Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 5
Lecture · Justin Wagner ·
published 2018-11-28 · 2:04:45 · 17,063 words
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psychoanalysishegel-dialecticscinema-art-culturereligion-theologyscience-physicssubjectivityphilosophy-generalideologycapitalismlanguage
Žižek delivers a seminar organized around four interlocking movements: (1) a re-reading of Brief Encounter, alternate scenarios and the prattling friend as paternal stand-in for the structure of confessional address; (2) a critique of Buddhism's foundational presupposition that beings seek happiness, against the psychoanalytic death drive; (3) a parallel between Lacan's two Reals (scientific and drive-based) and the duality of quantum mechanics/relativity, with an extended argument that capitalism is the Lacanian Real as a worldless formal matrix; (4) an extended treatment of Hegel's dialectics, cunning of reason, predicate-to-subject reversal, subjectivity as self-supposition, and the thesis via Chesterton that law is universalized crime.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 26
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's methodological principle: an example always exceeds the theoretical point it is meant to illustrate, you get 'caught in your own trap'; demonstrated by his Brief Encounter re-viewing revealing new structural layers.
as “death drive / compulsion to repeat”
Deployed against Buddhism's foundational premise: psychoanalysis shows humans are NOT simply striving for happiness or to avoid pain, the death drive and compulsion to repeat directly contradict the Buddhist presupposition.
Via Badiou's being/world/event triad: capitalism is the first civilization without a symbolic world, no encompassing horizon of meaning, which is why cultures must defend their 'particular world' against it.
Lacanian category used in two senses: the scientific Real (knowledge inscribed in natural processes) and the psychoanalytic Real (of drive/trauma); Žižek argues capitalism operates as the Lacanian Real, a formal, meaning-less matrix that reproduces itself across all symbolic universes.
as “capitalism as the Lacanian Real”
Žižek's signature thesis: the logic of capital is Real in that it is a neutral formal machine functioning identically inside every possible symbolic universe (Buddhist, Catholic, Japanese capitalism), making it the first worldless civilization.
Lacan's notion of knowledge inscribed directly in natural reality (a stone 'knows' the laws of gravity); Žižek uses this to argue the gap between a thing and its symbolic registration is already operative in nature (quantum physics).
as “two deaths”
Symbolic vs real death: a regime can persist while already symbolically dead (everyone knows it's over but it continues), or vice versa; illustrated by the Shah's rule, Napoleon's second defeat, and speculatively by Labour under Prescott.
as “minimal gap between reality and its registration”
The delay between a thing's brute reality and its registration in some medium allows for 'cheating'; Žižek argues quantum physics demonstrates this gap is inscribed in nature itself, not only in human symbolic life.
as “curved space of desire”
Analogy between Einstein's general relativity (curved space) and Lacan's object a: the cause of desire curves the field so the object always remains at the same distance, making the detour sometimes the shortest path.
as “objet petit a / object small a”
The object-cause of desire: not what one desires but that which makes one desire; analogized to the curvature agent in curved space, why circling around an object yields more satisfaction than direct possession.
as “melancholy vs mourning”
Via Agamben's reversal of Freud: the melancholic treats an object as already lost before actually losing it; one gets the object but at that very moment the object-cause of desire vanishes, hence melancholy belongs to the rich who have everything but desire nothing.
Lacan's late concept: the elementary atom or quanta of enjoyment; Žižek reads it as Lacan's attempt to unify the hermeneutic (unconscious/signifier) and energetic (libido/id) aspects of psychoanalysis, parallel to superstring theory uniting quantum and relativistic physics.
Hegel's concept, reinterpreted by Žižek: not a positive teleology where reason secretly controls events, but a wager that things will go wrong for the adversary, their failure becomes their truth; exemplified by the Cuba embargo strategy.
Hegel's endpoint of the Phenomenology; early Lacan identified the analyst with the Hegelian master-philosopher of absolute knowing, but later retracted this in revising Écrits, the analyst's characteristic is utter passivity, not imposing.
Badiou's term for forcing/imposing something onto reality; mentioned to contrast with the Hegelian analyst's utter passivity, the analyst does NOT practice forçage.
Žižek's formulation of the key Hegelian dialectical move: what appears as predicate or deficiency (e.g., 'femininity is dispersed') is elevated to the defining feature itself ('dispersion IS femininity'); the apparent failure becomes the central characteristic.
as “subject supposed to know”
Lacan's figure arising in transference: the analyst is attributed knowledge of the meaning of symptoms from the outset; illustrated here by Columbo who always already knows who did it before any explicit deduction.
Žižek's extension of Lacan's matheme series: the subject for whom appearances must be protected, who must not know; corresponds to the master signifier S1; illustrated by Potemkin villages built for Mao.
Žižek's extension: the subject fantasized as enjoying more than us (racist/sexual envy: 'blacks really enjoy'); corresponds to surplus enjoyment / objet a.
as “subject as supposition”
Moving from 'subject supposed to X' to the subject itself as a supposition, there is no substantial self, only a void haunted by what it would be as an existing object; subjectivity is fundamentally hysterical.
as “hysterical subjectivity”
For Hegel and Lacan, subjectivity is fundamentally hysterical: the basic question is not 'what do I want?' but 'what am I as an object for the other?', a perplexity about what makes one an object of libidinal investment.
Via Robert Pfaller: an act/object can function as its own substitute as long as some threshold ensures it is not taken to be itself (Cavallo wearing his own mask; gay bashers performing the very act they oppose); correlative with Hegelian pure appearance.
Lacan's formula deployed via All's Well That Ends Well: even married consummation must be sustained by a phantasmatic supplement (Bertram thinks he sleeps with Diana), so the actual sexual relationship is propped up by fantasy.
as “law is crime elevated to universality”
Žižek's radical Hegelian thesis via Chesterton: not only is transgression mediated by law, but law itself is the universalized crime, 'property is theft' elevated; the encompassing unity of law and transgression is transgression, not law.
Hegelian movement where a second negation does not restore the original but produces something new at the level of universality; used to show that law is crime universalized, not that transgression is merely negated by law.
Hegel's dialectical sublation; Žižek stresses a radical reading: what is truly sublated is not finite reality into the infinite but God himself, God dies on the cross and returns as Holy Ghost, a purely virtual dimension of finite human community.
Stories he reaches for 5
Žižek recalls his father returning from work and openly telling young Slavoj to just babble, anything, so as not to be in silence. He found this humiliating; the truth of Brief Encounter is the heroine should say to her friend 'just go on talking, it doesn't matter what.'
“he sat down and said oh I'm tired come here to me why don't you just babble talk something it doesn't matter what just”
Two Greek painters compete: Zeuxis paints grapes so real birds peck at them; Parrhasius paints a curtain, and when Zeuxis asks Parrhasius to reveal what's behind, that IS the painting. The curtain conceals only that there is nothing behind it, pure appearance without a substance behind it.
“the other guy just paints a curtain and then when the first guy comes to check it say okay let's see what did you paint reveal the curtain”
Žižek proposes three alternate versions to reveal the necessity of the film's structure: (1) the friend stops talking, the heroine would beg her to continue; (2) Trevor Howard is revealed to be unmarried, his tragic flavor a fabrication; (3) a Bridges of Madison County twist, the husband knew all along but pretended not to out of love.
“I made two or even three alternate scenarios of the film and I hope you will agree that I think this is a productive strategy”
For Hegel, Christianity's revolution is that God (substantial infinite) dies on the cross and is resurrected not as restored infinity but as Holy Ghost, a purely virtual entity existing only within finite human community. The only site of the infinite is finite human life; Aufhebung cancels not finite reality but God himself.
“Holy Ghost is a virtual entity it exists only on the terrain of finite human existence Holy Ghost is the virtuality to which we refer”
Comparing the original published version of 'The Function and Field of Speech' with its revision in Écrits, Žižek shows Lacan desperately erased Hegelian traces: in the early version the analyst is the Hegelian master with absolute knowing; later he retracted this, linking analytic neutrality to Hegelian passivity instead.
“you can see Lacan in the later rewriting desperately trying to erase all Hegelian to traces to de-Hegelianize because it's crazy how radically pro-Hegelian Lacan is there”
Works invoked 16
Vertigo film
Hitchcock film; briefly referenced as previously analyzed, the moment Scotty drags Madeleine from the bay and the phone rings (the husband) illustrates the same structure of paternal interruption as the prattling friend in Brief Encounter.
Logics of Worlds book
Badiou's book; praised as 'definitely on the correct track'; its being/world/event ontology is used to theorize capitalism as the first worldless civilization.
Chesterton novel; quoted at length for the thesis that compared to the lawless philosopher, ordinary criminals are essentially moral. Žižek uses it to develop the thesis that law is universalized crime, and reads the novel's end (supreme criminal = supreme policeman = God) as confirming it, while arguing Chesterton himself was 'not radical enough.'
Écrits book
Lacan's collected writings; Žižek compares the original and revised versions of 'The Function and Field of Speech' to demonstrate Lacan's early radical Hegelianism and his later attempt to erase it.
Žižek says 'I hate it' and contrasts with Badiou's taste; nonetheless uses the premise to construct an alternate scenario for Brief Encounter (the husband who knew all along).
Brief Encounter film
1945 David Lean film; main object of extended analysis in the opening section. Žižek says he 'got caught in his own trap' re-watching it, develops the prattling friend as husband's stand-in, proposes three alternate scenarios, and links it to the structure of confessional address.
Columbo tv
TV detective series with Peter Falk; Žižek says 'I like that series'; used to illustrate the subject supposed to know, Columbo inexplicably knows from the start, inverting the whodunit formula.
The Shah of Shahs book
Kapuściński's book on the Iranian revolution; recommended and used for the Tehran crossing moment illustrating symbolic death preceding real collapse.
Shakespeare play; bed-trick plot used to illustrate the paradox of law sustained by transgression and Lacan's 'there is no sexual relationship.' Source cited as the Rough Guide to Shakespeare.
Critical Inquiry journal
Academic journal; mentioned as the forthcoming venue for Laclau's polemic attacking Žižek's understanding of the Lacanian Real.
Chesterton essay; quoted for the inversion that the detective/police is the original romantic rebel and 'morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies.'
The Elegant Universe book
Brian Greene's popular science book; quoted directly for the quantum energy-borrowing analogy; Žižek acknowledges his scientific horizon is limited to such popularizations.
Great Expectations book
Dickens novel; analyzed as the model Hegelian novel, Pip's apparent worldly failure (return to childhood community) is the true 'great expectation' retroactively.
A small recently published French booklet of two Lacan talks to different Catholic groups, not yet translated into English at the time of this talk; used for Lacan's distinction between the scientific Real and the psychoanalytic Real. ASR-basis: described in sufficient detail to identify as a real publication (likely 'Le Triomphe de la religion' 2005 or a related booklet).
Realphilosophie book
Early Hegel text; a passage on cunning is quoted directly: 'cunning is something other than trickery the most open activity is the greatest cunning.'
Žižek's self-declared source for Shakespeare; noted self-deprecatingly as 'my limit Shakespeare.'
People invoked 22
Jacques Derrida negative
Criticized for misreading Lacan's formula 'the letter always arrives at its destination' as teleological; Žižek (via Johnson) argues Derrida gets it wrong, it is not hidden teleology but the inevitability of the symptom/comeuppance.
Barbara Johnson positive
Cited in defense of Lacan against Derrida: 'the letter always arrives at its destination not because it cannot miss it but because retroactively wherever it arrives we retroactively say that was its destination.'
Mentioned as representative of economic liberalism in the discussion of liberalism's internal contradiction; no extended commentary.
Called 'the great conformist of French Napoleon politics'; the dinner anecdote illustrates how the letter always arrives at its destination through retroactive designation.
Cited as representative of the earliest conservative reactions that detected capitalism's meaninglessness, its undermining of organic social structures, from the outset.
Jacques Lacan positive
Primary theoretical framework throughout: the Real, objet a, sinthome, subject supposed to know, il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel, savoir dans le réel. Žižek also traces Lacan's early Hegelian phase and later de-Hegelianization of Écrits.
Stephen Hawking negative
Mentioned as a cautionary example: if the left does not address big metaphysical questions, 'people like Stephen Hawking or the new agers will do it in their way', implying this would be an inadequate or wrong-headed approach.
G. K. Chesterton positive
The Man Who Was Thursday and 'Defense of the Detective Story' extensively deployed; the universal criminal thesis is 'wonderful' but Žižek argues Chesterton is 'not radical enough', he missed that the nightmare of universal crime already exists as the legal order.
Robert Pfaller positive
Called 'my good friend'; quoted directly on the paradoxical logic of substitution ('what is substituted can also appear itself in the role of the substitute'); the gay-bashing example is his.
Ryszard Kapuściński positive
The Shah of Shahs cited and recommended; Žižek treats its reconstruction of the symbolic moment of the Shah's fall as capturing a genuine logic even if the specific event is 'mythical reconstruction' (se non è vero è ben trovato).
Alain Badiou positive
Praised for Logics of Worlds and the being/world/event triad used to theorize capitalism's worldlessness; 'definitely on the correct track.' Minor divergence: Badiou 'loved' Brief Encounter while Žižek finds Bridges of Madison County hateful.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Credited with pointing out Freud's reversed definition of melancholy: the melancholic treats an object as lost before actually losing it; Žižek builds on this to redefine melancholy as the loss of the object-cause at the moment of possessing the object.
Terry Eagleton positive
Cited in the Q&A segment with agreement: 'I tend to agree with Terry Eagleton the left today should not have fear to address what in old-fashioned terms was called the big metaphysical questions.'
UK Deputy PM; his cricket affair speculatively treated as a potential 'Tehran crossing' moment for New Labour. Žižek explicitly states he has no sympathy for Prescott or New Labour.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Praised for combining progressive social engagement with a misanthropic vision of humanity ('people are hell and shit'). Žižek also reads Brecht's private archival note on the Moscow trials as a radical second reading, distinct from Stalinist orthodoxy.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Referred to as 'ex-friend'; a 'ferocious' polemic forthcoming in Critical Inquiry claims Žižek understands 'the ABC of the Lacanian Real.' Žižek dismisses the critique and defends the capitalism-as-Real thesis.
Actor playing Columbo; Žižek says he likes the series. ASR-basis: name appears clearly in the transcript.
Napoleon positive
Used as Hegel's own example: Napoleon didn't know he was symbolically dead after his first defeat and had to lose again to be reminded, illustrating the gap between symbolic and real death.
Charles Dickens positive
Žižek confesses a 'very soft spot' for Dickens, noting he lives across the street from the Dickens house; Great Expectations is analyzed as the model Hegelian novel.
Brian Greene positive
The Elegant Universe quoted directly for the quantum mechanics energy-borrowing metaphor; Žižek self-deprecatingly acknowledges his scientific knowledge is limited to such popularizations.
Sigmund Freud positive
Death drive, compulsion to repeat, melancholy/mourning, unconscious vs id. Freud's oscillation between hermeneutic and energetic registers is paralleled to the quantum mechanics/relativity duality.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central reference throughout the second half: cunning of reason, predicate-to-subject reversal, Aufhebung, Christianity/Holy Ghost, and the thesis that law is universalized crime. Žižek consistently defends and radicalizes Hegelian moves against the standard teleological reading.
