Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 4
Lecture · Justin Wagner ·
published 2018-11-28 · 2:10:29 · 13,026 words
the date above is when the video was uploaded, no recording date was found
cinema-art-culturepsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsideologyphilosophy-generalreligion-theologyscience-physicssexuality-gendereveryday-life
Žižek critiques the film United 93 for avoiding the 'real' by offering identification with heroic rebellion, arguing instead that true horror lies in pure hopelessness. He explores the concept of the Big Other as the 'protector of appearances' using a scene from Brief Encounter, then links the Lacanian Real to the death drive and surface repetition, contrasting Joyce's linguistic wealth with Beckett's minimalism. Žižek contrasts psychoanalysis with Buddhism, arguing that while both reject the substantial self, Buddhism treats desire as an epistemological error to be corrected, whereas psychoanalysis locates a radical, pre-phenomenal 'drive' within the void of Nirvana itself. He posits that the 'fall' into samsara is not a mistake but the result of a minimal asymmetry or disturbance in the void, identified with the Freudian death drive. This leads to a reinterpretation of Hegel and Marx, where the mystery is not reality behind appearances, but the emergence of appearance from reality, illustrated by a subversive reading of Star Wars. Žižek critiques Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anti-Islamic bias, arguing that Islam functions as the 'in-between' obstacle preventing a mythical East-West reconciliation, while noting the ironic reversals of 'Orientalism' in Russian and Japanese contexts. He applies this to a Lacanian reading of love as the 'real of an illusion' and uses Hanif Kureishi’s novel and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s cinema to illustrate Hegel’s 'concrete universality,' where a genre or concept must negate itself to fulfill its own definition. Finally, he argues that genetic/chemical interventions do not destroy freedom but reveal that freedom was always an illusion, as we are determined by our biological constitution regardless of whether it is natural or engineered. Žižek critiques the bioethical debate on genetic intervention, arguing that both liberal humanitarians and conservative religious figures share a cynical denial of human unfreedom, illustrated by a radio receiver metaphor for the soul. He then explains Hegel’s concept of concrete universality, positing that universality emerges not from harmonious particularity but from the failure or 'thwarting' of specific functions, using examples from Marx, sexuality, and cinema. The excerpt concludes with a self-deprecating joke about the 'Stalinist solution' to avoid showing film clips.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 36
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The actual event's quality, which the film obscures by adding narrative meaning and rebellion.
The film's identification with heroic rebellion serves to shield the viewer from the true, pointless horror of the event.
The cinematic convention where the hero's sacrifice is meaningful only because the spectators know and observe it.
A Hegelian structure where universality is not a neutral container for species, but a process where one species (A) must pass into its opposite (B) to fully actualize its own notion, thereby exploding its own frame.
as “universality explodes”
The moment when a particular entity is 'thwarted, twisted, displaced, out of joint,' causing it to transcend its specific role and achieve universal significance.
as “Big Other”
The symbolic agency or witness in front of whom we must maintain appearances; here defined as the 'protector of appearances' (e.g., the child, the interfering friend).
Žižek's definition of the Big Other as the figure who ensures social rituals and masks are maintained.
as “living dead”
The state of the mask/dead object when it takes possession of us, imposing a compulsion to repeat.
The kernel of being located 'out there' in the automaton/mask, driving compulsive repetition.
as “idiotic superego injunction”
The obscene command of the death drive that compels us to act against our conscious standards.
as “Lacanian real”
Defined here as a minimal difference or elementary drive, closer to the structure of the Real than standard phenomenological accounts.
as “lalangue”
Lacan's term for language in its non-structural, rhizomatic, pathological wealth (wordplay, resonances), which Žižek critiques.
Žižek's characterization of Hegelian dialectics: seeing less to find the notional determination, rather than seeing more connections.
The core of drive and the Real, found in Beckett's repetition where things are 'the same but not quite the same.'
Žižek's designation for Beckett, whose work embodies the abstract persistence of the death drive.
The psychoanalytic act of overcoming the illusions on which desires are based, which Žižek notes Buddhism also enacts.
Described pejoratively as an 'incestuous bliss' that the Buddhist shift into enlightenment might resemble, but which Žižek rejects in favor of the violence of losing one's ground.
The preferred starting point for Buddhist enlightenment, characterized by the feeling of suffering an injustice without a cause, which masks the narcissistic/masochistic nature of the self.
The wheel of life, defined as the eternal circular movement of craving; Žižek asks how we fell out of Nirvana into this state.
Cited from Marx; the mystery is not the true nature of capitalism, but why the true essence appears in the guise of the commodity form.
as “shunyata”
The Buddhist concept of the void; Žižek locates a 'terrifying radical evil' or asymmetry within this void itself.
as “disturbance in power”
A playful, Star Wars-inflected term for the radical evil or asymmetry located within the pre-phenomenal world of Nirvana/shunyata that breaks its symmetry.
Used as a metaphor for the space of nothingness containing a minimal, persistent disturbance or asymmetry that is not yet desire.
The core of Hegelian dialectics: the minimal movement by which the 'zero' or pure identity is disturbed, leading to the development of content through negation.
Cited as containing more potential than late Derrida’s ethical justice, specifically the idea of a minimal disturbance at the zero level of reality.
as “zero level of reality”
Žižek’s term for the true reality, defined not as a stable substance but as a minimal disturbance or asymmetry in the void.
Beckett’s work cited for its last line, illustrating the persistence of a disturbance that turns around and goes on, even when not yet desire.
Identified not as a failure to enter Nirvana, but as the very asymmetry or disturbance that breaks the symmetry of Nirvana and makes appearance emerge.
A Heideggerian concept referenced by Iranian conservatives; Žižek argues that Westerners miss this difference by treating the prohibited (impossible) as an ontic entity that can be violated.
as “real of an illusion”
The definition of love: an illusion to which one must remain faithful because it contains a 'real' that justifies that faithfulness.
A Hegelian shift where the failure of the father (the exception) defines the concept of fatherhood itself, rather than fathers merely failing to meet an ideal standard.
as “abstract universality”
The simple logic of universality and specific differences (e.g., films are either documentaries or fiction), which Hegel’s concrete universality supersedes.
A paradoxical formulation (e.g., 'more Scots than Scots') where an entity becomes the purest embodiment of a trait by splitting off from the original source, locating universality in the overlapping of particularities.
Žižek's label for bioethical opponents of genetic intervention who, like religious conservatives, secretly know we are not free but maintain the illusion of autonomy to preserve ethics.
A theological argument that the brain is merely a receiver for the immaterial soul, so damaging the brain breaks the reception but not the soul itself.
as “Stalinist solution”
A joke about solving a problem by eliminating the subjects involved (e.g., killing prisoners to stop rights violations), used here to humorously justify skipping film clips.
Stories he reaches for 1
The standard noir scene where the hero helps an enemy secretly; it is 'ontological cheating' because the spectators know, making it less desperate.
“it’s a kind of ontological cheating... we secretly impute to the victims there... you see, they will be redeemed because they know that they are observed”
Works invoked 23
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book, where he briefly develops the concept of minimal difference.
Žižek's own book, cited as mentioning the 9/11 passengers as heroes.
The Unnamable book
Part of Beckett's trilogy, cited as featuring the 'undead partial object' and the 'writer of drive.'
Romance film
Catherine Breillat's film, described as a 'vogue' that 'withdrew' because it tried to combine hardcore realism with emotional engagement.
Finnegans Wake book
Joyce's work, described as an 'impossible task' and 'pseudo-wealth' that Beckett rejected.
Brief Encounter film
Used to exemplify the Big Other (the interfering friend) and the death drive (the policewoman's song).
Malone Dies book
Part of Beckett's trilogy, cited as even more minimal.
Tristes Tropiques book
Used to illustrate Lévi-Strauss’s 'violent anti-Islamic outburst' and 'new-age rubbish' about East-West sexual harmony.
United 93 film
Critiqued for avoiding the real by focusing on heroic rebellion; Žižek claims the passengers are 'true proletarian heroes' but the film fails to render the real.
Kalevala book
Finnish epic, cited as an example of 'minimal repetition' where everything is said twice.
Le sinthome book
Lacan's seminar on Joyce, called 'his worst seminar' for being seduced by linguistic wealth.
Rashomon film
Celebrated in Europe as 'Oriental spirituality' but failed in Japan as 'too Western,' illustrating the paradox of cultural perception.
Syriana film
Liked but 'ambiguously' and 'overestimated'; used to illustrate the horror of realistic torture scenes.
Book by Mark Epstein; cited for its positive reference to Lacan's mirror stage and the formula regarding the observer's perspective.
Used to support the argument that female orgasm, having no evolutionary function, is a prime example of a particularity thwarted that achieves universal status.
First Love film
Kieślowski’s 1974 documentary; cited as the point where documentary probing into intimacy becomes 'obscenity,' forcing the switch to fiction.
Molloy book
Part of Beckett's trilogy, cited as an example of minimal storytelling.
Orientalism book
Said’s work; Žižek critiques its object (Islam) but respects its critical potential, noting it focuses on the 'in-between' rather than the true Orient.
Space Opera film
Used as a genre example: Space Opera is structurally a sub-species of the Western, emerging from the Western’s deadlock.
Star Wars III film
Used as a setpiece for a 'perverse shift of perspective' to illustrate ideological inversion and the 'disturbance in power.'
Referenced via the 'curious accident' on the 614th night to illustrate the emergence of appearance/phenomenal reality.
United film
Mentioned in passing as another example of Kieślowski’s work, linked to his documentary approach.
Western film
Used as a genre example: The Western encounters a deadlock and must reinvent itself as Space Opera to survive.
People invoked 39
Martin Amis positive
Praises Amis's point about love at the 'zero point' of dying, calling it a 'Paulinian point' he likes, despite finding it 'pathetic'.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte positive
Grouped with Hegel and Marx as holding that the ultimate metaphysical decision is ethical/practical, not merely knowledge.
Mark Epstein positive
Author of a book on Buddhism and psychoanalysis; quoted positively regarding the ego as an object and the formula that 'nothing was changed but the perspective of the observer.'
George Clooney/The Cranberries positive
Director of Syriana, which Žižek 'liked but ambiguously' and considers 'overestimated'.
Danny Postel positive
Friend from the US writing a book on the Iranian revolution; cited as an example of an 'Orientalist Heideggerian' who understands the depth of Iranian conservatives' views.
Parmenides negative
Grouped with Plato as representing the traditional view that universality is ideal and particularity is secondary.
Claude Lévi-Strauss negative
Critiques Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques for its 'violent anti-Islamic outburst' and 'new-age rubbish,' arguing he constructs Islam as the 'utmost evil' obstacle to East-West reconciliation.
Jacques Derrida negative
Critiqued for his late ethical justice; Žižek claims 'more in différance than this late Derridian ethical justice,' preferring early Derrida.
Elisabeth Lloyd positive
Author of 'The Case of the Female Orgasm'; her biological argument is used by Žižek to illustrate how universality emerges from thwarted function.
Mentioned in the joke that liking Wagner redeems one even if they are a fascist or racist.
Moritz Schreber positive
Used as an example of a 'successful father' (his father was a judge) leading to the son’s psychosis, illustrating the necessity of the 'failed father' for the son’s survival.
Jacques Lacan positive
Uses Lacanian concepts (Real, Big Other, lalangue) but critiques Lacan's focus on Joyce's linguistic wealth in Le sinthome.
Referenced in the Schreber anecdote, where Daniel Schreber believed he was 'screwing God.'
Roland Barthes positive
Referenced for the concept of 'the effect of the real,' which Žižek argues requires knowing the image is fake.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited for deploying the logic of the death drive (compulsion to repeat) in Difference and Repetition.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Grouped with Habermas as 'simple humanitarians' who do not understand the Hegelian move regarding genetic/chemical intervention and freedom.
Edward Said positive
Met Said and 'laughed him nonetheless' because Said liked Wagner; critiques Said’s Orientalism for focusing on Islam rather than the true 'Orient,' but respects his critical object.
Georges Bataille positive
Contrasted with Deleuze; Bataille's view of violent transgression is opposed by Žižek's focus on surface.
Rudy Giuliani negative
Describes him as 'very disgusting' and a 'pretender' who exploited firefighters and failed to cover wounded with insurance.
George H. W. Bush negative
Sarcastically suggested Lévi-Strauss might be 'George Bush’s big ideologist' due to his view of Islam as an obstacle to be erased.
Benedict XVI negative
Mentioned as having co-published a volume with Habermas, representing the conservative Catholic attitude of prohibiting genetic meddling.
Mentioned as trying to violate the taboo of combining hardcore realism with emotional engagement, but failing.
Mentioned in Lévi-Strauss’s 'new-age rubbish' as a 'feminine figure' in the history of reconciliation between East and West.
Hanif Kureishi positive
Had lunch with Kureishi; praises his insight that the 'failed father' is the definition of fatherhood, using it to illustrate Hegelian concrete universality.
Benedictus de Spinoza negative
Grouped with Buddhism and Gnosticism as holding that the wrong choice is a matter of not knowing properly the truth, implying no radical evil.
Samuel Beckett positive
Cited for The Unnamable, specifically the last line, to illustrate the persistence of a minimal disturbance.
Used as a persona/style reference ('to put it like Sherlock Holmes') to introduce the anecdote about the 614th night.
Martin Heidegger positive
Notes that Iranian conservatives refer to Heidegger; appreciates the insight that Westerners miss the 'ontological difference' by treating the impossible as an ontic entity.
Krzysztof Kieślowski positive
Cited as someone who understood that rendering things directly on screen 'de-realizes' them, turning tragedy into travesty.
Cited as someone who attributed Stalinism to 'Oriental Asiatic principle' via the concept of Asiatic despotism.
James Joyce negative
Critiqued for being 'seduced' by the 'wealth of language' in Finnegans Wake, which Žižek sees as a mistake.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Criticizes Habermas’s worries about genetic determinism as 'spontaneous mystification' and 'simple humanitarians' who fail to see that freedom is lost once intervention is possible.
Referenced by traditional Russians as the beginning of the line of Stalinism, viewed as 'violent Westernization' rather than Oriental despotism.
Referenced in the context of 'Stalinism' being attributed to Oriental despotism by Western Marxists.
Plato negative
Representing the 'pseudo-Platonic view' where universality is ideal and particularity is a conflict; Žižek argues this is the opposite of Hegel's materialism.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for the point that the mystery of capitalism is not its true nature, but why it appears in the guise of the commodity form.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the concept of the Freudian drive, which Žižek reinterprets as an asymmetry within the void of Nirvana.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The primary philosophical reference; Žižek explains his concept of concrete universality and how it emerges from the thwarting of the particular.
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
Cited as having designated the 'conservative fear of origins', the refusal to probe into the material origins of the soul.
