Slavoj Žižek — On G.W.F. Hegel, Lecture 1 [Remaster]
Lecture · WhereAreWeSeeing ·
2009-08 · 2:33:15 · 20,506 words
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Žižek argues that standard textbook interpretations of Hegel, specifically the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad and the idea of 'Absolute Knowing' as the end of history, are fundamentally wrong. He redefines Hegelian historicity not as a linear, teleological progression, but as a retroactive process where necessity is established only after contingent events occur. Using examples from Engels, Adorno, and East German history, he demonstrates that true historical experience is the realization of an 'impossibility', the inability to return to a pre-break state, and that historical agents act blindly, discovering necessity only in retrospect. Žižek analyzes the dialectic of 'returning to the past' in history, arguing that attempts to ignore a historical break (like Kant’s revolution or the introduction of sound in cinema) often reveal a deeper, more radical truth than acceptance of the new. He uses Rossini, Luther, Pascal, and Chaplin’s transition to sound film as examples of how resistance to modernity exposes the uncanny nature of the 'voice' as an external, controlling force (objet petit a). Finally, he frames the post-Hegelian break (Schelling, Schopenhauer, Marx) as an 'anti-philosophy' that exposes the 'cheating' of Hegel’s idealism, suggesting that those who resist the new paradigm often see its limits more clearly. Žižek argues that the standard post-Hegelian critique of Hegel as an absurd, abstract idealist is a 'screen memory' (Deck-Erinnerung) that obscures Hegel's radical break with traditional metaphysics. He posits Hegel as a 'vanishing mediator' who, despite his flaws, uniquely anticipated the post-Hegelian turn to actuality, will, and the irrational. Using examples from Malebranche, Descartes, and Freud, Žižek contends that Hegel’s 'idealism' actually captures the traumatic excess of human subjectivity (the death drive/will) that later 'anti-philosophies' (Marx, Kierkegaard, Schelling) tried to repress by returning to 'real life'. Žižek argues that culture is not merely a break from nature but is structured by the Freudian death drive, an 'absolute insistence' that requires symbolic stabilization. He critiques Steven Pinker’s evolutionary psychology for failing to account for non-adaptive, 'stupid' excesses in human behavior, such as sexual display. Using the peacock as an example, Žižek suggests that this irrational excess serves as a signal of strength, revealing a fundamental gap in utilitarian accounts of the mind. Žižek argues that human desire and cultural development are driven by a 'death drive' or 'immortality' that insists beyond natural life, rather than utilitarian needs. He analyzes this through Kant’s distinction between negative and infinite judgment, Freud’s death drive, and Lacan’s distinction between aim and goal, using examples from ape behavior, a patient’s slip of the tongue, and Balkan jokes. In the second part, he explores Hegel’s 'concrete universality' and Deleuze’s 'pure difference' through Robert Schumann’s Humoreske and E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate, suggesting that true ideological change occurs in the virtual background of repetition. Žižek analyzes the retroactive nature of time and meaning using Deleuze, Bergson, and Hegel, arguing that new realities retroactively create their own possibilities and restructure the past. He applies this to literary adaptation, historical events, and political theory, positing that necessity arises contingently rather than preceding it. The talk concludes with a defense of Hegel’s constitutional monarchy as the necessary site of radical contingency within a rational state. Žižek argues for an 'ontological openness' in reality, drawing an analogy between the indeterminacy of quantum physics and the 'blurring' of unrendered details in video games. He posits that this incompleteness is not merely epistemological but ontological, serving as a materialist critique of reductionism and a key to understanding Hegel's 'concrete universality.' He applies this framework to critique the notion of 'alternate modernities,' arguing that all specific forms of capitalism are attempts to resolve the inherent antagonism of the universal concept of capitalism itself.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 51
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Hegel's concept of the end of history and total self-transparency, which Žižek rejects as a naive 'pan-logical' view.
A triadic formula Hegel never used, attributed to his pupil Karl Rosenkranz, which Žižek dismisses as an anti-Hegelian distortion.
The standard perception of Hegel as believing in a universal, evolutionary mobilization where everything is in constant flux.
as “anatomy of a man is a key to the anatomy of the ape”
Marx's statement illustrating that understanding development requires knowing the end result first, allowing for retroactive analysis.
The classical Marxist critique that Hegel's dynamic method contradicts his conservative, static system.
Žižek's term for anti-essentialist views that all forms of life are contingent symbolic constructs, which he opposes.
Žižek's definition of history not as fluidity, but as the experience of an 'impossibility', the realization that one cannot return to the past after a break.
Hegel's paradoxical opposite: new things emerge not as pure novelty, but as an illusory repetition of the past.
Hegel's view that historical acts are blind because the agent cannot include the act's own result within the act itself.
Hegel's metaphor that understanding (the owl taking flight) only occurs at dusk, i.e., after events have transpired.
The structural reason why history is not predetermined: the subject cannot include themselves in the picture of history.
Žižek’s label for Rossini, whose comic operas ideologically pretend the French Revolution didn't happen, maintaining the ancien régime's nostalgia.
A formula for ideological nostalgia or 'fake' return, where one acts as if a historical break (Kant, Revolution) never occurred.
The Hegelian paradox that attempting to return to the past (Luther, Pascal) often produces the most radical historical changes because it confronts the impossibility of the return.
The trivial, historically irrelevant result of trying to return to the past without achieving a radical break.
as “object a (voice)”
Lacan’s concept applied to the voice as a 'partial organ' or 'ventriloquist aspect' that is not a spontaneous expression of the body but a foreign intruder that controls/haunts it.
Žižek’s description of the silent movie universe (Chaplin, Sennett) as lacking death and true sexuality, operating on primitive oral-anal logic.
Badiou’s term for the post-Hegelian break (Schopenhauer, Marx, Freud) which treats philosophy as a secondary screen for a more substantial, irrational life process (will/nature).
Schelling’s distinction: Hegel is a 'negative philosopher' who only deploys conceptual structures, missing the 'positive being' or living substance of reality.
as “Hegel's cheating”
Schelling’s accusation that Hegel cheats by pretending to deduce nature from the self-movement of concepts, knowing nature exists independently.