Transcript 10 turns
unknown
the work I will skip
the work I will skip
Slavoj Žižek
which is no movie please but I was tempted to break it my work my work sorry because when I was checking up something when I saw again just key passages in The Brief Encounter I noticed that how should I put it I got caught into my own trap do you remember at the beginning I explained the logic of example which is always richer than what you try to illustrate by it I really advise you maybe if you don't have anything more intelligent to do and so on to see the movie but from this standpoint you know what shocked me a couple of things first I think that in my basic description I was right that is to say that the role of that prattling friend is really that of a I mean there is a certain scene which does surprisingly does not take place only in melodramas but also in real life like I remember sometimes being desperate and you just somehow want to fall down maybe not exactly to kill yourself but just you know to disappear to fall and then some totally stupid thing a friend bothering you something that you experience as a total nuisance nonetheless is a stupid obstacle preventing you from falling down and because later after the guy leaves the would-be lover the two ladies Celia Johnson the loved one and the prattling friend found then sit together in a train carriage and then there the structure is even clearer this structure of oh why doesn't she shut up the other one she goes on talking but I made two or even three alternate scenarios of the film and I hope you will agree that I think this is a productive strategy because if you make just this small mental experiment what if this were to happen what if that a little bit differently the story then you feel the necessity of the story for example what if when later in the train or at any point what if the girl sorry the prattling friend who talks all the time were to stop talking I think it would have been a horrifying silence and I think that if the movie were to be psychologically consistent at that point Celia Johnson would be obliged to tell her please please go on talking you know to revert like she needs that second thing that I imagined this would be a Roald Dahl version what if when they are separating while they are separating in such a pathetic way through some small slip I don't know a some small piece of paper or whatever falls out of Trevor Howard's jacket it doesn't matter how but or she the heroine would discover or we were to discover that that he is not married at all that all this idea I also have a wife with two children and so on is just his fake his pretense to give a more dramatic romantic tragic flavor to an otherwise vulgar common love affair the third version that I would almost prefer is the although I hate although now I will be evil in contrast to my friend I am now denouncing my friends in contrast to my friend Alain Badiou who loved the movie don't ask me why I hate it Bridges of the Madison County I know what you're saying I would like the Bridges of the Madison County twist wouldn't it be nice if at the end the husband Fred if we were to discover that he knew all of it all the time but was just out of love not to hurt her was pretending that he doesn't know it this would be then the truly awkward situation like for her all of a sudden to discover the guy knows everything because you know where the structure is even nicer both of them the the babbling prattling friend and the husband are I claim two aspects of the same person in her crucial monologue the heroine I even didn't know that noticed it only yesterday evening that the entire inner monologue narration flashback is addressed at her husband and the whole structure is you are the only one I can address but that's supposed to be then the tragic split but precisely you are the one who whom I cannot confess and the stupid okay stupid ordinary common friend the lady who talks all the time she the heroine would like to confess to her but she is simply not appropriate so it's simply a split in the addressee to whom one should confess so I really think that in the underlying symbolic economy of the film it's like you remember when from Vertigo I showed you that moment of erotic tension after Scotty drags Madeleine out of the [unintelligible] where precisely when the contact is established the phone rings the husband I think that in the same sense this prattling babbling lady is the husband's stand-in maybe this is one of the ways to grasp that Lacan's statement woman is one of the names of the father you know she woman is that prattling lady that's the paternal authority embodied why did this movie now I will tell you almost and then I will stop with this actor studio personal confessional mode but nonetheless almost a personal confession because I remember when I was young I found myself often in the same situation which was extremely humiliating for me my father a very patriarchal person which is why it wasn't a very classical Freudian way when I learned some five years ago that my father died I was glad it I didn't have any problem or whatever I remember my father returning from his job at around four in the afternoon when I was like ten years old and he sat down and said oh I'm tired come here to me why don't you just babble talk something it doesn't matter what just and I felt it so humiliating no he I mean even if you mean it you don't say it so openly basically he told me openly it doesn't matter what just go on talking something and I think that this would have been the truth of that situation it's not that the lady friend is interrupting in in maybe the true film would have been for Celia Johnson to say to her friend listen just please just go on talking something it doesn't matter what and so on and so on but okay we are not dealing with this today enough with this so let's go on I'm really sad that we did not have time to enter more at the very end you remember into that short Buddhism debate maybe we should really do it at the very end so I will just now in literally one two minutes try to recapitulate something that I already said and which for me is the problem of Buddhism it's a very simple one don't go too fast to the end Nirvana enlightenment and so on isn't nonetheless that's my where for me problems begin the entire edifice grounded in a certain apparently very common presupposition which is repeated all the time with all of them from the big original figure Buddha to Dalai Lama today that all sentient beings are striving for happiness they want to avoid pain and that's then the presupposition that's the idea well if there is a lesson of psychoanalysis it's that this is not true at least for humans that it's definitely pathetically if you want not true that all sentient beings are striving for happiness or to avoid pain that's the whole point of death drive of compulsion to repeat and so on and so on already here here is the gap in this apparently neutral but very basic the most elementary presupposition another problem that I have and I here very open when I say another problem that I have is it's not a polite way to say I have a solution but I play open spirit with you I really think it's a problem maybe I even misunderstand something is that I often see Buddhist texts for which I have a great respect oscillating between the two extremes on the one hand I am very well aware of the fundamental gap between the Buddhist authentic Buddhist approach and Western mysticism in Western mysticism the idea is that through ecstasy whatever you at least in the standard versions of Christian mysticism you how should I put it naively you really try to move out of this world into another reality while as true Buddhists always emphasize Nirvana does not mean you go into some kind of transmigration of the soul everything is here exactly the way it is so I am well aware that when I said that for Buddhism after enlightenment the wheel stops to turn it doesn't mean that in your reality you no longer have desires fears and so on what changes is just how you relate to all this but nonetheless what is the nonetheless the nonetheless is here that how should I put it nonetheless and at the same time you find descriptions which at least sound as that the ultimate goal of Buddhist enlightenment is even to redeem all the sentient beings of their suffering and so on and so on like you know what I mean it's I see in Buddhism inscribed this oscillation between on the one hand nothing really has to change not even less suffering if we understand by suffering what is happening in reality people dying of pain and so on all that has to change is your attitude you have to change so that the suffering no longer works the way it works in a pulling engaging way for you but this is always redoubled by a much more radical radical in a superficial sense rather almost I would say cosmic prospect of effectively how should I put it stopping canceling the very life circulation of bringing all the universe even to a standstill if you want I see again I see this as a kind of a as a kind of a tension okay but here things are more precise probably I guess we should we should go at it later now before and today you will get Hegel before going to Hegel directly I would like nonetheless to I cannot sustain from indulging in what I consider a small nice speculation about how Lacan refers to sciences I know I was already mentioning here two-three times the Higgs field and so on now from a little bit of a different approach namely first and this traumatizes me a little bit because in the polemic very violent polemic which will now explode in the next issue of Critical Inquiry my ex-friend okay Ernesto Laclau is attacking me ferociously where I learn I understand nothing I don't understand Lacan I don't understand Hegel I don't understand him I don't understand Marx okay among other things and this shocks me a little bit because I always thought that if my name is associated with something it's the Lacanian Real no now I learn there that quote from Laclau Žižek obviously doesn't understand the ABC of what the Lacanian Real is no okay that's nice to learn why because the topic is and this is incredibly how all the people are annoyed by this when I emphasize again and again that from a Lacanian perspective capitalism the logic of the capital is Real and I don't know why there must be something in it because I notice that with all my friends they go defensive even in very strange mood like in the sense of but here I contradict myself but don't you see capitalism cannot be Real and so on and so on but I think it is Real and what do I mean by Real you know that in Badiou's Alain Badiou's recent work and I like very much his development in his last book the Logics of Worlds I think he is definitely on the correct track he noticed that if you know a little bit about Badiou's ontology that the mere duality of being the totally stupid flat multi-multiplicity of being that we cannot as it were pass directly from it to event something is missing in between which is the notion of the world the world I claim is precisely let's call it the world in the symbolic sense the horizon of meaning if you want this is in between because events do not happen directly in reality events shatter always a certain world events are events within a certain world because the entire structure of presence representation totalization and so on within which an event intervenes shattering it is the structure of a world and what Badiou some of you if you follow his work must know it because I know that he was making this point often in his London appearances even likes to emphasize is that what is really new about capitalist okay civilization or whatever is that precisely it is the first worldless civilization it's no longer a world and I'm just tempted to take him seriously here I don't think that this debate about is capitalism Eurocentric or whatever is really relevant of course empirically it originated in Europe but I think this is a contingent fact which has no significance deeper significance what is important is that let's call it the elementary logic of the capital this profit-making whatever machinery of surplus-value is a kind of a formal matrix which remains the same can op can be operative in all possible worlds by worlds I mean symbolic universes you can have Buddhist capitalism Catholic capitalism Japanese capitalism Indian capitalism Latino-American capitalism it's that which precisely remains the same in all possible possible symbolic universes and that's what I think is so shattering about capitalism that it's in a in a way a worldless civilization which is why the typical defense is then to how the or the problems that even the problem that we even at the everyday level experience is how to secure our particular roots our particular way of life which precisely means our world against capitalism and this what remains the same in all possible universes and so on and so on is I claim precisely the Real in this sense it should be always kept in mind that capitalism is Real Real precisely in the sense that it's just some kind of a neutral formal frame which reproduces itself this kind of a social virus if you want in all possible universes and which has no deeper meaning in the sense that the problem is precisely how to safeguard meaning my god isn't this the problem with capitalism from the very beginning if you look at the first conservative reactions from Edmund Burke whatever you want and so on it's they all detected from the very beginning a certain meaninglessness in capitalism meaninglessness in the sense of undermining any organic meaningful social structure and so on and isn't then the problem of all great conservatives from let's call them gentle conservatives de Gaulle in France up to fascists how to unite capitalism with meaning meaning of course as a social meaning precisely because again capitalism in this sense works as the Real okay but let me go on so when Lacan deals with the notion of the Real in this short book that he recently that was recently published of his two two talks to different groups of Catholics Lacan addressing the Catholics it's in a small booklet recently published in France not yet translated into English Lacan makes a very nice point of how the two Reals to be opposed today are the scientific Real and the psychoanalytic Real and that this gap defines us today that is to say that what psychoanalysis deals with is not the scientific Real but the Real of drive a different traumatic and so on Real but nonetheless what is so interesting is that although Lacan opposes these two Reals he often resorts to the scientific Real and evokes examples from hard sciences in order to clarify the deadlocks the problems of the psychoanalytic Real the question here is are these references meant to be only metaphors didactic borrowings with no inherent cognitive value or do they involve a theoretical link bridge between the two domains although Lacan tends to downplay these borrowings reducing them to didactic tools the case is often more ambiguous let me take Lacan's characterization of hard sciences as dealing with what he calls savoir dans le réel knowledge in the Real it is as if there is a knowledge of the laws of nature directly inscribed into the Real of natural objects and processes for instance a stone somehow knows what laws of gravity to obey when it is falling now it may seem that Lacan is simply confusing things here you would say the stone doesn't know it's simply part of its immediate objective existence it's only in human history that laws are norms which can be forgotten or otherwise disobeyed let me evoke an old example of mine which I use in many of my books the archetypal scene from cartoons which relies for its comical effect precisely on the confusion of these two level levels like a cat walks across above the precipice it continues to float in the air it falls only after it looks down and becomes aware of how it has no support beneath its feet as if it has momentarily forgotten the natural laws its body has to obey and has to be reminded of them like don't you see what about natural laws oh yes now I remember them I fall down however okay the first thing to say here is that to pass from cartoon's comedy to tragedy isn't it that when a political regime disintegrates in historical reality that we can along similar lines distinguish between its two deaths symbolic and real death like there are those strange epochs when a regime for a limited period persists in power although its time is clearly over it is as if it goes on living because it doesn't notice that it is already dead this happens always that the certain it's really like as if it goes on and it has to be too reminded like at some point as Hegel puts it nicely all you have to do to those in power is like treat them like a cat above the precipice no ah look down don't you know your time is over no but there are even more mysterious moments and I remember them from my political youth where they hold those in power onto their power it goes on although somehow they all know that the game is over I think these are very interesting phenomena like in my one of my early books I quote I really advise you to read it if you want to get the political dynamic that wonderful book by Ryszard Kapuściński the Pole you know The Shah of Shahs about Iran where he claims of course it's a mythical reconstruction but I think the logic is right he was there and wanted to isolate the precise moment when it was over I mean the rule of Shah and his result was that it wasn't over when Shah effectively fled or whatever his idea is that it happened around if I remember it correctly half a year earlier a certain and he claimed even if it's not true again as Italians say se non vero ben trovato that a certain event happened on one of the main crossroads sorry squares whatever of Tehran where a crowd was gathering for demonstrations and policemen approached them not a large crowd and started to shout at them disperse disperse go and one of the guys not even a great hero it's not even according to Kapuściński known who he is simply this miracle happened maybe he simply made a good judgment of the situation maybe he saw that the policeman is not so sure of himself he stood up and said no we will not go you go and policeman looked perplexed for a couple of seconds and turned around and left then in a mysterious way you know how these rumors function no did you notice how even if of course now I'm not preaching mysticism it can usually be usually my god now I talk like I'm superstitious be explained rationally but did you notice how there is something so mysterious in rumors that there are things that happen and then all of a sudden everybody knows it no like it happened it happened to me to me oh my god it's such an embarrassing episode but okay I was young thirty years ago in the army we were it was a large military barracks on the one hand I was there talking only with two soldiers we were talking what soldiers are usually talking about sexual practices and so on no and then these were tough pro-macho soldiers and said how decadent in the West you know men even do cunnilingus ugh a true man never eats meat there never do that and then I made my fatal mistake I said what's so bad if you are washed I did it no they looked at me and then something mysterious happened an officer came and told me take this message run fast to the other side of the military barracks we were alone there there were no phones there I ran there to deliver a message to another officer I entered the you know how the officer addressed me are you the guy who is licking cunt I don't get it somehow then as you can imagine I was called whatever name was then my destiny was signed for since then but what I want to say is that in the same way in Tehran in this mysterious way all of a sudden the rumor spread that happened that event and it worked like this pure everybody somehow knew from that point on that it's over for the Shah it went on for half a year there were still street battles people were dying but you know what I mean in an imperceptible way the whole atmosphere changed from that point on it was over I always love these symbolic moments how again you can have the gap in both directions either you have a power which like I wonder but I don't think so they are too arrogant is this happening now to the Labour in power John Prescott yes yes yes maybe this but again we are here at this logic that I mentioned that I mentioned apropos of this will have been I claim that in the same way you remember when I gave you that nice French quote which was if Balladur will win the election it will have been a necessary victory retroactively so I claim that yes if Labour will fall apart or whatever lose a year from now or half a year whenever it will have been that the Prescott was maybe maybe maybe Prescott and cricket will be your Tehran crossing or whatever you know what I mean this element which it's a purely symbolic element ultimately it even doesn't matter if it's true or not not that I have great sympathies for Prescott or new Labour but wait a minute I agreed with a commentary that I read I never got it okay he was playing cricket okay apart from the obvious fact that cricket is a game where I it's total mystic to me a guy throws a ball then some other guy start to run in a I don't but apart from that I mean I read even a comment where they said imagine this to happening to an a different old conservative politi- I mean it's absolutely irrational I claim what happened but nonetheless okay this will maybe what I'm saying is that it can work in both ways either a certain power structure still persists goes on but everybody knows including themselves that they are already dead and the same thing obviously took place in Soviet Union sometime during Gorbachev era or even more interesting the other way around they don't know that they are dead and how should I put it the knowledge comes too late they have to be to be reminded like here you have Hegel's famous commentary on Napoleon that Napoleon's problem was that when he lost the first time he didn't know that he is dead so he had to be defeated the second time just to be reminded that that he is dead no so okay now comes my point you will say but of course this gap is the typical gap that pertains to the symbolic order a gap between the brutal stupid reality and its symbolic registration however you call it but it doesn't happen in brute physical reality there things simply are what they are but here again to give you a simple example isn't it that at its most daring quantum physics does allow for such a paradox of cartoon of the momentarily suspension forgetting of the knowledge in the Real imagine that you have to take a flight on a certain day to pick up a fortune the next day but you do not have the money to buy the ticket but then you discover that the accounting system of the airline is such that if you wire the ticket payment within hours of arrival at your destination no one will ever know it was not paid prior to departure so you can temporarily cheat a little bit now in a homologous way I am here quoting I'm sorry that's my the limit of my scientific horizon Brian Greene the Elegant Universe in a homologous way the energy a particle has can widely fluctuate so long as this fluctuation is over a short enough time scale so just as the accounting system of the airline allows you to borrow the money for a plane ticket provided you pay it back quickly enough quantum mechanics allows a particle to borrow energy so long it can relinquish it within a time frame determined by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle but quantum mechanics forces us to take the analogy one important step further imagine someone who is a compulsive borrower and goes from friend to friend asking for money borrow and return borrow and return over and over again with unflagging intensity he takes in money only to give it back in short order a similar frantic shifting back and forth of energy and momentum is occurring perpetually in the universe of microscopic distance and time intervals end of quote so this is how even in an empty region of space a particle emerges out of nothing borrowing its energy from the future and paying for it with its annihilation before the system notices this borrowing so the whole network can function like this in a rhythm of borrowing and annihilation one borrowing from the other displacing the debt onto the other now what this presupposes is a minimal gap between things in their immediate brute reality and the registration of this reality in some medium one can cheat in so far as the second is in a delay with regard to the first so again I think that what is for me so fascinating for quantum physics is that this minimal delay you know this logic that everyone of us has let's say you are on a diet and let's say you are have a severe person a mother a spouse who controls you no but who if you had this problem who didn't have this it's not simply cheating you really think that it works that somehow if I quickly secretly ate something and if the other controls me doesn't notice it somehow it doesn't count you really believe that it doesn't count what counts is but okay again you will say this is symbolic cheating what about reality the mystique again is that okay mystique precisely not mystique but the miracle of quantum physics is that as if you can cheat in this way in reality in reality itself so it is as if again the gap which may appear specifically symbolic cultural the gap between what a thing is in its stupid immediate reality and its registration that this gap is inscribed into reality itself which is why you know all these problems which I think are wonderful problems and insoluble in its own domain of quantum physics when they say the wave oscillation collapses with registration but then there are debates okay but what counts as the moment of registration it is when the machine makes the measure it is when a person is it so and it's incredible how you have all possible versions up to the purely linguistic ones one of those how's his name the popularizer John Gribbin or what his claim is even that it's only when it's put in language that the registration that is to say the collapse of the