Transcript 47 turns
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Okay,
Okay,
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thanks for coming again. Slavoj will start with a few film clips and he will be discussing the real and then linking up to the Hegel analysis of last week and finishing. So when the film is ready... everything okay? [unintelligible] Yeah, yeah, okay. Okay. I hope, if you permit me, a little bit of... you will have to suffer two times... something doesn’t work with the volume... it’s very sad because... because it does work. I mean, I tested it just now at home so it’s not the DVD. And it worked five days ago. Yes, the last time five days ago... Sorry. No, this is empty because it’s already full. Okay... Yes, okay, but why don't I then nonetheless start? Do we need the sound? Yes. No, no, it’s up... it’s unfortunately... Can you read the words? Yeah, but it’s like words are not only words but obscene sounds and so on and I don’t want to do too much of that. Okay and... really sorry for this confusion and... No, no. Why don't you start? Okay. But let's test him nonetheless the second... No, it should have already been in the sound. Okay. Then you just go on trying and I will nonetheless because I can skip this one. What I wanted to do nonetheless before coming back to Hegel—I had this fear of being too boring by talking only about Hegel—so I wanted to take three films to develop a little bit the point about the real. First, some very simple remarks suggested to me by a friend who sent me a short email interpretation on the film which just now, I think the last Friday, it opened: *United Why I think this film is nonetheless basically wrong, ideological, with all the respect and so on and so on. First, I do admit the touch of authenticity in the film, like this is what almost all the critics praise, how it’s not this big Hollywood scandal, whatever, it’s modest, subdued, sober, and so on. But nonetheless, what’s the problem? The problem is the following one for me: that the film uses this kind of a realist style to claim authenticity. But it manipulates its authenticity itself. In what sense? The difficulty is that it tries to create what this friend of mine who emailed me even calls "the Schindler effect," referring to of course Spielberg’s *Schindler’s List*. As you probably know, Spielberg in *Schindler’s List*—Spielberg’s take on the Holocaust was to focus on an anomalous condition within the Holocaust which... it was factually true, I mean Schindler was really saving the Jews, but it was highly anomalous, an exception. So that we are presented with a hero with whom we can identify and who makes us feel that we can redeem control of the horror, do something. That’s the message of *Schindler’s List*. And *United also shows an event which occurred within the struggle between American-led
thanks for coming again. Slavoj will start with a few film clips and he will be discussing the real and then linking up to the Hegel analysis of last week and finishing. So when the film is ready... everything okay? [unintelligible] Yeah, yeah, okay. Okay. I hope, if you permit me, a little bit of... you will have to suffer two times... something doesn’t work with the volume... it’s very sad because... because it does work. I mean, I tested it just now at home so it’s not the DVD. And it worked five days ago. Yes, the last time five days ago... Sorry. No, this is empty because it’s already full. Okay... Yes, okay, but why don't I then nonetheless start? Do we need the sound? Yes. No, no, it’s up... it’s unfortunately... Can you read the words? Yeah, but it’s like words are not only words but obscene sounds and so on and I don’t want to do too much of that. Okay and... really sorry for this confusion and... No, no. Why don't you start? Okay. But let's test him nonetheless the second... No, it should have already been in the sound. Okay. Then you just go on trying and I will nonetheless because I can skip this one. What I wanted to do nonetheless before coming back to Hegel—I had this fear of being too boring by talking only about Hegel—so I wanted to take three films to develop a little bit the point about the real. First, some very simple remarks suggested to me by a friend who sent me a short email interpretation on the film which just now, I think the last Friday, it opened: *United Why I think this film is nonetheless basically wrong, ideological, with all the respect and so on and so on. First, I do admit the touch of authenticity in the film, like this is what almost all the critics praise, how it’s not this big Hollywood scandal, whatever, it’s modest, subdued, sober, and so on. But nonetheless, what’s the problem? The problem is the following one for me: that the film uses this kind of a realist style to claim authenticity. But it manipulates its authenticity itself. In what sense? The difficulty is that it tries to create what this friend of mine who emailed me even calls "the Schindler effect," referring to of course Spielberg’s *Schindler’s List*. As you probably know, Spielberg in *Schindler’s List*—Spielberg’s take on the Holocaust was to focus on an anomalous condition within the Holocaust which... it was factually true, I mean Schindler was really saving the Jews, but it was highly anomalous, an exception. So that we are presented with a hero with whom we can identify and who makes us feel that we can redeem control of the horror, do something. That’s the message of *Schindler’s List*. And *United also shows an event which occurred within the struggle between American-led
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global
global
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capitalism and the Islamic reaction to it. The structure of this struggle is such
capitalism and the Islamic reaction to it. The structure of this struggle is such
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that actions undertaken by the Islamic side are, although we find them totally unacceptable in their form, are nonetheless acts of rebellion. But *United the film, chooses to portray
that actions undertaken by the Islamic side are, although we find them totally unacceptable in their form, are nonetheless acts of rebellion. But *United the film, chooses to portray
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an anomalous event, a rebellion in the opposite direction within
an anomalous event, a rebellion in the opposite direction within
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this greater
this greater
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rebellion. The passengers storm the
rebellion. The passengers storm the
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hijackers. It’s
hijackers. It’s
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dramatically satisfying because, like in the
dramatically satisfying because, like in the
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case of *Schindler’s List*, we are allowed to identify with people who take control of the horror and are therefore redeemed. But in this way, the film obscures the reality of September 11th—the fact that it was a horrific act but nonetheless a horrific act of rebellion, carried out in reaction to previous acts perceived by the terrorists as wrong. So the film claims the status of rebels for the victims of the hijacking in order to suppress inquiry into the motives of the hijackers. And here, this friend of mine, his name is Paul Price, made a wonderful remark: that the truly oppressive thing—just imagine the same film with one twist—is that it would have been a film not about this case where desperately the hijacked passengers tried to rebel, but about the other flights which... where there was no rebellion, they simply crashed into one of the Twin Towers or whatever. There, we would have... it wouldn’t make hijackers look any better, but it would be a story of irredeemably pointless horror. And this would arouse the proper questions: how can this happen?
case of *Schindler’s List*, we are allowed to identify with people who take control of the horror and are therefore redeemed. But in this way, the film obscures the reality of September 11th—the fact that it was a horrific act but nonetheless a horrific act of rebellion, carried out in reaction to previous acts perceived by the terrorists as wrong. So the film claims the status of rebels for the victims of the hijacking in order to suppress inquiry into the motives of the hijackers. And here, this friend of mine, his name is Paul Price, made a wonderful remark: that the truly oppressive thing—just imagine the same film with one twist—is that it would have been a film not about this case where desperately the hijacked passengers tried to rebel, but about the other flights which... where there was no rebellion, they simply crashed into one of the Twin Towers or whatever. There, we would have... it wouldn’t make hijackers look any better, but it would be a story of irredeemably pointless horror. And this would arouse the proper questions: how can this happen?
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Precisely the function of this
Precisely the function of this
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successful rebellion is to offer a point of identification which prevents us from asking questions. That is to say, we have a certain terrifying situation; hijackers took over the plane. Instead of—you get my point—instead of pushing us towards... and I'm not
successful rebellion is to offer a point of identification which prevents us from asking questions. That is to say, we have a certain terrifying situation; hijackers took over the plane. Instead of—you get my point—instead of pushing us towards... and I'm not
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saying, to avoid a misunderstanding, that the
saying, to avoid a misunderstanding, that the
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point is that we should in this cheap humanitarian way "understand" the Islamists; it's not a question of agreeing with them or what. It's just a question of analyzing the problem. The cheap identification the film offers, the function of it is precisely to give
point is that we should in this cheap humanitarian way "understand" the Islamists; it's not a question of agreeing with them or what. It's just a question of analyzing the problem. The cheap identification the film offers, the function of it is precisely to give
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us this "you see, even in this situation it was possible to do something,
us this "you see, even in this situation it was possible to do something,
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a heroic act," and so on, so we don't ask questions. With all the talk of the liberal
a heroic act," and so on, so we don't ask questions. With all the talk of the liberal
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critics about how authentic, sordid, etc., the
critics about how authentic, sordid, etc., the
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film is, nonetheless, it doesn’t raise questions. It’s basically a feel-good film. Why I generally agree with this analysis—now of course, evil as I am, I always complicate things—at two points I don't agree with it. The first point: this reproach on "untypical," that the film focuses on a situation which is highly untypical. I claim that this first sounds to me a little bit too Stalinist. Maybe some of you know this Stalinist socialist realism aesthetics where the motto was always "a socialist novel should portray typical people in typical situations," and so on. I claim that it is a little bit
film is, nonetheless, it doesn’t raise questions. It’s basically a feel-good film. Why I generally agree with this analysis—now of course, evil as I am, I always complicate things—at two points I don't agree with it. The first point: this reproach on "untypical," that the film focuses on a situation which is highly untypical. I claim that this first sounds to me a little bit too Stalinist. Maybe some of you know this Stalinist socialist realism aesthetics where the motto was always "a socialist novel should portray typical people in typical situations," and so on. I claim that it is a little bit
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more complex; that sometimes it’s even very subversive to focus on the
more complex; that sometimes it’s even very subversive to focus on the
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untypical, but we can do it in two ways. The very focusing on the untypical can bring successfully, if we do it in a proper way, into critical light what is wrong with the typical. And I think, with all my criticism—and if there is somebody who is critical towards Spielberg, it’s me—I do not agree with the reading proposed in the text by this friend of mine; I do not agree with the reading of *Schindler's List*. I think there Spielberg was right. Why? Because the problem with Holocaust, as with other horrors, is to relativize them in a historicist sense. Like, why was that horrible book, Goldhagen’s *Hitler's Willing Executioners*, such a hit, even especially in Germany? Because basically it brings good news to Germans. It tells them: listen, it’s not you individually, it’s part of the very German historical identity, so what do I care, that’s my historical substance, I couldn’t have done it otherwise. What I like about *Schindler’s List* is that precisely by focusing on the exception, it provides a critique of the typical ones. No, it’s not true that you were simply terrorized, it’s not true that you were determined by German history, it’s not true that the situation was so desperate that nothing could have been done. You know what I mean? Here, the very focusing on the untypical shows the lie of the typical excuse. It was totalitarian—no, it was possible to do it. Here I think it’s the correct thing. But the way *United does it, I think it’s not correct, because there the untypical does not allow us to adopt an analytical critical attitude towards, let's call it, the typical majority situation, but on the contrary mystifies this situation. The lie is the same as some seven or eight years ago; there was a popular film—even in the West it was praised here in *Sight and Sound*, but I don’t like it, I will tell you immediately why—one of the post-Yugoslav films. It was called, I don’t know how it was translated, the literal translation is *Pretty Village, Pretty Flame* (*Lepa sela lepo gore*). And it was praised by all the multiculturalists as the first balanced view: you know, both sides, Bosnian Serbs, are shown as equally crazy, blah blah. I think this is simply... if you first, it did the same but wrong, ideologically twisted turn towards the untypical. In what sense? The untypical, sorry. It focuses on the fate of a couple of Serbs who are in a tunnel beneath the mountain, who are there under siege by... surrounded by Muslim units. You know, it’s as if turning the true Sarajevo situation around. And another ideological... that I think was a mystifying gesture. Another ideological mystification—and here I really hate ideological street purists—is what this film does exactly the same as the other Spielberg, *Munich*. I mean, I almost get the Joseph Goebbels reaction and start to draw my gun when somebody tells me, "You know, *Munich* is a more complex film. It shows the Jewish... those of Mossad who wanted to... whose duty was to kill the terrorists or the slaughter in the Munich
untypical, but we can do it in two ways. The very focusing on the untypical can bring successfully, if we do it in a proper way, into critical light what is wrong with the typical. And I think, with all my criticism—and if there is somebody who is critical towards Spielberg, it’s me—I do not agree with the reading proposed in the text by this friend of mine; I do not agree with the reading of *Schindler's List*. I think there Spielberg was right. Why? Because the problem with Holocaust, as with other horrors, is to relativize them in a historicist sense. Like, why was that horrible book, Goldhagen’s *Hitler's Willing Executioners*, such a hit, even especially in Germany? Because basically it brings good news to Germans. It tells them: listen, it’s not you individually, it’s part of the very German historical identity, so what do I care, that’s my historical substance, I couldn’t have done it otherwise. What I like about *Schindler’s List* is that precisely by focusing on the exception, it provides a critique of the typical ones. No, it’s not true that you were simply terrorized, it’s not true that you were determined by German history, it’s not true that the situation was so desperate that nothing could have been done. You know what I mean? Here, the very focusing on the untypical shows the lie of the typical excuse. It was totalitarian—no, it was possible to do it. Here I think it’s the correct thing. But the way *United does it, I think it’s not correct, because there the untypical does not allow us to adopt an analytical critical attitude towards, let's call it, the typical majority situation, but on the contrary mystifies this situation. The lie is the same as some seven or eight years ago; there was a popular film—even in the West it was praised here in *Sight and Sound*, but I don’t like it, I will tell you immediately why—one of the post-Yugoslav films. It was called, I don’t know how it was translated, the literal translation is *Pretty Village, Pretty Flame* (*Lepa sela lepo gore*). And it was praised by all the multiculturalists as the first balanced view: you know, both sides, Bosnian Serbs, are shown as equally crazy, blah blah. I think this is simply... if you first, it did the same but wrong, ideologically twisted turn towards the untypical. In what sense? The untypical, sorry. It focuses on the fate of a couple of Serbs who are in a tunnel beneath the mountain, who are there under siege by... surrounded by Muslim units. You know, it’s as if turning the true Sarajevo situation around. And another ideological... that I think was a mystifying gesture. Another ideological mystification—and here I really hate ideological street purists—is what this film does exactly the same as the other Spielberg, *Munich*. I mean, I almost get the Joseph Goebbels reaction and start to draw my gun when somebody tells me, "You know, *Munich* is a more complex film. It shows the Jewish... those of Mossad who wanted to... whose duty was to kill the terrorists or the slaughter in the Munich
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Olympic village. They showed them with their doubts, oscillations, failures, and so on and so on." But I think this is a clear example of how apparently painting the good guys also with their weaknesses, far from involving a critical attitude, it’s even a worse form of racism. Why? Because if you look closely at *Munich*, the Jewish side is portrayed with all this blah blah weaknesses as real persons and so on, but not the other side. So you get my point? The more it shows them realistically than our side, it's a lie. This is a perfect ideological mechanism—that precisely by portraying people in their reality with their weaknesses and so on, you elevate them even more. You propose them as points of identification and so on and so on. So again, along these lines I see the falsity also, the ideological falsity. So that’s the first thing where I don’t agree with this guy. The second problem is that I do not see the things so that, as this friend of mine claims, that we the spectators are left wondering "what if?" Had they, the passengers who rebelled, succeeded, we can imagine that they could have brought the plane to safety and thereby defeated their oppressors. It’s not that even if they failed, they nonetheless rebelled. I think the movie’s message is a different one. The whole point of the film is that we know in advance that the rebelling passengers will not succeed in taking over the control of the plane. The ethical point of the film is rather that the rebelling passengers *do* succeed. First, it’s simply not true that the film tells about their failure. They do succeed in their endeavor. The dilemma the passengers confront is: what can they do in a situation in which they know for sure that they will die? Their heroic act is: "If we cannot save ourselves, let us at least try to save others' lives." So they storm the pilot’s cabin with the true goal precisely to crash the plane, to bring it down before it will hit the target intended by the kidnappers. Because as we know, they already knew that the first two planes hit the Twin Towers. So again, it’s I think a simply wrong reading. It’s a story about a success, so it’s even more, if you want, ideological at this point. But I agree with the main insight of this friend of mine: that the film’s focus on the rebellion serves the purpose of preventing us to ask the truly pertinent questions. The ultimate irony of the film is that what the rebelling passenger engages in is precisely another suicidal act. It’s that basically the substory could have been how not only the so-called Arab terrorists, but we also can become suicidal and so on and so on.
Olympic village. They showed them with their doubts, oscillations, failures, and so on and so on." But I think this is a clear example of how apparently painting the good guys also with their weaknesses, far from involving a critical attitude, it’s even a worse form of racism. Why? Because if you look closely at *Munich*, the Jewish side is portrayed with all this blah blah weaknesses as real persons and so on, but not the other side. So you get my point? The more it shows them realistically than our side, it's a lie. This is a perfect ideological mechanism—that precisely by portraying people in their reality with their weaknesses and so on, you elevate them even more. You propose them as points of identification and so on and so on. So again, along these lines I see the falsity also, the ideological falsity. So that’s the first thing where I don’t agree with this guy. The second problem is that I do not see the things so that, as this friend of mine claims, that we the spectators are left wondering "what if?" Had they, the passengers who rebelled, succeeded, we can imagine that they could have brought the plane to safety and thereby defeated their oppressors. It’s not that even if they failed, they nonetheless rebelled. I think the movie’s message is a different one. The whole point of the film is that we know in advance that the rebelling passengers will not succeed in taking over the control of the plane. The ethical point of the film is rather that the rebelling passengers *do* succeed. First, it’s simply not true that the film tells about their failure. They do succeed in their endeavor. The dilemma the passengers confront is: what can they do in a situation in which they know for sure that they will die? Their heroic act is: "If we cannot save ourselves, let us at least try to save others' lives." So they storm the pilot’s cabin with the true goal precisely to crash the plane, to bring it down before it will hit the target intended by the kidnappers. Because as we know, they already knew that the first two planes hit the Twin Towers. So again, it’s I think a simply wrong reading. It’s a story about a success, so it’s even more, if you want, ideological at this point. But I agree with the main insight of this friend of mine: that the film’s focus on the rebellion serves the purpose of preventing us to ask the truly pertinent questions. The ultimate irony of the film is that what the rebelling passenger engages in is precisely another suicidal act. It’s that basically the substory could have been how not only the so-called Arab terrorists, but we also can become suicidal and so on and so on.