The pre-conceptual, irrational force of pure willing (Schelling) or subjective leap (Kierkegaard) that post-Hegelians claim Hegel missed, but which Žižek argues is central to Hegel's logic.
as “Wiederholungszwang (compulsion to repeat)”
Freud's concept of pure repetition without Hegelian Aufhebung (sublation/elevation), which Žižek argues exists within Hegel's system despite his dismissal of modern mathematics and natural sciences.
A historical figure or concept that facilitates a transition between two epochs but is subsequently erased or misunderstood; here, Hegel is the vanishing mediator between traditional metaphysics and post-Hegelian anti-philosophy.
as “Deck-Erinnerung (screen memory)”
A false, ridiculous, or comforting image (the 'absurd Hegel') that conceals a truly traumatic or excessive truth (Hegel's radical insight into the irrational will).
The only legitimate criticism of Hegel: he fails to fully embrace the radical irrationality/will he identifies, falling back into 'culturalization' or 'civilization' narratives rather than accepting the traumatic excess.
as “wild child / wild undisciplined character”
Kant's example of a child who resists discipline, representing an excess that is 'denaturalized nature', not animal instinct, but not yet culture, which serves as the vanishing mediator for human subjectivity.
The Freudian term for the excessive, non-natural, eternalizing aspect of human desire/sexuality that Hegel implicitly captures but fails to fully articulate, distinguishing humans from animals.
Evolutionary theories (associated with Pinker) that explain mental faculties and behaviors solely by their survival value, which Žižek finds insufficient.
Behaviors or traits (like sexual display) that have no direct survival utility but persist, revealing the underlying death drive or insistence beyond adaptation.
as “reductionism”
The attempt to ground higher-level phenomena (mind, society) in a 'zero level' of pure matter or authentic experience, which Žižek rejects because no such zero level exists.
The human tendency to persist in impossible or irrational desires (unlike apes who calculate rationally), which produces a repetitive drive (death drive) that denaturalizes natural instincts.
Kant’s concept where a non-predicate is affirmed (e.g., 'you are undead'), opening a third domain of 'obscene life' or 'living death' distinct from simple negation ('you are alive').
as “aim vs. goal”
Lacan’s distinction where the 'goal' is the official end (e.g., penetration), but the 'aim' is the circular movement of the drive itself, which provides the true satisfaction.
Deleuze’s notion of a repetition of the same that produces radical difference not in the actual notes/events, but in the 'virtual' background or intensity of the repetition.
Schumann’s 'music for the eye,' a third line of notes in Humoreske that is not played but serves as a virtual reference point for the other two lines.
Not mere possibility, but something 'as possible as non-actual' that exerts its own efficiency; the hidden resonance that changes when the actual content remains identical.
as “real repetition”
A repetition where the actual content (notes, plot) remains identical, but the virtual background or resonance changes, revealing a 'pure difference'.
A Deleuzian concept where two actual series (novel and film) coexist in relation to a virtual object that circulates between them, generating a 'true' version that never actually exists.
as “retroactive movement”
The process by which a present event or reality restructures the past, making it appear as if it was always possible or necessary, thereby creating its own conditions of possibility.
The psychic structure 'je sais bien, mais quand même' (I know very well, but nonetheless...), where one acknowledges a possibility abstractly but refuses to believe it can actually happen until it does.
A Deleuzian concept of an atemporal, eternal texture where all events are stored and remembered as they pass, which is restructured by new radical changes.
as “totalizing”
Not a closed circle of potentials, but a radically open, contingent history where new events restructure the past itself, creating precursors and influences retroactively.
Hegel’s concept where the subject does not just exist within a totality but actively changes the past of that totality through retroactive movement.
The core of Žižek's Hegel: necessity is not pre-written by history but is established retroactively after contingent events occur.
The domain of 'Being' in Hegel’s Logic, which is the starting point of multiplicity and contingency from which essence and necessity arise.
as “ontological openness”
The idea that reality itself is indeterminate and incomplete, not just in our knowledge of it, but in its fundamental structure, analogous to unrendered areas in a video game.
The hypothetical authentic, pre-sedimented experience (like the original meaning of a handshake) which Žižek argues is a myth; the gap is present from the beginning.
The failure to reduce individual psychic experience to objective social structures (or vice versa), which Adorno and Žižek argue is itself the fundamental social fact.
Hegel’s idea that the universal develops its entire concrete content through the self-movement of the notion, rather than being an abstract feature extracted from concrete reality.
as “capitalism without alienation”
The ideological fantasy underlying 'alternate modernity': the desire for the benefits of modernization/capitalism while excluding its inherent antagonism/alienation.
The ideological claim that non-Western societies can achieve modernization/capitalism without the social alienation inherent to the universal concept of capitalism.
Stories he reaches for 9
Friedrich Engels, in the 1870s/80s, predicted a future European war involving Germany caught between Anglo-Saxons and Russia, which Germany would lose and then restart, demonstrating that Marxists can be lucky or prescient.
“Engels... clearly predicted World War II... Germany will find itself coined between two poles: Anglo-Saxon, French and Russian.”
Žižek expected the novel Billy Bathgate to be better than the mediocre film, but found the novel even worse. This 'real repetition' (same plot/content) reveals a 'pure difference' in the virtual background (the quality of the work).
“the novel was even worse... We have the real repetition.”
Hegel’s defense of constitutional monarchy: the King is an 'idiot' whose function is merely to sign his name, representing the necessary element of radical contingency at the top of the rational state.
“The function of the king is to sign his name... the less he knows all the better.”
Henri Bergson’s shock at the outbreak of WWI: it was subjectively 'impossible' until it happened, at which point it retroactively became 'possible' and normal, illustrating how reality creates its own possibility.
“I experienced... a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from the abstract to the concrete.”
Borges’ claim that great artists like Kafka do not just have predecessors, but create them; Kafka retroactively puts the possibility of himself into Dostoevsky and Poe.
“A truly great author creates his or her precursors.”
Adorno argues that after Schoenberg's atonal revolution, traditional tonal music (like Rachmaninov's) loses its innocence and becomes 'kitsch' or a negation of itself, mediated by the new break.
“This new tonal music has lost its innocence. It is already mediated by the atonal break and thus functions already as its negation.”