wave function effectively occurs again it is as if part of what we perceived usually as specific to human reality this gap between the raw Real and its registration somehow has to be at work already in let's call it natural reality now my second example the big counterpoint to quantum physics Einstein's theory of relativity there I claim we also find an unexpected parallel with the Lacanian theory as you know the starting point of the theory of relativity is the strange fact that for every observer no matter in what direction and how fast he moves light moves at the same speed and I claim in an analogous way for Lacan no matter if the desiring subject approaches or runs from his object of desire this object seems to remain at the same distance from him we all remember the nightmarish situation from a dream the more I run away the more I remain at the same place and I think that this paradox can be neatly resolved through the difference between the object and the cause of desire no matter how close I get to the object of desire its cause remains at a distance elusive furthermore as you know the general theory of relativity resolves the antinomy between the relativity of every movement with regard to observer and the absolute velocity of light which moves at the constant speed independently of the point of observation with the notion of curved space again I claim that in a homologous way the Freudian solution to the antinomy between the subjects approaching or running away from his objects of desire and the constant speed and distance from him of the object of desire results in the curved space of desire sometimes the shortest way to realize a desire is to bypass its object to circulate around it to postpone its encounter and I think this would be the most elementary definition of what Lacan means by object small a the object cause of desire the agent of this curving that x on account of which when we confront the object of desire more satisfaction is provided by dancing around it than by directly going at it that's the object small a again let me take this point I want to be clear here the object a for Lacan is not what you desire is that which makes you desire what you desire it's not let's say a woman or a man I love it's that which and I'm usually not even aware of what this is that which makes me love that woman as I developed like totalitarianism book in this way you can turn around in a wonderful way the usual way people approach the problem of melancholy no usually melancholy is celebrated even by some gay theorists as somehow more authentic than mourning the idea is you have a traumatic attachment to an object through mourning you let it go gradually through the work of mourning while a melancholic remains faithful to it but already Agamben pointed out how if you read Freud closely you find a definition of melancholy which is exactly the opposite one the problem with melancholic is not that you cannot get over the loss of the object of desire it it is rather that you treat an object as lost even before you actually lose it it's still here but it's already lost because you no longer desire it that is to say I think that what is the proper moment of melancholy is when you get the object but at that very point the object cause of desire what made you desire the object disappear which is why the typical situation of melancholic is not poor people who don't get it it's rich people who get everything but nonetheless no longer desire it no it's the opposite it's the opposite structure okay so even more generally but let's stop it here one can develop that in the same way that if we have this duality between quantum physics and relativity theory do not do we not have the same duality in psychoanalysis I claim between let's call it the hermeneutical aspect of Freud hermeneutics of the unconscious interpretation of dreams slips of talk tongues and so on like here we think of Freud's interpretation of dreams psychopathology of everyday life and so on and on the other side a more positivist study of our psychic apparatus as a machine for dealing with libidinal energies and it's clear that the clearest expression of this tension in Freud of course is his oscillation between the unconscious and the id unconscious is a more hermeneutic unconscious if you want unconscious repressed meanings signifiers id is more libido the id as opposed to superego and ego is more energetic and I claim that there is a parallel here that in exactly the same way that modern physics is trying to combine and we know this is the big prize I I like it seems to me as an old Stalinist nor the electrical materialist superstring theory but I'm an idiot all I can do is to look for what people who know more say and the latest results I think is that it's out again superstring theory no that it's dismissed okay but nonetheless I claim that for the Lacan was struggling to the end with the same problem and that his notion elaborated in the last years of his teaching his notion of le sinthome symptom synthetic man all the associations synthetic man Saint Thomas of Aquinas and so on as the elementary atom of enjoyment is something like Lacan's attempt to bring the two together it's the best designation of what Lacan calls sinthome is a quanta of enjoyment a minimum quanta of enjoyment the idea enjoyment also comes in minimal quantas this small states sinthoms which are again the elements and since sinthome is defined Lacan uses I discovered with surprise sometimes even the term that it oscillates like a string where this was Lacan's attempt as superstring theory to unite the two the energetic libido and the other one now of course I will not go into it today but I'm well aware of the basic epistemological problem here the danger is always okay as a Stalinist I will say right wing left wing deviation right wing deviation direct naturalization so that we say so our symbolic structures must already be embedded in nature you find structures like language already in nature the opposite leftist deviation would have been a too fast historicist culturalization the idea then being all this only proves that we cannot get out of our language that even when quantum physicists study nature they had to rely on terms mechanisms which are really specific to our language what I am desperately trying to is precisely to avoid this second conclusion I think it's too easy because if nothing else if it simply how should I put it it's too Kantian for me in the sense that it doesn't even approach the question but okay if then all our cognition of reality is already mediated through symbolic structures not only formally but even at the level of content that the structures that we perceive in nature are already secretly mediated or by the structures of language and so on the problem is but then I'm here an old-fashioned materialist nonetheless but there is Real out there I don't think that language is the origin of everything and that it's just a void before so isn't it then that we cannot simply you know the conclusion is too symbolically solipsistic for me the conclusion is a very comfortable one all that we can say is within our language so you can just it's too simple a conclusion okay now we finished with this Real and finally Hegel Hegel only Hegel what I was promising a long time Hegelian cunning of reason why is I want to start with something which Lacan tried to erase in the first years sorry in the last years of his teaching the extent to which especially in the early fifties Lacan was very pro-Hegelian namely it's very interesting to read to do something slightly evil to read the function and speech of psychoanalysis the fundamental écrits to read it the way it is in écrits and to compare it with how it was when it was in its original version from I think published you can see Lacan in the later rewriting desperately trying to erase all Hegelian to traces to de-Hegelianize because it's crazy how radically pro-Hegelian Lacan is there he to put it very simply Lacan refers there to Hegelian absolute knowing in order to propose the identification of the analyst with the Hegelian master philosopher who has access to absolute knowing for Lacan the analyst stands for the Hegelian master the embodiment of absolute knowing why ah now things get complex precisely because he renounces all this is the term that Badiou likes to use forçage in the sense of enforcing imposing something onto reality for Lacan and for Hegel what characterizes the analyst is precisely utter passivity in action and I don't have time to do this today maybe later maybe not because in a short text which I think I sent it to some a small journal in Oxford where they asked me for it I think it didn't yet appear I approached from here the whole problem of Hegel and anal oral economy like Hegel is usually perceived as the philosopher of oral economy in the sense of to swallow everything no the concept mediates everything and it is true Hegel in his naive idealist way even likes to say how the animal eating when we or we humans eat or when animal swallow an object eat that this is the most elementary form of conceptual grasping of so is then the absolute knowledge this absolute you eat all the shit you kind of swallow the whole world I think not I don't have time to develop it today but it's so interesting how for Hegel then when you eat everything the concluding moment is always the opposite one okay I will not pronounce the name because the title of my text is Hegel on Shitting and so on but it's literally like that the complete masterhood is precisely for Hegel to to let it go to let it go to allow to the object its own dynamics to withdraw completely so in this sense who is the analyst for Hegel or the philosopher it's the one who is fully aware that the actual reality is already in itself rational so he can adopt the attitude of a passive observer who does not intervene directly into the content but only manipulates the scene so that the content destroys itself confronted with its own inconsistencies this is what Lacan refers to when he writes that Hegel's work is I quote precisely what we need to confer on a meaning to confer a meaning precisely what we need to confer a meaning on so-called analytic neutrality a meaning other than that the analyst is simply in a stupor it is this neutrality which keeps the analyst on the path of non-action so again the Hegelian wager is that the best way to destroy an enemy is to give him the free field to deploy his her their potentials and that the enemy's success will be his failure since the lack of external obstacles will confront him with the absolutely inherent obstacle of the inconsistency of his own position here is a nice quote from Hegel's real philosophie from an early Hegelian text on cunning quote cunning is something other than trickery the most open activity is the greatest cunning the other must be taken in its truth in other words with his openness a man exposes the other in himself he makes him he makes the other appear as he is in and for himself and thereby does away with himself cunning is the great art of inducing others to be as they are in and for themselves and to bring this out to the light of consciousness although others are in the right they do not know how to defend it by means of speech muteness is bad mean cunning consequently a true master is at bottom only he who can provoke the other to transform himself through his act what does Hegel mean here let me give you a strange maybe for you example which maybe even will not sound enough leftist politically to you the true cunning of the American administration and I say this with all sympathy for Cuban revolution would be to drop all the embargo to say okay you want it we give it to you and unfortunately I think that it would have worked I think that Cuban socialism would have been over in maximum two-three years I think that it's precisely you know this would be the Hegelian attitude you want end of embargo open can here you have it and I think that it's precisely the resistance against embargo which is the mobilizing point in Cuba without that you just let the other you want this okay you have it the wager is because I'm sure you will destroy itself so you get to put it very simply you get the point here the point this is the cunning of reason it is basically the cunning of unreason at its most elementary it is not okay let's allow all the mess I'm sure that somehow secretly reason will prevail it's not I can rely on some mysterious agency that which I don't know divine wisdom reason in history that events will take the right course it's quite on the contrary the what Hegel con calls I claim cunning of reason it's to put it in a slightly cynical way it's rather a deep trust that have it your way because I'm sure that somehow you will screw it up if you want that things will go wrong and that will be your truth you will undo yourself this is why as I developed already years ago but I like to repeat it this is why with all my respect for Derrida when Derrida reproaches Lacan with for his formula the letter always arrives at its destination as teleological formula it means letter never just disseminates itself that it's hidden teleology I think that he gets it wrong letter arrives at its destination means simply to put it in this I think this is I don't know if this is a general term or I heard it always only in Orson Welles that you will get your comeuppance or how they call it no you know sometimes I find myself as speaking a weird language I read wonderful memoirs of recently of a guy who was the American translator I mean there with direct debate with Russian president American translator and he said that it's so strange that they spoke a very nice English the Russian translators but English learned not through talking with real Englishmen but from mostly Dickens and authors like this and then it was so comical for example Gorbachev said to Reagan I don't agree with here you are trying ah ah and then the translation was fiddlesticks or something some crazy 19th- or that Reagan was so shocked when Gorbachev told him something you are trying to deceive me and then the translation ran you are trying to hang to hang to hang noodles around my ears and so on Reagan was not exactly the most witty guy was strange no so my point is that when I use these terms like comeuppance it's as if I maybe I'm sorry for it speak this kind of in but what I want to say is that so you got my point another way the Freudian way to say a letter always arrives at its destination is to say there is no repression without the return of the repressed it says that you know there will always be a symptom something that will screw up things for you so the the ultimate wager again is not positive cunning of reason some whatever the confusion appears some higher power guarantees that it will turn out okay it's on the contrary no matter how good your plans are some higher power if you want will take care that it will screw up your plans and that will be your truth that is to say to put it in more modern terms the inherent antagonism will destroy you or even to put it in the terms of of the logic of desire even it's not that you don't get what you desire it's that you never really know what you desire Hegel is here more radical you desire something then you fight for it then you get something then you say oh that's not what I wanted no this is truly what you wanted so let's go on now a little bit more in this logic the fundamental as it were mechanism of the properly Hegelian reversal reversal is just to put it in very naive terms you try to do something you have a plan this plan fails but then you have to make a strange shift of perspective where you realize how the very apparent failure was a success but measured with a different measure that's the proper dialectical reversal where to put it in slightly cynical terms and I think Hegel is cynical here there is always a success not because there is always a success simply but because even if I fail I change the measure so that it's a success or as Barbara Johnson put it nicely long ago in his defense of Lacan against Derrida the letter always arrives at its destination not because it cannot miss it but because retroactively wherever it arrives we retroactively say that was its destination you know it's a little bit like my favorite conformist phrase this is the cunning of reason you know that wonderful I think even Hegel quotes it a saying by the great conformist of French Napoleon politics Talleyrand you know that famous incident where he was having I don't know dinner lunch with people and they heard sounds of street battle outside and Talleyrand said you see our side is winning they asked him okay but which side is winning he said I don't know I will learn this tomorrow you know this is how the letter arrives at its destination if you want no so what you know it's something like okay let me give you now to make this absolutely clear a couple of surprising examples and then of course to complicate things a little bit I'm very sorry but since I live here across the street almost that Beckland place down there it's on that okay whatever street Dickens house I must say I have a very soft spot for for Dickens and Great Expectations is the model in this sense of a Hegelian novel why you know Pip is designated as a man of great expectations everybody perceives this as the forecast of his worldly success however at the novel's end when he abandons London's false glamour and returns to his modest childhood community we get it that this was the true great expectation no that what appears as his social failure is is true greatness this kind of a shift or let me give you another example now or even another two other examples which will be a little bit more a little bit more surprising one would be of this how you shift the measure I remember how all of my friends are shocked when they read Brecht's famous statement apropos of the accused in the Moscow show trials of the thirties Brecht said and this appears as the ultimate arch-Stalinist statement Brecht said even if they are really innocent you know the liberals proclaim but wait a minute Bukharin and so on but they are innocent Brecht said if they are innocent they deserve all the more to be shot now this can be read as the ultimate Stalinist madness which is even if they are innocent they are not innocent because their very insistence on their innocence means that they prefer that the accused prefer their bourgeois subjectivity individuality to the needs of the party if you really are ready to sacrifice yourself for the party you would say who cares if I'm innocent or not obviously the party needs my my blood now and I will gladly give it so the very form of asserting your innocence is your guilt that is to say formally it means you stick to the bourgeois individual morality blah blah blah this is the reading the official reading Brecht horrible ultra-Stalinist but from a friend of mine told me who had a look into some new Brecht archives now that at okay this is typical Brechtian hypocrisy that he put another reading only in his private notes but the Brecht had a different thing in mind here it was much nastier his logic was this one and in this sense I think we can even agree with Brecht he said Stalin was a terrible criminal he deserved to be killed and the accused were accused basically in the big trial you remember I was giving history of trying to kill Stalin the accused effectively since they were Stalin's collaborators I mean they were meeting him some of them even members of the Politburo they effectively were in a position to kill Stalin and they didn't do it in this sense if they are innocent they deserve to be shot they had a chance to get rid of all of us of one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century and they didn't do it they deserve to be shot they didn't use the opportunity like you know if you are in front of Hitler my god you refuse to kill him but you got the effect here does this change in perspective like another one the famous Göring's one although it's wrongly attributed to Göring whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my pistol for my gun but you know that Göring we are reading it in a correct way now but Göring meant it in the opposite way Göring's meaning was whenever I hear the word culture I know it's not just intellectuals I think about how our German culture is threatened today and I reach for my gun to protect the German culture from Jewish Russian barbarian Slavic whatever barbarian so he meant this but of course the truth is he is the barbarian now comes an example which will maybe surprise you a little bit from Buddhism you know that there are three schools of bad schools of Buddhism the main split of Buddhism is the one between Hinayana the small wheel and Mahayana the great wheel the first one is elitist demanding trying to maintain the fidelity to Buddha's teaching focusing on the individual's effort to get rid of the illusion of the self to attain enlightenment the second school Mahayana arose through the split from the first one it subtly shifts the accent onto compassion with others its central figure is Bodhisattva the individual who after achieving enlightenment decides out of compassion to return to the world of material illusions in order to help others to achieve enlightenment that is to say to work for the end of suffering of all sentient beings and I think this is where things go wrong the split is here irreducible working for one's own enlightenment reasserts the centrality of the self in the very striving for its overcoming while the great wheel way out of this predicament just repeats the deadlock I mean the Mahayana version in a displaced way egotism is overcome but the price is that universal enlightenment itself turns into an object of the instrumental activity of the self you get my point I think you cannot escape it whatever you do if you do Hinayana or Mahayana I think you get caught in a contradiction in an antagonism so I really think that although it's usually praised as more authentic the beauty of this thought you postpone your own enlightenment you return to this miserable reality of passions to help all others to reach enlightenment I think this is the beginning of the ethical fiasco because it introduces the logic of self-sacrifice and so on and so on which is I think the origin of all difficulties but now we have the third school Vajrayana which predominates in Tibet and Mongolia and which is often dismissed as a reinscription of Buddhism into traditional ritualistic magic practices we have all those things that we like to make fun of like the the praying wheels and so on the total fanatical codification ritualization hierarchy and so on and so on but my point here is not to make fun of these superstitious features of the Tibetan Buddhism because it's easy to say the first two that is to say Hinayana Mahayana are authentic ones while the Tibetan Buddhism is a primitive regression to superstitious practices it is true that it's difficult to imagine a more radical contrast as between Buddha's beginning where as you know the point was I don't care if God exists I don't care what techniques you use I don't care about rituals all I care is to effectively pragmatically help people stop suffering can it be anything more opposed to it than this Tibetan Buddhist approach of all that matters is to do properly the ritual to repeat thousand times a day this to pray and so on just to but you know what's the paradox the paradox is that if you are truly a pragmatist you should accept the Tibetan way because if you say like Buddha what matters is does it work or not but what is precisely the ritualization works that is precisely to say what if this way which appears to be the most ritualized non-pragmatic it doesn't matter if you are happy or not what matters is that you strictly obey the ritual what if this is the way the only way which effectively functions to make you happy it is to make a tasteless comparison isn't it a little bit like like like in sexuality you know that if you are in trouble men usually impotence and so on the worst thing is to say forget about all the rules don't take it as a duty just relax and do it that's formula for sabotage the thing that works is a more Tibetan approach it's to say let me forget about myself and let's treat performing sexual act as a pure bureaucratic duty you sit down with a partner and you say okay I will first put your finger there no you will put it there no and you have a long Stalinist debate and I will guarantee you after half an hour you will say I'm tired of this let's fuck or whatever and it will but but you get my point the opposite works the bureaucratic approach works in the same way no but you get the point that I was trying to make apparently there is the radical opposition authentic Buddha don't care about rituals just lead suffering and then this crazy hierarchic alienation hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism but what if that precisely works measured by the strictest standards okay now let's go a little bit further we are not dealing here with a simple reversal of the formula we are dealing with the way a contradiction is how should I put it reformulated what happens with contradiction in the Hegelian process let me take a simple example the notion of liberalism the way this notion liberalism functions in today's discourse its main meanings focus on two opposite poles we have on the one hand economic liberalism free market individualism opposition to strong state regulation and so on and so on on the other hand we have political libertarian liberalism accent on equality social solidarity permissiveness multicultural tolerance and so on and so on like in the United States Republicans are more liberal in the first sense Democrats of course in the second sense the point is that it's meaningless to ask which is the true liberalism of course people like Hayek would say our individualist market liberalism is the true liberalism your liberalism of equality human rights already has the despotic state intervention potentials while on the other hand again left liberals would have said no yours is a road to slavery to economic slavery only if only through affirmative action and so on can true liberty