Slavoj Žižek
So you see my point here: that although you will say "wait a minute, but this is a movie," no, you can not only think with films, but you can also prevent thinking with films. And I think again that this is the lie. And the almost, I would say, artistic tragedy of the film is that—I admit, I concede all these points that it’s done soberly and so on and so on—but again, in this concrete constellation, the true horror, the true touch of the real would have been to shoot again the same film but about the other cases where you had this pure pointless horror, which then forces you to ask questions. Again, I’m not saying that we should ask these stupid humanitarian, stupidly pro-Arab questions, "Oh, why did they do it, they must have had their reason." No, no, the point is just to be intrigued. The way the film is done, by focusing on this rebellion, enigma disappears, we are not intrigued. So again, I claim that although it may appear to be a film which wants to bring us in contact with, or kind of a touch of the real, it's the identification that the film offers—identification with the rebelling passengers and so on—is precisely an avoidance of the real. If you want a touch of the real, it would have been again the same film without rebellion. Just this utter hopelessness. Is this a question, or...? "The incident did happen. It was real." Yes, absolutely! But we are not there. You know what I mean? I think that it’s... how should I put it? In a way—now I will say something horrible—in a way, it’s totally irrelevant, this. Because even—no, I’m not one of those crazy paranoiac leftists who claim it was all organized by CIA and the Jewish lobby and then the plane never crashed into Pentagon and so on—all I’m saying is that I have small, tiny—I know it all happened—doubts even about... did it? No, I know it was very real. And I’m even tempted... no, I don’t have any problems here to tell you frankly: for me, those who rebelled there in a way are real heroes. I don’t have, to avoid now any problem, I don't have any problems to admit this. This is for me one of the definitions of heroism: not that you can act where you know... where you know that everything is lost. How should I put it? In a way, no? And I even am ready to make... I'm politically, as you can imagine, if I take power... Martin Amis goes to gulag for years. But I like the point he made in the last—I think it was *Independent* or *Guardian*, I even forgot where—about this film, where he draws attention to the simple fact that how, you know, when you are at the point of dying, the message is to your nearest "I love you" and so on. It’s a very Paulinian point that I like it, even if it's pathetic, that the ultimate real in this sense is love, where you are at the zero point. Why not? I’m not ashamed to make this point. All again, all I’m saying is that it’s again... it was absolutely... although even—but why say "even," he’s not an idiot—Martin Amis makes at the same time the right point, which is that... how should I put it? You know phenomenologically—now I would have to go to a more precise analysis, but phenomenologically—the way we, I claim, subconsciously—I on purpose use this term, not Freudian unconscious, it would have been too big here—when we see a hero doing a beautiful sacrificial gesture, even if within the narrative the hero is alone, it is somehow as if—it’s not so much that the hero knows there, but the screen persona, it is as if she acts for our spectator’s view. It’s and that’s what makes it much less desperate and so on. And my God, somebody who is highly sympathetic of the film, Martin Amis, makes this remark that here, necessarily, the film mystifies the situation. Mystifies it in the sense that... in the sense that, how should I put it? The whole staging, the moment we are in a movie theater, it’s that you see, we secretly impute to the victims there, as it were, "you see, they will be redeemed because they know that they are observed." This is part of our most elementary phenomenological perception. In their very solitude they will find redemption knowing that we are there. Okay, let me return to my old topics: that *we* are their Big Other there, the viewers. But this precisely is where it's very good, even theoretical, not only aesthetic question: how to do a film about, how should I put it, the true solitude? You know, because you know if you watch, for example, films starring Humphrey Bogart, you know that one of the standard scenes of the *noir* detective is that at the end he makes a sacrificial gesture. Like, you know, this old melodramatic topic of: I do secretly a gesture helping my enemy even because secretly I love him or her, whatever, and it’s so noble that nobody knows about it. Yeah, but screw it, *we* know it, the spectators! And it’s always inscribed into the situation. It’s a kind of ontological cheating. In other words, I claim quite seriously that the film... [unintelligible technical noise and laughter as a woman walks across the stage] Is this what is called vulgar American cock-teasing, that you just gave me a kiss and then... or will it work? Will you go to the end as an honest woman? Okay, you just go. Thank you very much, yeah. Perfect. Perfect timing because now I am at the end of this one. Incidentally, I hope you got my point: of course, I haven’t seen the film, *United No, I don’t have time for such films, no, I just analyze them, no, okay. Okay, so but nonetheless, again I’m absolutely... I think that if you ask me again to avoid any moral misunderstanding here, that the two heroes of those September 11th events are for me these passengers. And I think I even mention them in my *Welcome to the Desert of the Real*, so I’m not now faking it now quickly to... and they are the true proletarian heroes if you ask me. Their story should have been told. The firefighters in New York, who were ruthlessly exploited... you know, it’s little known how the very disgusting Rudolph Giuliani, who pretends to be the big hero, you know that then it was a scandal how those who were wounded were not even properly covered by the insurance and so on. They are the true proletarian exploited guys there. So again, I have no problem with this. All I’m saying again is that yes, I agree with you, it was real, but the film doesn’t render *that* real which was there. It’s very difficult to do it. I mean, that’s why, and I wanted to talk late... lately, later about it. You know, that’s the problem that Kieślowski encountered when I will talk about concrete universality more, with pornography. Look, if you do certain things which, if done improperly, you can bring children—I shouldn’t here use the f-word—on screen, of course it’s real! But the very fact that you act it on the screen de-realizes it. So you know what I mean? It’s very difficult to render on screen the real. Somehow the screen has a certain effect of de-realizing it. For example, and this is what Kieślowski got: if you render something directly in a documentary way on the screen, it’s no longer perceived as real in its helpless tragic dimension; it becomes a travesty, an obscenity. As we all know, imagine a scene of torture. If it’s rendered realistically, we can be properly terrified. For example, a film which I liked but ambiguously—I think it was a little bit overestimated, it’s even politically more ambiguous—*Syriana* by George Clooney. You can imagine an old sadist like me, what’s my favorite scene? He deserves it, a beauty getting so much beautiful... you know, when they pull his... these nails, nails out, you know. Now imagine that you think you are in a movie, then what, you don’t like him more, why were you so horrified? Okay. The imagine that a camera would approach it and all of a sudden you would have seen "my God, it’s really going on." I claim this would be... it would ruin everything. Which is why, to repeat my old joke, sorry, but it’s crucial here, this is why we have this big problem with pornography. Again, I know you all know the jokes, but I should repeat it here, the joke how if, as every normal human person at some point in your life you have the misfortune to see some hardcore pornography, is it what always shocked me there is how impossible, as if some structural necessity prevents it from making... For me, the interesting point was always the story which accompanies it. And how, it is as if there is some urge to make this story as stupid as possible. Like, I enjoy them because I like vulgarity. The last one I saw, I love it. It was the plumber comes and the housewife is at home alone and she... he fixes the hole, and then the housewife tells him, "Look, I have another hole to fix, can you also fix this hole?" and you know... But what I’m saying is that the stories are so stupid that I don't accept it that they who organized the film, scenario writers, can be so stupid. I really claim that there is some kind of silent censorship there. Like, you will see it all at the level of raw sexuality—real orgasm, ejaculation—but the price is that the story will be ridiculed. You can’t have it both. Which is why I think that this... that we now... I well know that Catherine Breillat and others in France now are trying to violate this taboo, this choice. But which is why I think it... it was only a vogue some three, four years ago, no, *Romance* and so on, and it withdrew. It’s as if this is too much for us: to have a film that would have been at the same time realistic in this vulgar sense through hardcore pornography and, how should I call it, emotionally engaging. So what I’m saying, very precise answer to you, is that, how should I put it, in order to have the effect—what Barthes would have called "the effect of the real"—in the sense of what we see on stage really affects us in its horror, sorry, on screen, we must somehow know that it’s a fake. There are nice para... there are nice paradoxes here at work. And again, that’s all I wanted to say in a respectful way. Okay, now I said there the Big Other is here in the sense of precisely when the hero appears to make his sacrifice alone, somehow he is observed. That makes the whole point of it. Now this agency would have been of course the Big Other. And now I want to develop a little bit this notion, here we are, because I was thinking about a very stupid question. Some of you approached me, not even here but on the street after the talk, and asked me a question which annoyed me because it was a good question. I really hate to be asked... I like stupid questions, so you can give us three... which was a very simple one: in what way can an individual embody the Big Other? Why is this simple question a good one? Because the point is precisely not to follow the usual path which is: yes, it’s the person who personifies our community, absolute leader, Stalin, Queen, whatever, like... you know, we always think about this sublime individual who *is* the Big Other already in himself. No, I think this is the wrong way to approach it. I think that one of the best definitions of the Big Other, of when a person embodies the Big Other, would be a person which functions for us as, let’s call it, a protector of appearances. A person in front of whom, for whom we must save, maintain the appearances. Like when parents say, when the wife or the husband says to his/her sexual partner, "Don't do this to me, the child might... our son may observe us." *He* is the Big Other. The Big Other is this again agency in front of whom we have to protect appearances. This would be one mode. Then, my favorite one. It’s quite... the origins of this, what I will show now, is quite vulgar. Yesterday evening I went to a walk at the only bookstore—this is still the barbarism of London—open at least of the big ones after that... that I don’t like on Charing Cross Road, but okay. I got there *Brief Encounter* for and... anal character etc. So, you remember—and I will show it now to you—you remember there is a perfect exemplification of Big Other. I mean, we all know the film, I need there... okay. You remember that the same scene is repeated at the beginning and at the end because it’s a flashback structure. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, the two, okay, not realized lovers but lovers to be, meet for the last time at the train station just when they hoped to enjoy for a minute their last moments alone, a friend of Celia Johnson comes, a kind of benevolent but ordinary common woman who prattles, talks all the time and is perceived as this disturbing appearance who instead of leaving the lovers alone disturbs their last moment. *She* is the Big Other. If that ever was a Big Other, this is it. So let’s see if this will work... [unintelligible, sound issues] I'm sorry... Okay, I think I will manage and I... but let's stay here for a minute. I don't trust this thing. I mean, you are I think this another embodiment of the Big Other, you know... [Laughter] Okay, I'm sorry... [Žižek struggles with technical issues] Okay, nonetheless let’s... [Žižek gives up on the clip] Maybe this is enough for the time being. But I hope this works, okay, sorry. And again the point is very simple, I hope you got it. When the mask, the dead object, comes alive by way of taking possession of us, its hold of us is that of a living dead, of a monstrous automaton imposing itself on us. So that the kernel of our being is out there, this machine of *jouissance*. This mask is just the partial object, death drive at its purest. Something that takes over the individual with its idiotic superego injunction. Because this is, if you want to know what superego is for Lacan, it is this. This superego is what makes the unfortunate policewoman [unintelligible] against her will. It’s a ridiculous scene, but I like it—how you remember how she even tries to resist it, cries, but cannot help joining in a duet in that idiotic song. It compels us to act against our conscious standards in an obscene way which embarrasses us. This logic of death drive, of compulsion to repeat as a matter of surface deployed by Deleuze in his *Difference and Repetition*, is to be opposed to the notion, which is closer to Bataille, of violent transgression as the act of tearing apart the cobweb of appearances, of forcing one’s way into the raw heart of the real. That’s now I’m returning, you remember, to what I was developing at the beginning. That precisely the Lacanian real is not when you... it’s not the Nietzschean Dionysian as opposed to Apollonian. It’s not surface of appearances we break, we violate them, force our way into the heart of darkness, palpitating. No, the real is on the surface. The real is a surface, the real is—how should I put it in Nietzschean terms?—the Dionysiac aspect of the Apollonian surface itself. It’s a surface starting to run madly in its spectral, stupid compulsion to repeat. So two things have to be added here apropos... just to clarify finally, apropos the Lacanian real. So when you hear about the Lacanian real, again forget everything about this standard topic of the symbolic structure in the sense of abstract, rational or logical or language coordinate, and then the wealth of reality, all that which escapes language. Even Lacan, he sometimes misperceives real at this level. For example, he even has a notion of it, what he calls "lalangue," sometimes translated with this stuttering effect as "llanguage" with double L. What Lacan wants to say with this—again, newly coined word, neologism—is language in its non-structural, in the formal sense of structure, aspect; all the what Deleuzians would have called rhizomatic aspects of language beneath its formal structure. Play words, resonances, etc., all these contingent metaphoric links, homonymies, wordplay, and so on and so on; all this as it were pathological wealth of language. But I think that it’s very risky to follow this path. Because the first thing to be said is that, you know, even Hegel—now I nonetheless start with Hegel slowly—even Hegel is sometimes misperceived as following this path. The idea is that, at least if you read the cheap pseudo-dialectical, dialectical materialist in the usual sense of the word versions, then the idea is that in our everyday approach we perceive objects metaphysically as isolated objects, but the dialectical approach enables us to locate objects into their proper global context, to perceive all the multitude, the wealth of their connections, and so on and so on. I think that it’s exactly the opposite which is true. For Hegel, the truly difficult thing is not to break out of abstraction into the concrete network, but on the contrary to abstract properly. For Hegel, the first task of conceptual analysis is not to see more than you perceive in reality, but to see less. To see where empirically we see all this wealth of features—"No, but this situation is always more complex" and so on—to see this as a lure blinding us for the notional determination which is the only thing which really matters. In this sense, dialectics is a violently reductionist affair. And Lacanian real is precisely this. Which is why, again a little bit of criticism for some of you if you also like literature, which is why I think that the misfortune of Lacan—and it is I claim his worst seminar, it’s the one recently published, *Le sinthome*, about Joyce. He was totally seduced with this wealth of language as this a-formal structure of homonymies, wordplay where everything is mixed in a chaotic orgy of resonances and so on. But I think that the whole of Beckett, who is for me the great one, should be conceived precisely as a reaction—we all know of this almost paternal-oedipal relationship, Beckett-Joyce, Beckett not seducing but rather rejecting the advances of Joyce’s daughter, what pushes her to madness, that’s another story what kind of a character was Beckett—what I’m saying is that when did Beckett become Beckett? I think when he got it that one has to reject this late Joycean *Finnegans Wake* pseudo-wealth of, you know, like this impossible task of *Finnegans Wake*, to write a book which would be all languages, everything resonates in it. And to ask the opposite: the reduction. And it’s wonderful for me, the trilogy of the 20th century, of course it’s *Molloy*, *Malone Dies*, *The Unnamable*. Did you notice how even the narrator gets... first the story is minimal in *Molloy*, in *Malone Dies* it’s even more minimal, just a guy dying; in *The Unnamable* finally we get this undead partial object speaking. So, and this is why I think that Beckett is at the same time the writer of minimal difference. Not this wealth of "Oh my God, this play, that play," and so on. Just minimal, some minimal difference. Which is of course precisely drive. I think Beckett is the true—as I already hinted at here apropos ethics—Beckett is for me the true writer of drive. Drive is this what you find in the last lines of *The Unnamable*. "I don't know, I know if I can but I must go on." This abstract, abstract persistence. And I claim that ultimately the minimal difference in Beckett is maybe even the difference—why not?—the difference between French and English versions. This seems to me very symptomatic, this translating... as if it’s a wrong question to ask "Is it English or French the original?" It is as if it’s a minimal... it’s a nice example of minimal difference: the same, the same but not quite the same. Which is why, as I develop it somewhere briefly in my last book, *The Parallax View*, which is why my favorite ancient epic narratives are those of Finland, *Kalevala*, where it’s all based on this minimal repetition. You know how their verse functions? It’s always repetitive, the same, like "The sun is rising in the morning, the sun is getting up," and so on. Literally everything is said twice. And that... that... this structure I think, this is again, this is much closer to the Lacanian real: this minimal difference which is again drive at its most elementary. And this brings us, if you allow me another improvisation I cannot resist it, a little bit let’s nonetheless focus on the real today. This is I think where—now I will try to do a serious, serious, okay, more conceptual intervention into—psychoanalysis and Buddhism. This is where I see a difference between all the... ultimate difference between psychoanalysis and Buddhism. With all respect for Buddhism, Buddhism effectively does lead us to enact a kind of traversing the fantasy, to overcome the illusions on which our desires are based, to confront the void beneath each object of desire. And also in Buddhism, of course, the very notion of desire, or rather this craving, is drive in a way. Furthermore, what psychoanalysis undoubtedly shares with Buddhism is the emphasis that there is no self as a substantial agent of psychic life. No wonder Mark Epstein in his book on Buddhism and psychoanalysis refers even positively to Lacan’s essay on the mirror stage with its notion of the ego as an object, the