Kierkegaard telling the Danish King he only needs good manners and a nice smile, not wisdom or history, illustrating the empty, contingent nature of the monarch’s role.
“Kierkegaard told him good manners, nice smile blah blah nothing more.”
The shocking 1972 visit by Nixon to Mao’s China, which immediately looked 'normal' and 'rational' in retrospect, despite being 'total madness' beforehand, illustrating retroactive normalization.
“How when it happened it immediately looked normal. Of course no break of course it's rational politics.”
Schumann’s piano piece uses 'Augenmusik' (a third line of notes for the eye). In the second part, the same notes are repeated, but the 'virtual' resonance changes (one resonates, one doesn’t), illustrating Deleuze’s 'pure difference' in repetition.
“you repeat exactly the same line but in such a way that what changes is not what you hear but what you don’t hear.”
Works invoked 38
Philosophy of Right book
Cited for Hegel's 'Owl of Minerva' metaphor about the dusk of understanding.
Grundrisse book
Cited for Marx's methodological introduction regarding the 'anatomy of a man' and retroactive understanding.
The Parallax View book
Žižek quotes from this book (specifically the end of the second part) regarding the behavioral biologist's account of sexual display.
Psycho film
Hitchcock’s film analyzed by Chion as the problem of the 'mother's voice floating around'.
The Great Dictator film
Chaplin’s first full sound film; illustrates the 'voice as object a' and the split between the Tramp and Hynkel.
The German Ideology book
Cited for Marx's metaphor comparing speculative philosophy to masturbation, illustrating the post-Hegelian desire for 'real life'.
Billy Bathgate film
A movie Žižek 'so-so didn't like too much,' used to illustrate 'real repetition' and 'pure difference' when compared to the novel.
Kant’s work containing the distinction between negative and infinite judgment, which Žižek claims is the 'best account of death drive'.
T.S. Eliot’s essay cited for the idea that new art retroactively changes the past.
Being and Event book
Badiou’s work containing an analysis of Pascal.
One of Deleuze’s 'absolute' books, a 'miracle' for Žižek.
The Fragile Absolute book
Žižek's own book where he developed the idea of 'vanishing mediator' taken from Fredric Jameson.
City Lights film
Chaplin’s first formally sound film (music/environmental sounds only); illustrates resistance to dialogue.
Fritz Lang’s film where the arch-criminal is known as a 'voice' seeking a body.
Stalin's philosophical writing, which Žižek critiques as 'totally anti-authentic Marxist' for positing objective historical tendencies.
Another of Žižek's books where he developed the idea of 'vanishing mediator'.
Hegel's Logic book
Hegel’s work begins with 'Being' (pure contingency) from which necessity arises.
Le Monde journal
Cited for a quote illustrating retroactive necessity regarding Edouard Balladur's election.
Stage Fright film
Jameson’s choice for Hitchcock’s failure; famous for a false flashback that violates Hitchcock’s rule.
Topaz film
Žižek’s choice for Hitchcock’s worst movie; an 'anti-communist movie' about Cuba.
The Barber of Seville opera
Used to illustrate 'pure composer of restoration' and ideological nostalgia.
The Shortest Shadow book
Alenka Zupancic’s book that 'converted' Žižek to Nietzsche.
Antichrist book
Nietzsche’s text, mentioned as one of the works he was working on when he collapsed.
The Book of Daniel book
Žižek likes this novel by Doctorow, contrasting it with Billy Bathgate.
Fedora film
Billy Wilder’s 'total failure' and 'box office failure'; Žižek thinks it has philosophical interest regarding the 'old young split'.
Humoreske song
Robert Schumann’s piano masterpiece, used to illustrate 'pure difference' and 'virtuality' through its structure of Augenmusik.
The Marriage of Figaro opera
Contrasted with Rossini; seen as announcing the revolution.
Modern Times film
Chaplin’s compromise with speech; speech comes only from media/radio within the narrative.
Charles Rosen’s second volume, covering Schubert, Schumann, and Chopin.
The Selfish Gene book
Dawkins' book; Žižek critiques it for introducing 'memes' as a space of freedom without accounting for the death drive.
Sunset Boulevard film
Mentioned in response to an audience question about the issue of the 'old young split' and voice.
Bergson’s text cited for the analysis of WWI and retroactive possibility.
Under Capricorn film
Hitchcock’s 'embarrassing Australian melodrama'; cited by a French school as the 'true Hitchcock' masterpiece.
The Classical Style book
Charles Rosen’s book, cited as a source for understanding Schumann’s Humoreske.
Der Fall Wagner book
Nietzsche’s text, mentioned in the context of Nietzsche’s ambiguous relationship with Wagner.
Kant and Hitchcock other
A talk given by Žižek at Berkeley, used to illustrate the 'obscenity' of linking Kant with Hitchcock.
Nietzsche’s text, mentioned alongside Der Fall Wagner and Antichrist as part of Nietzsche’s attempt to prove he was always against Wagner.
Other Inquisitions book
Borges’ collection containing the essay on Kafka and precursors.
People invoked 73
Used in Borges’ example to illustrate how great artists create their precursors (Dostoevsky, Poe).
Nicholas Fearn positive
Author of a 'shitty introduction to philosophy' from which Žižek extracts the video game analogy regarding ontological status.
Cited in the anecdote of his visit to China as an example of retroactive normalization.
Mentioned as a scientist who claims Spinoza was a 'proto-brain scientist.'
Charles Rosen positive
Praised as 'maybe the greatest musicologist'; author of The Classical Style and The Romantic Generation, used to explain Schumann’s Humoreske.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as a 'favorite rational choice theoretician' and 'intelligent guy' whose work links necessity and contingency.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as 'my friend' and 'part of my Slovene gang'; credited with converting Žižek to Nietzsche via her book The Shortest Shadow.
Michel Chion positive
Cited as a 'very good theorist' who elaborated on the problem of the voice in Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Bergson references William James’s concept of 'admiration for the facility of the passage from the abstract to the concrete.'
Blaise Pascal positive
Admired by Badiou; seen as seeing more of modernity’s limits by insisting on the paradox of being modern yet orthodox.
Édouard Balladur positive
A French politician used in a Le Monde quote to illustrate retroactive necessity.
Sergei Rachmaninoff positive
Cited as an example of a composer who continued tonal music after Schoenberg, thus producing 'kitsch'.
