete universality. It's not any magic deduction you know like out of universal you develop everything, it's that concrete examples are not simply the dynamic of concrete examples is not a dynamic external to universality. It's at the same time a tension between concrete examples and universalities, that is to say attempts to resolve the crisis of universality. For example this is the Hegelian dialectic of state, that state is for Hegel a problem. A problem of how to keep organic society of of how what's for Hegel the problem of the state? It's again how to keep a complex society organic, united and so on. And concrete forms of the state are precisely answers to this problem and answers which incidentally for Hegel always ultimately fail, which is why at the end of the state you pass to religious community and so on. Quite on the contrary of what people claim that for Hegel analytical material particular content always fits universality. On the contrary they never fit. The gap is constitutive. That is to say why don't they fit? Precisely because again remember the universality is the site of antagonism and you have this ten- in this sense that's the beauty of it, I think that how should I put it universality, Hegel is here at the radical opposite of this pagan New Age view: we small people are caught in our struggles but from the divine perspective all is one and encompassing. Don't you have one of your those stupid metaphysical points: Alexander Pope who wrote one of the most boring poems how you know what appears to us as struggle is just harmony if you move up above enough. For Hegel it's the contrary. The only God is God or the absolute idea is the absolute contradiction and the concrete particular formations are attempts to pacify, to bring to peace this contradiction. Which is why we will do this later. You know it, I was lucky enough to discover it only half a year ago, everybody knows it in England: Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday. You know at the end this identity of the biggest criminal policeman God. The whole point is how to read this: it's not simply because we are finite, God appears to us with two faces but in reality he is one above, we just cannot grasp it. Remember the final answer this God gives is: can you pass, can you also drink that drink? That is to say the message is: you think you suffer, I'm suffering. Okay which means contradiction is universality as such is the site of contradiction. Okay maybe slowly I should come to an end, we have more of Hegel. Why do you always agree when I say something against myself? Okay sorry no what I want- what I was going to say is that the next time we go to the cunning of reason where what I will try to prove is that cunning of reason is for Hegel not some mysterious reason is really controlling everything. It's precisely the Hegelian fundamental pessimism. The idea is things always go wrong and all good things that happen are a byproduct a kind of you know you want to do something you fail, if you are lucky something will come out come up as a byproduct of how things fail. Which is why I will give you I will try to elaborate next time this no- which is why okay just one thing then I will... I think that this idea Hegelian idea of cunning of reason has nothing to do with this for example ridiculous justification of Auschwitz in the sense of ah in the cunning of reason Auschwitz even if five million six whatever Jews died, maybe it did have some historical meaning helping us to become more aware of human rights whatever. This would be an obscenity for Hegel. Not only an obscenity but also theoretically wrong. Why? Because this would have involved precisely the wrong external teleology. As if some divine agency, reason, judged in advance: like imagine God sitting there like the Master of Matrix of our reality, should I allow Hitler to kill the Jews? Many people will suffer, on the other hand after the World War when he when Hitler will nonetheless lose there will be human rights, Hague tribunals so maybe let's this is an obscenity. There is no such agency. All Hegel is: there is no way to justify it in advance. Hegel's cunning of reason doesn't doesn't mean somehow it is justified. It's just that afterwards something can or cannot emerge out of it. Because like the big argument against Hegel is: but what if nothing came out of it? My God read Hegel! He knows very well! He writes about for example apropos, okay it's another question to what extent he accepts the Western vulgar historiography of of Tartar Mongol invasions. He knows. Flourishing Arab civilizations were ruined. No Aufhebung there. Nothing great arrived out of it. Although in China it’s different. Every objective Chinese will tell you that the Mongol invasion created an extraordinary- Alain Badiou, old pro-Maoist told me how he claims at least that even now in Chinese if you want to signal that a certain part of the city is safe safe in the sense that you can walk in the evening nothing happens you say: it’s as if the Mongols are in control there, you know? So it’s but okay. What I want to say is again that there are so many of these myths to be dispelled. Hegel's vision is genuinely tragic. This is the other materialist meaning I wasn't giving last time of this what you mentioned is again Athena Minerva takes flight afterwards, which means there is no in-advance teleology. All teleology for Hegel is a kind of a patch-up bricolage afterwards maybe something comes, but you know it's kind of to afterwards rationalize a failure. Okay maybe it was enough for today but next time please if you don't have any other things to do but you do have but whatever now I’m like okay I will now do a really evil thing. You don't have to read necessity like the father Chesterton. But if you really like it and you know how Chesterton loves you you should read the man and then I will try to illustrate I decided to make it funnier that maybe at the beginning we should have minutes of movie experience if you think I went low today there is a movie I will show a couple of clips next time yeah I’m not crazy with Jim Carrey The Mask that big film. Okay that one yes. Can we have ten minutes of questions because I think you did touch so many issues and maybe people want to ask for clarification or... Yes but it’s a little bit like you know can I kill myself now? Of course I can but I will not. Okay but okay we can have but I gave you pleasure so now I give you punishment, so. Okay. Yes. You say that the eye is the abstract part of negativity which has come into existence in the very domain of its own determination. Do you mean by that that the Lacanian symptom can be formed and out-borne to embody our void in the Deleuz- Yeah first I don't see quite- okay I’ll put it this way. I agree with both your statements I just don't see immediately maybe because I'm tired the link between the two. That is to say first yes Hegel's point is that the core of human personality the I is precisely a concept which comes to existence. It sounds crazy but even in an intuitive way it works because a concept is abstract. Abstract universality cannot come to a concrete existence which precisely thing means it can come to existence only as a void and that's subjectivity how should I put it no that the void how should I put it? The problem of Hegel is always not universality as such, but how a universality comes to existence. That is to say how something perceives itself as universal. As Hegel would have put it: how universality becomes for itself. Its true subjectivity which means the utter absolute singularity, irrational singularity. And as I will develop next time when we will go further apropos I will give a much more detailed reading than in my books on that's the whole point for example of the Hegelian deduction of the king of the monarch. It may be stupid monarchism but the logic is incredibly materialist dialectic. It's contrary to the stupid idea of universal logical notional necessity. It’s that the only way to actualize to finish state as a rational totality is to have a contingent idiot who precisely is a zero point of contingency. He makes decisions for no reason at all. Whatever we say, again Hegel, with we give it this clear- which is why it pisses me off so much when people reproach to Hegel that stupid argument of Krug's pen, you know like "ah can Hegel who thinks he can deduce everything deduce the pen I am writing with at this moment?" No! Not only not, but for Hegel it's not only that contingency necessarily arises in the world. It's that necessity itself is contingent. What the king is doing is precisely you remember the example that I gave you how something retroactively may become necessary. This is what the king does. You have a law but you have a contingent gesture of signing the law which then actualizes necessity. Now you will say but in nature laws are really only necessary. Here Hegel's genius comes and he says: no, they are totally contingent. Why? Because only human laws, with a human law you can say: okay, I allow torture that we can cut off the testicles of terrorists. Okay you will ask me why? Ground it! You cannot just say it. In this sense human laws cannot be just contingent. But if you ask me why does the apple fall blah blah? It's just because it does. There is a basic contingency for this sense in Hegel natural laws just are. Which means they are contingent. So but back to your question, this was the first one. The second point with the symptom: yes for Lacan and Hegel also knew it, in order for universality of the subject to exist it has to be linked to a contingent minimal positive element. Hegel was deeply I think the deepest insight of Hegelian dialectic is how necessity in order to establish itself always had to have an umbilical cord to to some utterly contingent empirical remainder. And this would have been the minimal definition of symptom, which is why no subject without symptom. Yes. Okay I think that is enough. Thank you very much. No but wait a minute now I'm one more ten... Okay more questions? If okay I think one more and then we loose. Yes. Yes it’s just a short question but maybe you could write a book about it. Do you think that the what what was the virtual sort of ingredient in uh in Nazism and fascism? And I’m thinking in the figure of Wagner. You say you're fond of the right-wing, these conservative figures and I know you've written something about it. Um what what would be a virtual ingredient of um of Nazism? Okay first I would say generally: it's relatively easy, it’s clear, anti-Semitism, the image the virtual ingredient would be simply the anti-Semitic fantasy and so on no? But uh I'm not simply saying that you know let's avoid this misunderstanding. I'm not simply saying that if something is virtual it's a priori good progressive whatever no? Uh I'm what to give you a concrete example: what really fascinates me in the way ideological texts are structured, it's how for example in my some of my cinema analysis I tried to develop how the virtual level of this what Deleuze would have called pure affect and so on undermines the explicit level. For example one way to utility it would be via homosexuality. I think that it's clear that Nazism and this is not an argument against homosexuality I've developed elsewhere why not. At the explicit level it was homophobic, it's clear that at the virtual level of this virtual obscenities it did incorporate its own version of thwarted homosexuality. But my big example here is in films: for example