be guaranteed but what Hegel would have simply said is that this opposition of two aspects of liberalism is inherent to the very is inherent to the very notion of liberalism that it marks precisely the historical limit of the notion of liberalism that we it's not you see here we have what I was talking about before this wisdom of the cunning of reason don't fight liberalism let it develop and it will get caught into this tension and you cannot resolve it that liberalism is defined by this tension which is also the tension inscribed into how the notion of freedom functions today that is to say what happens here is that how should I put it what appears as a contradiction failure of the idea turns into the central feature of the idea it's not a contradiction which is a limitation of the notion of liberalism it's a contradiction which defines liberalism this tension so now let me now I come to the crucial point for today how does this reversal work it's not only a reversal of a predicate into subject but a more complex reversal let me take a terrifying example here it's a very male chauvinist one but the logic works you know the well-known male chauvinist wisdom or notion of how in contrast to man's self-identity the essence of woman is dispersed elusive displaced the thing to do here is to move from this claim that the essence of woman is forever dispersed to the more radical claim that this dispersion displacement as such is the essence of femininity this is what Hegel deployed as the dialectical shift in which the predicate turns into the subject you know the old Rabinovich joke that I repeat all the time I want to emigrate out of Soviet Union for two reasons the first reason communism will disappear the bureaucrat says but communism will last forever well that's my second reason and so on it's the same here imagine Rabinovich coming at an exam of psychoanalysis and said I found the essence of femininity the professor answered but you cannot find it femininity is a dark continent dispersed displaced where this dispersion is the essence of femininity and so on and I claim that such a shift signals or characterizes the very formal structure of subjectivity what does this mean let me explain it through the structure of supposition Lacan as you all know or should know developed first the notion of the analyst as the subject supposed to know which arises through transference supposed to know what the meaning of the patient symptom and again to repeat my old typical example if you want to get what the subject supposed to know means just take what is I think the nicest example from TV series you know the good old Columbo with Peter Falk I like that series because it breaks two basic rules of detective series one is that whodunit is not a problem you know how the series was structured no first you see exactly how the murder was done who did it and so on so this I think is proves that they are wrong those who think that at the end you learn whodunit no you the mystery the true mystery is the deduction how you connect what really happened with the deceiving appearance and so on and so on okay but the other thing the central mystery of Columbo series is that after the murder Columbo arrives arrives on the scene and in a totally mysterious way from the very beginning he knows who did it did you notice this he simply focuses on a guy and harasses him or her blah blah blah but it's very mysterious why this even without any he just arrives and knows the subject okay then we have the subject supposed to believe which would be precisely the subject supposed not to know what I called two days ago the one for whom the appearances should be protected then we have of course the subject supposed to enjoy the subject of sexual envy it can be racist sexual envy blacks really enjoy they can satisfy our women more than us and so on and so on so the structure here is clear subject supposed to know is knowledge S2 in Lacanian mathemes subject supposed to believe is S1 the master small a surplus enjoyment subject supposed to enjoy so what would be then the fourth element the subject do we get a subject supposed to be subject no I think what we get is that this is the shift I'm talking about from the subject supposed to something supposed to know supposed to enjoy supposed to believe we should pass to subject itself as a supposition and I think this is Lacan's most radical thesis it's not that only that as a subject caught in intersubjective networks I'm always supposed to something like a naive child supposed not to know those for or even in communism I think that you find this tension between know not to know in the figure of the Stalinist leader but not only Stalinist leader that's already the whole mystery of Potemkin's villages how on the one hand the leader is wisdom knows everything but at the same time we should cover up the vulgarity failures so that the leader's eye will not perceive them if I read it correctly in one older biography of Mao the greatest Potemkin's village was when in the great famine later Mao took a long ride by the train about two-three thousand miles and you know what they did this is true Potemkin's village they reconstructed happy villages and so on along the entire rail line so that whenever Mao would say oh let's stop and see how farmers are they wanted to be sure that there was a happy village there okay so the here always the subject is supposed to something to know to enjoy to believe but what about the subject itself as a supposition it's not only that subject is supposed to something it is itself a supposition what does this mean let us imagine a proposition a statement how does this statement get subjectivized when some reflexive feature inscribes into it the subjective attitude you know like if a machine repeats something it's not subjectivized but if you suspect some feature inscribing into it a subjective attitude that somebody not only says something but relates to it in a way this subjectivizes it the subject is the absent x that has to be supposed in order to account for this distortion reflexive twist whatever okay now you will say but this holds only for the other subject like when I this would be even maybe the point of those tests of artificial intelligence that this is how we identify a text as a text behind which there stands a subject through this twists reflexive twists distortions like you know when a machine goes on when a machine goes wrong then we are for a brief moment usually not sure did the machine simply go wrong or did it go wrong to put it in a stupid way in a meaningful way if this we suppose a subject there must be a subject you know like those stories which I love because I'm afraid of flying that for example you fly and then the voice tells you be sure nothing goes wrong on this plane whenever in the strong turbulence I hear this this announcement my dream is always that then things are really bad when the captain tells you everything is under control no that that if you that you are really listening to a pre-recorded message and that if you look through the window you already see the captains jumping down no but okay this this so when this would be when things go wrong or when the message of this proverbial message where the voice says this computer cannot go wrong cannot go wrong cannot go wrong and it goes wrong into this you would say is just a malfunctioning but when this malfunctioning occurs at some significant point whatever okay you you suppose subjectivity now you will say but this is only when we are confronting something that we suppose an x behind I claim and I'll try to prove next week apropos of close reading of Hegel's anthropology that the the the craziest dimension of the German idealist notion of subjectivity is that precisely you are a subject as a subject you are a supposition also for yourself that what you are all the time haunted by is yourself but yourself in the sense of you know this classical Humean notion of classical Humean critique of of the self like there is no self all I if I look deep oh this is the most classical Hume no if I look into myself all I found are always particular ideas perceptions and so on there is no self yes there is no self you presuppose it and okay I don't have time to go into it now but the idea is that precisely this is why the notion of double is so traumatic it's not simply there is out somebody like me but out there I would really exist it's as if I am no longer just a supposition I am posited out there this is why again for Hegel this is the source of madness as I will develop apropos of habit madness and so on that the subject is a void but a void which is haunted by what it would have been as an existing object that you that the subject is never just this entity I think you are always haunted by the notion of of what I am as an object which even brings us to the notion of hysteria for Hegel subjectivity is for this reason fundamentally hysterical because again the basic hysterical question for Freud Lacan is precisely what for an object I am that is to say the that is when people say hysteria desire no it's not what I desire it's not this stupidity I don't know what I want blah blah blah the original question of desire is this perplexity of the small child you know like I see that others see something in me they want something from me what is it in me that makes me an object of libidinal investment for others here women are structurally okay if you accept even that hysteria is more feminine more intelligent than men because male stupidity is that males are obsessionals men think that the enigma is only out there woman but that they know what they are okay but that's another point but you got my basic point here is that it's not simply subject supposed to that subject as such is a presupposition which then haunts us through double whatever deadlock all these nightmarish living dead are figures where you would fully substantially exist where you would not only be where your your self would exist as an object so let's go on apropos this reversal this reversal towards itself is the key dialectical moment let me give you now to make it really clear a couple of examples for Hegel he likes to emphasize how the if an idea cannot adequately represent itself if its representation is distorted deficient then this distortion simultaneously signals a limit a deficiency of the idea itself this is an eternal Hegelian motive if empirical actualization of an idea disappoints you then the idea itself wasn't strong enough to be able to actualize itself so it was limited but one should make a step further here now comes the central trick not only does the universal idea always appear in a distorted displaced way the idea is nothing but this distortion displacement this self-inadequacy of the particular with regard to itself and one could even claim that this reversal formally defines subjectivity substance is something which appears in phenomena while a subject is nothing but its own appearance and we have many of these formulas like the universal is nothing but the inadequacy the non-identity of the particular with itself the essence is nothing but the inadequacy of the appearance to of the appearance to itself this means that for Hegel let's say what does it mean that there is an essence behind appearance it means that the appearance is inconsistent that there is a crack in the order of appearances essence well let me give you an example here when Hegel says this stupid phrase which is often repeated the essence is only as rich as it appears that is to say there is no hidden inner essence the wealth of essence is in the wealth of appearances Hegel does not simply mean this stupidity that the essence has to appear in the sense of it must develop all its moments no it has to appear as essence within appearances within the appearances there should be an appearance which as it were points beyond appearances and this crack within the appearances is all that essence is if you know Lacan a little bit you got it where I'm aiming at the famous Lacan's reference to those old Greek story about two painters competing Zeuxis Parrhasius no when one wins through perfect realistic depiction where even the birds then hit the painting thinking these are real grapes but the other guy just paints a curtain and then when the first guy comes to check it say okay let's see what did you paint reveal the curtain that's that's that's the appearance that it's what appears is appearance as such that is to say the essence has to inscribe itself into appearance as essence how does it inscribe itself precisely as a gap distortion this is what I was telling you the last time you remember when I spoke about concrete universality how the problem for Hegel is how does universality emerge out of the particular where precisely where there are cracks in the particular where the particular does not fully fit itself so let's go on here the structure here is the one of again of minimal difference that is to say the structure of when a thing appears is as it were a sign of itself relates a thing relates to itself but not in the sense but the thing becomes its own appearance without there being a substance behind appearing let me give you an example so that okay now you'll say this is confusing okay it is but I will give you a nice quote which I use it in one of my books from my good friend Robert Faller who developed this paradoxical logic of how a thing can function as a substitute for itself I quote Robert Faller what is substituted can also appear itself in the role of the substitute there only must be some feature ensuring that it is not taken to be itself such a feature is provided by the threshold which separates the place of what is substituting from what is being substituted and then he gives some examples those okay radical one example radical right-wing opponents of male homosexuality in the United States act in a they organize gay bashings in the course of which they beat up and finally rape gays homosexuals the ultimate homicidal or homosexual gratification of drives can therefore also be attained if only if it only fulfills the condition of evoking the semblance of a counter-measure what seems to be opposition has the effect that the act to be fended off can appear itself and be taken for a non-act you got it that what these gay people engaging in gay bashing do is they exactly repeat the homosexual act but it functions as its opposite there are even okay let me give you another example from my own experience when in the early days of video when I was taping films I of course was I didn't quite trust the mechanism so I was always worrying that something will be wrong with the recording so I anxiously watched the TV while the tape was running just to be sure that everything is okay so the paradox is here that I did watch a film even very closely but in a kind of suspended state without really following it all that interested me was that everything was really there I think we find something similar in a certain perverse sexual economy in which I perform the act only in order to be sure that I can in future really perform the act the act was the same but you get my point it didn't really count the act was in a way a sign of itself or to give you yet another strange two other examples one I quote the other one is a new one already in a book the wonderful adventure I was quoting Argentina when in that economic fiasco in Argentinians went to the street to protest against the government and especially against Cavallo the economy minister he was found himself under siege in a ministry of finance or economy but so he escaped how he put on a mask of what of himself because he was so hated that people were selling his mask so he put on his mask and nobody suspected that his mask would be himself it worked so and in a similar way I had recently a very strange a very strange dream I was dreaming that I had a chest pain because I often had am afraid of panic attacks and so on and how did I prolong my sleep no sorry and then when I awakened I discovered that I really have a chest pain so you see the irony I had a chest pain and I prolonged my dream by transforming this chest pain into a dream which was only a dream that I have a chest pain I mean it's just pure repetition nothing nothing effectively if you want nothing effectively happened so I hope you got the point here the point is that how to put it in this kind of a pure repetition appearance enters but like that you know that curtain drawn by I don't know which one Zeuxis or Parrhasius one of the two where the curtain doesn't conceal something hidden behind all it what it conceals is precisely that it is just a painting that there is nothing behind so it's an appearance but a pure appearance in the sense of what's behind is just an x okay the idea being that this precisely this defines subjectivity this subjectivity is correlative with this kind of a pure appearance let me give you again since we are here in England another of my favorite examples in All's Well That Ends Well and don't be afraid I didn't read Shakespeare my source is that wonderful book Rough Guide to Shakespeare that's my limit Shakespeare you know the story All's Well That Ends Well Count Bertram who on the king's orders was forced to marry Helen a common doctor's daughter refuses to live with her and to consummate the marriage he tells her that he will agree to be her husband only if she removes the ancestral ring from his finger and bears his child at the same time Bertram tries to seduce the young beautiful Diana now Helen and Diana are friends they concoct a plan to bring Bertram back to his wife Helen how Diana agrees to spend the night with Bertram telling him to visit her chamber at midnight there in darkness the couple exchange their rings and make love however unknowingly to Bertram the woman with whom he spent the night was not Diana but Helen his own wife so when they are later confronted he Bertram has to admit that both of his conditions for recognizing the marriage are met what then was the status of this bed trick at the very end of Act Helen provides a wonderful definition quote when then why then tonight let us assay our plot which if it speed is wicked meaning in a lawful deed and lawful meaning in a wicked act where both not sin and yet a sinful fact and so on and so on we are effectively dealing both with a wicked meaning in a lawful deed what can be more lawful than a consummated marriage a husband sleeping with his wife and yet the meaning is wicked Bertram thought he is sleeping with Diana not with his wife and a lawful meaning in a wicked act the meaning Helen's intention is lawful to sleep with her husband but the act is wicked she deceives her husband who does it thinking he is cheating on her the result is then not sin and yet a sinful fact not sin because what happened was merely a consummation of marriage but a sinful fact something that involved intentional cheating from both partners the true question here is not only whether all's well that ends well whether the final outcome nothing wrong effectively happened cancels the sinful tricks and intentions but a more radical one what if the rule of law can only be asserted through wicked sinful meanings and acts what if in order to rule the law has to rely on this subterranean interplay of cheatings and deceptions this I think is maybe what Lacan aims at with his paradoxical proposition il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel there is no sexual relationship was not Bertram's situation during the night of love the fate of most married couples you make love to your lawful partner while cheating in your mind fantasizing that you are doing it with another partner so it is as if the actual sex relationship has to be sustained by this phantasmatic by this phantasmatic supplement so again the crucial now we come to the next crucial point the we the crucial fact here is that it's not simply the question this is I think why this title of Shakespeare is very Hegelian All's Well That Ends Well what does it mean does it mean okay a little bit of tricks but the this would be the simple teleological reading we are allowed bad tricks and so on if they are done for the legitimate person here sorry purpose the purpose is legitimate the consummation of marriage and so on so we can do all the tricks but what if we shift the accent and say but what kind of a law is this which in order to sustain itself needs cheating who mediates what here the standard Hegelian reading of the dialectic of law and its criminal transgression would have been that of course Hegel admits that the law can reproduce itself only through criminal transgression that law always involves the dialectical movement of the negation of negation law is negated in the criminal transgression and then law sublates the Hegelian Aufhebung subsumes into its movement through punishment and so on its transgression so that's the standard critique of Hegel restrained economy Hegel allows negativity transgression but only as an a subordinated moment of the self-mediation of the law but what if things are a little bit more complex here what if it is the other way around that not only the criminal transgression is mediated by the law but the law what if the law is in itself criminalized criminal in the sense that that the not only is the transgression a moment particular moment of the law but law is also nothing but the universalized transgression what do I mean by this ah here a wonderful quote from the beginning of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday where Chesterton has a wonderful conservative of course critique of modern intellectuals as the true criminals precisely because they are universal criminals here is this wonderful quote from Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday we say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher compared to him burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men my heart goes out to them they burglars bigamists accept the essential ideal of man they only seek it wrongly thieves respect property they only wish the property to become their property so that they may more perfectly respect it but philosophers dislike property as property they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession bigamists respect marriage or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and ever ritualistic formality of bigamy but philosophers despise marriage as marriage murderers respect human life they only wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of those of what seems to them to be lesser lives but philosophers hate life itself their own as much as other people's the common criminal is a bad man but at least he is as it were a conditional good man he says that if only a certain obstacle be removed say a wealthy uncle he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God he is a reformer but not an anarchist he wishes to clean the edifice but not to destroy it but the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things but to annihilate them this is a wonderful theory which then goes into this idea of we will talk about this later of that what we need today is intellectual police the police not only looking for particular criminals but as Chesterton put it which circulates intellectual parties artist circles universities to look for these universal criminals which are the true source of it but nonetheless I think that Chesterton is not radical enough here what he doesn't get is that universalized crime is no longer a crime it overcomes itself as crime and it turns transgression into a new order he Chesterton is right to claim that compared to the entirely lawless philosopher burglars bigamists even murderers are essentially moral at this Pip is a conditionally good man he doesn't deny property as such he just wants more property for himself however the conclusion to be drawn from this is that crime as such is essentially moral it it wants just a particular illegal reordering of the global moral order which should remain in a truly Hegelian spirit one should bring this proposition of the essential morality of the crime to its imminent reversal not only is crime essentially moral morality itself is essentially criminal again not only in the sense that the universal moral order necessarily negates itself in particular crimes but more radically in the sense that the way morality asserts itself is already in itself a crime property is theft as they used to say in the 19th century that is to say one should pass from theft as a particular criminal violation of the universal form of property to this form itself as a criminal violation what Chesterton fails to perceive is that the universalized crime that he projects into lawless modern philosophy and its particular political equivalent the anarchist movement already exists in the guise of the existing rule of law what I think he doesn't see is that that nightmare this anarchist who want to destroy everything that they are already in power in what way I am not now you'll say okay it's easy to pull these cheap Marxist tricks no I think that he was simply Chesterton simply wasn't radical enough here that elsewhere he knew it for example in his wonderful short text Defense of the Detective Story he remarks how quote the detective story keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions when the detective in a police romance stands alone and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thief's kitchen it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice which is the original and poetic figure while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves the police romance is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies you see here he knows it that the external opposition between law and its transgression is transformed into the opposition internal to what not to the law but to transgression you see my point the usual critique of Hegel is that the encompassing unity between law and its transgression is the law the law mediates its negations and so on but I think the properly Hegelian move is the opposite one it is that the unity is crime that the tension between law and crime is inherent to crime crime is the universalized law law is the crime which universalized itself