So you see my point here: that although you will say "wait a minute, but this is a movie," no, you can not only think with films, but you can also prevent thinking with films. And I think again that this is the lie. And the almost, I would say, artistic tragedy of the film is that—I admit, I concede all these points that it’s done soberly and so on and so on—but again, in this concrete constellation, the true horror, the true touch of the real would have been to shoot again the same film but about the other cases where you had this pure pointless horror, which then forces you to ask questions. Again, I’m not saying that we should ask these stupid humanitarian, stupidly pro-Arab questions, "Oh, why did they do it, they must have had their reason." No, no, the point is just to be intrigued. The way the film is done, by focusing on this rebellion, enigma disappears, we are not intrigued. So again, I claim that although it may appear to be a film which wants to bring us in contact with, or kind of a touch of the real, it's the identification that the film offers—identification with the rebelling passengers and so on—is precisely an avoidance of the real. If you want a touch of the real, it would have been again the same film without rebellion. Just this utter hopelessness. Is this a question, or...? "The incident did happen. It was real." Yes, absolutely! But we are not there. You know what I mean? I think that it’s... how should I put it? In a way—now I will say something horrible—in a way, it’s totally irrelevant, this. Because even—no, I’m not one of those crazy paranoiac leftists who claim it was all organized by CIA and the Jewish lobby and then the plane never crashed into Pentagon and so on—all I’m saying is that I have small, tiny—I know it all happened—doubts even about... did it? No, I know it was very real. And I’m even tempted... no, I don’t have any problems here to tell you frankly: for me, those who rebelled there in a way are real heroes. I don’t have, to avoid now any problem, I don't have any problems to admit this. This is for me one of the definitions of heroism: not that you can act where you know... where you know that everything is lost. How should I put it? In a way, no? And I even am ready to make... I'm politically, as you can imagine, if I take power... Martin Amis goes to gulag for years. But I like the point he made in the last—I think it was *Independent* or *Guardian*, I even forgot where—about this film, where he draws attention to the simple fact that how, you know, when you are at the point of dying, the message is to your nearest "I love you" and so on. It’s a very Paulinian point that I like it, even if it's pathetic, that the ultimate real in this sense is love, where you are at the zero point. Why not? I’m not ashamed to make this point. All again, all I’m saying is that it’s again... it was absolutely... although even—but why say "even," he’s not an idiot—Martin Amis makes at the same time the right point, which is that... how should I put it? You know phenomenologically—now I would have to go to a more precise analysis, but phenomenologically—the way we, I claim, subconsciously—I on purpose use this term, not Freudian unconscious, it would have been too big here—when we see a hero doing a beautiful sacrificial gesture, even if within the narrative the hero is alone, it is somehow as if—it’s not so much that the hero knows there, but the screen persona, it is as if she acts for our spectator’s view. It’s and that’s what makes it much less desperate and so on. And my God, somebody who is highly sympathetic of the film, Martin Amis, makes this remark that here, necessarily, the film mystifies the situation. Mystifies it in the sense that... in the sense that, how should I put it? The whole staging, the moment we are in a movie theater, it’s that you see, we secretly impute to the victims there, as it were, "you see, they will be redeemed because they know that they are observed." This is part of our most elementary phenomenological perception. In their very solitude they will find redemption knowing that we are there. Okay, let me return to my old topics: that *we* are their Big Other there, the viewers. But this precisely is where it's very good, even theoretical, not only aesthetic question: how to do a film about, how should I put it, the true solitude? You know, because you know if you watch, for example, films starring Humphrey Bogart, you know that one of the standard scenes of the *noir* detective is that at the end he makes a sacrificial gesture. Like, you know, this old melodramatic topic of: I do secretly a gesture helping my enemy even because secretly I love him or her, whatever, and it’s so noble that nobody knows about it. Yeah, but screw it, *we* know it, the spectators! And it’s always inscribed into the situation. It’s a kind of ontological cheating. In other words, I claim quite seriously that the film... [unintelligible technical noise and laughter as a woman walks across the stage] Is this what is called vulgar American cock-teasing, that you just gave me a kiss and then... or will it work? Will you go to the end as an honest woman? Okay, you just go. Thank you very much, yeah. Perfect. Perfect timing because now I am at the end of this one. Incidentally, I hope you got my point: of course, I haven’t seen the film, *United No, I don’t have time for such films, no, I just analyze them, no, okay. Okay, so but nonetheless, again I’m absolutely... I think that if you ask me again to avoid any moral misunderstanding here, that the two heroes of those September 11th events are for me these passengers. And I think I even mention them in my *Welcome to the Desert of the Real*, so I’m not now faking it now quickly to... and they are the true proletarian heroes if you ask me. Their story should have been told. The firefighters in New York, who were ruthlessly exploited... you know, it’s little known how the very disgusting Rudolph Giuliani, who pretends to be the big hero, you know that then it was a scandal how those who were wounded were not even properly covered by the insurance and so on. They are the true proletarian exploited guys there. So again, I have no problem with this. All I’m saying again is that yes, I agree with you, it was real, but the film doesn’t render *that* real which was there. It’s very difficult to do it. I mean, that’s why, and I wanted to talk late... lately, later about it. You know, that’s the problem that Kieślowski encountered when I will talk about concrete universality more, with pornography. Look, if you do certain things which, if done improperly, you can bring children—I shouldn’t here use the f-word—on screen, of course it’s real! But the very fact that you act it on the screen de-realizes it. So you know what I mean? It’s very difficult to render on screen the real. Somehow the screen has a certain effect of de-realizing it. For example, and this is what Kieślowski got: if you render something directly in a documentary way on the screen, it’s no longer perceived as real in its helpless tragic dimension; it becomes a travesty, an obscenity. As we all know, imagine a scene of torture. If it’s rendered realistically, we can be properly terrified. For example, a film which I liked but ambiguously—I think it was a little bit overestimated, it’s even politically more ambiguous—*Syriana* by George Clooney. You can imagine an old sadist like me, what’s my favorite scene? He deserves it, a beauty getting so much beautiful... you know, when they pull his... these nails, nails out, you know. Now imagine that you think you are in a movie, then what, you don’t like him more, why were you so horrified? Okay. The imagine that a camera would approach it and all of a sudden you would have seen "my God, it’s really going on." I claim this would be... it would ruin everything. Which is why, to repeat my old joke, sorry, but it’s crucial here, this is why we have this big problem with pornography. Again, I know you all know the jokes, but I should repeat it here, the joke how if, as every normal human person at some point in your life you have the misfortune to see some hardcore pornography, is it what always shocked me there is how impossible, as if some structural necessity prevents it from making... For me, the interesting point was always the story which accompanies it. And how, it is as if there is some urge to make this story as stupid as possible. Like, I enjoy them because I like vulgarity. The last one I saw, I love it. It was the plumber comes and the housewife is at home alone and she... he fixes the hole, and then the housewife tells him, "Look, I have another hole to fix, can you also fix this hole?" and you know... But what I’m saying is that the stories are so stupid that I don't accept it that they who organized the film, scenario writers, can be so stupid. I really claim that there is some kind of silent censorship there. Like, you will see it all at the level of raw sexuality—real orgasm, ejaculation—but the price is that the story will be ridiculed. You can’t have it both. Which is why I think that this... that we now... I well know that Catherine Breillat and others in France now are trying to violate this taboo, this choice. But which is why I think it... it was only a vogue some three, four years ago, no, *Romance* and so on, and it withdrew. It’s as if this is too much for us: to have a film that would have been at the same time realistic in this vulgar sense through hardcore pornography and, how should I call it, emotionally engaging. So what I’m saying, very precise answer to you, is that, how should I put it, in order to have the effect—what Barthes would have called "the effect of the real"—in the sense of what we see on stage really affects us in its horror, sorry, on screen, we must somehow know that it’s a fake. There are nice para... there are nice paradoxes here at work. And again, that’s all I wanted to say in a respectful way. Okay, now I said there the Big Other is here in the sense of precisely when the hero appears to make his sacrifice alone, somehow he is observed. That makes the whole point of it. Now this agency would have been of course the Big Other. And now I want to develop a little bit this notion, here we are, because I was thinking about a very stupid question. Some of you approached me, not even here but on the street after the talk, and asked me a question which annoyed me because it was a good question. I really hate to be asked... I like stupid questions, so you can give us three... which was a very simple one: in what way can an individual embody the Big Other? Why is this simple question a good one? Because the point is precisely not to follow the usual path which is: yes, it’s the person who personifies our community, absolute leader, Stalin, Queen, whatever, like... you know, we always think about this sublime individual who *is* the Big Other already in himself. No, I think this is the wrong way to approach it. I think that one of the best definitions of the Big Other, of when a person embodies the Big Other, would be a person which functions for us as, let’s call it, a protector of appearances. A person in front of whom, for whom we must save, maintain the appearances. Like when parents say, when the wife or the husband says to his/her sexual partner, "Don't do this to me, the child might... our son may observe us." *He* is the Big Other. The Big Other is this again agency in front of whom we have to protect appearances. This would be one mode. Then, my favorite one. It’s quite... the origins of this, what I will show now, is quite vulgar. Yesterday evening I went to a walk at the only bookstore—this is still the barbarism of London—open at least of the big ones after that... that I don’t like on Charing Cross Road, but okay. I got there *Brief Encounter* for and... anal character etc. So, you remember—and I will show it now to you—you remember there is a perfect exemplification of Big Other. I mean, we all know the film, I need there... okay. You remember that the same scene is repeated at the beginning and at the end because it’s a flashback structure. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, the two, okay, not realized lovers but lovers to be, meet for the last time at the train station just when they hoped to enjoy for a minute their last moments alone, a friend of Celia Johnson comes, a kind of benevolent but ordinary common woman who prattles, talks all the time and is perceived as this disturbing appearance who instead of leaving the lovers alone disturbs their last moment. *She* is the Big Other. If that ever was a Big Other, this is it. So let’s see if this will work... [unintelligible, sound issues] I'm sorry... Okay, I think I will manage and I... but let's stay here for a minute. I don't trust this thing. I mean, you are I think this another embodiment of the Big Other, you know... [Laughter] Okay, I'm sorry... [Žižek struggles with technical issues] Okay, nonetheless let’s... [Žižek gives up on the clip] Maybe this is enough for the time being. But I hope this works, okay, sorry. And again the point is very simple, I hope you got it. When the mask, the dead object, comes alive by way of taking possession of us, its hold of us is that of a living dead, of a monstrous automaton imposing itself on us. So that the kernel of our being is out there, this machine of *jouissance*. This mask is just the partial object, death drive at its purest. Something that takes over the individual with its idiotic superego injunction. Because this is, if you want to know what superego is for Lacan, it is this. This superego is what makes the unfortunate policewoman [unintelligible] against her will. It’s a ridiculous scene, but I like it—how you remember how she even tries to resist it, cries, but cannot help joining in a duet in that idiotic song. It compels us to act against our conscious standards in an obscene way which embarrasses us. This logic of death drive, of compulsion to repeat as a matter of surface deployed by Deleuze in his *Difference and Repetition*, is to be opposed to the notion, which is closer to Bataille, of violent transgression as the act of tearing apart the cobweb of appearances, of forcing one’s way into the raw heart of the real. That’s now I’m returning, you remember, to what I was developing at the beginning. That precisely the Lacanian real is not when you... it’s not the Nietzschean Dionysian as opposed to Apollonian. It’s not surface of appearances we break, we violate them, force our way into the heart of darkness, palpitating. No, the real is on the surface. The real is a surface, the real is—how should I put it in Nietzschean terms?—the Dionysiac aspect of the Apollonian surface itself. It’s a surface starting to run madly in its spectral, stupid compulsion to repeat. So two things have to be added here apropos... just to clarify finally, apropos the Lacanian real. So when you hear about the Lacanian real, again forget everything about this standard topic of the symbolic structure in the sense of abstract, rational or logical or language coordinate, and then the wealth of reality, all that which escapes language. Even Lacan, he sometimes misperceives real at this level. For example, he even has a notion of it, what he calls "lalangue," sometimes translated with this stuttering effect as "llanguage" with double L. What Lacan wants to say with this—again, newly coined word, neologism—is language in its non-structural, in the formal sense of structure, aspect; all the what Deleuzians would have called rhizomatic aspects of language beneath its formal structure. Play words, resonances, etc., all these contingent metaphoric links, homonymies, wordplay, and so on and so on; all this as it were pathological wealth of language. But I think that it’s very risky to follow this path. Because the first thing to be said is that, you know, even Hegel—now I nonetheless start with Hegel slowly—even Hegel is sometimes misperceived as following this path. The idea is that, at least if you read the cheap pseudo-dialectical, dialectical materialist in the usual sense of the word versions, then the idea is that in our everyday approach we perceive objects metaphysically as isolated objects, but the dialectical approach enables us to locate objects into their proper global context, to perceive all the multitude, the wealth of their connections, and so on and so on. I think that it’s exactly the opposite which is true. For Hegel, the truly difficult thing is not to break out of abstraction into the concrete network, but on the contrary to abstract properly. For Hegel, the first task of conceptual analysis is not to see more than you perceive in reality, but to see less. To see where empirically we see all this wealth of features—"No, but this situation is always more complex" and so on—to see this as a lure blinding us for the notional determination which is the only thing which really matters. In this sense, dialectics is a violently reductionist affair. And Lacanian real is precisely this. Which is why, again a little bit of criticism for some of you if you also like literature, which is why I think that the misfortune of Lacan—and it is I claim his worst seminar, it’s the one recently published, *Le sinthome*, about Joyce. He was totally seduced with this wealth of language as this a-formal structure of homonymies, wordplay where everything is mixed in a chaotic orgy of resonances and so on. But I think that the whole of Beckett, who is for me the great one, should be conceived precisely as a reaction—we all know of this almost paternal-oedipal relationship, Beckett-Joyce, Beckett not seducing but rather rejecting the advances of Joyce’s daughter, what pushes her to madness, that’s another story what kind of a character was Beckett—what I’m saying is that when did Beckett become Beckett? I think when he got it that one has to reject this late Joycean *Finnegans Wake* pseudo-wealth of, you know, like this impossible task of *Finnegans Wake*, to write a book which would be all languages, everything resonates in it. And to ask the opposite: the reduction. And it’s wonderful for me, the trilogy of the 20th century, of course it’s *Molloy*, *Malone Dies*, *The Unnamable*. Did you notice how even the narrator gets... first the story is minimal in *Molloy*, in *Malone Dies* it’s even more minimal, just a guy dying; in *The Unnamable* finally we get this undead partial object speaking. So, and this is why I think that Beckett is at the same time the writer of minimal difference. Not this wealth of "Oh my God, this play, that play," and so on. Just minimal, some minimal difference. Which is of course precisely drive. I think Beckett is the true—as I already hinted at here apropos ethics—Beckett is for me the true writer of drive. Drive is this what you find in the last lines of *The Unnamable*. "I don't know, I know if I can but I must go on." This abstract, abstract persistence. And I claim that ultimately the minimal difference in Beckett is maybe even the difference—why not?—the difference between French and English versions. This seems to me very symptomatic, this translating... as if it’s a wrong question to ask "Is it English or French the original?" It is as if it’s a minimal... it’s a nice example of minimal difference: the same, the same but not quite the same. Which is why, as I develop it somewhere briefly in my last book, *The Parallax View*, which is why my favorite ancient epic narratives are those of Finland, *Kalevala*, where it’s all based on this minimal repetition. You know how their verse functions? It’s always repetitive, the same, like "The sun is rising in the morning, the sun is getting up," and so on. Literally everything is said twice. And that... that... this structure I think, this is again, this is much closer to the Lacanian real: this minimal difference which is again drive at its most elementary. And this brings us, if you allow me another improvisation I cannot resist it, a little bit let’s nonetheless focus on the real today. This is I think where—now I will try to do a serious, serious, okay, more conceptual intervention into—psychoanalysis and Buddhism. This is where I see a difference between all the... ultimate difference between psychoanalysis and Buddhism. With all respect for Buddhism, Buddhism effectively does lead us to enact a kind of traversing the fantasy, to overcome the illusions on which our desires are based, to confront the void beneath each object of desire. And also in Buddhism, of course, the very notion of desire, or rather this craving, is drive in a way. Furthermore, what psychoanalysis undoubtedly shares with Buddhism is the emphasis that there is no self as a substantial agent of psychic life. No wonder Mark Epstein in his book on Buddhism and psychoanalysis refers even positively to Lacan’s essay on the mirror stage with its notion of the ego as an object, the
unknown
result of
result of