Charlie Chaplin positive
Žižek 'loves' early sound Chaplin; uses him to illustrate the trauma of sound and the voice as object a.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Used to illustrate how historical breaks (Schoenberg) render previous forms (Rachmaninov) into 'kitsch' or negation.
Thomas Müntzer positive
Described as a 'great revolutionary leader' and theological writer who led the peasant rebellion.
Arnold Schoenberg positive
Representing the 'atonal revolution' that changed the meaning of subsequent tonal music.
Not explicitly named in this excerpt, but implied through concepts like 'objet petit a' or 'the Real' in other contexts; here, no direct reference.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Identified as the scientist Žižek supports in the debate against Pinker, implying agreement with Gould's critique of strict utilitarianism.
Georgi Plekhanov negative
Cited as representing the 'stupid dialectic' of Marxism (necessity of contingency) which Žižek rejects.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited as trying to return to the pre-Kantian age of Leibniz and Spinoza, writing 'as if Kant didn't exist.'
Fritz Lang positive
Director of Testament of Dr. Mabuse, cited as another intelligent director who saw the problem of the 'free-floating voice'.
Al Gore negative
Mocked as a 'holist' who blames Descartes for everything; Žižek calls this 'the worst of Al Gore.'
Mentioned in an obscene joke about his wife pronouncing 'happiness' as 'appiness' (penis), used to explain Žižek’s 'penis problems' with the audience.
Steven Pinker negative
Described as having a 'Goebbels reaction' to French thought; criticized for being 'weak' because his evolutionary account cannot explain non-adaptive excess.
Judith Butler negative
Žižek says he 'always' tries to annoy Butler by using binary logic (one partner vs. many) to critique her opposition to binary logic.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart positive
Contrasted with Rossini; his Figaro is seen as clearly announcing the revolution.
Nicolas Malebranche positive
Described as a 'genius' and a 'vanishing mediator' between medieval theology and modern mechanical materialism; Žižek praises his 'crazy' radicalization of Descartes.
Alain Badiou positive
Mentioned as someone who will 'torture you in the afternoon'; likes Pascal and uses the term 'anti-philosophy'.
Charles Taylor negative
Žižek calls Taylor's book on Hegel 'one of the worst books on Hegel. It should be burned publicly,' arguing Taylor's rehabilitation of Hegel is insufficient.
Gérard Lebrun positive
Described as a 'good reader of Hegel' who quotes the example of crossing the Rubicon.
E. L. Doctorow positive
Author of Billy Bathgate, used as an example of 'real repetition' where the novel is worse than the film, revealing a difference in the virtual background.
Frederick II of Prussia positive
Rehabilitated by the GDR as a 'progressive bourgeois modernizer' to gain nationalist legitimacy.
Bertrand Russell negative
Cited as an example of 'extremely anti-Hegelian histories of philosophy' that mistakenly impose the triad on Hegel.
Fredric Jameson positive
Collaborator with Žižek on the idea of a book about Hitchcock’s failures.
Friedrich Engels positive
Praised for his prescient prediction of World War II, showing Marxists can be 'lucky' or intelligent.
Nikita Khrushchev positive
Cited as the last Soviet leader who believed in genuine progress and competition with the West.
Benedictus de Spinoza positive
Mentioned as a philosopher favored by scientists and analytic thinkers, unlike Hegel.
Actor in the film adaptation of Billy Bathgate.
T. S. Eliot positive
Cited for the idea that new works of art retroactively change the past itself, restructuring how classical arts are perceived.
Arthur Schopenhauer positive
Described as 'the great anti-Hegelian really like personally. He hated Hegel.' Used to illustrate the 'anti-philosophy' break.
Werner Heisenberg positive
Cited regarding the uncertainty principle and the debate over whether quantum indeterminacy is epistemological or ontological.
Henri Bergson positive
Cited for his analysis of WWI and the retroactive creation of possibility; Žižek calls him a 'conservative' he likes.
Actor in the film adaptation of Billy Bathgate.
Richard Dawkins negative
Criticized for inconsistency in The Selfish Gene; Žižek argues Dawkins posits 'memes' as freedom without accounting for the traumatic excess of the death drive.
Used in the Plekhanov example to illustrate contingent realization of historical necessity.
Darian Leader positive
Described as a 'nice British Lacanian' and 'very good popularizer'; cited for the 'bed for two' anecdote illustrating the aim vs. goal distinction.
Mentioned in the context of Nixon’s visit to China.
Mentioned in an anecdote about Schopenhauer’s mother’s honesty regarding Goethe’s wife, Christiane Vulpius.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Used to explain the 'post-Hegelian break'; Žižek agrees with Schelling’s critique that Hegel 'cheats' by ignoring the 'positive being' of nature.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited for a passage about great works of art being like shots on film for which the developer was not yet discovered, supporting the idea of understanding with delay.
Identified as the pupil who putatively introduced the 'thesis, antithesis, synthesis' triad, which Hegel never used.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited as part of the post-Hegelian break; represents the 'individual with the absurd' and 'leap of faith' which post-Hegelians claim Hegel missed.
Goethe’s lower-class wife, ignored by high society until Schopenhauer’s mother’s comment.
Niels Bohr positive
Cited alongside Heisenberg for the radical position that ontological openness is in the thing itself.
Used as an example of a historical figure whose meaning might be understood only with a delay by later hermeneutics.
Robert Schumann positive
Cited for his piano piece Humoreske, which illustrates the concept of 'virtuality' and 'pure difference' through Augenmusik.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Žižek plans a book on Hitchcock’s 'failures' (Under Capricorn, Stage Fright, Topaz) to find the 'true masterpiece'.
Leonid Brezhnev negative
Contrasted with Khrushchev; his claim about grandsons being communists would be laughed at, showing loss of legitimacy.
Peter the Great positive
Used as a historical model for Stalin's brutal, violent modernization of Russia.
Joseph Stalin negative
Described as 'Peter the Great' imposing brutal modernization; his philosophical writings are cited as 'totally anti-authentic Marxist'.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz positive
Mentioned as a philosopher liked by Bertrand Russell and others in the analytic tradition.