crime sorry law is the crime elevated at the level of universality that's what he says here and I think that in this sense the man who was Thursday should be read in a very precise way what goes on later in the novel does not simply illustrate this plan of universal police this is only the one-sided view the final message that the supreme criminal is the same person as this supreme policeman is God himself precisely tells this story that God the whole message of Chesterton and this is for him the big thing if you want about Christianity is that God is God has to be at the same time the greatest transgressor the greatest criminal itself that in other words God and devil are the same I mean we must go here to the end in what sense what effectively happens here let me finish with another short mediation precisely on this topic of negation of negation sublation and so on and so on what is Hegel's point why is Christianity for Hegel so revolutionary what happens in Christianity through Christ and so on it's that before we have God who is a substantial real God God as being existing prior to the world whatever this God dies on the cross and is resuscitated as Holy Ghost but Hegel makes it clear what is Holy Ghost as I developed I think in my first talk here apropos the big other Holy Ghost is a virtual entity it exists only on the terrain of finite human existence Holy Ghost is the virtuality to which we refer and Hegel says this literally he says that the only site of the infinite is finite human life there is no infinity anywhere else infinity Ghost is only against sexuality as aspect of human practice what does this mean this means that we should be very precise here when Hegel says God dies and then God is resuscitated this this does not mean that somehow in the negation of negation and so on we magically return to infinity to divine it's not this God stupid God playing games with itself okay I pretend to die then I return to myself when God is dead God is dead that is to say the every notion of substantial infinity there is some higher reality out there and so on that's over God dies definitely that is to say the only site where things can the death of God means that the only locality site where things can happen is the finitude of human passions and so on and so on and God's return means that the infinite dimension has to return as an aspect of this finite life it has to be reinvented as virtual at this level so you got my point my point is that when people speak about Hegelian Aufhebung cancellation elevation they usually read it as if the finite has to be aufgehoben cancelled in the infinite that the finite does not have reality it should be rendered only part of an ideal movement but I think there is a more radical Aufhebung in Hegel it's not that we have finite moments and then they are aufgehoben sublated cancelled in their immediacy they become moments of ideal totality no the problem is the status of this totality itself you know that the Hegelian term Aufhebung has three meanings to cancel to negate something to maintain it and to elevate it on a higher level what is truly aufgehoben sublated in this sense is God himself not reality God in the Holy Ghost God is a negated he dies b continues to live but in elevated form what elevated form of the Holy Ghost which is the purely virtual if you want spiritual human community which only exists in which only exists at the level of the finitude and again for Hegel you got my point here my point is that it's not that the movement is in particularization like God alienates itself come no God loses itself and the very how should I put it shift focuses to to the finite universe God has to be reinvented there as a simply as a finite community so now to recapitulate things the you got I hope you got it how I tried to repeat at three levels the same movement first in the cunning of reason the cunning of reason does not mean there is some teleology in the vulgar sense of some higher authority controlling events all the time no that higher authority precisely loses and the cunning of reason means that through that lost a new order is retroactively chaotically recreated it doesn't mean God controls the universe it means God screws us up and through this failure in an improvised retroactive way something new emerges it's in this sense the cunning of unreason again as I already said the ultimate Hegelian wager is for sure things will somehow go wrong that's the only way to to get something new second thing again with respect to displacement and so on the the crucial passage is the passage from predicate to subject that is to say from for example as I said from essence appears to essence is only its own appearance from essence expresses itself in a contradictory way to this contradiction is the essence of the essence so that what appears to appears as a predicate secondary is elevated into the central feature itself and the last feature variation where we are dealing with the tension between universal particular law its criminal transgression how the whole Hegelian the Hegelian point is not that we have a law or a noble beginning goodness which somehow that's the usual notion of Hegel no what does it mean reason in history God God guards it's a benevolent authority over our history and of course there are terrible things happening but God takes care that all particular evils somehow serve the higher purpose at the end everything is economically used for some higher purpose no it's precisely it's precisely not this what Hegel's point is precisely the opposite one how good arises out of if you want self-reflection self-relating of evil itself that is to say how at the level of crime law itself is crime elevated to universality that is to say that the encompassing unity of law and its criminal transgression is transgression that's my god to quote Chesterton again morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies in other words that the legal order is the most dark and daring of all crimes it's really like Brecht says what is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank to put it in these terms what is breaking the law compared to the much higher crime of found- of founding the new law now of course it's another question if this is the entire truth of Hegel dialectics and so on and so on I just again all I wanted to do today is just to shatter a little bit this usual prejudice about Hegel I'm sorry if I was a little bit confused as usually next Tuesday I will first clarify some more things about this logic of negation and then finally I will go on to Chesterton the man who was Thursday we still have a couple of minutes please if there are some questions this to warn you if some of you are getting bored the first talk of next week will be even more abstract and then we slowly start to move towards politics Foucault Heidegger all those things please if there are some just now I am alone myopic so please if I ignore some of you it is not only because I am an anti-feminist racist or whatever but it's only at least a little bit objectively okay you and you sorry you saw how much sorry you saw what the last word just the last yes you once you get the enlightenment you have to mature further the unism of your attainment whereas for you you first of all empty the beyond of all positivity you then transfer the interiority of the self to this beyond from then on you know you begin your Hegelian retroactive positive movement to infinity so hence for you man was always already man and that’s a little bit regressive on my view this is for me you know what is why is for me we should really have talked here more so strange because the usual version would have been to and this is why I like your critique precisely the opposite one it would have been that Hegelians are usually accused of being progressive you know you go on you mediate you
which is no movie please but I was tempted to break it my work my work sorry because when I was checking up something when I saw again just key passages in The Brief Encounter I noticed that how should I put it I got caught into my own trap do you remember at the beginning I explained the logic of example which is always richer than what you try to illustrate by it I really advise you maybe if you don't have anything more intelligent to do and so on to see the movie but from this standpoint you know what shocked me a couple of things first I think that in my basic description I was right that is to say that the role of that prattling friend is really that of a I mean there is a certain scene which does surprisingly does not take place only in melodramas but also in real life like I remember sometimes being desperate and you just somehow want to fall down maybe not exactly to kill yourself but just you know to disappear to fall and then some totally stupid thing a friend bothering you something that you experience as a total nuisance nonetheless is a stupid obstacle preventing you from falling down and because later after the guy leaves the would-be lover the two ladies Celia Johnson the loved one and the prattling friend found then sit together in a train carriage and then there the structure is even clearer this structure of oh why doesn't she shut up the other one she goes on talking but I made two or even three alternate scenarios of the film and I hope you will agree that I think this is a productive strategy because if you make just this small mental experiment what if this were to happen what if that a little bit differently the story then you feel the necessity of the story for example what if when later in the train or at any point what if the girl sorry the prattling friend who talks all the time were to stop talking I think it would have been a horrifying silence and I think that if the movie were to be psychologically consistent at that point Celia Johnson would be obliged to tell her please please go on talking you know to revert like she needs that second thing that I imagined this would be a Roald Dahl version what if when they are separating while they are separating in such a pathetic way through some small slip I don't know a some small piece of paper or whatever falls out of Trevor Howard's jacket it doesn't matter how but or she the heroine would discover or we were to discover that that he is not married at all that all this idea I also have a wife with two children and so on is just his fake his pretense to give a more dramatic romantic tragic flavor to an otherwise vulgar common love affair the third version that I would almost prefer is the although I hate although now I will be evil in contrast to my friend I am now denouncing my friends in contrast to my friend Alain Badiou who loved the movie don't ask me why I hate it Bridges of the Madison County I know what you're saying I would like the Bridges of the Madison County twist wouldn't it be nice if at the end the husband Fred if we were to discover that he knew all of it all the time but was just out of love not to hurt her was pretending that he doesn't know it this would be then the truly awkward situation like for her all of a sudden to discover the guy knows everything because you know where the structure is even nicer both of them the the babbling prattling friend and the husband are I claim two aspects of the same person in her crucial monologue the heroine I even didn't know that noticed it only yesterday evening that the entire inner monologue narration flashback is addressed at her husband and the whole structure is you are the only one I can address but that's supposed to be then the tragic split but precisely you are the one who whom I cannot confess and the stupid okay stupid ordinary common friend the lady who talks all the time she the heroine would like to confess to her but she is simply not appropriate so it's simply a split in the addressee to whom one should confess so I really think that in the underlying symbolic economy of the film it's like you remember when from Vertigo I showed you that moment of erotic tension after Scotty drags Madeleine out of the [unintelligible] where precisely when the contact is established the phone rings the husband I think that in the same sense this prattling babbling lady is the husband's stand-in maybe this is one of the ways to grasp that Lacan's statement woman is one of the names of the father you know she woman is that prattling lady that's the paternal authority embodied why did this movie now I will tell you almost and then I will stop with this actor studio personal confessional mode but nonetheless almost a personal confession because I remember when I was young I found myself often in the same situation which was extremely humiliating for me my father a very patriarchal person which is why it wasn't a very classical Freudian way when I learned some five years ago that my father died I was glad it I didn't have any problem or whatever I remember my father returning from his job at around four in the afternoon when I was like ten years old and he sat down and said oh I'm tired come here to me why don't you just babble talk something it doesn't matter what just and I felt it so humiliating no he I mean even if you mean it you don't say it so openly basically he told me openly it doesn't matter what just go on talking something and I think that this would have been the truth of that situation it's not that the lady friend is interrupting in in maybe the true film would have been for Celia Johnson to say to her friend listen just please just go on talking something it doesn't matter what and so on and so on but okay we are not dealing with this today enough with this so let's go on I'm really sad that we did not have time to enter more at the very end you remember into that short Buddhism debate maybe we should really do it at the very end so I will just now in literally one two minutes try to recapitulate something that I already said and which for me is the problem of Buddhism it's a very simple one don't go too fast to the end Nirvana enlightenment and so on isn't nonetheless that's my where for me problems begin the entire edifice grounded in a certain apparently very common presupposition which is repeated all the time with all of them from the big original figure Buddha to Dalai Lama today that all sentient beings are striving for happiness they want to avoid pain and that's then the presupposition that's the idea well if there is a lesson of psychoanalysis it's that this is not true at least for humans that it's definitely pathetically if you want not true that all sentient beings are striving for happiness or to avoid pain that's the whole point of death drive of compulsion to repeat and so on and so on already here here is the gap in this apparently neutral but very basic the most elementary presupposition another problem that I have and I here very open when I say another problem that I have is it's not a polite way to say I have a solution but I play open spirit with you I really think it's a problem maybe I even misunderstand something is that I often see Buddhist texts for which I have a great respect oscillating between the two extremes on the one hand I am very well aware of the fundamental gap between the Buddhist authentic Buddhist approach and Western mysticism in Western mysticism the idea is that through ecstasy whatever you at least in the standard versions of Christian mysticism you how should I put it naively you really try to move out of this world into another reality while as true Buddhists always emphasize Nirvana does not mean you go into some kind of transmigration of the soul everything is here exactly the way it is so I am well aware that when I said that for Buddhism after enlightenment the wheel stops to turn it doesn't mean that in your reality you no longer have desires fears and so on what changes is just how you relate to all this but nonetheless what is the nonetheless the nonetheless is here that how should I put it nonetheless and at the same time you find descriptions which at least sound as that the ultimate goal of Buddhist enlightenment is even to redeem all the sentient beings of their suffering and so on and so on like you know what I mean it's I see in Buddhism inscribed this oscillation between on the one hand nothing really has to change not even less suffering if we understand by suffering what is happening in reality people dying of pain and so on all that has to change is your attitude you have to change so that the suffering no longer works the way it works in a pulling engaging way for you but this is always redoubled by a much more radical radical in a superficial sense rather almost I would say cosmic prospect of effectively how should I put it stopping canceling the very life circulation of bringing all the universe even to a standstill if you want I see again I see this as a kind of a as a kind of a tension okay but here things are more precise probably I guess we should we should go at it later now before and today you will get Hegel before going to Hegel directly I would like nonetheless to I cannot sustain from indulging in what I consider a small nice speculation about how Lacan refers to sciences I know I was already mentioning here two-three times the Higgs field and so on now from a little bit of a different approach namely first and this traumatizes me a little bit because in the polemic very violent polemic which will now explode in the next issue of Critical Inquiry my ex-friend okay Ernesto Laclau is attacking me ferociously where I learn I understand nothing I don't understand Lacan I don't understand Hegel I don't understand him I don't understand Marx okay among other things and this shocks me a little bit because I always thought that if my name is associated with something it's the Lacanian Real no now I learn there that quote from Laclau Žižek obviously doesn't understand the ABC of what the Lacanian Real is no okay that's nice to learn why because the topic is and this is incredibly how all the people are annoyed by this when I emphasize again and again that from a Lacanian perspective capitalism the logic of the capital is Real and I don't know why there must be something in it because I notice that with all my friends they go defensive even in very strange mood like in the sense of but here I contradict myself but don't you see capitalism cannot be Real and so on and so on but I think it is Real and what do I mean by Real you know that in Badiou's Alain Badiou's recent work and I like very much his development in his last book the Logics of Worlds I think he is definitely on the correct track he noticed that if you know a little bit about Badiou's ontology that the mere duality of being the totally stupid flat multi-multiplicity of being that we cannot as it were pass directly from it to event something is missing in between which is the notion of the world the world I claim is precisely let's call it the world in the symbolic sense the horizon of meaning if you want this is in between because events do not happen directly in reality events shatter always a certain world events are events within a certain world because the entire structure of presence representation totalization and so on within which an event intervenes shattering it is the structure of a world and what Badiou some of you if you follow his work must know it because I know that he was making this point often in his London appearances even likes to emphasize is that what is really new about capitalist okay civilization or whatever is that precisely it is the first worldless civilization it's no longer a world and I'm just tempted to take him seriously here I don't think that this debate about is capitalism Eurocentric or whatever is really relevant of course empirically it originated in Europe but I think this is a contingent fact which has no significance deeper significance what is important is that let's call it the elementary logic of the capital this profit-making whatever machinery of surplus-value is a kind of a formal matrix which remains the same can op can be operative in all possible worlds by worlds I mean symbolic universes you can have Buddhist capitalism Catholic capitalism Japanese capitalism Indian capitalism Latino-American capitalism it's that which precisely remains the same in all possible possible symbolic universes and that's what I think is so shattering about capitalism that it's in a in a way a worldless civilization which is why the typical defense is then to how the or the problems that even the problem that we even at the everyday level experience is how to secure our particular roots our particular way of life which precisely means our world against capitalism and this what remains the same in all possible universes and so on and so on is I claim precisely the Real in this sense it should be always kept in mind that capitalism is Real Real precisely in the sense that it's just some kind of a neutral formal frame which reproduces itself this kind of a social virus if you want in all possible universes and which has no deeper meaning in the sense that the problem is precisely how to safeguard meaning my god isn't this the problem with capitalism from the very beginning if you look at the first conservative reactions from Edmund Burke whatever you want and so on it's they all detected from the very beginning a certain meaninglessness in capitalism meaninglessness in the sense of undermining any organic meaningful social structure and so on and isn't then the problem of all great conservatives from let's call them gentle conservatives de Gaulle in France up to fascists how to unite capitalism with meaning meaning of course as a social meaning precisely because again capitalism in this sense works as the Real okay but let me go on so when Lacan deals with the notion of the Real in this short book that he recently that was recently published of his two two talks to different groups of Catholics Lacan addressing the Catholics it's in a small booklet recently published in France not yet translated into English Lacan makes a very nice point of how the two Reals to be opposed today are the scientific Real and the psychoanalytic Real and that this gap defines us today that is to say that what psychoanalysis deals with is not the scientific Real but the Real of drive a different traumatic and so on Real but nonetheless what is so interesting is that although Lacan opposes these two Reals he often resorts to the scientific Real and evokes examples from hard sciences in order to clarify the deadlocks the problems of the psychoanalytic Real the question here is are these references meant to be only metaphors didactic borrowings with no inherent cognitive value or do they involve a theoretical link bridge between the two domains although Lacan tends to downplay these borrowings reducing them to didactic tools the case is often more ambiguous let me take Lacan's characterization of hard sciences as dealing with what he calls savoir dans le réel knowledge in the Real it is as if there is a knowledge of the laws of nature directly inscribed into the Real of natural objects and processes for instance a stone somehow knows what laws of gravity to obey when it is falling now it may seem that Lacan is simply confusing things here you would say the stone doesn't know it's simply part of its immediate objective existence it's only in human history that laws are norms which can be forgotten or otherwise disobeyed let me evoke an old example of mine which I use in many of my books the archetypal scene from cartoons which relies for its comical effect precisely on the confusion of these two level levels like a cat walks across above the precipice it continues to float in the air it falls only after it looks down and becomes aware of how it has no support beneath its feet as if it has momentarily forgotten the natural laws its body has to obey and has to be reminded of them like don't you see what about natural laws oh yes now I remember them I fall down however okay the first thing to say here is that to pass from cartoon's comedy to tragedy isn't it that when a political regime disintegrates in historical reality that we can along similar lines distinguish between its two deaths symbolic and real death like there are those strange epochs when a regime for a limited period persists in power although its time is clearly over it is as if it goes on living because it doesn't notice that it is already dead this happens always that the certain it's really like as if it goes on and it has to be too reminded like at some point as Hegel puts it nicely all you have to do to those in power is like treat them like a cat above the precipice no ah look down don't you know your time is over no but there are even more mysterious moments and I remember them from my political youth where they hold those in power onto their power it goes on although somehow they all know that the game is over I think these are very interesting phenomena like in my one of my early books I quote I really advise you to read it if you want to get the political dynamic that wonderful book by Ryszard Kapuściński the Pole you know The Shah of Shahs about Iran where he claims of course it's a mythical reconstruction but I think the logic is right he was there and wanted to isolate the precise moment when it was over I mean the rule of Shah and his result was that it wasn't over when Shah effectively fled or whatever his idea is that it happened around if I remember it correctly half a year earlier a certain and he claimed even if it's not true again as Italians say se non vero ben trovato that a certain event happened on one of the main crossroads sorry squares whatever of Tehran where a crowd was gathering for demonstrations and policemen approached them not a large crowd and started to shout at them disperse disperse go and one of the guys not even a great hero it's not even according to Kapuściński known who he is simply this miracle happened maybe he simply made a good judgment of the situation maybe he saw that the policeman is not so sure of himself he stood up and said no we will not go you go and policeman looked perplexed for a couple of seconds and turned around and left then in a mysterious way you know how these rumors function no did you notice how even if of course now I'm not preaching mysticism it can usually be