shifted, in the shift from enlightenment to German idealism, from light to night, to darkness. For German idealism who we the German idealist resuscitates here the old mystical tradition, the core of subjectivity is what they call the night of the world, darkness, madness if you want. So it's no longer that we the core of our subjectivity is the light of reason threatened around by onslaughts of divine madness of natural bestiality whatever. No, the very core of subjectivity is void, darkness. In pre-Kantian universe we are simply humans, beings of reason, while with Kant the excess to be fought is immanent, it’s the inhuman core of our subjectivity itself. Okay so in order before even we go to Hegel, in order to clarify the status of it of this subjectivity I want to develop further to put a better formulation on two three things that I mentioned the last time but I think I wasn't quite clear about it. First because some of you that I met afterwards told me I was confused. Okay let me clarify them. First okay this is nothing new okay but first super-ego. What did I exactly mean by super-ego? For Lacan, let me repeat it, super-ego has nothing to do with moral conscience as far as this is a quote from Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Super-ego has nothing to do with moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are concerned. Super-ego is on the contrary for Lacan the anti-ethical agency, the stigmatization, the proof, the trace of an ethical betrayal. So we cannot, as some psychoanalysts like to do, oppose the good ego-ideal, rational, moderate, caring, and the bad irrational excessive cruel anxiety provoking super-ego. Then with of course the psychoanalytic goal to treat the patient haunted by the evil excessive super-ego and its dits so that no you should treating the patient in such a way that this bad super-ego transforms itself into a good caring ego-ideal. Lacan opposes this way out. Why? For him the ego-ideal this seemingly benevolent agency which leads us to moral growth and maturity, the ego-ideal forces us to betray what Lacan calls the law of desire, do not compromise your desire, by way of adopting reasonable demands on of the existing socio-symbolic order. The super-ego with its excessive feeling of guilt is only the necessary obverse of the ego-ideal. It exerts its unbearable pressure upon us on behalf of our betrayal of the ethics of desire. In short for Lacan the guilt we experience under the super-ego pressure is not illusory, it's actual. As Lacan put it, I quoted him two days ago, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire. And again the moment you identify with subordinate yourself to the ego-ideal, you give up you compromise your desire. And super-ego is just an obscene punishment for it. This is how Lacan very elegantly accounts for the basic paradox of super-ego noted already by Freud, that the more you obey its commands the more you are guilty. Precisely because you are guilty, you are guilty for... So again the basic message from all this: we cannot it’s as if the super-ego is in a properly dialectical way the truth of the ego-ideal. We cannot simply oppose them and say let's fight this bad irrational guilt feeling super-ego and let's reconstruct our normativity so that it will be the benevolent caring ego-ideal soliciting you to become more gentle, better and so on and so on. No, in super-ego you are paying the price for the ego-ideal, the price for betraying your desire. Another thing I want to clarify is that I think wasn't put in clear enough way is that formula that I quoted the last time for Lacan the true formula of atheism. Quote again: the true formula of atheism is not God is dead, even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder. This is quote from Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts, page English translation. Freud protects the father. The true formula of atheism is God is unconscious. What does Lacan mean by this? I think that in order to properly understand this passage, one has to read it together with another thesis of Lacan. I will quote it. And even with some of okay Lacan’s reading of some of the dreams of Freud. But here is another version. It’s from it’s from it’s from seminar seminar I think seminar The Ego in Freud's Theory. As you know, quote from Lacan, the father Karamazov's son Ivan leads the later latter into those audacious avenues taken by the thought of the cultivated man and in particular he says Ivan the son if God doesn't exist... If God doesn't exist the father says then everything is permitted. Then Lacan comments on it: quite evidently a naive notion for we analysts know full well that if God doesn't exist then nothing at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove that to us every day. End of quote. Why what does Lacan mean by it? The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead. What he doesn't know is that unconsciously he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and then engages in transgressive fantasies. Today we have on the contrary a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness and whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions. What is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures but prohibitions themselves. If God doesn't exist then everything is prohibited means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment. And of course one should also not forget to supplement this thesis with its opposite: if God exists then everything is permitted. And this is I think the most succinct definition of what we call today at least what the media call religious fundamentalism. For a fundamentalist God fully exists. He perceives himself as God's instrument. Which is why he can do whatever he wants. His acts are in advance redeemed since they express the divine will. Okay, or to put this opposition between conscious normativity and unconscious prohibitions in the terms of the opposition between a ego-ideal and super-ego. It is as if a modern atheist no longer needs God or some divine normativity as ego-ideal. The price he pays is all the stronger super-ego super-ego pressure. And again permit me to quote an old joke of mine, but it makes perfectly the point to explain to you what I mean by this. It's the story that I used already in my Ticklish Subject. I mean you I think you know of the unfortunate child who on Sunday afternoon has to visit his grandmother and it his father is a traditional ego-ideal father, good old-fashioned oppressive father. I love them. He he will tell the boy: I don't care how you feel. Shut up, behave properly, let's visit grandmother. I can guarantee you he will survive normally this child. He will it will be easy for him to rebel to the father he will just externally obey it no problem. But let's now imagine the true super-ego monster called the postmodern caring permissive father. Mine was like this. This is why he is dead and it's a good thing that he is dead, how should I put it. What would he and he did once tell this to me. What would he have told the child? You know the trick. His message would have been: you know how your grandmother loves you. But nonetheless you should visit her only if you really want to. Now every idiot and children are not idiots knows what this means. Beneath the appearance of the free choice, there is an even stronger injunction. The true message is: not only you have to visit your grandmother, but you have to do it with love. You have to do it freely. That's the trick. And okay we can play with all these games about how this is the trick of totalitarianism and so on and so on. What this simple story and there are numerous other like how choices function together and so on nicely illustrates I think is precisely how the problem today is not hedonism as neoconservatives try to convince us. Good old Adorno was right when he says precisely today in so longer consumer society a simple intense enjoyment is maybe the most difficult thing to achieve. Which is why I always use those example of mine of decaf coffee, chocolate laxative whatever. I don't think we live in a consumerist society. I think the rule is rather have it without paying the price for it. Which is why although I am the only idiot in my generation as far as I know who haven't now some of you will not even want to talk with me after saying this, but you know that I am the only one that I know in my generation who hasn't tested even a marijuana, no drugs. But I must admit that the true people who are true subject of the society of consumation are for me drug addicts. They go to the end. What and the reason marijuana is so popular it's this kind of a decaffeinated drug no the dream is you can have it without really paying the price for it. No I think that at the level of consumption you want to cheat you want to have it without paying the price of it. It’s so again I don't think we really live in I think that the whole neo-conservative diagnosis is is wrong here. That which is why we are so horrified by drugs by drugs today. Because they mean that you really surrender surrender yourself to it. Okay. The last thing I wanted to add but I already developed it even in my first talk I think is how so for Lacan you see now what’s the problem for Lacan’s ethics. It is: how is an ethics thinkable without the reference to Big Other? Now you will say but who believes in a Big Other today? Okay my reply will not only be: we believe secretly at Big Other at an unconscious level. But it's even explicitly. Let me give you some let me give you some a couple of simple examples. Even take somebody like Derrida. I claim that his notion that Derridean notion of deconstruction as justice still has it in a hidden way I claim still harbors this notion of a utopian hope of infinite justice. Of course Derrida knows it's always coming, it will never be here, but on the horizon as inaccessible there is still this idea that we should that deconstruction of justice. Although it will never come we are as it were acting with reference