Karl Marx positive
Cited as a 'true Hegelian' for his retroactive method ('anatomy of a man is a key to the anatomy of the ape').
Jorge Luis Borges positive
Cited for the paradox that great artists create their precursors; Žižek admits he doesn't always like Borges but values this specific insight.
René Descartes positive
Žižek defends Descartes against 'holists' like Al Gore, arguing Descartes is a 'big good guy' for establishing the dualism that Malebranche tried to solve.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for 'Wiederholungszwang' (compulsion to repeat) and 'death drive'; Žižek argues Hegel's view of sexuality is closer to Freud's than to the 'culturalization hypothesis'.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel negative
The target of the 'anti-philosophy' critique; accused of 'cheating' by pretending to deduce nature from concepts.
Immanuel Kant positive
Identified as marking the 'big break' or 'transcendental revolution' in modern European philosophy.
Güven Güzeldere positive
A Turkish behavioral scientist at Duke University; cited for empirical experiments with apes showing rational sexual selection vs. human irrational persistence.
Shares Lacan’s 'big distrust' of Nietzsche; mentions Alenka Zupancic’s book The Shortest Shadow as having converted him, but remains skeptical of Nietzsche’s relation to Wagner.
Thomas Aquinas negative
Žižek states he is 'totally anti-Aquinas,' viewing him as the 'great Aristotelizer' of Christianity in a negative sense.
Martin Luther negative
Mocked as an 'idiot' who betrayed the peasant rebellion and became antisemitic; used to illustrate 'illusory return to origins'.
Gioachino Rossini positive
Used as an example of 'pure composer of restoration' whose operas ideologically pretend the French Revolution didn't happen.
Mentioned as a precursor retroactively created by Kafka.
Transcript 35 turns
Slavoj Žižek
How to start with Hegel. It’s a problem. So please, maybe we will be a little bit more, all I can say is that I will try to proceed slowly, systematically, not any kind of general introduction, just to give you an idea of some fundamental Hegelian moves. Because the first thing to do of course is, if your knowledge of Hegel is the general one that you get from textbooks, you know, German Idealist, Absolute Idealism, he believed in a kind of a pan-logical view that you can out of the self-movement of a notion you can somehow develop, deduce the entire reality in the sense of absolute knowing, the end of history, all that stuff. Forget about it. Or if you have an idea that somehow the basic as it were matrix of the Hegelian movement, of the self-deployment of Hegelian dialectic is this infamous triad: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Forget about it. Incidentally, I hope you know that's the ABC. Hegel even never used, never used the terms. It's quite breathtaking how people don't take into account this. Hegel never used the term. It's I think, I'm not sure, that it's Karl Rosenkranz, one of the pupils of Hegel, who putatively once uses, uses these terms. So it's quite breathtaking when you take these extremely anti-Hegelian histories of philosophy like the popular one by Bertrand Russell where he automatically assumed thesis, antithesis, synthesis, you find nowhere this, simply nowhere this in Hegel. Also, the idea that Hegel somehow thought that history is over with him, that he comes at the end. It's how should I put it naively, it's empirically not true. For example, if you read closely his philosophy of nature again and again he emphasizes it is too early to say we don't know yet enough about that and so on. Even in the domain of history, for example, it's very interesting to read the most racist Hegel, although I claim it's much more ambiguous, the introduction to his philosophy of history where he deals with so-called geographic, geographic presuppositions of history. Okay, here you have Hegel, I admit it, at his worst Eurocentric because he deals with Black Africans only here as not history proper but geographic presuppositions of history. That's another story. But nonetheless, what is interesting here is that, for example, when he, and remind you this was written in 1810s, when he deals with mentions briefly Russia, Russian Empire, and United States. He says it's too early today, next 20th century will be the century of these two countries. We cannot develop theory now. So at least empirically he wasn't an idiot. No, when he made predictions they were usually good predictions, no. Incidentally, although Marxists are, Marxists are usually dismissed as a kind of, you know, fanatical dogmatics, sometimes they were incredibly, okay I wouldn't say intelligent, maybe just lucky. For example, as far as I know, I read this in an article of a how do you call it, futurolog, guys who deal with future in a scientific way more or less, if you can. He confesses that the only guy who already in the 19th century clearly predicted World War II, not I, was Friedrich Engels. In a letter in already in I think late 1870s or early 1880s when it became clear this tension because of German role wanted more colonies and so on, and then he said not only will probably there be somewhere in the beginning of next century a big European war, but probably Germany will find itself coined between two poles: Anglo-Saxon, French and Russian. It will lose the war and then a decade or two later it will start a new war. No, that's not so bad, no. Okay, but let's go on. Please have patience today. You can complain afterwards and we can move back to obscene stories about cinemas and what other obscenities I like to talk about, structure of toilets or whatever, no. Okay, we have to do it. Let's start. First, Hegel and history. You know what is the standard problem with Hegel. Probably you know this about Hegel and this is even usually I warn you I will consciously move at a very elementary level. If you Hegel is usually perceived as the one who asserted a kind of a universal historicist dialectical movement. Nothing is stable, everything is moving, changing, there is movement not only in the domain of empirical reality but also in the domain of ideas. Ideas develop, you start with being, you go to nothing, becoming, whatever. This kind of an idea of let's call it universal mobilization. And then some wise guys like to say one of the most stupid things for me in the history of thought is that but there is a contradiction in Hegel. How could he, I mean it's not only Friedrich Engels it's already some young Hegelians who started this stupidity, saying but isn't there a contradiction in Hegel? On the one hand dialectic everything moves, genesis, you know to understand a thing means to understand its role place in a global development. So to Hegel it's usually imputed, don't tell me wrong, this developmental evolutionary view that to understand a phenomenon is to understand its genesis. To understand what something is is to understand how this thing came to be. I mean of course it's totally the opposite. Marx is a true Hegelian when he says a statement which may appear teleological but it's deeply non-teleological. You know this quite surprising statement in that methodological introduction to Grundrisse manuscripts when Marx says the anatomy of a man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. That is to say you have first to when you are observing or trying to understand the development of a certain form, you first have to know the end result so that then retroactively backwards you can recognize, trace the elements which led to it. Now you will say this is clear teleology, we begin at the end and then only backwards we can analyze it. No, it's the exact contrary. Marx's point is that precisely because history is contingent, because new always reemerges emerges sorry ex nihilo. No matter how you look into the ape, if you accept okay we can play this ultra-deep ecological view why should man be more