usually my god now I talk like I'm superstitious be explained rationally but did you notice how there is something so mysterious in rumors that there are things that happen and then all of a sudden everybody knows it no like it happened it happened to me to me oh my god it's such an embarrassing episode but okay I was young thirty years ago in the army we were it was a large military barracks on the one hand I was there talking only with two soldiers we were talking what soldiers are usually talking about sexual practices and so on no and then these were tough pro-macho soldiers and said how decadent in the West you know men even do cunnilingus ugh a true man never eats meat there never do that and then I made my fatal mistake I said what's so bad if you are washed I did it no they looked at me and then something mysterious happened an officer came and told me take this message run fast to the other side of the military barracks we were alone there there were no phones there I ran there to deliver a message to another officer I entered the you know how the officer addressed me are you the guy who is licking cunt I don't get it somehow then as you can imagine I was called whatever name was then my destiny was signed for since then but what I want to say is that in the same way in Tehran in this mysterious way all of a sudden the rumor spread that happened that event and it worked like this pure everybody somehow knew from that point on that it's over for the Shah it went on for half a year there were still street battles people were dying but you know what I mean in an imperceptible way the whole atmosphere changed from that point on it was over I always love these symbolic moments how again you can have the gap in both directions either you have a power which like I wonder but I don't think so they are too arrogant is this happening now to the Labour in power John Prescott yes yes yes maybe this but again we are here at this logic that I mentioned that I mentioned apropos of this will have been I claim that in the same way you remember when I gave you that nice French quote which was if Balladur will win the election it will have been a necessary victory retroactively so I claim that yes if Labour will fall apart or whatever lose a year from now or half a year whenever it will have been that the Prescott was maybe maybe maybe Prescott and cricket will be your Tehran crossing or whatever you know what I mean this element which it's a purely symbolic element ultimately it even doesn't matter if it's true or not not that I have great sympathies for Prescott or new Labour but wait a minute I agreed with a commentary that I read I never got it okay he was playing cricket okay apart from the obvious fact that cricket is a game where I it's total mystic to me a guy throws a ball then some other guy start to run in a I don't but apart from that I mean I read even a comment where they said imagine this to happening to an a different old conservative politi- I mean it's absolutely irrational I claim what happened but nonetheless okay this will maybe what I'm saying is that it can work in both ways either a certain power structure still persists goes on but everybody knows including themselves that they are already dead and the same thing obviously took place in Soviet Union sometime during Gorbachev era or even more interesting the other way around they don't know that they are dead and how should I put it the knowledge comes too late they have to be to be reminded like here you have Hegel's famous commentary on Napoleon that Napoleon's problem was that when he lost the first time he didn't know that he is dead so he had to be defeated the second time just to be reminded that that he is dead no so okay now comes my point you will say but of course this gap is the typical gap that pertains to the symbolic order a gap between the brutal stupid reality and its symbolic registration however you call it but it doesn't happen in brute physical reality there things simply are what they are but here again to give you a simple example isn't it that at its most daring quantum physics does allow for such a paradox of cartoon of the momentarily suspension forgetting of the knowledge in the Real imagine that you have to take a flight on a certain day to pick up a fortune the next day but you do not have the money to buy the ticket but then you discover that the accounting system of the airline is such that if you wire the ticket payment within hours of arrival at your destination no one will ever know it was not paid prior to departure so you can temporarily cheat a little bit now in a homologous way I am here quoting I'm sorry that's my the limit of my scientific horizon Brian Greene the Elegant Universe in a homologous way the energy a particle has can widely fluctuate so long as this fluctuation is over a short enough time scale so just as the accounting system of the airline allows you to borrow the money for a plane ticket provided you pay it back quickly enough quantum mechanics allows a particle to borrow energy so long it can relinquish it within a time frame determined by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle but quantum mechanics forces us to take the analogy one important step further imagine someone who is a compulsive borrower and goes from friend to friend asking for money borrow and return borrow and return over and over again with unflagging intensity he takes in money only to give it back in short order a similar frantic shifting back and forth of energy and momentum is occurring perpetually in the universe of microscopic distance and time intervals end of quote so this is how even in an empty region of space a particle emerges out of nothing borrowing its energy from the future and paying for it with its annihilation before the system notices this borrowing so the whole network can function like this in a rhythm of borrowing and annihilation one borrowing from the other displacing the debt onto the other now what this presupposes is a minimal gap between things in their immediate brute reality and the registration of this reality in some medium one can cheat in so far as the second is in a delay with regard to the first so again I think that what is for me so fascinating for quantum physics is that this minimal delay you know this logic that everyone of us has let's say you are on a diet and let's say you are have a severe person a mother a spouse who controls you no but who if you had this problem who didn't have this it's not simply cheating you really think that it works that somehow if I quickly secretly ate something and if the other controls me doesn't notice it somehow it doesn't count you really believe that it doesn't count what counts is but okay again you will say this is symbolic cheating what about reality the mystique again is that okay mystique precisely not mystique but the miracle of quantum physics is that as if you can cheat in this way in reality in reality itself so it is as if again the gap which may appear specifically symbolic cultural the gap between what a thing is in its stupid immediate reality and its registration that this gap is inscribed into reality itself which is why you know all these problems which I think are wonderful problems and insoluble in its own domain of quantum physics when they say the wave oscillation collapses with registration but then there are debates okay but what counts as the moment of registration it is when the machine makes the measure it is when a person is it so and it's incredible how you have all possible versions up to the purely linguistic ones one of those how's his name the popularizer John Gribbin or what his claim is even that it's only when it's put in language that the registration that is to say the collapse of the wave function effectively occurs again it is as if part of what we perceived usually as specific to human reality this gap between the raw Real and its registration somehow has to be at work already in let's call it natural reality now my second example the big counterpoint to quantum physics Einstein's theory of relativity there I claim we also find an unexpected parallel with the Lacanian theory as you know the starting point of the theory of relativity is the strange fact that for every observer no matter in what direction and how fast he moves light moves at the same speed and I claim in an analogous way for Lacan no matter if the desiring subject approaches or runs from his object of desire this object seems to remain at the same distance from him we all remember the nightmarish situation from a dream the more I run away the more I remain at the same place and I think that this paradox can be neatly resolved through the difference between the object and the cause of desire no matter how close I get to the object of desire its cause remains at a distance elusive furthermore as you know the general theory of relativity resolves the antinomy between the relativity of every movement with regard to observer and the absolute velocity of light which moves at the constant speed independently of the point of observation with the notion of curved space again I claim that in a homologous way the Freudian solution to the antinomy between the subjects approaching or running away from his objects of desire and the constant speed and distance from him of the object of desire results in the curved space of desire sometimes the shortest way to realize a desire is to bypass its object to circulate around it to postpone its encounter and I think this would be the most elementary definition of what Lacan means by object small a the object cause of desire the agent of this curving that x on account of which when we confront the object of desire more satisfaction is provided by dancing around it than by directly going at it that's the object small a again let me take this point I want to be clear here the object a for Lacan is not what you desire is that which makes you desire what you desire it's not let's say a woman or a man I love it's that which and I'm usually not even aware of what this is that which makes me love that woman as I developed like totalitarianism book in this way you can turn around in a wonderful way the usual way people approach the problem of melancholy no usually melancholy is celebrated even by some gay theorists as somehow more authentic than mourning the idea is you have a traumatic attachment to an object through mourning you let it go gradually through the work of mourning while a melancholic remains faithful to it but already Agamben pointed out how if you read Freud closely you find a definition of melancholy which is exactly the opposite one the problem with melancholic is not that you cannot get over the loss of the object of desire it it is rather that you treat an object as lost even before you actually lose it it's still here but it's already lost because you no longer desire it that is to say I think that what is the proper moment of melancholy is when you get the object but at that very point the object cause of desire what made you desire the object disappear which is why the typical situation of melancholic is not poor people who don't get it it's rich people who get everything but nonetheless no longer desire it no it's the opposite it's the opposite structure okay so even more generally but let's stop it here one can develop that in the same way that if we have this duality between quantum physics and relativity theory do not do we not have the same duality in psychoanalysis I claim between let's call it the hermeneutical aspect of Freud hermeneutics of the unconscious interpretation of dreams slips of talk tongues and so on like here we think of Freud's interpretation of dreams psychopathology of everyday life and so on and on the other side a more positivist study of our psychic apparatus as a machine for dealing with libidinal energies and it's clear that the clearest expression of this tension in Freud of course is his oscillation between the unconscious and the id unconscious is a more hermeneutic unconscious if you want unconscious repressed meanings signifiers id is more libido the id as opposed to superego and ego is more energetic and I claim that there is a parallel here that in exactly the same way that modern physics is trying to combine and we know this is the big prize I I like it seems to me as an old Stalinist nor the electrical materialist superstring theory but I'm an idiot all I can do is to look for what people who know more say and the latest results I think is that it's out again superstring theory no that it's dismissed okay but nonetheless I claim that for the Lacan was struggling to the end with the same problem and that his notion elaborated in the last years of his teaching his notion of le sinthome symptom synthetic man all the associations synthetic man Saint Thomas of Aquinas and so on as the elementary atom of enjoyment is something like Lacan's attempt to bring the two together it's the best designation of what Lacan calls sinthome is a quanta of enjoyment a minimum quanta of enjoyment the idea enjoyment also comes in minimal quantas this small states sinthoms which are again the elements and since sinthome is defined Lacan uses I discovered with surprise sometimes even the term that it oscillates like a string where this was Lacan's attempt as superstring theory to unite the two the energetic libido and the other one now of course I will not go into it today but I'm well aware of the basic epistemological problem here the danger is always okay as a Stalinist I will say right wing left wing deviation right wing deviation direct naturalization so that we say so our symbolic structures must already be embedded in nature you find structures like language already in nature the opposite leftist deviation would have been a too fast historicist culturalization the idea then being all this only proves that we cannot get out of our language that even when quantum physicists study nature they had to rely on terms mechanisms which are really specific to our language what I am desperately trying to is precisely to avoid this second conclusion I think it's too easy because if nothing else if it simply how should I put it it's too Kantian for me in the sense that it doesn't even approach the question but okay if then all our cognition of reality is already mediated through symbolic structures not only formally but even at the level of content that the structures that we perceive in nature are already secretly mediated or by the structures of language and so on the problem is but then I'm here an old-fashioned materialist nonetheless but there is Real out there I don't think that language is the origin of everything and that it's just a void before so isn't it then that we cannot simply you know the conclusion is too symbolically solipsistic for me the conclusion is a very comfortable one all that we can say is within our language so you can just it's too simple a conclusion okay now we finished with this Real and finally Hegel Hegel only Hegel what I was promising a long time Hegelian cunning of reason why is I want to start with something which Lacan tried to erase in the first years sorry in the last years of his teaching the extent to which especially in the early fifties Lacan was very pro-Hegelian namely it's very interesting to read to do something slightly evil to read the function and speech of psychoanalysis the fundamental écrits to read it the way it is in écrits and to compare it with how it was when it was in its original version from I think published you can see Lacan in the later rewriting desperately trying to erase all Hegelian to traces to de-Hegelianize because it's crazy how radically pro-Hegelian Lacan is there he to put it very simply Lacan refers there to Hegelian absolute knowing in order to propose the identification of the analyst with the Hegelian master philosopher who has access to absolute knowing for Lacan the analyst stands for the Hegelian master the embodiment of absolute knowing why ah now things get complex precisely because he renounces all this is the term that Badiou likes to use forçage in the sense of enforcing imposing something onto reality for Lacan and for Hegel what characterizes the analyst is precisely utter passivity in action and I don't have time to do this today maybe later maybe not because in a short text which I think I sent it to some a small journal in Oxford where they asked me for it I think it didn't yet appear I approached from here the whole problem of Hegel and anal oral economy like Hegel is usually perceived as the philosopher of oral economy in the sense of to swallow everything no the concept mediates everything and it is true Hegel in his naive idealist way even likes to say how the animal eating when we or we humans eat or when animal swallow an object eat that this is the most elementary form of conceptual grasping of so is then the absolute knowledge this absolute you eat all the shit you kind of swallow the whole world I think not I don't have time to develop it today but it's so interesting how for Hegel then when you eat everything the concluding moment is always the opposite one okay I will not pronounce the name because the title of my text is Hegel on Shitting and so on but it's literally like that the complete masterhood is precisely for Hegel to to let it go to let it go to allow to the object its own dynamics to withdraw completely so in this sense who is the analyst for Hegel or the philosopher it's the one who is fully aware that the actual reality is already in itself rational so he can adopt the attitude of a passive observer who does not intervene directly into the content but only manipulates the scene so that the content destroys itself confronted with its own inconsistencies this is what Lacan refers to when he writes that Hegel's work is I quote precisely what we need to confer on a meaning to confer a meaning precisely what we need to confer a meaning on so-called analytic neutrality a meaning other than that the analyst is simply in a stupor it is this neutrality which keeps the analyst on the path of non-action so again the Hegelian wager is that the best way to destroy an enemy is to give him the free field to deploy his her their potentials and that the enemy's success will be his failure since the lack of external obstacles will confront him with the absolutely inherent obstacle of the inconsistency of his own position here is a nice quote from Hegel's real philosophie from an early Hegelian text on cunning quote cunning is something other than trickery the most open activity is the greatest cunning the other must be taken in its truth in other words with his openness a man exposes the other in himself he makes him he makes the other appear as he is in and for himself and thereby does away with himself cunning is the great art of inducing others to be as they are in and for themselves and to bring this out to the light of consciousness although others are in the right they do not know how to defend it by means of speech muteness is bad mean cunning consequently a true master is at bottom only he who can provoke the other to transform himself through his act what does Hegel mean here let me give you a strange maybe for you example which maybe even will not sound enough leftist politically to you the true cunning of the American administration and I say this with all sympathy for Cuban revolution would be to drop all the embargo to say okay you want it we give it to you and unfortunately I think that it would have worked I think that Cuban socialism would have been over in maximum two-three years I think that it's precisely you know this would be the Hegelian attitude you want end of embargo open can here you have it and I think that it's precisely the resistance against embargo which is the mobilizing point in Cuba without that you just let the other you want this okay you have it the wager is because I'm sure you will destroy itself so you get to put it very simply you get the point here the point this is the cunning of reason it is basically the cunning of unreason at its most elementary it is not okay let's allow all the mess I'm sure that somehow secretly reason will prevail it's not I can rely on some mysterious agency that which I don't know divine wisdom reason in history that events will take the right course it's quite on the contrary the what Hegel con calls I claim cunning of reason it's to put it in a slightly cynical way it's rather a deep trust that have it your way because I'm sure that somehow you will screw it up if you want that things will go wrong and that will be your truth you will undo yourself this is why as I developed already years ago but I like to repeat it this is why with all my respect for Derrida when Derrida reproaches Lacan with for his formula the letter always arrives at its destination as teleological formula it means letter never just disseminates itself that it's hidden teleology I think that he gets it wrong letter arrives at its destination means simply to put it in this I think this is I don't know if this is a general term or I heard it always only in Orson Welles that you will get your comeuppance or how they call it no you know sometimes I find myself as speaking a weird language I read wonderful memoirs of recently of a guy who was the American translator I mean there with direct debate with Russian president American translator and he said that it's so strange that they spoke a very nice English the Russian translators but English learned not through talking with real Englishmen but from mostly Dickens and authors like this and then it was so comical for example Gorbachev said to Reagan I don't agree with here you are trying ah ah and then the translation was fiddlesticks or something some crazy 19th- or that Reagan was so shocked when Gorbachev told him something you are trying to deceive me and then the translation ran you are trying to hang to hang to hang noodles around my ears and so on Reagan was not exactly the most witty guy was strange no so my point is that when I use these terms like comeuppance it's as if I maybe I'm sorry for it speak this kind of in but what I want to say is that so you got my point another way the Freudian way to say a letter always arrives at its destination is to say there is no repression without the return of the repressed it says that you know there will always be a symptom something that will screw up things for you so the the ultimate wager again is not positive cunning of reason some whatever the confusion appears some higher power guarantees that it will turn out okay it's on the contrary no matter how good your plans are some higher power if you want will take care that it will screw up your plans and that will be your truth that is to say to put it in more modern terms the inherent antagonism will destroy you or even to put it in the terms of of the logic of desire even it's not that you don't get what you desire it's that you never really know what you desire Hegel is here more radical you desire something then you fight for it then you get something then you say oh that's not what I wanted no this is truly what you wanted so let's go on now a little bit more in this logic the fundamental as it were mechanism of the properly Hegelian reversal reversal is just to put it in very naive terms you try to do something you have a plan this plan fails but then you have to make a strange shift of perspective where you realize how the very apparent failure was a success but measured with a different measure that's the proper dialectical reversal where to put it in slightly cynical terms and I think Hegel is cynical here there is always a success not because there is always a success simply but because even if I fail I change the measure so that it's a success or as Barbara Johnson put it nicely long ago in his defense of Lacan against Derrida the letter always arrives at its destination not because it cannot miss it but because retroactively wherever it arrives we retroactively say that was its destination you know it's a little bit like my favorite conformist phrase this is the cunning of reason you know that wonderful I think even Hegel quotes it a saying by the great conformist of French Napoleon politics Talleyrand you know that famous incident where he was having I don't know dinner lunch with people and they heard sounds of street battle outside and Talleyrand said you see our side is winning they asked him okay but which side is winning he said I don't know I will learn this tomorrow you know this is how the letter arrives at its destination if you want no so what you know it's something like okay let me give you now to make this absolutely clear a couple of surprising examples and then of course to complicate things a little bit I'm very sorry but since I live here across the street almost that Beckland place down there it's on that okay whatever street Dickens house I must say I have a very soft spot for for Dickens and Great Expectations is the model in this sense of a Hegelian novel why you know Pip is designated as a man of great expectations everybody perceives this as the forecast of his worldly success however at the novel's end when he abandons London's false glamour and returns to his modest childhood community we get it that this was the true great expectation no that what appears as his social failure is is true greatness this kind of a shift or let me give you another example now or even another two other examples which will be a little bit more a little bit more surprising one would be of this how you shift the measure I remember how all of my friends are shocked when they read Brecht's famous statement apropos of the accused in the Moscow show trials of the thirties Brecht said and this appears as the ultimate arch-Stalinist statement Brecht said even if they are really innocent you know the liberals proclaim but wait a minute Bukharin and so on but they are innocent Brecht said if they are innocent they deserve all the more to be shot now this can be read as the ultimate Stalinist madness which is even if they are innocent they are not innocent because their very insistence on their innocence means that they prefer that the accused prefer their bourgeois subjectivity individuality to the needs of the party if