to a utopian point where all the symbolic accounts will be settled all the debts will be will be paid so even if this point of Last Judgment is indefinitely postponed, always to come, it remains the ultimate horizon of our activity. The we pro- so again I claim that here even Derrida remains for Lacan too metaphysical. Of course it's metaphysics under erasure how should I put it. You are aware it will never come but you need it as a point of reference. And the problem for Lacan is: is ethics possible without this reference? And again that’s what Lacan is trying to answer. How? Now Hegel. Slowly, slowly. I will try to do something very naive because I know that I think that Lacanian Hegelianism is an answer to it. Now here I’m entering very difficult waters. Why? Because as you all know your first association, and I would like to give full right to this association, is: my God of all people why Hegel? Isn't what are your first assu- this is what I will try to do today. It may be that it will be a little bit confused but something very simple and please if anything is not clear interrupt me. Okay if you take this literally means you should interrupt me all the time but nonetheless with moderation first. What are probably your first associations with Hegel? I hope you agree that this is a productive way to begin. There are four common topics which are usually associated with Hegel and which probably would have made you think that Hegel is the very opposite of this ethics or even ontology without reference to a Big Other. First, isn't Hegel the ultimate absolute how should I put it guy of the Big Other which even has a name: Absolute Knowing? The idea of a self-enclosed notional totality. So isn't the whole point of Lacan the Big Other doesn't exist precisely that we never can count on this utopian point where every element every injustice that we suffer will be accounted for in the sense of properly condemned properly judged that we have to renounce it? Again so isn't Hegel the exact opposite in the sense of not only he claims we need this reference to absolute point of symbolization where everything is notionally articulated he even pretends to embody to develop this absolute knowledge? Although my God, read Hegel please. Because here already things turn mysterious. Because you know the first problem is that in a first approach Hegel may appear an idiot. In the sense of there is something ridiculous in it. Look this guy, rather fat, not beautiful, born in Germany in he really thought he knows, you know there is something ridiculous, this pure stupid guy thought absolute knowledge, I know everything. It's not as simple as that. The first mystery is: read Hegel closely and you will discover how often he historicizes absolute knowing. For him this is not: I’m at the end of history. Basically his point is at every point precisely because we are finite we are thrown into the position of absolute knowing. Which simply means: absolute knowing is not for Hegel I know everything. It's the absolute closure. It means you have to accept that you are caught in a certain horizon. It's precisely what was it you who mentioned this yesterday Costas this owl of Minerva? I’m for Latin again against Greek. Minerva, okay sorry. But you know what I mean like that that it's our limitation. The idea is you have to accept the finite the finitude of your horizon. And all you can do is describe it. It's interesting how read the very end of Hegel's system, which is the last part of his the very conclusion of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, where of course in his usual arrogant way after Kant, Fichte, Schelling he talks about himself, no? Okay, but then he says: for the time being this is what till furth- twice he relativizes it. Clearly historicizing it. Not only this but for example people say how crazy Hegel was in his Philosophy of Nature he thought he can ded- no in many places in his Philosophy of Nature he openly he says: this is all we know now but there are many new things to be discovered and so on. Even in his when people say: okay but historically doesn't he claim the end of history? No, he claim his claim is simply that at every point we are at the end of history. In the simple sense that you see the trick? The teleology that critics attribute to Hegel, Hegel's critical point is that we live in this teleology. Which means we perceive our point as absolute and even when we pretend to transgress our situation we do it against the background of where we are. Read his again introductions to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History where he deals with United States and Russia. Not in the same passages but twice he repeats the same formula and at least admit he wasn't an idiot for a guy from early 19th century. He says: apropos United States and apropos Russia these are the lands of the future. Once he even says: in a letter of the next century. So he wasn't an idiot when he claimed in that America United States he meant and Russia he said: we cannot yet say. So again it's absolutely clear he doesn't mean: I am at the end. He means radical historicism in the sense of every epoch has to accept its closure. Another wonderful thing. People accuse Hegel of this German like Heidegger you know Germanocentrism, emphasizing German language, using all these play words like for example you know Aufhebung, to sublate to overcome, three meanings which the term has only in German: to negate, to preserve and to raise at the higher level. So isn't it nonetheless that somehow Hegel secretly privileges German? Ah, there is a triumphant proof in one of the letters that I found that it's not so. No Hegel's point is wonderful here if you read him closely. He says this Hegel's point is that language as such is against thought. You have to think against your language. Language is too contingent, too stupid and so on, you have to if you want to elaborate concepts you have to think against language. Language seduces you with its non-dialectical form shape. But now comes the genius. Hegel is not naive in claiming: yes of course this means we should move to pure thought above language. Hegel at the same time knows that you can do this only within language. How? By mobilizing the only resource that you have in language precisely the most contingent irrational elements in language. Which as Hegel emphasized it are totally contingent, there is no deeper deeper reason at work and specific to any language. Now comes the proof. I found the letter, I can quote it to you next time, I forgot, which is a letter to his Dutch friend. You know all this mythology Hegel accepted a post in Berlin because it's the central German university so that he could be a German philosopher. Fuck off, I mean. Read his letters. The only thing that interest him interested him is how much money. He oscillated to the end: do I get better conditions here, there and so on. Not only this. At the same time he was considering an invitation to Amsterdam. And it's so nice that he almost accepted it then the problem was money no that's philosophy I’m sorry no but what I want to say is that it's so nice that he already started to learn Dutch. And he in despair wrote to some to a Dutch friend of him: could you learn me tell me send me a list of Dutch workplace contingent jokes and so on? That was the way for him to approach a language. In this most so isn't this a nice paradox that: yes, you have to move above the stupid contingency of language to notional necessity, but since we think only in language, the only way to do it is not through this analytical dream of purify language of purely logical language. On the contrary, relying on what is the most contingent in language. Okay if we are talking about all this I cannot but mention another element which I like most in Hegel which is okay it's a joke but I like it as a joke superstitious joke. You know that the point where people usually make fun of Hegel is that okay it's a historical tragedy. I don't know when but a year or two after Neptune is the last the ninth planet of is it Neptune? No Poseidon. No that's now you are cheating now we're at that point Neptune the ninth planet... sorry Pluto yes. After Pluto was already discovered but Hegel didn't know it. So he thought still there are only eight. He deduced the necessity why there are eight only. Why they have to be eight. Now it's easy for idiots to laugh haha stupid Hegel. I had you can imagine an intellectual orgasm when two years ago I read the latest discovery, you know that scientists today think that Pluto is a satellite it's not really a planet. So Hegel... okay I know very well but it's nice to hear it you know I know it's not now... okay but let's go on more seriously. So there are four clichés about Hegel. All I want to do today in the remaining hour is just somehow to open up to you a different way to look at them. To see how what appears the most crazy idealist Hegel can be given a very rational materialist foundation, can be read in a different way. So the first feature is this but wait a minute, Hegel, absolute knowledge, the closed network of of reason rational edifice. Where is here the place for contingency and so on? Second thing connected with this one precisely necessity-contingency. Isn't it that in Hegel contingency is always ultimately subordinated to conceptual necessity? Isn't it that in Hegel at its best contingency is the mode of appearance of a deeper conceptual necessity? For a superficial view a process natural historical may appear contingent but as a philosopher you have to move penetrate the deeper logical notional necessity. So how is this? Third point: what about concrete universality? Isn't this the ultimate Hegelian madness? Doesn't concrete universality mean that we do not have really a gap between universal and particular, but all particular content of a notion can be deduced developed out of its universal form? Isn't this the ultimate idealist madness? Last feature: cunning of reason. Isn't this precisely the recapitulation of idealist madness? Isn't the idea that even when things appear to go wrong we just don't know but behind our backs some higher rational authority, reason in history, God ultimately, is pulling the strings so that doesn't cunning of reason mean: don't worry too much, at the end everything serves a higher purpose. What appears as a catastrophe is always a priori a blessing in disguise. And of course then we can play these cheap games. Hegel is for this reason not able to grasp a phenomenon like Auschwitz because it's obscene to claim that Auschwitz is a blessing in disguise and so on and so on. So let's do something. Let's start with absolute knowing as this complete network of notional determinations. I would like to begin here with