Slavoj Žižek
the subject’s identification with the idealized fixed image of itself. The self is a fetishized illusion of a
the subject’s identification with the idealized fixed image of itself. The self is a fetishized illusion of a
unknown
substantial
substantial
Slavoj Žižek
core of subjectivity
core of subjectivity
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where effectively there is nothing. This is why for
where effectively there is nothing. This is why for
Slavoj Žižek
Buddhism the point
Buddhism the point
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is not to discover one’s true self, but to
is not to discover one’s true self, but to
Slavoj Žižek
accept that there is none, that the self as such is an illusion. You get this nice almost Hegelian twist: the point is from the false self to
accept that there is none, that the self as such is an illusion. You get this nice almost Hegelian twist: the point is from the false self to
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the self itself as false, as falsity. One should accept that there the self as such is an illusion and imposture. Or to put it in more psychoanalytic terms, not only should one analyze resistances, but ultimately there is nothing but
the self itself as false, as falsity. One should accept that there the self as such is an illusion and imposture. Or to put it in more psychoanalytic terms, not only should one analyze resistances, but ultimately there is nothing but
Slavoj Žižek
resistances
resistances
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to be analyzed. There is no true self waiting in the wings to be released. Self is a disruptive, false and as such ultimately unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing. When we awaken to knowing, we realize that all that goes on in us is the flow of thoughts without a thinker. The impossibility of figuring out who or what we are is inherent, since there is nothing that we really are, just a void in the core of our being. Consequently, in the process of the Buddhist enlightenment, we do not quit this terrestrial world for another true reality; we just accept its non-substantial, fleeting, illusory character. We undergo the process of—again I quote Mark Epstein, very nice formulation—of "going to pieces without falling apart." In the agnostic mode, for Buddhism ethics is ultimately a question of knowledge and ignorance. Our craving, our attachment to terrestrial goods is conditioned by our ignorance, so that deliverance comes from proper knowing. What Christian love means is that on the contrary, there is a decision not grounded in true or false knowledge. Christianity breaks with this entire tradition of the primacy of
to be analyzed. There is no true self waiting in the wings to be released. Self is a disruptive, false and as such ultimately unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing. When we awaken to knowing, we realize that all that goes on in us is the flow of thoughts without a thinker. The impossibility of figuring out who or what we are is inherent, since there is nothing that we really are, just a void in the core of our being. Consequently, in the process of the Buddhist enlightenment, we do not quit this terrestrial world for another true reality; we just accept its non-substantial, fleeting, illusory character. We undergo the process of—again I quote Mark Epstein, very nice formulation—of "going to pieces without falling apart." In the agnostic mode, for Buddhism ethics is ultimately a question of knowledge and ignorance. Our craving, our attachment to terrestrial goods is conditioned by our ignorance, so that deliverance comes from proper knowing. What Christian love means is that on the contrary, there is a decision not grounded in true or false knowledge. Christianity breaks with this entire tradition of the primacy of
Slavoj Žižek
knowledge which spans from Buddhism through Gnosticism to Spinoza. So again, the stakes here are very precise. And I’m here unfortunately on the side of Christianity, where I see also Marxism and others. You get the point that for Hegel, Fichte, Marx, the ultimate metaphysical decision is ethical, practical, is not knowledge. While for Buddhism, up to Spinoza and so on, the wrong choice is always a matter of not knowing properly the truth. There are no... there is ultimately, the consequence of this is very radical, it concerns evil. There is ultimately no evil. Evil is simply an effect of an, if you want, epistemological mistake. But nonetheless, let me go on with Buddhism. So crucial for Buddhism is the reflexive change from the object to the thinker himself. First, we isolate the thing that bothers us, that causes our suffering. Then we change not the object, but ourselves, the way we relate to what appears to us as the cause of our suffering. What should be extinguished is not the object, but the false view of the self. What had always been illusory has to be understood as such. Nothing, as I again quote Mark Epstein, his formula, "nothing was changed but the perspective of the observer." This shift involves great pain. It is not only a liberation, a step into the incestuous bliss of the infamous oceanic feeling, but also the violent experience of losing one’s ground under one’s feet, of being deprived of the most familiar stay of one’s being. This is why the best starting point for the Buddhist enlightenment is to focus on the most elementary feeling of injured innocence, of suffering an injustice without a cause, which is of course the preferred topic of narcissistic, masochistic thoughts. "How could she do this to me? I don't deserve to be treated that way," and so on and so on. The next step is then to make the shift to the ego itself, to the subject of these painful emotions, rendering clear and palpable its own fleeting and irrelevant status. The aggression against the object that causes suffering should be turned against the self itself. We do not repair the damage; we gain the insight into the illusory nature of that which should be repaired. So again, with great respect, do you imagine what a radical ethical position this is—that the ultimate goal is literally to have thoughts which are thoughts of no one, to have thoughts which are not subjectivized, thoughts not spoken or thought from a certain subjective position of enunciation. In what then, the crucial question, does the gap that separates psychoanalysis from Buddhism consist? In order to answer this question, I think that we should confront the basic enigma of Buddhism, what I think is its blind spot. How did the fall into what in Buddhism is called *samsara*, the wheel of life, this eternal circular movement of craving—how did this fall occur? The question to be raised is the exact opposite of the main Buddhist concern, which is "How can we break out of the wheel of life and attain Nirvana?" But I think the key question is the opposite one: it's the question of "How did we fall out of Nirvana in the first place?" Incidentally, we will have time to work on this later; it's exactly the same with Hegel, I think this is the true greatness of Hegel. His—if you read him closely, you will see that his question is not: are we condemned to live in appearances, how do we know if there is some substantial reality behind appearances, how to penetrate the veil of appearances towards reality? No, for Hegel, as for any good dialectician, reality is out there stupidly. There is no problem in reality. The true problem is how do appearances emerge in the middle of reality? That’s the true mystery, and that’s what should be celebrated. In a wonderful passage celebrating thought, Hegel says the true greatness of human spirit is not that we can perceive reality the way it is—every stupid ape can do it. What only a human can do is to tear reality apart, as Hegel puts it: to take something which has no autonomous being, just a property, a sound, something which in reality exists only as a part, part of more complex reality, and treat it as an autonomous entity. This exploding, tearing apart of reality—this is the greatness of spirit. So again, as I already developed in my books, it’s the same point with Marx as he said: for Marx, the mystery is not the true nature of capitalism—he said bourgeois economy already knows this—the mystery is the appearance. The mystery is why this true essence appears in the guise of the commodity form. The mystery is not beneath appearance; the mystery is the mystery of the very appearance. So again, back to Buddhism. The nature, the origin of the impetus by means of which desire, its deception, emerges out of the void is, I think, the big unknown in the heart of the Buddhist edifice. It points towards an act which breaks the symmetry within Nirvana itself and thus makes something to appear out of nothing. Of course, I’m again playing here with quantum physics, its notion of breaking the symmetry. But you see now my point. Of course, the standard I asked some of my Buddhist friends, and their point is, "You are too Western, this is too speculative." Their point is, "We don't even worry about this. Our problem is strictly pragmatic, practical. People suffer, we want to help them to stop suffering." But I think again that we should insist on this question. Why? Because if our everyday world of phenomenal reality is an illusory world, then the question for me is again: how does it explode? How does it arise in the first place out of the, let’s call it somehow naively, eternal bliss of Nirvana? Now I know what every Buddhist will tell me: that I am now introducing a duality which is not there, that—you know this joke—"apple is an apple, apple is not an apple, at the end you again say apple is an apple" or "roses are roses." That is to say that for Buddhism there is no other reality. Nirvana is not the Western mystical notion of you escape out of material reality and enter some transcendental bliss. No, Nirvana is exactly the same reality only perceived in its utter non-substantial character. You don't go anywhere; the universe remains the same. But nonetheless I claim the question is: so how did this—how do you call it—epistemological mistake occur? I think that Buddhism has to avoid it because the only way to answer properly this question—now I will show you openly my unashamed Western Eurocentrism—would have been to accept something which I think only the Western mysticism was truly ready to think to the end. It’s the idea that it’s not... there must be some terrifying radical evil located already into the, how should I call it, pre-phenomenal world of Nirvana itself, of *shunyata*, of the void. That, you know, it’s not simply the void and then false appearance of our illusory material reality; this reality emerges when something goes—okay, to put it almost ironic now in the terms of *Star Wars*, no?—the disturbance in power, how should I put it, no? That up there in Nirvana something must go wrong. And now comes my point: drive is the name of this, the Freudian drive I claim. Freudian drive is not phenomenal. Freudian drive does not mean "Oh you idiot, you cannot enter the eternal bliss of Nirvana, you fall." Freudian drive means some kind of asymmetry already in this—I’m consciously using these big metaphysical terms—in this a priori void of Nirvana itself. Here I come back to the metaphor which as you know I’ve already used, this Higgs field. The idea is that in the space of nothingness, the way Buddhism defines it if I understand it correctly, that in that space there already is a certain always a certain minimal disturbance, asymmetry, which is not yet the asymmetry of our ordinary phenomenal reality. And here, with all my debates with Derrida and so on, I claim that in a way—which is why I prefer early Derrida to later Derrida, as I developed—that there is more in *différance* than this late Derridian ethical justice, infinite justice, and so on stuff. It’s precisely this idea that, how should I put it, the zero level of reality—and I use this term now in a totally naive way, the true reality—is this kind of a minimal, minimal disturbance. And this disturbance, this sense that it’s not yet desire, it’s just that it turns around, it persists, it goes on—think about the last line of Beckett’s *The Unnamable*. The way I see it, this—maybe I’m terribly wrong, because on the other hand I am fully aware how, at least in some versions of Buddhism, of course I know, I’ve read it when I was young, all those Tibetan books on the dead and all those evil demons and so on and so on. But nonetheless I think that to think again at its most radical dimension, this—how should I put it?—minimal disturbance in the domain of Nirvana itself. This is what—because if you take this seriously, again, then the whole problem turns around. It’s no longer a problem "how can we break out of movement into this eternal bliss" and so on and so on. The true mystical experience is the experience of how this balance is disturbed. Which is why this brings me even to political conclusions. You know, *Star Wars III* and this—I mean, my dream, as I put it in my last book, is to remake *Star Wars* but with a total perverse shift of perspective. Basically, the story about good, egalitarian, progressive Emperor with his great help, super-dark Vader,
knowledge which spans from Buddhism through Gnosticism to Spinoza. So again, the stakes here are very precise. And I’m here unfortunately on the side of Christianity, where I see also Marxism and others. You get the point that for Hegel, Fichte, Marx, the ultimate metaphysical decision is ethical, practical, is not knowledge. While for Buddhism, up to Spinoza and so on, the wrong choice is always a matter of not knowing properly the truth. There are no... there is ultimately, the consequence of this is very radical, it concerns evil. There is ultimately no evil. Evil is simply an effect of an, if you want, epistemological mistake. But nonetheless, let me go on with Buddhism. So crucial for Buddhism is the reflexive change from the object to the thinker himself. First, we isolate the thing that bothers us, that causes our suffering. Then we change not the object, but ourselves, the way we relate to what appears to us as the cause of our suffering. What should be extinguished is not the object, but the false view of the self. What had always been illusory has to be understood as such. Nothing, as I again quote Mark Epstein, his formula, "nothing was changed but the perspective of the observer." This shift involves great pain. It is not only a liberation, a step into the incestuous bliss of the infamous oceanic feeling, but also the violent experience of losing one’s ground under one’s feet, of being deprived of the most familiar stay of one’s being. This is why the best starting point for the Buddhist enlightenment is to focus on the most elementary feeling of injured innocence, of suffering an injustice without a cause, which is of course the preferred topic of narcissistic, masochistic thoughts. "How could she do this to me? I don't deserve to be treated that way," and so on and so on. The next step is then to make the shift to the ego itself, to the subject of these painful emotions, rendering clear and palpable its own fleeting and irrelevant status. The aggression against the object that causes suffering should be turned against the self itself. We do not repair the damage; we gain the insight into the illusory nature of that which should be repaired. So again, with great respect, do you imagine what a radical ethical position this is—that the ultimate goal is literally to have thoughts which are thoughts of no one, to have thoughts which are not subjectivized, thoughts not spoken or thought from a certain subjective position of enunciation. In what then, the crucial question, does the gap that separates psychoanalysis from Buddhism consist? In order to answer this question, I think that we should confront the basic enigma of Buddhism, what I think is its blind spot. How did the fall into what in Buddhism is called *samsara*, the wheel of life, this eternal circular movement of craving—how did this fall occur? The question to be raised is the exact opposite of the main Buddhist concern, which is "How can we break out of the wheel of life and attain Nirvana?" But I think the key question is the opposite one: it's the question of "How did we fall out of Nirvana in the first place?" Incidentally, we will have time to work on this later; it's exactly the same with Hegel, I think this is the true greatness of Hegel. His—if you read him closely, you will see that his question is not: are we condemned to live in appearances, how do we know if there is some substantial reality behind appearances, how to penetrate the veil of appearances towards reality? No, for Hegel, as for any good dialectician, reality is out there stupidly. There is no problem in reality. The true problem is how do appearances emerge in the middle of reality? That’s the true mystery, and that’s what should be celebrated. In a wonderful passage celebrating thought, Hegel says the true greatness of human spirit is not that we can perceive reality the way it is—every stupid ape can do it. What only a human can do is to tear reality apart, as Hegel puts it: to take something which has no autonomous being, just a property, a sound, something which in reality exists only as a part, part of more complex reality, and treat it as an autonomous entity. This exploding, tearing apart of reality—this is the greatness of spirit. So again, as I already developed in my books, it’s the same point with Marx as he said: for Marx, the mystery is not the true nature of capitalism—he said bourgeois economy already knows this—the mystery is the appearance. The mystery is why this true essence appears in the guise of the commodity form. The mystery is not beneath appearance; the mystery is the mystery of the very appearance. So again, back to Buddhism. The nature, the origin of the impetus by means of which desire, its deception, emerges out of the void is, I think, the big unknown in the heart of the Buddhist edifice. It points towards an act which breaks the symmetry within Nirvana itself and thus makes something to appear out of nothing. Of course, I’m again playing here with quantum physics, its notion of breaking the symmetry. But you see now my point. Of course, the standard I asked some of my Buddhist friends, and their point is, "You are too Western, this is too speculative." Their point is, "We don't even worry about this. Our problem is strictly pragmatic, practical. People suffer, we want to help them to stop suffering." But I think again that we should insist on this question. Why? Because if our everyday world of phenomenal reality is an illusory world, then the question for me is again: how does it explode? How does it arise in the first place out of the, let’s call it somehow naively, eternal bliss of Nirvana? Now I know what every Buddhist will tell me: that I am now introducing a duality which is not there, that—you know this joke—"apple is an apple, apple is not an apple, at the end you again say apple is an apple" or "roses are roses." That is to say that for Buddhism there is no other reality. Nirvana is not the Western mystical notion of you escape out of material reality and enter some transcendental bliss. No, Nirvana is exactly the same reality only perceived in its utter non-substantial character. You don't go anywhere; the universe remains the same. But nonetheless I claim the question is: so how did this—how do you call it—epistemological mistake occur? I think that Buddhism has to avoid it because the only way to answer properly this question—now I will show you openly my unashamed Western Eurocentrism—would have been to accept something which I think only the Western mysticism was truly ready to think to the end. It’s the idea that it’s not... there must be some terrifying radical evil located already into the, how should I call it, pre-phenomenal world of Nirvana itself, of *shunyata*, of the void. That, you know, it’s not simply the void and then false appearance of our illusory material reality; this reality emerges when something goes—okay, to put it almost ironic now in the terms of *Star Wars*, no?—the disturbance in power, how should I put it, no? That up there in Nirvana something must go wrong. And now comes my point: drive is the name of this, the Freudian drive I claim. Freudian drive is not phenomenal. Freudian drive does not mean "Oh you idiot, you cannot enter the eternal bliss of Nirvana, you fall." Freudian drive means some kind of asymmetry already in this—I’m consciously using these big metaphysical terms—in this a priori void of Nirvana itself. Here I come back to the metaphor which as you know I’ve already used, this Higgs field. The idea is that in the space of nothingness, the way Buddhism defines it if I understand it correctly, that in that space there already is a certain always a certain minimal disturbance, asymmetry, which is not yet the asymmetry of our ordinary phenomenal reality. And here, with all my debates with Derrida and so on, I claim that in a way—which is why I prefer early Derrida to later Derrida, as I developed—that there is more in *différance* than this late Derridian ethical justice, infinite justice, and so on stuff. It’s precisely this idea that, how should I put it, the zero level of reality—and I use this term now in a totally naive way, the true reality—is this kind of a minimal, minimal disturbance. And this disturbance, this sense that it’s not yet desire, it’s just that it turns around, it persists, it goes on—think about the last line of Beckett’s *The Unnamable*. The way I see it, this—maybe I’m terribly wrong, because on the other hand I am fully aware how, at least in some versions of Buddhism, of course I know, I’ve read it when I was young, all those Tibetan books on the dead and all those evil demons and so on and so on. But nonetheless I think that to think again at its most radical dimension, this—how should I put it?—minimal disturbance in the domain of Nirvana itself. This is what—because if you take this seriously, again, then the whole problem turns around. It’s no longer a problem "how can we break out of movement into this eternal bliss" and so on and so on. The true mystical experience is the experience of how this balance is disturbed. Which is why this brings me even to political conclusions. You know, *Star Wars III* and this—I mean, my dream, as I put it in my last book, is to remake *Star Wars* but with a total perverse shift of perspective. Basically, the story about good, egalitarian, progressive Emperor with his great help, super-dark Vader,