developed than ape but if we somehow accept this, no matter how you analyze apes you will not found there some elementary seeds so that you know there is no progress, there are radically contingent cuts. So this so again Hegel is definitely not a historicist. And this idea of some contradiction as they usually put it between dialectic method and Hegelian system. That's it's usually put in classical Marxism as those who criticize Hegel in this way as the contradiction between dialectical method and Hegelian system like method good, you analyze everything in its dynamics, system bad, Hegel that idiot who thought with his Prussian monarchy history was at an end, it didn't and so on. So we have to reject this, but how? Easy to say difficult to do of course. First, Hegel in a way was a historicist, but the main feature of the authentic historical thought proper is not what we may call mobilization, this motive of fluidification or historical relativization of all forms of life. The idea that you know everything is historically conditioned and so on and so on. Which is quite incidentally I also for reasons which will become clear later today I hope, totally oppose this so-called postmodern discursive historicism in the sense of you know in the sense precisely of anti-essentialism, in the sense of all forms of life are are are emerged contingently, symbolic constructs and so on and so on. I will try to develop later why I disagree with this. But again so it's not this general idea of evolutionary mobilization. Nothing is stable, everything moves and so on. I think that where our historical experience begins if I were to be asked what is historical experience at its zero level? It's I claim the experience of a certain impossibility. In the sense of after a true break, a true historical break you cannot return to the past. You cannot go back as if nothing happened. If you do, of course you can empirically, but if you do the same practice acquires a radically changed meaning. For example, this is a nice example from Adorno. He refers to Schoenberg, Arnold Schoenberg, Second Viennese School, atonal revolution in music. And his point, Adorno's, is that of course after this revolution took place of course we can and we do, we have many of these modern kitsch composers, you can go on composing in the traditional tonal way. Like who was doing this exemplarily, I don't know, mostly let's say in Russia somebody like Rachmaninov who consciously tried to stick to this but but Adorno's point is that this new tonal this new tonal music has lost its innocence. It is already mediated by the atonal break and thus functions already as its negation. It's no longer what it was before. What was before let's say an immediate authenticity of tonal music becomes now a kind of a fake kitschy nostalgic imitation. You get my point? It's no longer the thing itself, it's already mediated by the new thing that emerges. And I’m not saying this is always kitsch. There can be very interesting developments here. Not only this, I’m not saying we shouldn't return to the past, Hegel is much more refined here. Sometimes the other side of this thesis is its paradoxical opposite. It is that for Hegel basically the new reemerges emerges almost always in the guise of an illusion of repetition. All really new things emerge as a kind of illusory return to the origins. For example, the greatest revolution in Christianity, Martin Luther, not King but the idiot who was licking the ass of the princes, you know I never forgive him for forgive Luther King for you know when there was Thomas Müntzer the rebellion, the big peasant rebellion, he took sides of the rich guys and said kill them like dogs and so on and so on, no. Although there is an anecdote connected with Martin Luther King which also tells you what is wrong with this general historicism. In East Germany, that's a nice part of the history of ideas, and this here I hope I will be able to show you what is historicist arrogance, where historicism is false. In DDR, East Germany, maybe if some of you know German culture a little bit 20th century you know what happened. Being afraid of losing popularity and legitimacy starting from you know that already in the '70s some kind of economic stagnation of communist regime in Eastern Europe started. Basically till somewhere the Khrushchev era. Khrushchev is an interest it's easy to make fun of Nikita Khrushchev but there is some even nice truthful moment about him. If you read history of Soviet Union you can immediately get it. Khrushchev was basically the last one where you can say that the ruling nomenklatura somehow still believes, not that they are truly a democratic country blah blah nobody believed this, but that somehow progress is on their side. They believed that there is a genuine competition between them and the West and they have a chance of winning. You remember that famous Khrushchev's visit I think already late '50s to the United States where he said your grand your grandsons will be communists and so on. You know if Brezhnev were to say this everybody would just laugh. It was the but what I’m saying is that in this gradual process of losing legitimacy something very interesting as an ideological movement started to happen. They tried to gain supplementary legitimacy by reinterpreting and appropriating their own nationalist past. For example, it's very interesting how the darkest, harshest power in KGB already started to support this Euro-Asian extreme Russian religious Orthodox nationalists, you know, this idea all bad things come from the West. And here again you can see how relative history, how you can manipulate, because I really hate them here you can see the racism of many Western Marxists. You know they have this big problem to explain Marxism which started with such a nice theory global liberation, how could it got so screwed up that it ended with a total catastrophe of Stalinism. The standard answer, totally false I think, is Asiatic mode of production, Asiatic despotism. That the mistake was that the first revolution happened in Russia. Russia was too much part of the Asiatic world and so there the new socialist regime got as it were infused with a dose of Asiatic despotism because of the leading role of Soviet Union in the communist movement they infiltrated others blah blah blah. Totally stupidity, totally totally wrong. But what is interesting I experienced this when I visited Russia is that if you ask Russian nationalists they will tell you exactly the opposite story which I think has more it's closer to truth. That no, that if there is a historical model for Stalinism it's Russian modernizers it's the West. No wonder Stalin liked Peter the Great and those big Tsarist demonstrator sorry modernizers. No, if anything Stalin was the new Peter the Great. You know what Peter the Great is. Abolish Moscow, Petersburg, extremely brutal violent global mobilization imposed modernization. So but let's go on. So after in this period when they start to lose their legitimacy especially in German Democratic Republic they started to invent sorry to reclaim so they basically tried to appropriate the entire history of their part of Germany, eastern part, Prussia to cut a long story short. And it's how very nice how till late '50s or even mid-'60s Frederick the Great was dismissed as you know feudal bourgeois Prussian militarism. All of a sudden even Frederick the Great was rehabilitated as progressive bourgeois modernizer blah blah and so on, no. And of course the key element in this modernization in this re-appropriating the past was Martin Luther. All of a sudden he was big progressive son of our people and I remember seeing in the early '80s I think even also on our TV they did celebrating his I don't know I don't know what anniversary I don't know even of what of life, death probably death I don't know. They did a big like I think six or ten hours mini-series of Luther's life. Of course as communists