Deleuze. Why Deleuze? Because Deleuze is of course the ultimate anti-Hegelian. And my joke will be that precisely Deleuze is here close to Hegel. Uh as you probably know some of you at least, the starting point of Deleuze’s what he calls, wonderful term, transcendental empiricism, is that there is always a hidden virtual aspect to any actual object or process. Actual things are not ontologically complete. In order to get a complete view of reality, we must supplement it with the virtual dimension. Uh what does he mean by this? Let me give you a example from Marxist historiography, not the orthodox one, but more Benjamin. What’s the whole point of Benjamin’s theses on history? It's basically the same, is that for example in order to grasp a French Revolution it's not enough to see what really happened there. You have as it were to include in it all the virtualities, all the emancipatory dreams which were betrayed. But you know like it is as if in order to grasp something which happened you should include in it the alternate histories what might have happened all the betrayed hopes and so on and so on because as you probably know ultimately Benjamin's view is that the final big proletarian revolution will precisely redeem retroactively these thwarted hopes. So that this is for Benjamin repetition in history. To repeat an event does not mean to repeat it the way it was. It means to repeat what failed in the original. To repeat it in a redemptive way. To repeat it by not missing what was failed. And in I think that even Marx should be reread in this way. We all like to quote from Marx this cynical acerbic remark on how French Revolution exploded in this Jacobining enthusiasm, human rights, freedom, but the truth was that they were just without being aware of it laying the foundation for the common market bourgeois vulgar life and so on. But it's not as simple as that. Marx's point is not those were only illusions whose truth was the bourgeois market economy. There was of course an excess there which was disappointed, but this excess is precisely what continues to haunt history. And it is as if the final revolution will redeem all that. Okay you got the basic idea. It is something a little bit, if I may be pretentious here, like in quantum physics where you have also this idea that what in order to grasp what actual- it's kind of open ontology. In order to grasp what actually happens you also have to grasp what might have happened. That is to say this is the proper sense for Deleuze of the term virtuality. Virtuality is possibility which is not simply canceled once it is not actualized. But it continues to haunt what happens so that in order to understand what happens you have to include as its echo that reverberates the possibilities. I mean to give you a simple moralistic example, and we are talking here about ethico-practical level, it’s as if remember when you are in a tight ethical position in the sense that dilemma you have to do something and you fail. Isn't it that your whole life will be haunted by what you should have done? You know it's in this sense that it's not enough to know what happened, what might have happened is part of what happened in order to get that's the idea. Agamben developed this although Agamben has as all Italians problem with Hegel how should I put it he thinks that Hegel doesn't get it but Agamben is right when he says that we should okay we should they did it already in medieval times some thinkers rehabilitate possibility in the sense that in the sense that to grasp the actuality you have to grasp again its inherent possibilities. So again back to Deleuze. This move from an actual given thing to its virtual conditions to this fantasmatic background of possibilities is for Deleuze the transcendental move. The deployment of the transcendental conditions of the given. However what does this mean for Deleuze? It's not the usual transcendental genesis. It's what Deleuze calls a genesis without dynamism, a static genesis. What he simply means again is that when you grasp a thing as in kind of a static superposition all the virtual all the virtualities that sustain it are co-present. This static character of the virtual field finds its clearest expression in a wonderful a wonderful notion by Deleuze developed already in his Difference and Repetition: the notion of a pure past. Not the past into which things present pass but an absolute past. A past quote where all events including those that have sunk without trace are stored and remembered as their passing away. So a virtual past which already contains also things which are present. As Deleuze puts it: a present can become past because in a way it is already past. It can perceive itself as part of the past. We are now doing what will have been history. Another quote from Difference and Repetition: it is with respect to this pure element of the past understood as the past in general as an a priori past that a given former present is reproducible and the present itself is able to reflect itself. End of quote, page This means that this pure past does this mean that this pure past then involves a truly deterministic notion of the universe so that everything to happen all actual spatio-temporal deployment is already part of a immemorial atemporal virtual network? That would be the first association to what I just said no? Isn't Deleuze here aiming at something like, I'm sorry for this vulgar common references, but in relativity theory you know this Einsteinian vision of time as the fourth dimension of space in the sense that what we perceive as temporal development is really just another spatial dimension so that if we were able to see things like with a divine view objectively, we would see that the universe really is totally static contemporaneous and that what we perceive as time is just another dimension of space along which we move while we are in time. If this were the case now I hope you got my connection with Hegel, if this were the case then of course Deleuze would have been a Hegelian and Hegel would have been a Hegelian in this bad stupid sense. There is already a complete past in the sense that a complete network where everything that is is described in its truth allocated its proper place. So that in order to conceive ourselves what we are we have to locate ourselves into this past. But is this the truth? No, Deleuze adds something very precise. He says the pure past must be all the past but must also be amenable to change through the occurrence of any new present. So the paradox is that it is a complete past it is a totality which but this totality itself past present included can change how? Ah now comes my stupid surprise. I know you know the text but admit it okay maybe some of you are intelligent enough I wonder if you would have expected me to quote it here. I always have a respect for conservatives, intelligent conservatives. TS Eliot, you know his what's that big text my God Tradition and Individual Talent. I think he gave a very nice formulation there and I’m sorry to inform you but I like Eliot he in at the end of his Idea Towards a Christian Society he has a wonderful formula where he says that sometimes to be a sectarian is the only way to save the general idea and so on. There are formulas in okay. Let me now give you this longer quote and then read it in a Deleuzian Hegelian way. You all know it just to remind you. Tradition cannot be inherited and if you want it to inherit it you must obtain it by great labor. Tradition involves in the first place the historical sense which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his 25th year. And the historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence. The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together is what makes a writer traditional. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone, you must set him for contrast and comparison among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic not merely historical criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere is not one-sided. What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves which is modified by the introduction of the new work of art among them. The existing order is complete before this is Hegelian closure of absolute knowing. Listen: the existing order is complete before the new work arrives. For order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art to the whole are readjusted and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European or of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. End of quote. So when Eliot writes that judging a living poet you must set him among the dead, he I think formulates precisely a nice example of this Deleuzian pure past. And when he writes that the existing order is complete before the new work arrives for order to persist after the supervention of novelty the whole existing order must be altered and so on and so on, he no less clearly formulates the paradoxical link between the completeness of the past and our capacity to change it retroactively. Precisely because the past is complete each new work rearranges its entire balance. Another example: recall Borges, I always found him boring but that's another story it's a good example. Borges the precise formulation by Borges of the relationship between Kafka and the multitude of the precursors of Kafka from old Chinese authors to Robert Browning. As Borges put it: Kafka’s idiosyncrasy in greater or lesser degree is present in each of these writings, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it. That is to say it would not exist. Each writer creates his precursors. His works modifies our conception of the past as it will modify the future. End of quote. So the properly dialectical solution of the dilemma of: is it really there in the source or did we only read into it, is: it is there but we can only perceive and stay this retroactively. So you see the paradox: we are at the same time less free and more free than we think. We are passive, determined by the past, dependent on the past. But we have the freedom to define the scope of this determination. You know it's as if for this properly Hegelian Deleuzian I use with full consciousness the iron- consciousness of irony this term: Deleuzian Hegelian perspective, it's wrong to see the scope of freedom in I'm not totally determined by the past there is an opening. No, we are totally determined by the past, we are always part of a closed totality. We cannot but we can change the entire totality as such. Every true change changes also changes the past the past itself. So what this means now we come to more crucial points. What this means, and I will quote Bergson that I quote in almost all my books, is that of course we are not talking here about crazy