you really are ready to sacrifice yourself for the party you would say who cares if I'm innocent or not obviously the party needs my my blood now and I will gladly give it so the very form of asserting your innocence is your guilt that is to say formally it means you stick to the bourgeois individual morality blah blah blah this is the reading the official reading Brecht horrible ultra-Stalinist but from a friend of mine told me who had a look into some new Brecht archives now that at okay this is typical Brechtian hypocrisy that he put another reading only in his private notes but the Brecht had a different thing in mind here it was much nastier his logic was this one and in this sense I think we can even agree with Brecht he said Stalin was a terrible criminal he deserved to be killed and the accused were accused basically in the big trial you remember I was giving history of trying to kill Stalin the accused effectively since they were Stalin's collaborators I mean they were meeting him some of them even members of the Politburo they effectively were in a position to kill Stalin and they didn't do it in this sense if they are innocent they deserve to be shot they had a chance to get rid of all of us of one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century and they didn't do it they deserve to be shot they didn't use the opportunity like you know if you are in front of Hitler my god you refuse to kill him but you got the effect here does this change in perspective like another one the famous Göring's one although it's wrongly attributed to Göring whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my pistol for my gun but you know that Göring we are reading it in a correct way now but Göring meant it in the opposite way Göring's meaning was whenever I hear the word culture I know it's not just intellectuals I think about how our German culture is threatened today and I reach for my gun to protect the German culture from Jewish Russian barbarian Slavic whatever barbarian so he meant this but of course the truth is he is the barbarian now comes an example which will maybe surprise you a little bit from Buddhism you know that there are three schools of bad schools of Buddhism the main split of Buddhism is the one between Hinayana the small wheel and Mahayana the great wheel the first one is elitist demanding trying to maintain the fidelity to Buddha's teaching focusing on the individual's effort to get rid of the illusion of the self to attain enlightenment the second school Mahayana arose through the split from the first one it subtly shifts the accent onto compassion with others its central figure is Bodhisattva the individual who after achieving enlightenment decides out of compassion to return to the world of material illusions in order to help others to achieve enlightenment that is to say to work for the end of suffering of all sentient beings and I think this is where things go wrong the split is here irreducible working for one's own enlightenment reasserts the centrality of the self in the very striving for its overcoming while the great wheel way out of this predicament just repeats the deadlock I mean the Mahayana version in a displaced way egotism is overcome but the price is that universal enlightenment itself turns into an object of the instrumental activity of the self you get my point I think you cannot escape it whatever you do if you do Hinayana or Mahayana I think you get caught in a contradiction in an antagonism so I really think that although it's usually praised as more authentic the beauty of this thought you postpone your own enlightenment you return to this miserable reality of passions to help all others to reach enlightenment I think this is the beginning of the ethical fiasco because it introduces the logic of self-sacrifice and so on and so on which is I think the origin of all difficulties but now we have the third school Vajrayana which predominates in Tibet and Mongolia and which is often dismissed as a reinscription of Buddhism into traditional ritualistic magic practices we have all those things that we like to make fun of like the the praying wheels and so on the total fanatical codification ritualization hierarchy and so on and so on but my point here is not to make fun of these superstitious features of the Tibetan Buddhism because it's easy to say the first two that is to say Hinayana Mahayana are authentic ones while the Tibetan Buddhism is a primitive regression to superstitious practices it is true that it's difficult to imagine a more radical contrast as between Buddha's beginning where as you know the point was I don't care if God exists I don't care what techniques you use I don't care about rituals all I care is to effectively pragmatically help people stop suffering can it be anything more opposed to it than this Tibetan Buddhist approach of all that matters is to do properly the ritual to repeat thousand times a day this to pray and so on just to but you know what's the paradox the paradox is that if you are truly a pragmatist you should accept the Tibetan way because if you say like Buddha what matters is does it work or not but what is precisely the ritualization works that is precisely to say what if this way which appears to be the most ritualized non-pragmatic it doesn't matter if you are happy or not what matters is that you strictly obey the ritual what if this is the way the only way which effectively functions to make you happy it is to make a tasteless comparison isn't it a little bit like like like in sexuality you know that if you are in trouble men usually impotence and so on the worst thing is to say forget about all the rules don't take it as a duty just relax and do it that's formula for sabotage the thing that works is a more Tibetan approach it's to say let me forget about myself and let's treat performing sexual act as a pure bureaucratic duty you sit down with a partner and you say okay I will first put your finger there no you will put it there no and you have a long Stalinist debate and I will guarantee you after half an hour you will say I'm tired of this let's fuck or whatever and it will but but you get my point the opposite works the bureaucratic approach works in the same way no but you get the point that I was trying to make apparently there is the radical opposition authentic Buddha don't care about rituals just lead suffering and then this crazy hierarchic alienation hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism but what if that precisely works measured by the strictest standards okay now let's go a little bit further we are not dealing here with a simple reversal of the formula we are dealing with the way a contradiction is how should I put it reformulated what happens with contradiction in the Hegelian process let me take a simple example the notion of liberalism the way this notion liberalism functions in today's discourse its main meanings focus on two opposite poles we have on the one hand economic liberalism free market individualism opposition to strong state regulation and so on and so on on the other hand we have political libertarian liberalism accent on equality social solidarity permissiveness multicultural tolerance and so on and so on like in the United States Republicans are more liberal in the first sense Democrats of course in the second sense the point is that it's meaningless to ask which is the true liberalism of course people like Hayek would say our individualist market liberalism is the true liberalism your liberalism of equality human rights already has the despotic state intervention potentials while on the other hand again left liberals would have said no yours is a road to slavery to economic slavery only if only through affirmative action and so on can true liberty be guaranteed but what Hegel would have simply said is that this opposition of two aspects of liberalism is inherent to the very is inherent to the very notion of liberalism that it marks precisely the historical limit of the notion of liberalism that we it's not you see here we have what I was talking about before this wisdom of the cunning of reason don't fight liberalism let it develop and it will get caught into this tension and you cannot resolve it that liberalism is defined by this tension which is also the tension inscribed into how the notion of freedom functions today that is to say what happens here is that how should I put it what appears as a contradiction failure of the idea turns into the central feature of the idea it's not a contradiction which is a limitation of the notion of liberalism it's a contradiction which defines liberalism this tension so now let me now I come to the crucial point for today how does this reversal work it's not only a reversal of a predicate into subject but a more complex reversal let me take a terrifying example here it's a very male chauvinist one but the logic works you know the well-known male chauvinist wisdom or notion of how in contrast to man's self-identity the essence of woman is dispersed elusive displaced the thing to do here is to move from this claim that the essence of woman is forever dispersed to the more radical claim that this dispersion displacement as such is the essence of femininity this is what Hegel deployed as the dialectical shift in which the predicate turns into the subject you know the old Rabinovich joke that I repeat all the time I want to emigrate out of Soviet Union for two reasons the first reason communism will disappear the bureaucrat says but communism will last forever well that's my second reason and so on it's the same here imagine Rabinovich coming at an exam of psychoanalysis and said I found the essence of femininity the professor answered but you cannot find it femininity is a dark continent dispersed displaced where this dispersion is the essence of femininity and so on and I claim that such a shift signals or characterizes the very formal structure of subjectivity what does this mean let me explain it through the structure of supposition Lacan as you all know or should know developed first the notion of the analyst as the subject supposed to know which arises through transference supposed to know what the meaning of the patient symptom and again to repeat my old typical example if you want to get what the subject supposed to know means just take what is I think the nicest example from TV series you know the good old Columbo with Peter Falk I like that series because it breaks two basic rules of detective series one is that whodunit is not a problem you know how the series was structured no first you see exactly how the murder was done who did it and so on so this I think is proves that they are wrong those who think that at the end you learn whodunit no you the mystery the true mystery is the deduction how you connect what really happened with the deceiving appearance and so on and so on okay but the other thing the central mystery of Columbo series is that after the murder Columbo arrives arrives on the scene and in a totally mysterious way from the very beginning he knows who did it did you notice this he simply focuses on a guy and harasses him or her blah blah blah but it's very mysterious why this even without any he just arrives and knows the subject okay then we have the subject supposed to believe which would be precisely the subject supposed not to know what I called two days ago the one for whom the appearances should be protected then we have of course the subject supposed to enjoy the subject of sexual envy it can be racist sexual envy blacks really enjoy they can satisfy our women more than us and so on and so on so the structure here is clear subject supposed to know is knowledge S2 in Lacanian mathemes subject supposed to believe is S1 the master small a surplus enjoyment subject supposed to enjoy so what would be then the fourth element the subject do we get a subject supposed to be subject no I think what we get is that this is the shift I'm talking about from the subject supposed to something supposed to know supposed to enjoy supposed to believe we should pass to subject itself as a supposition and I think this is Lacan's most radical thesis it's not that only that as a subject caught in intersubjective networks I'm always supposed to something like a naive child supposed not to know those for or even in communism I think that you find this tension between know not to know in the figure of the Stalinist leader but not only Stalinist leader that's already the whole mystery of Potemkin's villages how on the one hand the leader is wisdom knows everything but at the same time we should cover up the vulgarity failures so that the leader's eye will not perceive them if I read it correctly in one older biography of Mao the greatest Potemkin's village was when in the great famine later Mao took a long ride by the train about two-three thousand miles and you know what they did this is true Potemkin's village they reconstructed happy villages and so on along the entire rail line so that whenever Mao would say oh let's stop and see how farmers are they wanted to be sure that there was a happy village there okay so the here always the subject is supposed to something to know to enjoy to believe but what about the subject itself as a supposition it's not only that subject is supposed to something it is itself a supposition what does this mean let us imagine a proposition a statement how does this statement get subjectivized when some reflexive feature inscribes into it the subjective attitude you know like if a machine repeats something it's not subjectivized but if you suspect some feature inscribing into it a subjective attitude that somebody not only says something but relates to it in a way this subjectivizes it the subject is the absent x that has to be supposed in order to account for this distortion reflexive twist whatever okay now you will say but this holds only for the other subject like when I this would be even maybe the point of those tests of artificial intelligence that this is how we identify a text as a text behind which there stands a subject through this twists reflexive twists distortions like you know when a machine goes on when a machine goes wrong then we are for a brief moment usually not sure did the machine simply go wrong or did it go wrong to put it in a stupid way in a meaningful way if this we suppose a subject there must be a subject you know like those stories which I love because I'm afraid of flying that for example you fly and then the voice tells you be sure nothing goes wrong on this plane whenever in the strong turbulence I hear this this announcement my dream is always that then things are really bad when the captain tells you everything is under control no that that if you that you are really listening to a pre-recorded message and that if you look through the window you already see the captains jumping down no but okay this this so when this would be when things go wrong or when the message of this proverbial message where the voice says this computer cannot go wrong cannot go wrong cannot go wrong and it goes wrong into this you would say is just a malfunctioning but when this malfunctioning occurs at some significant point whatever okay you you suppose subjectivity now you will say but this is only when we are confronting something that we suppose an x behind I claim and I'll try to prove next week apropos of close reading of Hegel's anthropology that the the the craziest dimension of the German idealist notion of subjectivity is that precisely you are a subject as a subject you are a supposition also for yourself that what you are all the time haunted by is yourself but yourself in the sense of you know this classical Humean notion of classical Humean critique of of the self like there is no self all I if I look deep oh this is the most classical Hume no if I look into myself all I found are always particular ideas perceptions and so on there is no self yes there is no self you presuppose it and okay I don't have time to go into it now but the idea is that precisely this is why the notion of double is so traumatic it's not simply there is out somebody like me but out there I would really exist it's as if I am no longer just a supposition I am posited out there this is why again for Hegel this is the source of madness as I will develop apropos of habit madness and so on that the subject is a void but a void which is haunted by what it would have been as an existing object that you that the subject is never just this entity I think you are always haunted by the notion of of what I am as an object which even brings us to the notion of hysteria for Hegel subjectivity is for this reason fundamentally hysterical because again the basic hysterical question for Freud Lacan is precisely what for an object I am that is to say the that is when people say hysteria desire no it's not what I desire it's not this stupidity I don't know what I want blah blah blah the original question of desire is this perplexity of the small child you know like I see that others see something in me they want something from me what is it in me that makes me an object of libidinal investment for others here women are structurally okay if you accept even that hysteria is more feminine more intelligent than men because male stupidity is that males are obsessionals men think that the enigma is only out there woman but that they know what they are okay but that's another point but you got my basic point here is that it's not simply subject supposed to that subject as such is a presupposition which then haunts us through double whatever deadlock all these nightmarish living dead are figures where you would fully substantially exist where you would not only be where your your self would exist as an object so let's go on apropos this reversal this reversal towards itself is the key dialectical moment let me give you now to make it really clear a couple of examples for Hegel he likes to emphasize how the if an idea cannot adequately represent itself if its representation is distorted deficient then this distortion simultaneously signals a limit a deficiency of the idea itself this is an eternal Hegelian motive if empirical actualization of an idea disappoints you then the idea itself wasn't strong enough to be able to actualize itself so it was limited but one should make a step further here now comes the central trick not only does the universal idea always appear in a distorted displaced way the idea is nothing but this distortion displacement this self-inadequacy of the particular with regard to itself and one could even claim that this reversal formally defines subjectivity substance is something which appears in phenomena while a subject is nothing but its own appearance and we have many of these formulas like the universal is nothing but the inadequacy the non-identity of the particular with itself the essence is nothing but the inadequacy of the appearance to of the appearance to itself this means that for Hegel let's say what does it mean that there is an essence behind appearance it means that the appearance is inconsistent that there is a crack in the order of appearances essence well let me give you an example here when Hegel says this stupid phrase which is often repeated the essence is only as rich as it appears that is to say there is no hidden inner essence the wealth of essence is in the wealth of appearances Hegel does not simply mean this stupidity that the essence has to appear in the sense of it must develop all its moments no it has to appear as essence within appearances within the appearances there should be an appearance which as it were points beyond appearances and this crack within the appearances is all that essence is if you know Lacan a little bit you got it where I'm aiming at the famous Lacan's reference to those old Greek story about two painters competing Zeuxis Parrhasius no when one wins through perfect realistic depiction where even the birds then hit the painting thinking these are real grapes but the other guy just paints a curtain and then when the first guy comes to check it say okay let's see what did you paint reveal the curtain that's that's that's the appearance that it's what appears is appearance as such that is to say the essence has to inscribe itself into appearance as essence how does it inscribe itself precisely as a gap distortion this is what I was telling you the last time you remember when I spoke about concrete universality how the problem for Hegel is how does universality emerge out of the particular where precisely where there are cracks in the particular where the particular does not fully fit itself so let's go on here the structure here is the one of again of minimal difference that is to say the structure of when a thing appears is as it were a sign of itself relates a thing relates to itself but not in the sense but the thing becomes its own appearance without there being a substance behind appearing let me give you an example so that okay now you'll say this is confusing okay it is but I will give you a nice quote which I use it in one of my books from my good friend Robert Faller who developed this paradoxical logic of how a thing can function as a substitute for itself I quote Robert Faller what is substituted can also appear itself in the role of the substitute there only must be some feature ensuring that it is not taken to be itself such a feature is provided by the threshold which separates the place of what is substituting from what is being substituted and then he gives some examples those okay radical one example radical right-wing opponents of male homosexuality in the United States act in a they organize gay bashings in the course of which they beat up and finally rape gays homosexuals the ultimate homicidal or homosexual gratification of drives can therefore also be attained if only if it only fulfills the condition of evoking the semblance of a counter-measure what seems to be opposition has the effect that the act to be fended off can appear itself and be taken for a non-act you got it that what these gay people engaging in gay bashing do is they exactly repeat the homosexual act but it functions as its opposite there are even okay let me give you another example from my own experience when in the early days of video when I was taping films I of course was I didn't quite trust the mechanism so I was always worrying that something will be wrong with the recording so I anxiously watched the TV while the tape was running just to be sure that everything is okay so the paradox is here that I did watch a film even very closely but in a kind of suspended state without really following it all that interested me was that everything was really there I think we find something similar in a certain perverse sexual economy in which I perform the act only in order to be sure that I can in future really perform the act the act was the same but you get my point it didn't really count the act was in a way a sign of itself or to give you yet another strange two other examples one I quote the other one is a new one already in a book the wonderful adventure I was quoting Argentina when in that economic fiasco in Argentinians went to the street to protest against the government and especially against Cavallo the economy minister he was found himself under siege in a ministry of finance or economy but so he escaped how he put on a mask of what of himself because he was so hated that people were selling his mask so he put on his mask and nobody suspected that his mask would be himself it worked so and in a similar way I had recently a very strange a very strange dream I was dreaming that I had a chest pain because I often had am afraid of panic attacks and so on and how did I prolong my sleep no sorry and then when I awakened I discovered that I really have a chest pain so you see the irony I had a chest pain and I prolonged my dream by transforming this chest pain into a dream which was only a dream that I have a chest pain I mean it's just pure repetition nothing nothing effectively if you want nothing effectively happened so I hope you got the point here the point is that how to put it in this kind of a pure repetition appearance enters but like that you know that curtain drawn by I don't know which one Zeuxis or Parrhasius one of the two where the curtain doesn't conceal something hidden behind all it what it conceals is precisely that it is just a painting that there is nothing behind so it's an appearance but a pure appearance in the sense of what's behind is just an x okay the idea being that this precisely this defines subjectivity this subjectivity is correlative with this kind of a pure appearance let me give you again since we are here in England another of my favorite examples in All's Well That Ends Well and don't be afraid I didn't read Shakespeare my source is that wonderful book Rough Guide to Shakespeare that's my limit Shakespeare you know the story All's Well That Ends Well Count Bertram who on the king's orders was forced to marry Helen a common doctor's daughter refuses to live with her and to consummate the marriage he tells her that he will agree to be her husband only if she removes the ancestral ring from his finger and bears his child at the same time Bertram tries to seduce the young beautiful Diana now Helen and Diana are friends they concoct a plan to bring Bertram back to his wife Helen how Diana agrees to spend the night with Bertram telling him to visit her chamber at midnight there in darkness the couple exchange their rings and make love however unknowingly to Bertram the woman with whom he spent the night was not Diana but Helen his own wife so when they are later confronted he Bertram has to admit that both of his conditions for recognizing the marriage are met what then was the status of this bed trick at the very end of Act Helen provides a wonderful definition quote when then why then tonight let us assay our plot which if it speed is wicked meaning in a lawful deed and lawful meaning in a wicked act where both not sin and yet a sinful fact and so on and so on we are effectively dealing both with a wicked meaning in a lawful deed what can be more lawful than a consummated marriage a husband sleeping with his wife and yet the meaning is wicked Bertram thought