they had somehow to justify the fact which I mentioned no that Luther turned against the most progressive movement at that point the peasant. Incidentally, Luther did the same with the Jews, no. First, he was totally pro-Jewish claiming that Jews were right to stick to their religion because Catholicism was you know the horror of Babylon and so on which I think today Rome is the horror of Babylon and God it, but that's another story. What I want to say is that so so he thought Jews were right. But his idea was but now that I returned Christianity to its origins Jews should join us, no, should convert. They didn't so he became even more ferociously antisemitic, no. Okay, but let's go on. So they had the problem to account for this. How to rehabilitate him as a truly progressive but nonetheless taking into account his his opposition to to this peasant rebellion. So they have in one installment of this series they have an encounter of Thomas Müntzer, you know the main and incidentally he is very interesting if you deal with theology he's not was not just a great revolutionary leader. Some German friends are telling me Thomas Müntzer is well worth reading as a theological writer. He has a wonderful reading of the Bible as an allegory to be used for ongoing political struggle and so on and so on. So they talk and it's breathtaking naivety historicist. Müntzer said fuck you but you said original Christianity return but that's what we do class blah blah and Luther answers him with some kind of almost a kind of a Marxist avant la lettre where you he tells Müntzer you are right but you want already a further popular worker's revolution. But the forces of production are not yet enough developed for that. We first need a bourgeois revolution with personal freedom property and only after a couple of hundred of years this will develop it will be possible you know this is the impossible position like this is what Hegel strictly prohibits. Hegel's absolute knowledge it's not this, it's precisely this closure when it's clear that you are totally caught in your time, that you cannot there is no way how should I put it to step on your shoulder and and how should I put it to see yourself objectively as what you are. Which is why I think Hegel is much more materialist and in this sense totally but we will come to this later totally incompatible with the standard later orthodox Stalinist historical dialectical materialism where what's the standard position of dialectical historical materialism? It's not an engaged position, it's based on objective knowledge. I think if you can really understand what Stalin was about you should read you get it everywhere on on the internet his big haha philosophical writing on dialectical and historical materialism. Where he explains why Marxist Marxist theories joined the workers and contributed to workers struggle. He said like this, he said that at the end of 19th century the working class was still a minority in Russia. But Marxist scientists saw that although farmers and others were a majority workers had a great future, they saw the future development. They saw which way the history is running so they decided to join the winning side as it were. This is totally anti-authentic Marxist. This idea that first you objectively establish the historical tendency towards end of capitalism working class revolution and then you knowing the tendency of history posit yourself, you as a particular historical agent as an instrument of realizing this historical necessity. This is what Hegel totally prohibits. That's what Hegel aims at with his well-known usually interpreted as conservative saying that you know at the end of his introduction to philosophy of right that the owl of Minerva only takes off in the dusk and so on that this is precisely the non-necessary, the open contingent Hegel. For Hegel an act is always blind. You do something you cannot include into it you cannot include into the act as it were its own result. Not and now we come to the crucial point not because history is too complex and we don't know what but it's not out there that the situation is too complex it's here, you cannot you know it's the problem of self-reference as it were you cannot include yourself into the picture. That's why again you can only discover a necessity retroactively. And this as I will try to show today this is also it's absolutely crucial how to read Hegel's historical necessity. It's always a retroactive necessity. It's not that history is some process which appears to us participants as contingent but there is some kind of a reason in history, absolute hidden subject who very precisely knows it's written in advance what is history and pulls the strings. No, it necessity emerges in a retroactive way. There are how should I put it once things happen they retroactively become necessary. In many of my books especially in this obscenity that you have there I think I quote this wonderful passage from my favorite rational choice theoretician who is really intelligent guy Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Who to establish this kind of a strange link between necessity and contingency quotes a wonderful comment in Le Monde. Okay, years ago there were elections in France it looks for some time that Edouard Balladur who was prime minister under Chirac will maybe blah blah. Okay. So Le Monde wrote something wonderful. It wrote if, if Monsieur Balladur will win the next preliminary election then his victory will be necessary. You know like if something happens but it's contingent if it happens or not, then retroactively the link is established it becomes necessary. Okay, how does this work? We will go on. Let me just go back to that point. So again the zero level of of historicity is this basic division this impossibility. We experience history when we all of a sudden discover that something is no longer possible. The way we were doing thing. Of course it's possible but it becomes a fake in a way. You know okay if you like history of music this would be a wonderful example. Rossini, Rossini is clear regression. Rossini you know that Giacomo Rossini, The Barber of Seville. You know that he was active before and after with boring serious operas but he is well known from his comic operas all written more or less in the era of He was the pure composer of restoration. The whole ideological point of his operas is let's pretend that French Revolution didn't happen. Let's pretend that we still live in the ancien régime. You can detect this clearly if you compare his Barber of Seville with the other figure of this Mozart's. Mozart's Figaro piece is clearly announcing revolution. This one is this pure nostalgia. In this sense of course in this sense it's a fake. Which is why we should be very attentive when philosophers pretend to return. Especially in modern European philosophy, of course everybody knows the big break is Kant, Kant's transcendental revolution. And again and again philosophers try to play the game of let's write as if Kant didn't exist. For example, Deleuze says somewhere this openly. He says my ultimate goal is to to return to the age of Leibniz, Spinoza and so on. To write philosophy to do philosophy in this pre-Kantian systematic way as if Kant didn't exist. Of course it is easy to show in a close analysis that this cannot be done. That that now I come back to this point of Luther that precisely when you do this it can either be kitschy nostalgia or it can announce an even more radical revolution. And this would be the nicest point of Hegelian theory of history that usually the new emerges precisely because you cannot return to the past. When you pretend to return to the past you either are simply an irrelevant historically irrelevant nostalgic kitsch or you really do something radically new. For example, again Luther, as we all know he didn't perceive himself as a revolutionary but on the contrary returning to the original blah blah and