temporal idealism. It's not that we can travel to the past and change it. But we can insert as Bergson put it and Deleuze likes to quote him: we can insert new possibilities into the past. For example after Kafka, of course Browning or those old idiots they remain factually the same, but the virtual dimension of possibilities changes. In other words, this is then another elegant Hegelian reversal of another commonplace. There is another commonplace which says: yes of course we have this existential opposition: on the one hand in so far as we are engaged in events, we perceive ourselves as free. You can do whatever you want, you are under the pressure to choose, but retroactively from afterwards we can perceive the necessity. You know you think you were free, when you look at the situation with the hindsight you see you really had no choice it was predetermined. From the Hegelian perspective it's rather the opposite: while you act immediately you think I cannot do it otherwise than I did it. It's only retroactively that you can introduce possibility into what appeared a necessity. In other words, now we come to the second point which will bring us back back to possibility: dialectical analysis is not simply the discovery of the underlying secret necessity which governs possibility. It's I’m tempted to say almost the opposite. First in the sense that it we should always remember that Hegel is a performative thinker. As he always repeats too, when we penetrate a deeper ground of something, the very movement of penetrating there creates this ground. You in the process of disc- for Hegel the basic hereticist illusion is the illusion of discovering something which in reality in the very process of discovering it you are creating it. So when Hegel speaks about the progress from contingency to deeper necessity, of course he talks about it, always bear in mind this is not a simple epistemological progress of discovering the true ground. This is a process of how necessity constitutes itself. And there is the catch: this process in itself is contingent. The true Hegelian so when we speak about Hegelian dialectic of necessity and contingency, it's much more complex than it may appear. It's not only things look contingent ah there is a deeper dialectical necessity. It's also the opposite: the true unity of necessity and contingency is contingency. That is to say the very the historical struggle is not simply contingent, we struggle we don't know what will be the result, but is a contingent struggle for which necessity will prevail. Let me give you a couple of nice examples. I really love this one because here unfortunately I have to disagree with Rousseau, I will read you a quote from why because this is Rousseau at his most Stalinist and I feel like betraying my mother father disagreeing, but it's a wonderful quote where in a truly dialectical Hegelian way we can show how where Rousseau goes wrong here is precisely by not getting this performative dimension by fetishizing the process. Rousseau in his social contract of course confronts this simple problem: after referendum voting general will is established, what happens with the minority? Why should minority obey the majority? And as a good Stalinist my heart is with him here he concludes absolutely they should obey it. None of this shit democratic minority blah blah. Why? Read it and wonder. I was shocked to find this paragraph. Apart from the primitive contract, the vote of the majority always binds all the rest. This follows from the contract social contract itself. But it is asked how a man can be both free and forced to conform to wills which are not his own. How are the opponents at once free and subject to laws they have not agreed to? I retort all quote from Rousseau: Rousseau Social Contract if you want Book Chapter subdivision on voting. I retort that the question is wrongly put. The citizen gives his consent to all the laws, including those which are passed in spite of his opposition and even those which punish him when he dares to break any of them. The constant will of all the members of the state is the general will. By virtue of it they are citizens and free. When in the popular assembly now comes madness: a law is proposed, what the people is asked is not exactly whether it approves or rejects the proposal, but whether it is in conformity this proposal with the general will which is their true will. Each man in giving his vote states his opinion on that point and the general will is found by counting votes. When therefore the opinion is contrary to my own the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken and that what I thought to be the general will was not so. If my particular opinion had carried the day I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will and it is in that case that I should not have been free. End of quote. You got the madness. The totalitarian catch here is the short circuit in Rousseau between let's call it by today's names, constative and performative dimension. Rousseau reads the voting procedure not as a performative act of decision. The question for him is not we will decide what is the general will. But as an act of expressing an opinion, of guessing what is the general will which is then automatically of course substantialized into something that precedes voting. So you get the point: for him when you are asked to vote for or against, you do not it's not a vote about what you want. It's kind of a opinion poll: you are asked what do you think that the majority thinks? And if you are in a minority it simply means that you were mistaken. So of course then you have to obey the majority. In other words again those who remain in the minority are not simply a minority, in learning the result of the vote which if it runs against their individual vote, they do not simply learn that they are a minority, what they learn is that they were mistaken about what is the general will and now you know you have to obey it. What I find here so interesting is the parallel between this substantialization of the general will and the religious notion of predestination. In the case of predestination, faith is also substantialized into a decision that precedes the process. So that the states of individual's activities is not to performatively constitute their faith but to discover or guess one's pre-existing state fate. What is obfuscated in both cases is the dialectical reversal of contingency into necessity. That is to say the way the outcome of a contingent process is the appearance of necessity. And the guy whom I really appreciate, I hope we'll have a chance to invite him here, the French theorist of rational choice Jean-Pierre Dupuy describes wonderfully this process apropos of catastrophes. This is a quote from his book The Small Metaphysics of Tsunamis. Quote from Dupuy: the catastrophic event is inscribed into the future as a destiny for sure but also as a contingent accident. It could not have taken place even if in futur anterieur it appears as necessary. If an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe for example, it could not not have taken place. Nonetheless in so far as it did not take place it is not inevitable. It is thus the event's actualization, the fact that it takes place, which retroactively creates its necessity. That's what precisely Rousseau doesn't see. That law is necessary but this necessity is contingently created. Dupuy provides a one a wonderful example from the French presidential elections of In the January forecast of the elections the one of the candidates at that point was Balladur, this is how the main polling institute wrote: this is a quote: if on next May the date of elections, Monsieur Balladur will be elected, if he will be elected, one can say that the presidential election was decided before it even took place. You get the point: if something contingent happened, retroactively fate is constituted. If accidentally an event takes place, it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable. This, not the commonplaces on how the underlying necessity expresses itself is in contingencies, is the Hegelian dialectics of contingency and necessity. And I think we have even the same this is how we perceive history. You know often what is imputed to Hegel is just Hegel's description of reality. Let's remember now Bush presidency. We all know it was the result of cheating Florida and so on and incidentally the best article that I read commentary on Bush elections the first one Florida was by a South African guy who coming from some small country I think Burkina Faso or what adopted in a wonderful reversal of racism adopted the perspective as if he is coming from a civilized country, well maybe this was true, visiting a primitive country United States. You know he said you know this is a barbarian country where president's brother is the local boss who corrupts there you know describing as a banana republic where with a little bit of cheating and so on. But after Bush won through this contingent cheating, now we already write books about you know the deep necessity of the defeat of liberalism of the shift towards neoconservative- but you get my point. The point here is that it's not simply that this necessity is false, it is a necessity. But necessity which once it is contingently established it is retroactively a necessity. In this aspect if you permit me a little bit of brutal racist Western Western Eurocentrism, in this sense predestination is foreign to its Eastern counterpoint reincarnation. What they both share is the idea that my present state is predetermined. However in the first case it is predetermined by the contingent divine decision which precedes my existence. So that the state of individual's activities is not to performatively constitute their fate but to discover or guess one's pre-existing state fate. What is obfuscated in both cases is the dialectical reversal of contingency into necessity, that is to say the way the outcome of a contingent process is the appearance of necessity. What I find not so sympathetic with reincarnation is that it's the ethical character of your past acts which determines you. I prefer much more this Western inscrutability which means really that we retroactively constitute our fate you know it doesn't blame you it's God did it I don't know why it's not because in the past life I was screwing my mother or whatever you know it's I don't know what at least more open. Okay from here to make it clear I would like to return to the example which I already mentioned in the first talk, you remember that because that's what we're dealing with with that. You remember the Billy Buddgate example: a novel no first I saw the film I saw the film is bad must be based on a good novel then I read the