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against decadent,
against decadent,
Slavoj Žižek
feudal, those knights and so on, which should be crushed to establish egalitarian unity. I mean, to remake it from the pro-Emperor
feudal, those knights and so on, which should be crushed to establish egalitarian unity. I mean, to remake it from the pro-Emperor
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side, how should I put it,
side, how should I put it,
Slavoj Žižek
no? It's just for me just reactionary, feudalist, separatist resisting progressive, progressive dictatorship, if you want, no? Okay, but that's another story. Yeah. What I wanted to go on a little bit: which is why—how should I put it?—Nirvana is
no? It's just for me just reactionary, feudalist, separatist resisting progressive, progressive dictatorship, if you want, no? Okay, but that's another story. Yeah. What I wanted to go on a little bit: which is why—how should I put it?—Nirvana is
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so strange, I claim, to... to the principle, or Nirvana to Freudian death drive. And again even Freud is here
so strange, I claim, to... to the principle, or Nirvana to Freudian death drive. And again even Freud is here
Slavoj Žižek
often confused. Death drive is not Nirvana. Death drive is precisely that which disturbs Nirvana. Death drive is something that the wheel goes on turning, how should I put it? And that’s the fundamental lesson of Lacan when he says even after you transgress the fantasy. This is for me
often confused. Death drive is not Nirvana. Death drive is precisely that which disturbs Nirvana. Death drive is something that the wheel goes on turning, how should I put it? And that’s the fundamental lesson of Lacan when he says even after you transgress the fantasy. This is for me
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the ultimate distinction between Lacan and Buddhism, with all great respect
the ultimate distinction between Lacan and Buddhism, with all great respect
Slavoj Žižek
again for Buddhism. That after you traverse the fantasy, or to put it in Buddhist terms, after you see the illusory nature of our desires and so on, the Buddhist result is then you find peace. For Lacan it's "No, it still moves." It still moves. It’s not peace. And what still moves even after you traverse the fantasy, what still moves is drive. Which is why I think one should be here Eurocentrist even in a... at a different
again for Buddhism. That after you traverse the fantasy, or to put it in Buddhist terms, after you see the illusory nature of our desires and so on, the Buddhist result is then you find peace. For Lacan it's "No, it still moves." It still moves. It’s not peace. And what still moves even after you traverse the fantasy, what still moves is drive. Which is why I think one should be here Eurocentrist even in a... at a different
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level, for example at the level of incest. In his interesting book, Jean-Joseph Goux about Oedipus, shows the
level, for example at the level of incest. In his interesting book, Jean-Joseph Goux about Oedipus, shows the
Slavoj Žižek
exceptional nature of the Oedipus myth. Okay, among other things, this concerns what? Recently I read—I don’t know which, I think F—the *Thousand and One Nights*. I think you call it here, following your imperialist translation, the *Arabian Nights* or what, no? Uh, to put it like Sherlock Holmes, I want to draw your attention to the curious accident which occurs on the 614th
exceptional nature of the Oedipus myth. Okay, among other things, this concerns what? Recently I read—I don’t know which, I think F—the *Thousand and One Nights*. I think you call it here, following your imperialist translation, the *Arabian Nights* or what, no? Uh, to put it like Sherlock Holmes, I want to draw your attention to the curious accident which occurs on the 614th
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night, when Joudar, one of the heroes, follows the order of an evil magician, and when confronted
night, when Joudar, one of the heroes, follows the order of an evil magician, and when confronted
Slavoj Žižek
his mother, has to basically force her to undress herself and rape her. Okay, he cannot do it; when he finally does it, the moment he should have gotten the naked mother, the mother dispels, disappears, and he sees it’s only an evil spirit. Now, many critics of Western Eurocentrism like to point this out as the example of the greater wisdom of the East, although in this case it wasn’t even the East, and we will talk about this later, next week. I want to do a friendly, not opposed—I think it has great critical potentials—reading of Islam. The critical idea came to me through reading recently Claude Lévi-Strauss’s *Tristes Tropiques*, where he in a pure way formulates the true Western prejudice, which is not anti-Orientalist but on the contrary, it’s a violent anti-Islamic outburst. It’s really sustained by a kind of vision of sexual harmony. In other words, Islam is responsible for non-existence of sexual relationship. In other words, literally, his claim—of Lévi-Strauss—is that we in the West are masculine; the true Orient back there is feminine, maternal goddess and so on—although okay, where is this feminine, that’s another question, that’s his vision. And for him, the history should have happened as a big reconciliation between East and West, masculine and feminine principle. The West should rejoin the Eastern maternal embrace. And for him, this could have happened—he goes through all this new-age rubbish: already Christ is a feminine figure, blah blah, we were already on the way—when the stupid Islam intervened. Islam is for him the utmost evil because it... he really constructs an incredible image of Islam as a kind of evil embodied, because for him it takes the worst from both worlds. From the West it takes this imperialist aggressiveness; from the East this whatever, irrationality, whatever. So that this is the... the obstacle. And he ends up with this dream: maybe—like, it’s a nice idea, Lévi-Strauss as George Bush’s big ideologist or what—no, that if we just erase somehow Islam, maybe the East and West can unite. So this would even throw a new light into how this... the problem that I always had with Edward Said’s *Orientalism*. And when I met him the last time, I laughed him nonetheless, because for me, you can be a fascist, you can be a racist, whatever, but if you like Richard Wagner, you are redeemed, no, so there was not a problem. But I told him nonetheless: but listen, what you constructed as a critical object of Orientalism, it’s not really Orient, it’s Islam, which was precisely all the time the mythical "in-between." The wall uniting but at the same time separating the West from, let’s call it, the true East or whatsoever. And in this... and these phenomena are always the most interesting: these phenomena which for us in the West are East, for those in the East are West. It’s the same like—I find this so fascinating—in Russia. You know that for Stalinism, Western Marxists in a typically—here I am totally anti-colonialist critical—Western Marxists in their arrogant way like to attribute Stalinism to the traces of Oriental Asiatic despotism, no? Even some Frankfurt School people did it with Wittfogel and so on, that the idea is that since there was this historical contingency, misfortune, that the first revolution was with Russia—Russia wasn't really part of the Western civil society, still marked by the Oriental despotic functioning, so this is why... so we attribute it to Oriental Asiatic principle, if you want, no? But you know what's the utmost irony? Is that for old traditional Russians, Stalinism on the contrary belongs to the line which began with Peter the Great; it’s precisely the violent Westernization. So I love this, how, you know, the same from each perspective, the same intruding element belongs to the opposite side. It’s the same paradox—but I still don’t like the film—with *Rashomon*. You know, we in the Europe celebrate *Rashomon* as the big discovery of Japanese Oriental spirituality, whatever, Venice Festival I don’t know when. But it’s interesting to read in good cinema histories that, you know—at least in the one I read, it’s great and since I like the theory it must be the true one, okay—that in Japan, the film was a failure. You know why, *Rashomon*? Because it was perceived as Western, too Western. Isn’t this wonderful, that the very film which was for us, oh, the discovery of Oriental spirituality, was for them too Western. So here, but we don’t have time to do it, we should complicate things a little bit. Okay, but to return to this, even Islam—the idea is the following one: the wisdom of the East, even of the Islam, is that they know that the incestuous ideal is in itself impossible. When you get the mother, the mother disappears. So it’s not only a matter of prohibition; prohibition covers an inherent impossibility. And the idea is that our Western violent metaphysics is grounded on the illusion that what is prohibited is in itself possible. If we really violently break it, you will really get the incest, that it’s ontologically possible. And some of my friends, Orientalist Heideggerians—and I more and more like that, you shouldn’t underestimate the extent, for example, my friend Danny Postel from United States, who is now writing a book on Iranian revolution, I think already told you this, told me to what extent even Iranian conservatives refer to Heidegger, no? Okay. Some of the people I met there, they told me, "You see, this is where in the West Heidegger was right, you miss the ontological difference. Because because you do not believe that the prohibited in itself impossible, which means you change the ontological absolute into an ontic entity which then you can rape, force, violate, and so on and so on." But I think we should—it sounds horrible, I know, but—I think we should remain faithful to the West here. I think that—how should I put it?—I think that even if, of course it is, the East is right: there is an illusion. But to put it in Lacanian terms: there is a real in this illusion, and to this real we should remain faithful. And this is for me, if you want, the—my God, now I’m pathetic, Christian-pathetic—the definition of love. Of course love is illusory, love is always an illusion. But it’s the real of an illusion. It’s an illusion to which precisely you should be faithful, faithful to the end. Okay, this—now you will say, okay, okay, what has all this to do with Hegel? You are at... [Žižek is interrupted] No, it’s the truth, yeah, okay. I think that this is the very core of Hegelian dialectics: this, how should I call it, minimal disturbance. Because that’s the whole problem of Hegel’s logic from the very beginning: being, nothingness, and so on. This minimal movement of how—how should I put it?—the zero itself is disturbed. Now, in the remaining time, I want—not yet to go to the big things that I promised you the last time, but through a couple of examples—to explain even further how, in what way the structure of Hegelian concrete universality functions. Recently I have—but I don’t want to be snobbish here because I don’t read novels—I just had lunch with Hanif Kureishi, the writer, and I was very—as usually I'm a tasteless guy—I was aggressive. He told me, "Oh, I'm now writing a novel which is totally different story, it’s no longer this usual stuff, but it’s about a writer who kills his... some of his closest wife and in order to cure himself, he turns into psychoanalyst," no? So then I said in all my aggressive sarcasm, "But the more you claim it totally different, nonetheless you will have your usual suspects, like I bet that the father of this hero is again a Pakistani failed writer, diplomat, or whatever, which is—no matter who is the Hanif Kureishi hero—his father is a Pakistani failed writer-diplomat," no? And he gave me, I must say, the right answer. He said, "But what’s the problem? Do we not have Pakistani failed writers as fathers? Is this not the very definition of a father is a failed Pakistani writer?" And I think he was right, in the sense that that’s Hegelian concrete universality. That there is some father by definition never succeeds as a father. In order to... if a successful... there was a successful father, with well-known results, it was Schreber, the father of Daniel Schreber, and you know what came with the son then: he thought he was screwing God, all those rays... That's you end... where you end where... You know what I mean? There in only... the only way for you as a kid to survive is to experience, see, perceive the weakness, the humiliation, the failure of the father, and then to—if you want, very naively—to take over the task, to prolong the father’s failure. In this sense, how should I put it, the exception is a rule. We don’t have only... I hope you will get the shift, which is the shift of concrete universality here. It is not simply that we all have strive for an ideal father but all our fathers fail in a specific way. No, it is rather the opposite: it’s that a certain mode of failure defines the father. And on the contrary, what each of us concretely tries is to make a success out of this failure, how should I put it? That’s what our careers are: you make a success if you succeed out of your father’s failure. So again, here he was right. How does this function? Let me go one, or rather two steps further. I’m sorry if I will again go to an example that I use in my books, but I will develop it in a different way. Let's take the most simple example: universality subdivided into two species. What Hegel calls "abstract universality" would be the simple logic of universality and specific differences. Like, for example—and you will get now my point to Kieślowski—we have cinema, films. Films are subdivided into, let’s say, documentaries and fiction films. And then you can say they share something, usually a certain narrative structure, but then you specify the difference. What... how would an analysis at the level of concrete universality function here? It would take over what Kieślowski did. You know what was, as I repeated it in two of my books already, the same trick? Kieślowski started as a documentarist. His idea was simply to render adequately, faithfully, the drab, gray reality of Communist Poland, covered up by socialist official ideology. So an authentic documentary approach. But then something strange happened to him, when precisely close to what I was improvising at the beginning apropos of *United he discovered that if you follow this approach too far into intimacies—his example was not pornography, but in his documentary *First Love* from '74, the camera follows a young unmarried couple during the girl's pregnancy, delivery of the baby, and so on. The father is shown holding the newly born baby and crying. Kieślowski reacted to the obscenity of such unwarranted probing into the other’s intimacy. He said, "No, here there should be a trespass." His idea was that precisely if you go too far in documentary approach, you enter obscenity, and the very task that you wanted to realize, you lose it. So I got—I hope now comes the crucial point—you will get the point, which is that precisely in order to bring to the end, to successfully fulfill the documentarist program, you have to pass into the fiction. You have to change the genre. So, the concrete universality is a name for this process through which fiction is not simply another sub-species—two types of narrative films which tell something, documentary/fiction. The... the point is to show how fiction explodes from within documentary. For the way the emergence of fiction cinema resolves the inherent deadlock of the documentary cinema. Let me give you another example from the history of cinema. As you probably know, one of the mysteries of cinema history is the sudden eclipse of Western in the mid-1950s. Part of the answer is the fact that at the same moment, Space Operas did rise as a genre. So I think one should venture the hypothesis that Space Opera took place... took the place of Western in the late 1950s. Again, the dialectical point here is that Western and Space Opera are not two sub-species of the genre adventure. One should shift the perspective and start only with Western. We start with Western. In its development, Western encounters a deadlock, and in order to survive it has to reinvent itself as Space Opera. So Space Opera is structurally the sub-species of Western. In the same way that for Kieślowski, fiction is a sub-species of documentary. You get the point? It’s not two species; is that fiction emerges within documentary as the only way to be authentically documentary. This is the Hegelian reversal when—when you try to, to put it in abstract terms—when you try to realize, actualize a certain notion, project, you discover that the only way to realize this notion is basically to drop it, to pass to the opposite notion. This also is how, I claim, in Hegel the passage from state to religion, to religious community functions. They are not simply two species of a genre large socio-ideological communities. It is that state in its particular forms cannot ever resolve the deadlock inscribed into its notion: to adequately represent, totalize a community. In the same way that for Kieślowski, documentary cannot adequately render the core of social reality. So the only way to do it is to pass to another notion, that of Church. Of course, not for us, but for Hegel, Church is in this sense "more state than state itself." The paradox is the same as, you know, those wonderful ethnic clichés when sometimes one claims of some group that they are "more X than X themselves." For example, the notion of misers of people who don't want to spend money is—I don't know if it's also with you here in England, but in Continental Europe it’s Scots, Scotland, no? Okay. Our Slovene pride is that, and that’s the way we put it: "We are more Scots than Scots themselves." That’s incidentally our... our national myth of the origin of Scotland: one of us was spending too much money, we put him on a boat, he ended up in Scotland, no? But you got the point: that you get some entity which no longer is... or even I—when I visited Iceland, I was told that that’s their myth of their origin by splitting off from Norway. Norwegians are supposed to be proud independent people, but Icelanders claim "We are more Norwegians than Norwegians themselves, we are the Norwegians for which even Norway was too oppressive." So, what happens in all these cases? Universality is here located in the entwinement or overlapping of particularities. A and B—documentary and fiction, or whatever—are not species of their encompassing universality. The point is that A, the first element, cannot fully become A, cannot actualize its notion, so in order to do it, it has to pass into B, which is formally its sub-species, but a sub-species which undermines the very species under which it is formally subsumed. So every species contains a sub-species which precisely in so far as it effectively realizes the notion of this species, explodes