he is sleeping with Diana not with his wife and a lawful meaning in a wicked act the meaning Helen's intention is lawful to sleep with her husband but the act is wicked she deceives her husband who does it thinking he is cheating on her the result is then not sin and yet a sinful fact not sin because what happened was merely a consummation of marriage but a sinful fact something that involved intentional cheating from both partners the true question here is not only whether all's well that ends well whether the final outcome nothing wrong effectively happened cancels the sinful tricks and intentions but a more radical one what if the rule of law can only be asserted through wicked sinful meanings and acts what if in order to rule the law has to rely on this subterranean interplay of cheatings and deceptions this I think is maybe what Lacan aims at with his paradoxical proposition il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel there is no sexual relationship was not Bertram's situation during the night of love the fate of most married couples you make love to your lawful partner while cheating in your mind fantasizing that you are doing it with another partner so it is as if the actual sex relationship has to be sustained by this phantasmatic by this phantasmatic supplement so again the crucial now we come to the next crucial point the we the crucial fact here is that it's not simply the question this is I think why this title of Shakespeare is very Hegelian All's Well That Ends Well what does it mean does it mean okay a little bit of tricks but the this would be the simple teleological reading we are allowed bad tricks and so on if they are done for the legitimate person here sorry purpose the purpose is legitimate the consummation of marriage and so on so we can do all the tricks but what if we shift the accent and say but what kind of a law is this which in order to sustain itself needs cheating who mediates what here the standard Hegelian reading of the dialectic of law and its criminal transgression would have been that of course Hegel admits that the law can reproduce itself only through criminal transgression that law always involves the dialectical movement of the negation of negation law is negated in the criminal transgression and then law sublates the Hegelian Aufhebung subsumes into its movement through punishment and so on its transgression so that's the standard critique of Hegel restrained economy Hegel allows negativity transgression but only as an a subordinated moment of the self-mediation of the law but what if things are a little bit more complex here what if it is the other way around that not only the criminal transgression is mediated by the law but the law what if the law is in itself criminalized criminal in the sense that that the not only is the transgression a moment particular moment of the law but law is also nothing but the universalized transgression what do I mean by this ah here a wonderful quote from the beginning of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday where Chesterton has a wonderful conservative of course critique of modern intellectuals as the true criminals precisely because they are universal criminals here is this wonderful quote from Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday we say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher compared to him burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men my heart goes out to them they burglars bigamists accept the essential ideal of man they only seek it wrongly thieves respect property they only wish the property to become their property so that they may more perfectly respect it but philosophers dislike property as property they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession bigamists respect marriage or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and ever ritualistic formality of bigamy but philosophers despise marriage as marriage murderers respect human life they only wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of those of what seems to them to be lesser lives but philosophers hate life itself their own as much as other people's the common criminal is a bad man but at least he is as it were a conditional good man he says that if only a certain obstacle be removed say a wealthy uncle he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God he is a reformer but not an anarchist he wishes to clean the edifice but not to destroy it but the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things but to annihilate them this is a wonderful theory which then goes into this idea of we will talk about this later of that what we need today is intellectual police the police not only looking for particular criminals but as Chesterton put it which circulates intellectual parties artist circles universities to look for these universal criminals which are the true source of it but nonetheless I think that Chesterton is not radical enough here what he doesn't get is that universalized crime is no longer a crime it overcomes itself as crime and it turns transgression into a new order he Chesterton is right to claim that compared to the entirely lawless philosopher burglars bigamists even murderers are essentially moral at this Pip is a conditionally good man he doesn't deny property as such he just wants more property for himself however the conclusion to be drawn from this is that crime as such is essentially moral it it wants just a particular illegal reordering of the global moral order which should remain in a truly Hegelian spirit one should bring this proposition of the essential morality of the crime to its imminent reversal not only is crime essentially moral morality itself is essentially criminal again not only in the sense that the universal moral order necessarily negates itself in particular crimes but more radically in the sense that the way morality asserts itself is already in itself a crime property is theft as they used to say in the 19th century that is to say one should pass from theft as a particular criminal violation of the universal form of property to this form itself as a criminal violation what Chesterton fails to perceive is that the universalized crime that he projects into lawless modern philosophy and its particular political equivalent the anarchist movement already exists in the guise of the existing rule of law what I think he doesn't see is that that nightmare this anarchist who want to destroy everything that they are already in power in what way I am not now you'll say okay it's easy to pull these cheap Marxist tricks no I think that he was simply Chesterton simply wasn't radical enough here that elsewhere he knew it for example in his wonderful short text Defense of the Detective Story he remarks how quote the detective story keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions when the detective in a police romance stands alone and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thief's kitchen it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice which is the original and poetic figure while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves the police romance is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies you see here he knows it that the external opposition between law and its transgression is transformed into the opposition internal to what not to the law but to transgression you see my point the usual critique of Hegel is that the encompassing unity between law and its transgression is the law the law mediates its negations and so on but I think the properly Hegelian move is the opposite one it is that the unity is crime that the tension between law and crime is inherent to crime crime is the universalized law law is the crime which universalized itself crime sorry law is the crime elevated at the level of universality that's what he says here and I think that in this sense the man who was Thursday should be read in a very precise way what goes on later in the novel does not simply illustrate this plan of universal police this is only the one-sided view the final message that the supreme criminal is the same person as this supreme policeman is God himself precisely tells this story that God the whole message of Chesterton and this is for him the big thing if you want about Christianity is that God is God has to be at the same time the greatest transgressor the greatest criminal itself that in other words God and devil are the same I mean we must go here to the end in what sense what effectively happens here let me finish with another short mediation precisely on this topic of negation of negation sublation and so on and so on what is Hegel's point why is Christianity for Hegel so revolutionary what happens in Christianity through Christ and so on it's that before we have God who is a substantial real God God as being existing prior to the world whatever this God dies on the cross and is resuscitated as Holy Ghost but Hegel makes it clear what is Holy Ghost as I developed I think in my first talk here apropos the big other Holy Ghost is a virtual entity it exists only on the terrain of finite human existence Holy Ghost is the virtuality to which we refer and Hegel says this literally he says that the only site of the infinite is finite human life there is no infinity anywhere else infinity Ghost is only against sexuality as aspect of human practice what does this mean this means that we should be very precise here when Hegel says God dies and then God is resuscitated this this does not mean that somehow in the negation of negation and so on we magically return to infinity to divine it's not this God stupid God playing games with itself okay I pretend to die then I return to myself when God is dead God is dead that is to say the every notion of substantial infinity there is some higher reality out there and so on that's over God dies definitely that is to say the only site where things can the death of God means that the only locality site where things can happen is the finitude of human passions and so on and so on and God's return means that the infinite dimension has to return as an aspect of this finite life it has to be reinvented as virtual at this level so you got my point my point is that when people speak about Hegelian Aufhebung cancellation elevation they usually read it as if the finite has to be aufgehoben cancelled in the infinite that the finite does not have reality it should be rendered only part of an ideal movement but I think there is a more radical Aufhebung in Hegel it's not that we have finite moments and then they are aufgehoben sublated cancelled in their immediacy they become moments of ideal totality no the problem is the status of this totality itself you know that the Hegelian term Aufhebung has three meanings to cancel to negate something to maintain it and to elevate it on a higher level what is truly aufgehoben sublated in this sense is God himself not reality God in the Holy Ghost God is a negated he dies b continues to live but in elevated form what elevated form of the Holy Ghost which is the purely virtual if you want spiritual human community which only exists in which only exists at the level of the finitude and again for Hegel you got my point here my point is that it's not that the movement is in particularization like God alienates itself come no God loses itself and the very how should I put it shift focuses to to the finite universe God has to be reinvented there as a simply as a finite community so now to recapitulate things the you got I hope you got it how I tried to repeat at three levels the same movement first in the cunning of reason the cunning of reason does not mean there is some teleology in the vulgar sense of some higher authority controlling events all the time no that higher authority precisely loses and the cunning of reason means that through that lost a new order is retroactively chaotically recreated it doesn't mean God controls the universe it means God screws us up and through this failure in an improvised retroactive way something new emerges it's in this sense the cunning of unreason again as I already said the ultimate Hegelian wager is for sure things will somehow go wrong that's the only way to to get something new second thing again with respect to displacement and so on the the crucial passage is the passage from predicate to subject that is to say from for example as I said from essence appears to essence is only its own appearance from essence expresses itself in a contradictory way to this contradiction is the essence of the essence so that what appears to appears as a predicate secondary is elevated into the central feature itself and the last feature variation where we are dealing with the tension between universal particular law its criminal transgression how the whole Hegelian the Hegelian point is not that we have a law or a noble beginning goodness which somehow that's the usual notion of Hegel no what does it mean reason in history God God guards it's a benevolent authority over our history and of course there are terrible things happening but God takes care that all particular evils somehow serve the higher purpose at the end everything is economically used for some higher purpose no it's precisely it's precisely not this what Hegel's point is precisely the opposite one how good arises out of if you want self-reflection self-relating of evil itself that is to say how at the level of crime law itself is crime elevated to universality that is to say that the encompassing unity of law and its criminal transgression is transgression that's my god to quote Chesterton again morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies in other words that the legal order is the most dark and daring of all crimes it's really like Brecht says what is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank to put it in these terms what is breaking the law compared to the much higher crime of found- of founding the new law now of course it's another question if this is the entire truth of Hegel dialectics and so on and so on I just again all I wanted to do today is just to shatter a little bit this usual prejudice about Hegel I'm sorry if I was a little bit confused as usually next Tuesday I will first clarify some more things about this logic of negation and then finally I will go on to Chesterton the man who was Thursday we still have a couple of minutes please if there are some questions this to warn you if some of you are getting bored the first talk of next week will be even more abstract and then we slowly start to move towards politics Foucault Heidegger all those things please if there are some just now I am alone myopic so please if I ignore some of you it is not only because I am an anti-feminist racist or whatever but it's only at least a little bit objectively okay you and you sorry you saw how much sorry you saw what the last word just the last yes you once you get the enlightenment you have to mature further the unism of your attainment whereas for you you first of all empty the beyond of all positivity you then transfer the interiority of the self to this beyond from then on you know you begin your Hegelian retroactive positive movement to infinity so hence for you man was always already man and that’s a little bit regressive on my view this is for me you know what is why is for me we should really have talked here more so strange because the usual version would have been to and this is why I like your critique precisely the opposite one it would have been that Hegelians are usually accused of being progressive you know you go on you mediate you
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build and so on and Buddhists are usually accused of that all that we can do is just like withdraw to the zero but so again okay let's not go to Brno but you know how should I put it you say maturity and so on okay now I will take you at your word this is not for me an argument against Buddhism but it tells something what shocked me when reading I mean some people
build and so on and Buddhists are usually accused of that all that we can do is just like withdraw to the zero but so again okay let's not go to Brno but you know how should I put it you say maturity and so on okay now I will take you at your word this is not for me an argument against Buddhism but it tells something what shocked me when reading I mean some people
Slavoj Žižek
did do this in the best naive Anglo-Saxon way which I love they said okay Buddhism proposes you prohibit killing you blah blah all that no and less suffering so they said okay so let's do something very simple let's look at the countries which are predominantly Buddhist or the king was a Buddhist or whatever and let's compare there as far as we can measure it level of suffering how many people were killed blah blah with non-Buddhist countries rulers the result is exactly the same if anything a little bit more cruelty in in Buddhist regimes I mean this is for me and this is for me not an argument if anything this renders me more sympathetic towards Buddhism why because I think the first way to take Buddhism seriously is to totally cut the link between this and this Westernized ecological humanitarian whatever for me oh balanced nature and against industrial distortion that's not Buddhism for a true Buddhist it doesn't matter if you are in the middle of smoke and cheat and pollution you find it there I think this is cheating any import of this European ecological notion into Buddhism for me that's the greatness of Buddhism that it's not you know we are gentle soft feminine goddess or all those things I mean this how Buddhism can also function as this theory of you know this overlapping of letting it go releasement and extreme discipline extreme cruelty why not I mean so you know what I mean here or I'll put it in another way I think that both Buddhism and Hegel have something in common nonetheless when you speak about maturity but isn't Buddhist maturity also circular they my god often use this wonderful term that in a true becoming you always become what you are already and so I just claim that to oppose Buddhism as how should I put it as progressive and Hegelian as regressive well one would have to to develop things a little bit maybe here no because I think that precisely how should I put it don't you think that the I somehow maybe it's a twisted dialectic but somehow I'm tempted to say that true progress can only occur if you break out of this Western notion of progress if you this is what attracts me in Buddhism and even in people like who definitely was not a Buddhist but rather a disgusting compromiser as a private person as Brecht I like people who see that you like the most stupid criticism of Buddhism for me is the standard Marxist one Buddhists ontologize suffering into the very foundations of universe they don't see that suffering is caused by the concrete social circumstances it's not the very structure of the living it's concrete no I think that it's totally wrong you can very well combine a how should I call it naively a global catastrophic vision suffering pertains to life as such and concrete engagement and this is what also attracts me in somebody like Brecht
did do this in the best naive Anglo-Saxon way which I love they said okay Buddhism proposes you prohibit killing you blah blah all that no and less suffering so they said okay so let's do something very simple let's look at the countries which are predominantly Buddhist or the king was a Buddhist or whatever and let's compare there as far as we can measure it level of suffering how many people were killed blah blah with non-Buddhist countries rulers the result is exactly the same if anything a little bit more cruelty in in Buddhist regimes I mean this is for me and this is for me not an argument if anything this renders me more sympathetic towards Buddhism why because I think the first way to take Buddhism seriously is to totally cut the link between this and this Westernized ecological humanitarian whatever for me oh balanced nature and against industrial distortion that's not Buddhism for a true Buddhist it doesn't matter if you are in the middle of smoke and cheat and pollution you find it there I think this is cheating any import of this European ecological notion into Buddhism for me that's the greatness of Buddhism that it's not you know we are gentle soft feminine goddess or all those things I mean this how Buddhism can also function as this theory of you know this overlapping of letting it go releasement and extreme discipline extreme cruelty why not I mean so you know what I mean here or I'll put it in another way I think that both Buddhism and Hegel have something in common nonetheless when you speak about maturity but isn't Buddhist maturity also circular they my god often use this wonderful term that in a true becoming you always become what you are already and so I just claim that to oppose Buddhism as how should I put it as progressive and Hegelian as regressive well one would have to to develop things a little bit maybe here no because I think that precisely how should I put it don't you think that the I somehow maybe it's a twisted dialectic but somehow I'm tempted to say that true progress can only occur if you break out of this Western notion of progress if you this is what attracts me in Buddhism and even in people like who definitely was not a Buddhist but rather a disgusting compromiser as a private person as Brecht I like people who see that you like the most stupid criticism of Buddhism for me is the standard Marxist one Buddhists ontologize suffering into the very foundations of universe they don't see that suffering is caused by the concrete social circumstances it's not the very structure of the living it's concrete no I think that it's totally wrong you can very well combine a how should I call it naively a global catastrophic vision suffering pertains to life as such and concrete engagement and this is what also attracts me in somebody like Brecht
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Brecht's vision is not world is wonderful men are beautiful it's just that
Brecht's vision is not world is wonderful men are beautiful it's just that
Slavoj Žižek
these social circumstances here are horrible what I like in Brecht is that he unites a progressive
these social circumstances here are horrible what I like in Brecht is that he unites a progressive
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social engagement with a vision of humanity which is
social engagement with a vision of humanity which is
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in a way extremely misanthropic people are hell they are shit no you know so again okay we would have to go further but
in a way extremely misanthropic people are hell they are shit no you know so again okay we would have to go further but
Slavoj Žižek
you know what I propose that maybe that additional discussion additional class that I will try to give because now we always don't have time that maybe we should really focus on this elementary question because here I tend to agree with Terry Eagleton the left today should not have fear to address this what in old-fashioned terms was called the big metaphysical questions it's a wrong alternative either that or concrete action if we don't do it then people like Stephen Hawking or the new agers will do it in their way no sorry you were the I am sorry yeah yeah we will be finishing in five minutes I said one hour or what no I so I mean about Buddhism I think the problem at the end I think you are really reading Buddhism in a totally soteriological way I mean only you only reading a kind of textual soteriology Buddhism and you leaving out what like anthropologists call the apotropaic yeah yeah okay because the problem is that even like your discussion of Buddhism is at the ideological what we would call dharma or this kind of level because suffering in that kind of level which also means especially in Tibetan Buddhism the only one I know from from first hand is the thing that you have two kinds of causations you have a kind of efficient causation which belongs to karma level and then you have a supernatural causation which belongs to daily life okay and the point is that the Tibetans for example are extremely concerned constantly their life is totally shimmering with all kinds of dangers of problems and they are always concerned how
you know what I propose that maybe that additional discussion additional class that I will try to give because now we always don't have time that maybe we should really focus on this elementary question because here I tend to agree with Terry Eagleton the left today should not have fear to address this what in old-fashioned terms was called the big metaphysical questions it's a wrong alternative either that or concrete action if we don't do it then people like Stephen Hawking or the new agers will do it in their way no sorry you were the I am sorry yeah yeah we will be finishing in five minutes I said one hour or what no I so I mean about Buddhism I think the problem at the end I think you are really reading Buddhism in a totally soteriological way I mean only you only reading a kind of textual soteriology Buddhism and you leaving out what like anthropologists call the apotropaic yeah yeah okay because the problem is that even like your discussion of Buddhism is at the ideological what we would call dharma or this kind of level because suffering in that kind of level which also means especially in Tibetan Buddhism the only one I know from from first hand is the thing that you have two kinds of causations you have a kind of efficient causation which belongs to karma level and then you have a supernatural causation which belongs to daily life okay and the point is that the Tibetans for example are extremely concerned constantly their life is totally shimmering with all kinds of dangers of problems and they are always concerned how
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to cope with these dangers and somehow to to an economy of merit they counterpose an economy of fortune that’s always there try to get the way to
to cope with these dangers and somehow to to an economy of merit they counterpose an economy of fortune that’s always there try to get the way to