novel even worse than the film. This is what I’m talking about: the film although coming after the novel retroactively inserted a new possibility into the novel. This is exactly exactly the same movement. Again this movement by means of which and again I don't like to repeat myself too much that is to say read my books when I quote that famous passage from Bergson when he says how we can reinsert possibilities into the past. But this is even nothing mysterious imagine how isn't it how something appears to you impossible, these are true political acts: you do something which appears impossible once you dare to do it of course there is always contingency if it comes out okay it retroactively it not only becomes actual but it even as it were retroactively creates its own necessity. Why not? The same goes I think for the October Revolution. Now it's easy to see how it had to explode. But it was very clear to Lenin that it depended on chance but once it is here it is here it reappears retroactively as necessary. So again I think that contrary to what may appear that is to say contrary to the idea that dialectical analysis discovers underlying necessity beneath contingencies, the appearance of contingencies. It's almost I would say the opposite. What a true dialectical analysis does is it takes a period a historical period which from our backward perspective appears just a necessary development. Let's say French Revolution we know the phrases first stage Jacobinism Napoleon and so on: necessary stages. But that's not the the whole truth about it. In order to grasp the concrete historical dynamics of the period, you have to include into it all the virtualities, the possibilities, the thwarted hopes and so on. You have to reinscribe possibility into necessity and not only to make a more plastic presentation but precisely how to put it: to grasp what happened what really happened you have to grasp what might have happened but failed. And this is dialectical analysis proper. It's precisely to it's not it's not to close the past in the sense of now we get a complete image. It's on the contrary to open the past, to see this is dialectical genesis proper. It's not necessary evolution, it's this outbreak of possibilities, outbreak of possibilities which was which was there. Okay, okay, let's make okay I wanted to go here a little bit further on but let's okay. What I will do is now to move to the other moment. Now I hope this covers a little bit the first two points: absolute knowledge how you saw the point absolute knowledge is still simply the finite historical closure and we are determined by it. But what Hegel allows for is a an even more radical intervention where what Eliot was talking about we can we can change all of it, the totality we can retroactively change the past every historical interventions doesn't only change doesn't only introduce a break between present and the past it retroactively changes the past itself radically. Here this is the proper dialectical moment. Uh to give you a simple example just to get the logic. Walter Scott and I always liked this here I share the taste of Lukács and this Marxist dogmatism. I think that wonderful things happened in English literature in early and mid 19th century. I think Dickens is great I think sorry to tell you this Walter Scott is great. Okay Walter Scott Waverley, you know it's not only the passage from primitive Highland authentic whatever pre-modern Scottish clan community to modern bourgeois community. It's how in this move the very meaning of pre-modern tribal life changes. What was this authentic free tribal life becomes common outlaw criminality. Here at some points I must say I think so Hegel is not radical enough with regard to himself and where unfortunately I must inform you precisely with regard to sexuality. With sexuality Hegel when he deals with sexuality remains too naive in the sense of treating sexuality as a natural substance which then animals simply practice it in an instinctual way they copulate while men eh elaborated it translated into a more cultural form. Instead of just raping a wife or whatever smelling her if her smell is good and then raping her whatever I eh these elaborate procedures of seduction and so on. So it is as if the natural substance remains the same but with humans it's cultivated. What Hegel doesn't get is that once you cultivate sexuality the very substance of sexuality retroactively changes. What you cultivate are not natural instincts but are what Freud would have called this unconditional death drive. You know what get my point? We don't have only again it's the same triple we don't when we pass from nature to culture this passage creates a third point of reference which would be something that is neither culture nor nature but is sexuality in its absolute passionate mortal dimension this death drive like the myth of Tristan sacrifice go to the end. This is what we are really trying to cultivate and this is not nature. You got my point: culturalization radically changes the very starting point. So this would be what I’m talking what I’m talking about. Okay so let’s go on now. Maybe we do have time for time for another sorry do I have it here or where? Yes. For another moment which again I will refer here to some of my works but what I already did say but it’s crucial to get it. Again I will try to develop it through Deleuze. Ironically now next point okay we covered now as I said necessity contingency absolute knowledge let’s go to the unfortunate concrete universality. What can be more crazy than that? Ah Hegel here or Deleuze a big Hegelian. In what sense? Uh you know that Deleuze ironically and I think this is the beauty of Deleuze even resuscitates the notion of idea. Deleuze is very Platonic here but how does he reinterpret in an anti-Platonic way the notion of idea? For Deleuze idea idea is not idea in the sense of fully elaborated concept but idea is to cut a long story short: the problem. Like the virtual open aspect and all empirical particular solutions are ways to solve but you always fail this problem. It’s a nice quote from Difference and Repetition: neither the problem nor the question is a subjective determination marking a moment of insufficiency in knowledge. Problematic structure is part of objects themselves allowing them to be grasped as signs. Because here we find a wonderful formulation in Deleuze which cannot but appear very strange where Deleuze opposes direct signs to indirect representations. Again Difference and Repetition a creative thought thought has to make a movement itself into a work without interpositions. He has to substitute direct signs for mediate representations. This sounds crazy because we think that representations of a thing are direct. You see a thing. Signs are mediate. For Deleuze signs are direct representations are mediate. What does he mean? Simply think about you are struggling with a certain problem you propose a series of solutions. So what is Deleuze’s point here? The first point that this is not just a feature of our knowledge it's inscribed into reality itself. Like in a wonderful rereading of Darwinian problematic of evolution for Deleuze the way nature experiments with organs it's for example eye is a reply particular reply of nature to a certain problem: problem of what to do with light and so on and so on. So in other words this tension between virtual problem and actual solutions what we actually see organs is not just in our knowledge it's inscribed into reality itself precisely in the guise of the opposition between between virtual and between virtual and actual. In this sense representations are indirect. Why? Because in representation we only see answers objects. What we don't see this is why they are indirect is the problem. The only way to grasp a thing concretely is to see the problem to which this thing is an answer. That is to say to conceive it as a sign of that problem. And here I claim Deleuze is as close as possible he no wonder he even uses the term to the Hegelian notion of concrete universality. Why? Let's think about it in these terms. For Hegel that what Deleuze calls idea, let's call it a problem, is universal and answers are particular actually existing proposals to solve the problem. And I’m sorry of quoting an old example of mine but it’s still the best one that I can think of, the example of and also at the same time the reason why I oppose as ideological this fashionable notion of alternate modernities. I think that Frederic Jameson in his book on singular modernity provided a definitive criticism of the notion of multiple alternate modernities. Why? What’s the idea of alternate modernities? The idea is that we here in the West have our own modernity: liberal capitalist one and so on. Why should we impose in a non-historical way our model to all other societies? Why shouldn't there be a Latin-American modernity, Hindu modernity, Asian modernity, African modernity, why can't they have alternate modernities? I agree with Jameson who claims that this is ideology at its purest. Why? Because let's be clear: modernity is another name for capitalism. So what alternate modernity means is that: why is it ideological? Because the dream of course is: we can have our own modernity which will avoid the deadlock of capitalist antagonisms and so on. But that, that is to say the idea that the deadlock of modernity doesn't belong to the very universal concept of modernity but is just the result of specific contingent local European conditions is ideology at its purest. Ideology is precisely the dream that you can have modernity without paying the price for it. In other words you can have capitalism without class antagonisms. No wonder then that that’s my reply to those who favor as liberating for Third World the notion of alternate modernities. Sorry but in Europe in first half of 20th century we did already have one big big big alternate modernity. If you don't know it was called fascism. Fascism is precisely an attempt of alternate modernity. How to have modernity, modern development science, futurism blah blah, without paying the price in class struggle, social- that’s the whole point. And one can even argue that at the different level Stalinism is a modernity. So back to my point: why is this ideology? Because it shifts or relocates the tension, the antagonistic tension from universality to particularity. It is as if antagonistic tension class struggle and so on is something that only belongs to our contingent experience. But the Hegelian-Deleuzian way to grasp it would have been the opposite one, would have been to say what defines modernity at its innermost is not an abstract idea of modernity but it’s a problem as Deleuze would have put it. That is to say an antagonism, the deadlock of