its frame. Space Opera is a Western at the level of its notion. And for that very reason, it's no longer a Western. So again, I hope I got you the idea, nothing idealistic in it, that this is the Hegelian—when Hegel speaks about how concrete universality develops its content through particular notions. You take a certain starting point, you develop its potentials, and it has to negate itself from within. Like, again, think about Kieślowski: he wanted to do a truly radical honest documentary. This inherent development brought "No, I can only really do it if I pass into fiction." And so on, maybe at some point we have to go at a different level back to documentary or whatever. But you got the point. Again, the difficult point is not to put the conflict simply at the particular level. To see how universality itself is caught into this conflict. So to give you another example of this, how universality is caught into it, and how this is what we usually fail to perceive. Let me give you one of the spaces where precisely this failure to reflect in a properly Hegelian way is at work. Today’s many of today’s debates on choice and genetic determinism. The idea is the following one: if I cease to smoke by genetic intervention, not through my strenuous effort, does this not deprive me of my freedom of choice? So the idea is or, I don't know, if I learn something by simply taking drugs which enhance my learning ability, this is what Habermas worries about, no? That we... the whole notion of education is lost. You simply do it in a self-objectivized way. You don't have to do it through your effort. But I think there is a spontaneous mystification here. Let's take this choice. Let’s say we are in competition, you are more intelligent and more with more will, more able to work than me. Then I cheat in what sense, that I take some drugs either to enhance my capacity to memorize or simply to enhance my will to work. And then I work and I win over you. Now, for some people, this is first an unfair, non-fair victory, and B, it somehow deprives me of my freedom. Why? Because the very abilities that I should properly develop through my self-education, conscious effort, are simply given to me, bestowed on me through a simple chemical or maybe in future genetic intervention. Where is the mystification here? In the following, I think: if my attitude, say my desire to smoke, is just a contingent fact, I perceive it as my choice and myself as responsible for it. If, on the contrary, my ceasing to smoke is the result of a biogenetic or chemical intervention, it is as if I am deprived of my freedom, I am under control of others. That's how we perceive things. I think it's wrong. Because: if my ceasing to smoke is conditioned by the geneticist or chemopharmacists meddling with my genes or with the chemical structure of my brain—isn't it that then my previous smoking was also determined by the previous different constellation of my genes or of my chemical substances in my body? If on the contrary, my previous smoking was my choice, then even after the geneticists meddling, I’m still free to stop smoking even if this now takes more or less effort. In other words, if genes determine me, then they determine me always, if their constellation is the result of natural blind chance or of the intervention of another person who changed my genome or whatever. Why then does it appear that the geneticist meddling deprives me of my freedom? I think there is only one consistent answer: if my genome depends on blind chance, then I can pretend that I am free, I can save the appearances. So, you got the point. Again, I repeat it. The point is that when we perceive it like, "isn't this horrible? If you change chemicals in my body, this will change my... my psychiatric..." For example, let's say I'm in a depression, I take a pill, I get into a better mood. Somebody will say "This is horrible, my innermost psychic state is manipulated by chemicals, I’m no longer free." But wait a minute! Reflect on it. If I can change your psychic disposition by chemical intervention, doesn't this prove that already before my chemical intervention, your psychic disposition was dependent on chemicals, just on *different* chemicals? So you were not free! You were just subordinated to a blind necessity, natural necessity of which you were not aware. So this is the typical Hegelian move. And this is I think where simple humanitarians like Habermas and Fukuyama don't get it. Once the intervention—intervention in the sense that by simple direct biological, biogenetic, chemopharmaceutical, whatever means—we can change our innermost subjective properties which we experience as free. Once we *can* do it, we no longer have a choice between freedom and non-freedom. Freedom is lost. We can only choose between maintaining the appearance of freedom or losing freedom. So the only way truly to answer it is to prove that even with biochemistry you cannot really do it. The choice—you know what I mean—you... there is not... the choice is not the choice between, as they put it, those who want to limit biogenetic interventions, "Will we turn into automata, into machines manipulated by biogeneticists, or will we retain our freedom?" Wait a minute! If they can do it, this already means that we are not free. And this is again for me the old problem where in a strange way these new humanitarians join—it’s for me the ultimate tragedy that Habermas, the great enlightened guy, joins hands here with—no wonder he co-published a small volume with the new Pope, with Ratzinger recently, no?—with those... the Catholic attitude of "do not mess with it, let's prohibit, she's going too far." Because again, as I already developed in my books, isn't this the ridiculous problem, namely when—at least many Catholics—argue against biogenetic interventions: "Don't play with the soul, don't turn man into a machine because human soul is immortal, immaterial," and so on. My brutal, vulgar answer: if human soul is immaterial and eternal, why are you then afraid if I meddle a little bit with your brains? I mean, it is free, it's up there, I can do whatever I want with your brains, no? I mean, something doesn't function here. It is as if the true between-the-lines Catholic strategy is a much more cynical one. Humanitarians—from a humanitarian point of view, maybe effective but cynical—it is: "We all know we are not free, but to admit this openly would have had catastrophic consequences for our ethics and so on." So to retain the illusion of ethical autonomy, let's not probe into that. It’s this typical, what already Nietzsche designated as the typically conservative fear of origins. Let's not probe into that. And I don't know if you read it, I think I report it in my book that I got one only one intelligent answer to this dilemma from a theological friend of mine. He almost convinced me but he didn't at the end. Namely, with a wonderful radio receiver metaphor. He told me, "Of course our soul is immortal. But our brains are like radio receiver. They receive radio program which is in this abstract sense immaterial, but in order to receive it, the radio had to be structured in a very precise way. So in the same way, our brain is like the perfect radio receiver created by God to receive the soul. If we mess with it, it's like breaking down the radio so that, you know, you will no longer be able to receive the immaterial program." Of course my answer is: "What about a nice new-ager friend coming and telling you: wait a minute, I will change the radio so that you will receive even more programs than God allowed you to and so on?" Sorry, today we are really in a Freudian day of mistakes and so on. Sorry. How do you put it? I heard that if you go to Harley Street—that even when the doctors inform you there sometimes they have to, that you will die, no?—so they tell you in a discreet way like, the message is, "I'm sorry sir, but it happens even in the best of families that people die," no? So okay, it happens in the best of families. What for... go on. Okay, so just to conclude—five minutes—the next point about Hegelian universality is that, as you could see for Hegel, universality—that's the basic idea of concrete universality—that it's literally concrete, always embedded in a situation. Universality is not given. Hegel’s problem is: how does universality emerge from a particular situation? For example, to take an example of Marx, for Hegel the problem is not "is there a universal notion of work?" Like people worked in all historical efforts. Of course they did! For Hegel the problem is: at what point, historical point, do individuals themselves perceive as having a universal capacity to work? The point when this universality becomes self-conscious—self-conscious in the sense that it's not only that people have different occupations but we all work, but that I myself experience my particular field of work as something ultimately contingent. It’s my choice if I do this or that or whatever. And again, this is for Hegel modernity, also at the level of citizenship: that only in modernity we are citizens, we have universal human rights. Before we had certain rights, but they were always attached to our particular identity. That would be at its minimum for Hegel the difference. In pre-modern space, your identity, you fit certain universality by fitting some of its sub-species. You are a "good man" if you do properly the particular role between the human organism. Like a wife should be a good wife, a master a good master, a child a good child, a king a good king. You know, you should fully fit your particularity. In this way you attribute your moment of... specific moment into the universal harmony. For Hegel’s modernity it's exactly the opposite. Universality explodes not when you fully are what you are particularly, but when you are thwarted in that. Which is why, to return to sexuality—I read recently an interesting book, I don’t know what’s its theoretical status but it must be true as they put it so nice: Elisabeth Lloyd, *The Case of the Female Orgasm*, which suggests that female orgasm has no positive evolutionary function. It cannot be accounted for as biological adaptation with evolutionary advantage. It’s not even... Her idea is that feminine orgasm is an appendix like male nipples. Something that remained from before differentiation and it has no function. Now, I was shocked about how many feminists exploded against this: "Oh, she wants to degrade women." My God, I cannot think of more idealist, spiritual... This is spirit! Spirit is that precisely something which is thwarted, in the sense of without function, gets co-opted for the universal function. Universality is for Hegel a particularity thwarted in its particular function. Which is why for Freud, in contrast to animal sexuality, human sexuality is universal. It’s precisely because it becomes self-goal, absolutized, we don't have sex for children but for... for pleasure and so on and so on. And this again is for me a big enigma of: how can they... aren’t they ashamed, those theologians who claim if you make love for pleasure only, you are animal? Sorry, but it’s precisely *this* that animals can’t do it. The... precisely through its limitation, through its thwarting its official goal, procreation, to turn it into self-goal, is that universality... is that sexuality, as it were, universalizes itself. So again, I hope you got the point, which is that for Hegel, universality is not something given; it is something which always emerges through the deadlocks of the particular. Let's take again cinema: you have documentary cinema, it’s thwarted, it fails. So you have to expand it into fiction, which then creates a larger universal notion of something encompassing documentary and fiction. You got it? That Hegel is here very materialist. The starting point is always the self-blockage, the failure of the particular to be what it is. It's exactly the opposite of the traditional pseudo-Platonic view with Plato and Parmenides—it’s more complex—where it looks as if: ideally you are universal, and then the more you get into conflicts, confusion, the more you are particular. No, at the particular level everything is at its place. But when the particular gets thwarted, twisted, displaced, out of joint—at that point universality explodes. And I’m sorry, I was tired today because of all this confusion, so at that point I explode today and disappear. I’m sorry for these confusions, I will take... you know, the Stalinist solution is... when you have human rights, one Stalinist famously said: that if you violate human rights in a certain prison, well, kill all the prisoners and there will be no humans to have human rights, so everything will be okay. So in this sense I will apply this Stalinist wisdom and I will not show you any movie clips in two days, so there will be no problems. So I did this, the real stuff, so from here concrete universality in two days, I promise, promise that I really go to... Sorry. [Audience member asks a question about Buddhism] You may surprise you... my God, you know wait, I had here what, quarter of an hour to do this. Of course I am aware of this. What I am only saying is, with all respect for Buddhism, is: first, don't reproach me for things which I openly admit. I mean, I openly admit that my starting point is, if you want to put it in this way, Judeo-Christian. Point two, how should I put it, I think that...
his mother, has to basically force her to undress herself and rape her. Okay, he cannot do it; when he finally does it, the moment he should have gotten the naked mother, the mother dispels, disappears, and he sees it’s only an evil spirit. Now, many critics of Western Eurocentrism like to point this out as the example of the greater wisdom of the East, although in this case it wasn’t even the East, and we will talk about this later, next week. I want to do a friendly, not opposed—I think it has great critical potentials—reading of Islam. The critical idea came to me through reading recently Claude Lévi-Strauss’s *Tristes Tropiques*, where he in a pure way formulates the true Western prejudice, which is not anti-Orientalist but on the contrary, it’s a violent anti-Islamic outburst. It’s really sustained by a kind of vision of sexual harmony. In other words, Islam is responsible for non-existence of sexual relationship. In other words, literally, his claim—of Lévi-Strauss—is that we in the West are masculine; the true Orient back there is feminine, maternal goddess and so on—although okay, where is this feminine, that’s another question, that’s his vision. And for him, the history should have happened as a big reconciliation between East and West, masculine and feminine principle. The West should rejoin the Eastern maternal embrace. And for him, this could have happened—he goes through all this new-age rubbish: already Christ is a feminine figure, blah blah, we were already on the way—when the stupid Islam intervened. Islam is for him the utmost evil because it... he really constructs an incredible image of Islam as a kind of evil embodied, because for him it takes the worst from both worlds. From the West it takes this imperialist aggressiveness; from the East this whatever, irrationality, whatever. So that this is the... the obstacle. And he ends up with this dream: maybe—like, it’s a nice idea, Lévi-Strauss as George Bush’s big ideologist or what—no, that if we just erase somehow Islam, maybe the East and West can unite. So this would even throw a new light into how this... the problem that I always had with Edward Said’s *Orientalism*. And when I met him the last time, I laughed him nonetheless, because for me, you can be a fascist, you can be a racist, whatever, but if you like Richard Wagner, you are redeemed, no, so there was not a problem. But I told him nonetheless: but listen, what you constructed as a critical object of Orientalism, it’s not really Orient, it’s Islam, which was precisely all the time the mythical "in-between." The wall uniting but at the same time separating the West from, let’s call it, the true East or whatsoever. And in this... and these phenomena are always the most interesting: these phenomena which for us in the West are East, for those in the East are West. It’s the same like—I find this so fascinating—in Russia. You know that for Stalinism, Western Marxists in a typically—here I am totally anti-colonialist critical—Western Marxists in their arrogant way like to attribute Stalinism to the traces of Oriental Asiatic despotism, no? Even some Frankfurt School people did it with Wittfogel and so on, that the idea is that since there was this historical contingency, misfortune, that the first revolution was with Russia—Russia wasn't really part of the Western civil society, still marked by the Oriental despotic functioning, so this is why... so we attribute it to Oriental Asiatic principle, if you want, no? But you know what's the utmost irony? Is that for old traditional Russians, Stalinism on the contrary belongs to the line which began with Peter the Great; it’s precisely the violent Westernization. So I love this, how, you know, the same from each perspective, the same intruding element belongs to the opposite side. It’s the same paradox—but I still don’t like the film—with *Rashomon*. You know, we in the Europe celebrate *Rashomon* as the big discovery of Japanese Oriental spirituality, whatever, Venice Festival I don’t know when. But it’s interesting to read in good cinema histories that, you know—at least in the one I read, it’s great and since I like the theory it must be the true one, okay—that in Japan, the film was a failure. You know why, *Rashomon*? Because it was perceived as Western, too Western. Isn’t this wonderful, that the very film which was for us, oh, the discovery of Oriental spirituality, was for them too Western. So here, but we don’t have time to do it, we should complicate things a little bit. Okay, but to return to this, even Islam—the idea is the following one: the wisdom of the East, even of the Islam, is that they know that the incestuous ideal is in itself impossible. When you get the mother, the mother disappears. So it’s not only a matter of prohibition; prohibition covers an inherent impossibility. And the idea is that our Western violent metaphysics is grounded on the illusion that what is prohibited is in itself possible. If we really violently break it, you will really get the incest, that it’s ontologically possible. And some of my friends, Orientalist Heideggerians—and I more and more like that, you shouldn’t underestimate the extent, for example, my friend Danny Postel from United States, who is now writing a book on Iranian revolution, I think already told you this, told me to what extent even Iranian conservatives refer to Heidegger, no? Okay. Some of the people I met there, they told me, "You see, this is where in the West Heidegger was right, you miss the ontological difference. Because because you do not believe that the prohibited in itself impossible, which means you change the ontological absolute into an ontic entity which then you can rape, force, violate, and so on and so on." But I think we should—it sounds horrible, I know, but—I think we should remain faithful to the West here. I think that—how should I put it?—I think that even if, of course it is, the East is right: there is an illusion. But to put it in Lacanian terms: there is a real in this illusion, and to this real we should remain faithful. And this is for me, if you want, the—my God, now I’m pathetic, Christian-pathetic—the definition of love. Of course love is illusory, love is always an illusion. But it’s the real of an illusion. It’s an illusion to which precisely you should be faithful, faithful to the end. Okay, this—now you will say, okay, okay, what has all this to do with Hegel? You are at... [Žižek is interrupted] No, it’s the truth, yeah, okay. I think that this is the very core of Hegelian dialectics: this, how should I call it, minimal disturbance. Because that’s the whole problem of Hegel’s logic from the very beginning: being, nothingness, and so on. This minimal movement of how—how should I put it?