modernity. Let's call it dialectic of enlightenment, class struggle, capitalist antagonism, a deadlock. And from here we can then grasp that’s the proper dialectic. All the point is not to claim that there are not alternate modernities. In so far as the advocates of alternate modernities want to say that we should not forget that European modernity or the predominant liberal capitalist modernity is just one of modernities. Here we should fully agree: what actually exists are just different modernities. These are answers. But answers to what? Different answers to the general universal problem. Modernity at its most fundamentalist, again, a problem, a contradiction, to put it in Hegel, problem which means antagonism of capitalist society. And from this perspective concrete examples, concrete models of modernity, fascist modernity, Stalinist modernity, Western liberal modernity, other possible Latin-American populist modernity, whatever you want, now I hope you will get the point are they are not simply they are not simply examples of modernity. There is a proper dialectical tension between universal as problem and particular as solution. They are at the same time attempts to resolve the tension inscribed into the universality. What is fascism as a concrete form of modernity if not an attempt to resolve the antagonism of modernity by saying: if we do it in the fascist way, that is to say private property strong state yes but not not too much market and especially not too much of this Jewish individual freedom, then we will avoid the deadlock of modernity. We will have modernization but the society will remain hierarchical, stable, organically linked and so on. What is the liberal dream if not another way of saying: if we stick to liberty, if we reduce state to night watchman and so on, we will also avoid antagonisms of modernity? What is Stalinism if not another attempt to resolve the deadlock of modernity? So you get my point: the paradox is that it is not that particular elements fight each other, there is a contradiction between fascism, liberalism, communism, against the background of the empty universal notion of modernity. No, the site of tension is universality itself. Imagine universality not as an empty container but as antagonism. And imagine particular forms not as simple examples of universality but as something which tries to mystify, obfuscate or rather resolve the tension of universality. And to cut a long story short this exactly is what Hegel means by concrete universality. It's not any magic deduction you know like out of universal you develop everything, it's that concrete examples are not simply the dynamic of concrete examples is not a dynamic external to universality. It's at the same time a tension between concrete examples and universalities, that is to say attempts to resolve the crisis of universality. For example this is the Hegelian dialectic of state, that state is for Hegel a problem. A problem of how to keep organic society of of how what's for Hegel the problem of the state? It's again how to keep a complex society organic, united and so on. And concrete forms of the state are precisely answers to this problem and answers which incidentally for Hegel always ultimately fail, which is why at the end of the state you pass to religious community and so on. Quite on the contrary of what people claim that for Hegel analytical material particular content always fits universality. On the contrary they never fit. The gap is constitutive. That is to say why don't they fit? Precisely because again remember the universality is the site of antagonism and you have this ten- in this sense that's the beauty of it, I think that how should I put it universality, Hegel is here at the radical opposite of this pagan New Age view: we small people are caught in our struggles but from the divine perspective all is one and encompassing. Don't you have one of your those stupid metaphysical points: Alexander Pope who wrote one of the most boring poems how you know what appears to us as struggle is just harmony if you move up above enough. For Hegel it's the contrary. The only God is God or the absolute idea is the absolute contradiction and the concrete particular formations are attempts to pacify, to bring to peace this contradiction. Which is why we will do this later. You know it, I was lucky enough to discover it only half a year ago, everybody knows it in England: Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday. You know at the end this identity of the biggest criminal policeman God. The whole point is how to read this: it's not simply because we are finite, God appears to us with two faces but in reality he is one above, we just cannot grasp it. Remember the final answer this God gives is: can you pass, can you also drink that drink? That is to say the message is: you think you suffer, I'm suffering. Okay which means contradiction is universality as such is the site of contradiction. Okay maybe slowly I should come to an end, we have more of Hegel. Why do you always agree when I say something against myself? Okay sorry no what I want- what I was going to say is that the next time we go to the cunning of reason where what I will try to prove is that cunning of reason is for Hegel not some mysterious reason is really controlling everything. It's precisely the Hegelian fundamental pessimism. The idea is things always go wrong and all good things that happen are a byproduct a kind of you know you want to do something you fail, if you are lucky something will come out come up as a byproduct of how things fail. Which is why I will give you I will try to elaborate next time this no- which is why okay just one thing then I will... I think that this idea Hegelian idea of cunning of reason has nothing to do with this for example ridiculous justification of Auschwitz in the sense of ah in the cunning of reason Auschwitz even if five million six whatever Jews died, maybe it did have some historical meaning helping us to become more aware of human rights whatever. This would be an obscenity for Hegel. Not only an obscenity but also theoretically wrong. Why? Because this would have involved precisely the wrong external teleology. As if some divine agency, reason, judged in advance: like imagine God sitting there like the Master of Matrix of our reality, should I allow Hitler to kill the Jews? Many people will suffer, on the other hand after the World War when he when Hitler will nonetheless lose there will be human rights, Hague tribunals so maybe let's this is an obscenity. There is no such agency. All Hegel is: there is no way to justify it in advance. Hegel's cunning of reason doesn't doesn't mean somehow it is justified. It's just that afterwards something can or cannot emerge out of it. Because like the big argument against Hegel is: but what if nothing came out of it? My God read Hegel! He knows very well! He writes about for example apropos, okay it's another question to what extent he accepts the Western vulgar historiography of of Tartar Mongol invasions. He knows. Flourishing Arab civilizations were ruined. No Aufhebung there. Nothing great arrived out of it. Although in China it’s different. Every objective Chinese will tell you that the Mongol invasion created an extraordinary- Alain Badiou, old pro-Maoist told me how he claims at least that even now in Chinese if you want to signal that a certain part of the city is safe safe in the sense that you can walk in the evening nothing happens you say: it’s as if the Mongols are in control there, you know? So it’s but okay. What I want to say is again that there are so many of these myths to be dispelled. Hegel's vision is genuinely tragic. This is the other materialist meaning I wasn't giving last time of this what you mentioned is again Athena Minerva takes flight afterwards, which means there is no in-advance teleology. All teleology for Hegel is a kind of a patch-up bricolage afterwards maybe something comes, but you know it's kind of to afterwards rationalize a failure. Okay maybe it was enough for today but next time please if you don't have any other things to do but you do have but whatever now I’m like okay I will now do a really evil thing. You don't have to read necessity like the father Chesterton. But if you really like it and you know how Chesterton loves you you should read the man and then I will try to illustrate I decided to make it funnier that maybe at the beginning we should have minutes of movie experience if you think I went low today there is a movie I will show a couple of clips next time yeah I’m not crazy with Jim Carrey The Mask that big film. Okay that one yes. Can we have ten minutes of questions because I think you did touch so many issues and maybe people want to ask for clarification or... Yes but it’s a little bit like you know can I kill myself now? Of course I can but I will not. Okay but okay we can have but I gave you pleasure so now I give you punishment, so. Okay. Yes. You say that the eye is the abstract part of negativity which has come into existence in the very domain of its own determination. Do you mean by that that the Lacanian symptom can be formed and out-borne to embody our void in the Deleuz- Yeah first I don't see quite- okay I’ll put it this way. I agree with both your statements I just don't see immediately maybe because I'm tired the link between the two. That is to say first yes Hegel's point is that the core of human personality the I is precisely a concept which comes to existence. It sounds crazy but even in an intuitive way it works because a concept is abstract. Abstract universality cannot come to a concrete existence which precisely thing means it can come to existence only as a void and that's subjectivity how should I put it no that the void how should I put it? The problem of Hegel is always not universality as such, but how a universality comes to existence. That is to say how something perceives itself as universal. As Hegel would have put it: how universality becomes for itself. Its true subjectivity which means the utter absolute singularity, irrational singularity. And as I will develop next time when we will go further apropos I will give a much more detailed reading than in my books on that's the whole point for example of the Hegelian deduction of the king of the monarch. It may be stupid monarchism but the logic is incredibly materialist dialectic. It's contrary to the stupid idea of universal logical notional necessity. It’s that the only way to actualize to finish state as a rational totality is to have a contingent idiot who precisely is a zero point of contingency. He makes decisions for no reason at all. Whatever we say, again Hegel, with we give it this clear- which is why it pisses me off so much when people reproach to Hegel that stupid argument of Krug's pen, you know like "ah can Hegel who thinks he can deduce everything deduce the pen I am writing with at this moment?" No! Not only not, but for Hegel it's not only that contingency necessarily arises in the world. It's that necessity itself is contingent. What the king is doing is precisely you remember the example that I gave you how something retroactively may become necessary. This is what the king does. You have a law but you have a contingent gesture of signing the law which then actualizes necessity. Now you will say but in nature laws are really only necessary. Here Hegel's genius comes and he says: no, they are totally contingent. Why? Because only human laws, with a human law you can say: okay, I allow torture that we can cut off the testicles of terrorists. Okay you will ask me why? Ground it! You cannot just say it. In this sense human laws cannot be just contingent. But if you ask me why does the apple fall blah blah? It's just because it does. There is a basic contingency for this sense in Hegel natural laws just are. Which means they are contingent. So but back to your question, this was the first one. The second point with the symptom: yes for Lacan and Hegel also knew it, in order for universality of the subject to exist it has to be linked to a contingent minimal positive element. Hegel was deeply I think the deepest insight of Hegelian dialectic is how necessity in order to establish itself always had to have an umbilical cord to to some utterly contingent empirical remainder. And this would have been the minimal definition of symptom, which is why no subject without symptom. Yes. Okay I think that is enough. Thank you very much. No but wait a minute now I'm one more ten... Okay more questions? If okay I think one more and then we loose. Yes. Yes it’s just a short question but maybe you could write a book about it. Do you think that the what what was the virtual sort of ingredient in uh in Nazism and fascism? And I’m thinking in the figure of Wagner. You say you're fond of the right-wing, these conservative figures and I know you've written something about it. Um what what would be a virtual ingredient of um of Nazism? Okay first I would say generally: it's relatively easy, it’s clear, anti-Semitism, the image the virtual ingredient would be simply the anti-Semitic fantasy and so on no? But uh I'm not simply saying that you know let's avoid this misunderstanding. I'm not simply saying that if something is virtual it's a priori good progressive whatever no? Uh I'm what to give you a concrete example: what really fascinates me in the way ideological texts are structured, it's how for example in my some of my cinema analysis I tried to develop how the virtual level of this what Deleuze would have called pure affect and so on undermines the explicit level. For example one way to utility it would be via homosexuality. I think that it's clear that Nazism and this is not an argument against homosexuality I've developed elsewhere why not. At the explicit level it was homophobic, it's clear that at the virtual level of this virtual obscenities it did incorporate its own version of thwarted homosexuality. But my big example here is in films: for example
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and it will have a link I’m not losing my connection with fascism as I already developed some of you may know this line: why is The Sound of Music one of the greatest
and it will have a link I’m not losing my connection with fascism as I already developed some of you may know this line: why is The Sound of Music one of the greatest
Slavoj Žižek
spiritual achievements of Western civilization and so on and so on? Because you know what did strike me if you watch the movie closely? It's how you have the actual official as it were party line: it's a film about anti-fasc- okay it's about many other things disgusting things to singing and singing and so on but anti-fascist struggle no? Small honest Austrians fighting bad Germans. That's the official story: Nazi invaders. But look about look at what Deleuze at least would have called and I’m here using the term in a too rude way I know but some nonetheless like let’s call it this virtual affectual dimension. The gestures, features, how the two sides: good honest Austrians the bad Nazis are portrayed. To cut a long story short: the good Austrians are portrayed as small is beautiful Nazis. You know this small peasant stupidity hierarchical and so on. The German and I went through the film again to verify this, the Nazis, those who take over the side are portrayed as Jews to cut a long story short. They are this kind of a Jewish in delicate you know uh tuxedo dressed with a it’s it’s it’s as if the the the message we get from this virtual more virtual level of the affective texture of the film is: dirty international Jews are taking over a small honest fascist Austria. It’s exactly the opposite of the official party line. But let me give you a more progressive nicer example where this tension works in a nice way. It is uh uh my favorite maybe movie of the Hollywood of the last couple of decades, of course it’s Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. Where I think many leftist critics focused too much on the how they call it social pessimism: the portrayal of the silent despair alienation of the middle class American suburbs blah blah. Yes that's no doubt the storyline. But if you look at the film's texture: you have a wonderful open ontology of parallel lines contingent encounters and so on and I think that this very Deleuzian in a way ontology is much more open, optimistic. So it’s a much more you shouldn't be too much blinded by the by this Marxist primitive rather than truly Marxist
spiritual achievements of Western civilization and so on and so on? Because you know what did strike me if you watch the movie closely? It's how you have the actual official as it were party line: it's a film about anti-fasc- okay it's about many other things disgusting things to singing and singing and so on but anti-fascist struggle no? Small honest Austrians fighting bad Germans. That's the official story: Nazi invaders. But look about look at what Deleuze at least would have called and I’m here using the term in a too rude way I know but some nonetheless like let’s call it this virtual affectual dimension. The gestures, features, how the two sides: good honest Austrians the bad Nazis are portrayed. To cut a long story short: the good Austrians are portrayed as small is beautiful Nazis. You know this small peasant stupidity hierarchical and so on. The German and I went through the film again to verify this, the Nazis, those who take over the side are portrayed as Jews to cut a long story short. They are this kind of a Jewish in delicate you know uh tuxedo dressed with a it’s it’s it’s as if the the the message we get from this virtual more virtual level of the affective texture of the film is: dirty international Jews are taking over a small honest fascist Austria. It’s exactly the opposite of the official party line. But let me give you a more progressive nicer example where this tension works in a nice way. It is uh uh my favorite maybe movie of the Hollywood of the last couple of decades, of course it’s Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. Where I think many leftist critics focused too much on the how they call it social pessimism: the portrayal of the silent despair alienation of the middle class American suburbs blah blah. Yes that's no doubt the storyline. But if you look at the film's texture: you have a wonderful open ontology of parallel lines contingent encounters and so on and I think that this very Deleuzian in a way ontology is much more open, optimistic. So it’s a much more you shouldn't be too much blinded by the by this Marxist primitive rather than truly Marxist
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message of oh what a condemnation of American alienation. It's very form rebels against it. Now back to your question. I think
message of oh what a condemnation of American alienation. It's very form rebels against it. Now back to your question. I think
Slavoj Žižek
that not only you find this tension in fascism but I think that it's even absolutely crucial for not only fascist regime but every oppressive regime. One of the big topics of my work is precisely how in this this is here really the logic of almost Derridean pharmakon: how it has to incorporate the very element it is fighting against. Like my big example you must know it and I love it: you remember in American movies which portray the marine or West Point training they have my favorite form of American music: these so-called marching chants. The obscene songs that soldiers are singing and I love those words like in one of them I think it's something like they are either limericks like meaningless rhymes intermixed with sexual or sadistic obscenities like: I think it's in An Officer and a Gentleman: I don't know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold and so on. Total vulgarity. The mystery is that you cannot say that this is any secret transgression. It is but it's inherent. The army life can be dedicated or whatever but as if in order to sustain itself it needs all this secret obscenity. And this is what always fascinated me in these so-called totalitarian institutions: how they always need at the virtual affective level this influx of obscenity again. [Music playing]
that not only you find this tension in fascism but I think that it's even absolutely crucial for not only fascist regime but every oppressive regime. One of the big topics of my work is precisely how in this this is here really the logic of almost Derridean pharmakon: how it has to incorporate the very element it is fighting against. Like my big example you must know it and I love it: you remember in American movies which portray the marine or West Point training they have my favorite form of American music: these so-called marching chants. The obscene songs that soldiers are singing and I love those words like in one of them I think it's something like they are either limericks like meaningless rhymes intermixed with sexual or sadistic obscenities like: I think it's in An Officer and a Gentleman: I don't know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold and so on. Total vulgarity. The mystery is that you cannot say that this is any secret transgression. It is but it's inherent. The army life can be dedicated or whatever but as if in order to sustain itself it needs all this secret obscenity. And this is what always fascinated me in these so-called totalitarian institutions: how they always need at the virtual affective level this influx of obscenity again. [Music playing]