—the zero itself is disturbed. Now, in the remaining time, I want—not yet to go to the big things that I promised you the last time, but through a couple of examples—to explain even further how, in what way the structure of Hegelian concrete universality functions. Recently I have—but I don’t want to be snobbish here because I don’t read novels—I just had lunch with Hanif Kureishi, the writer, and I was very—as usually I'm a tasteless guy—I was aggressive. He told me, "Oh, I'm now writing a novel which is totally different story, it’s no longer this usual stuff, but it’s about a writer who kills his... some of his closest wife and in order to cure himself, he turns into psychoanalyst," no? So then I said in all my aggressive sarcasm, "But the more you claim it totally different, nonetheless you will have your usual suspects, like I bet that the father of this hero is again a Pakistani failed writer, diplomat, or whatever, which is—no matter who is the Hanif Kureishi hero—his father is a Pakistani failed writer-diplomat," no? And he gave me, I must say, the right answer. He said, "But what’s the problem? Do we not have Pakistani failed writers as fathers? Is this not the very definition of a father is a failed Pakistani writer?" And I think he was right, in the sense that that’s Hegelian concrete universality. That there is some father by definition never succeeds as a father. In order to... if a successful... there was a successful father, with well-known results, it was Schreber, the father of Daniel Schreber, and you know what came with the son then: he thought he was screwing God, all those rays... That's you end... where you end where... You know what I mean? There in only... the only way for you as a kid to survive is to experience, see, perceive the weakness, the humiliation, the failure of the father, and then to—if you want, very naively—to take over the task, to prolong the father’s failure. In this sense, how should I put it, the exception is a rule. We don’t have only... I hope you will get the shift, which is the shift of concrete universality here. It is not simply that we all have strive for an ideal father but all our fathers fail in a specific way. No, it is rather the opposite: it’s that a certain mode of failure defines the father. And on the contrary, what each of us concretely tries is to make a success out of this failure, how should I put it? That’s what our careers are: you make a success if you succeed out of your father’s failure. So again, here he was right. How does this function? Let me go one, or rather two steps further. I’m sorry if I will again go to an example that I use in my books, but I will develop it in a different way. Let's take the most simple example: universality subdivided into two species. What Hegel calls "abstract universality" would be the simple logic of universality and specific differences. Like, for example—and you will get now my point to Kieślowski—we have cinema, films. Films are subdivided into, let’s say, documentaries and fiction films. And then you can say they share something, usually a certain narrative structure, but then you specify the difference. What... how would an analysis at the level of concrete universality function here? It would take over what Kieślowski did. You know what was, as I repeated it in two of my books already, the same trick? Kieślowski started as a documentarist. His idea was simply to render adequately, faithfully, the drab, gray reality of Communist Poland, covered up by socialist official ideology. So an authentic documentary approach. But then something strange happened to him, when precisely close to what I was improvising at the beginning apropos of *United he discovered that if you follow this approach too far into intimacies—his example was not pornography, but in his documentary *First Love* from '74, the camera follows a young unmarried couple during the girl's pregnancy, delivery of the baby, and so on. The father is shown holding the newly born baby and crying. Kieślowski reacted to the obscenity of such unwarranted probing into the other’s intimacy. He said, "No, here there should be a trespass." His idea was that precisely if you go too far in documentary approach, you enter obscenity, and the very task that you wanted to realize, you lose it. So I got—I hope now comes the crucial point—you will get the point, which is that precisely in order to bring to the end, to successfully fulfill the documentarist program, you have to pass into the fiction. You have to change the genre. So, the concrete universality is a name for this process through which fiction is not simply another sub-species—two types of narrative films which tell something, documentary/fiction. The... the point is to show how fiction explodes from within documentary. For the way the emergence of fiction cinema resolves the inherent deadlock of the documentary cinema. Let me give you another example from the history of cinema. As you probably know, one of the mysteries of cinema history is the sudden eclipse of Western in the mid-1950s. Part of the answer is the fact that at the same moment, Space Operas did rise as a genre. So I think one should venture the hypothesis that Space Opera took place... took the place of Western in the late 1950s. Again, the dialectical point here is that Western and Space Opera are not two sub-species of the genre adventure. One should shift the perspective and start only with Western. We start with Western. In its development, Western encounters a deadlock, and in order to survive it has to reinvent itself as Space Opera. So Space Opera is structurally the sub-species of Western. In the same way that for Kieślowski, fiction is a sub-species of documentary. You get the point? It’s not two species; is that fiction emerges within documentary as the only way to be authentically documentary. This is the Hegelian reversal when—when you try to, to put it in abstract terms—when you try to realize, actualize a certain notion, project, you discover that the only way to realize this notion is basically to drop it, to pass to the opposite notion. This also is how, I claim, in Hegel the passage from state to religion, to religious community functions. They are not simply two species of a genre large socio-ideological communities. It is that state in its particular forms cannot ever resolve the deadlock inscribed into its notion: to adequately represent, totalize a community. In the same way that for Kieślowski, documentary cannot adequately render the core of social reality. So the only way to do it is to pass to another notion, that of Church. Of course, not for us, but for Hegel, Church is in this sense "more state than state itself." The paradox is the same as, you know, those wonderful ethnic clichés when sometimes one claims of some group that they are "more X than X themselves." For example, the notion of misers of people who don't want to spend money is—I don't know if it's also with you here in England, but in Continental Europe it’s Scots, Scotland, no? Okay. Our Slovene pride is that, and that’s the way we put it: "We are more Scots than Scots themselves." That’s incidentally our... our national myth of the origin of Scotland: one of us was spending too much money, we put him on a boat, he ended up in Scotland, no? But you got the point: that you get some entity which no longer is... or even I—when I visited Iceland, I was told that that’s their myth of their origin by splitting off from Norway. Norwegians are supposed to be proud independent people, but Icelanders claim "We are more Norwegians than Norwegians themselves, we are the Norwegians for which even Norway was too oppressive." So, what happens in all these cases? Universality is here located in the entwinement or overlapping of particularities. A and B—documentary and fiction, or whatever—are not species of their encompassing universality. The point is that A, the first element, cannot fully become A, cannot actualize its notion, so in order to do it, it has to pass into B, which is formally its sub-species, but a sub-species which undermines the very species under which it is formally subsumed. So every species contains a sub-species which precisely in so far as it effectively realizes the notion of this species, explodes its frame. Space Opera is a Western at the level of its notion. And for that very reason, it's no longer a Western. So again, I hope I got you the idea, nothing idealistic in it, that this is the Hegelian—when Hegel speaks about how concrete universality develops its content through particular notions. You take a certain starting point, you develop its potentials, and it has to negate itself from within. Like, again, think about Kieślowski: he wanted to do a truly radical honest documentary. This inherent development brought "No, I can only really do it if I pass into fiction." And so on, maybe at some point we have to go at a different level back to documentary or whatever. But you got the point. Again, the difficult point is not to put the conflict simply at the particular level. To see how universality itself is caught into this conflict. So to give you another example of this, how universality is caught into it, and how this is what we usually fail to perceive. Let me give you one of the spaces where precisely this failure to reflect in a properly Hegelian way is at work. Today’s many of today’s debates on choice and genetic determinism. The idea is the following one: if I cease to smoke by genetic intervention, not through my strenuous effort, does this not deprive me of my freedom of choice? So the idea is or, I don't know, if I learn something by simply taking drugs which enhance my learning ability, this is what Habermas worries about, no? That we... the whole notion of education is lost. You simply do it in a self-objectivized way. You don't have to do it through your effort. But I think there is a spontaneous mystification here. Let's take this choice. Let’s say we are in competition, you are more intelligent and more with more will, more able to work than me. Then I cheat in what sense, that I take some drugs either to enhance my capacity to memorize or simply to enhance my will to work. And then I work and I win over you. Now, for some people, this is first an unfair, non-fair victory, and B, it somehow deprives me of my freedom. Why? Because the very abilities that I should properly develop through my self-education, conscious effort, are simply given to me, bestowed on me through a simple chemical or maybe in future genetic intervention. Where is the mystification here? In the following, I think: if my attitude, say my desire to smoke, is just a contingent fact, I perceive it as my choice and myself as responsible for it. If, on the contrary, my ceasing to smoke is the result of a biogenetic or chemical intervention, it is as if I am deprived of my freedom, I am under control of others. That's how we perceive things. I think it's wrong. Because: if my ceasing to smoke is conditioned by the geneticist or chemopharmacists meddling with my genes or with the chemical structure of my brain—isn't it that then my previous smoking was also determined by the previous different constellation of my genes or of my chemical substances in my body? If on the contrary, my previous smoking was my choice, then even after the geneticists meddling, I’m still free to stop smoking even if this now takes more or less effort. In other words, if genes determine me, then they determine me always, if their constellation is the result of natural blind chance or of the intervention of another person who changed my genome or whatever. Why then does it appear that the geneticist meddling deprives me of my freedom? I think there is only one consistent answer: if my genome depends on blind chance, then I can pretend that I am free, I can save the appearances. So, you got the point. Again, I repeat it. The point is that when we perceive it like, "isn't this horrible? If you change chemicals in my body, this will change my... my psychiatric..." For example, let's say I'm in a depression, I take a pill, I get into a better mood. Somebody will say "This is horrible, my innermost psychic state is manipulated by chemicals, I’m no longer free." But wait a minute! Reflect on it. If I can change your psychic disposition by chemical intervention, doesn't this prove that already before my chemical intervention, your psychic disposition was dependent on chemicals, just on *different* chemicals? So you were not free! You were just subordinated to a blind necessity, natural necessity of which you were not aware. So this is the typical Hegelian move. And this is I think where simple humanitarians like Habermas and Fukuyama don't get it. Once the intervention—intervention in the sense that by simple direct biological, biogenetic, chemopharmaceutical, whatever means—we can change our innermost subjective properties which we experience as free. Once we *can* do it, we no longer have a choice between freedom and non-freedom. Freedom is lost. We can only choose between maintaining the appearance of freedom or losing freedom. So the only way truly to answer it is to prove that even with biochemistry you cannot really do it. The choice—you know what I mean—you... there is not... the choice is not the choice between, as they put it, those who want to limit biogenetic interventions, "Will we turn into automata, into machines manipulated by biogeneticists, or will we retain our freedom?" Wait a minute! If they can do it, this already means that we are not free. And this is again for me the old problem where in a strange way these new humanitarians join—it’s for me the ultimate tragedy that Habermas, the great enlightened guy, joins hands here with—no wonder he co-published a small volume with the new Pope, with Ratzinger recently, no?—with those... the Catholic attitude of "do not mess with it, let's prohibit, she's going too far." Because again, as I already developed in my books, isn't this the ridiculous problem, namely when—at least many Catholics—argue against biogenetic interventions: "Don't play with the soul, don't turn man into a machine because human soul is immortal, immaterial," and so on. My brutal, vulgar answer: if human soul is immaterial and eternal, why are you then afraid if I meddle a little bit with your brains? I mean, it is free, it's up there, I can do whatever I want with your brains, no? I mean, something doesn't function here. It is as if the true between-the-lines Catholic strategy is a much more cynical one. Humanitarians—from a humanitarian point of view, maybe effective but cynical—it is: "We all know we are not free, but to admit this openly would have had catastrophic consequences for our ethics and so on." So to retain the illusion of ethical autonomy, let's not probe into that. It’s this typical, what already Nietzsche designated as the typically conservative fear of origins. Let's not probe into that. And I don't know if you read it, I think I report it in my book that I got one only one intelligent answer to this dilemma from a theological friend of mine. He almost convinced me but he didn't at the end. Namely, with a wonderful radio receiver metaphor. He told me, "Of course our soul is immortal. But our brains are like radio receiver. They receive radio program which is in this abstract sense immaterial, but in order to receive it, the radio had to be structured in a very precise way. So in the same way, our brain is like the perfect radio receiver created by God to receive the soul. If we mess with it, it's like breaking down the radio so that, you know, you will no longer be able to receive the immaterial program." Of course my answer is: "What about a nice new-ager friend coming and telling you: wait a minute, I will change the radio so that you will receive even more programs than God allowed you to and so on?" Sorry, today we are really in a Freudian day of mistakes and so on. Sorry. How do you put it? I heard that if you go to Harley Street—that even when the doctors inform you there sometimes they have to, that you will die, no?—so they tell you in a discreet way like, the message is, "I'm sorry sir, but it happens even in the best of families that people die," no? So okay, it happens in the best of families. What for... go on. Okay, so just to conclude—five minutes—the next point about Hegelian universality is that, as you could see for Hegel, universality—that's the basic idea of concrete universality—that it's literally concrete, always embedded in a situation. Universality is not given. Hegel’s problem is: how does universality emerge from a particular situation? For example, to take an example of Marx, for Hegel the problem is not "is there a universal notion of work?" Like people worked in all historical efforts. Of course they did! For Hegel the problem is: at what point, historical point, do individuals themselves perceive as having a universal capacity to work? The point when this universality becomes self-conscious—self-conscious in the sense that it's not only that people have different occupations but we all work, but that I myself experience my particular field of work as something ultimately contingent. It’s my choice if I do this or that or whatever. And again, this is for Hegel modernity, also at the level of citizenship: that only in modernity we are citizens, we have universal human rights. Before we had certain rights, but they were always attached to our particular identity. That would be at its minimum for Hegel the difference. In pre-modern space, your identity, you fit certain universality by fitting some of its sub-species. You are a "good man" if you do properly the particular role between the human organism. Like a wife should be a good wife, a master a good master, a child a good child, a king a good king. You know, you should fully fit your particularity. In this way you attribute your moment of... specific moment into the universal harmony. For Hegel’s modernity it's exactly the opposite. Universality explodes not when you fully are what you are particularly, but when you are thwarted in that. Which is why, to return to sexuality—I read recently an interesting book, I don’t know what’s its theoretical status but it must be true as they put it so nice: Elisabeth Lloyd, *The Case of the Female Orgasm*, which suggests that female orgasm has no positive evolutionary function. It cannot be accounted for as biological adaptation with evolutionary advantage. It’s not even... Her idea is that feminine orgasm is an appendix like male nipples. Something that remained from before differentiation and it has no function. Now, I was shocked about how many feminists exploded against this: "Oh, she wants to degrade women." My God, I cannot think of more idealist, spiritual... This is spirit! Spirit is that precisely something which is thwarted, in the sense of without function, gets co-opted for the universal function. Universality is for Hegel a particularity thwarted in its particular function. Which is why for Freud, in contrast to animal sexuality, human sexuality is universal. It’s precisely because it becomes self-goal, absolutized, we don't have sex for children but for... for pleasure and so on and so on. And this again is for me a big enigma of: how can they... aren’t they ashamed, those theologians who claim if you make love for pleasure only, you are animal? Sorry, but it’s precisely *this* that animals can’t do it. The... precisely through its limitation, through its thwarting its official goal, procreation, to turn it into self-goal, is that universality... is that sexuality, as it were, universalizes itself. So again, I hope you got the point, which is that for Hegel, universality is not something given; it is something which always emerges through the deadlocks of the particular. Let's take again cinema: you have documentary cinema, it’s thwarted, it fails. So you have to expand it into fiction, which then creates a larger universal notion of something encompassing documentary and fiction. You got it? That Hegel is here very materialist. The starting point is always the self-blockage, the failure of the particular to be what it is. It's exactly the opposite of the traditional pseudo-Platonic view with Plato and Parmenides—it’s more complex—where it looks as if: ideally you are universal, and then the more you get into conflicts, confusion, the more you are particular. No, at the particular level everything is at its place. But when the particular gets thwarted, twisted, displaced, out of joint—at that point universality explodes. And I’m sorry, I was tired today because of all this confusion, so at that point I explode today and disappear. I’m sorry for these confusions, I will take... you know, the Stalinist solution is... when you have human rights, one Stalinist famously said: that if you violate human rights in a certain prison, well, kill all the prisoners and there will be no humans to have human rights, so everything will be okay. So in this sense I will apply this Stalinist wisdom and I will not show you any movie clips in two days, so there will be no problems. So I did this, the real stuff, so from here concrete universality in two days, I promise, promise that I really go to... Sorry. [Audience member asks a question about Buddhism] You may surprise you... my God, you know wait, I had here what, quarter of an hour to do this. Of course I am aware of this. What I am only saying is, with all respect for Buddhism, is: first, don't reproach me for things which I openly admit. I mean, I openly admit that my starting point is, if you want to put it in this way, Judeo-Christian. Point two, how should I put it, I think that...