he achieved what is arguably the most radical revolution in the history of Christianity. The same goes for example this is a nice example of what is historicity, Pascal. This is why Alain Badiou, Badiou who will torture you in the afternoon, likes Pascal. He wrote I think somewhere in his being and event a very nice analysis of Pascal where he says there was in Pascal's era already this modernity, Galilean science and so on all that. Liberals, early rationalists simply endorsed modernity. Pascal asked a totally different question. His question was how can one be modern while still remain an orthodox Christian? And precisely because he insisted on this paradoxical impossible task, precisely because he didn't simply accept modernity he is much more read today he saw much more. Not only in the sense of he had a better understanding of of modernity he even saw some limits of modernity and so on and so on. It's the same if you know in the history of cinema, this is historicity. You remember when sound was introduced. It is absolutely clear that it's those who were traumatized by sound who resisted to it that got immediately much deeper intuition into what does sound mean in cinema. For example, this is why I love the early Chaplin, sorry the early sound Charlie Chaplin movies. You know that he was totally traumatized by sound and you know how you can exactly isolate in four stages, three or four, the his gradual acceptance of sound. His first formally sound film in the sense that it had a soundtrack was *City Lights*. There it's only music and environmental sounds, you know a car driving, pop a ball falling down, but all the dialogues are mute and so on, he resists sound. Then you get *Modern Times*, a first compromise with speech. You hear speech but if you saw the movie you remember all the speech you hear there is a speech from the media within the narrative. Like you hear someone talking on the radio, you hear someone singing from a from a from a seventy-eight or whatever disc. You don't hear no immediate sounds. The first full sound film in the sense that actors are talking is his *Great Dictator*. But it's worth seeing because there you have a kind of implicit meta-theory of sound. Where you know the movie, I mean it's my God it's one of the absolute movies I think. [Someone in audience: "But doesn't he sing in the end of *Modern Times*?"] Sorry? [Audience member repeated: "He sings in the end of *Modern Times*."] Does he sing? [Audience: "Yes, he sings when he dances in the cabaret."] Okay, the beginning you got me here. You know I talk about movies I don't see them. Okay, okay. But I was right I thought percent that before that he doesn't. [Audience: "He sings and dances in the end in the cabaret. But his voice you hear..."] I'm almost positive it's his voice. Maybe, you got me here. Okay. What happens in did you notice how the figure of the tramp is split into two played by two in in in *The Great Dictator*. You have the poor Jewish barber who is although he talks he is basically the old silent figure, the old tramp and then you have the bad guy played also by Chaplin Hynkel, the Dictator. And it's clear that the opposition here is between the good tramp, the old Chaplin and the new evil figure. Because Hynkel is already introduced as the embodiment of his voice. I think even maybe the first time I'm not sure you see Hynkel when the tramp is taking his girlfriend played by his wife of course Paulette Goddard on on a stroll in in the ghetto and all of a sudden from loudspeakers you hear this terrible obscene voice of Hynkel, Hitler of the Dictator shouting. And it's clear that the sound is precisely and then you see Hitler's Hynkel's face but a kind of a totally distorted face as if a face distorted by sound. It's not in the case of Dictator Hynkel it's not the sound the voice which is emitted by the body it's in the way the body which is controlled or just materializes the sound. And if you read the film in this way it's not such a simple film as it is sometimes dismissed you encounter an incredible amount of wonderful ambiguities. For example, for example how perversely Hynkel relates Hynkel, Hitler figure relates to speech. Remember there are some wonderful scenes, one is where Hynkel dictates his secretary. And Chaplin plays wonderfully on a total gap non-correspondence between his dictation and what happens. For example, once he says three-four words and the secretary types for one minute. Then he goes on for two minutes and the secretary does tat-ta two sounds and then and then as if playing with your spectator the shift expectations the Hynkel figure said oh something is wrong looks at what the girl typed and said oh-oh okay you did it right and so on. Or you remember when Hynkel has a speech, it's a wonderful speech total obscenity of a speech. You don't understand anything only from time to time you identify some totally vulgar common words like Wiener Schnitzel, Apfelstrudel, or things like that and so on. So what what he was aware is that something very deep is that human voice is never simply a property of us as a body. That there is always a kind of a ventriloquist aspect to it. That voice is potentially what Lacan calls what Lacan calls the object a. That how should I put it partial organ within you which controls you a potentially threat destabilizing a foreign foreign intruder who. And this is how he plays with voice. It's a wonderful scene in that beginning when we first hear Hynkel's voice when he is walking with the girl and then a Nazi guy starts to chase them. And then how the whole scene is a kind of a ballet dominated by Hitler's voice, you know when Hitler goes slowly with the voice they walk slow. So this idea of a voice not as a spontaneous realistic expression that's what Chaplin saw already. And it's interesting how other intelligent directors also saw like one of the great early sound movies was Fritz Lang's *Testament of Dr. Mabuse*. Where the topic is exactly the same, Mabuse the arch-criminal is known as a voice. The problem of the entire film is exactly the same as Hitchcock's *Psycho* decades later. You have a free-floating voice to try to find a body for this voice. And this is basically as Michel Chion, a very good theorist elaborated the problem of Hitchcock's *Psycho* is the problem of the voice, mother's voice floating around. And the problem is whose voice is this to find the body to this voice. So you see my point, my point is that Chaplin's idea is very Freudian one naively Freudian that the sound sorry silent movie universe was a kind of oral-anal, pre-sexual, pre-superego flat universe of like cartoons of undead people where life goes on indefinitely, you know. It's a little bit like in cartoons, in all those Mack Sennett comedies, you know you can be hit you can be run over you stand up it always goes on, there is no death, there is no sexuality basically. Although there are and I love them it's maybe my racism and so on but there are such stupid if there is sexuality it's usually reduced to some extremely primitive oral level. For example, I remember this were times when this was still possible in Hollywood, a scene where a lady is taking a bath and of course the black guy the cliché was they are horny all the time who is carrying a big big block of ice takes it up to an apartment and the door is a little bit open sees the lady there naked in the bath and he does [makes bubbling sound] and of course all the ice melts instantly and so on. But you know this is not sexuality, this is more a primitive oral-anal logic logic and again how then it's the. So the important message is
How to start with Hegel. It’s a problem. So please, maybe we will be a little bit more, all I can say is that I will try to proceed slowly, systematically, not any kind of general introduction, just to give you an idea of some fundamental Hegelian moves. Because the first thing to do of course is, if your knowledge of Hegel is the general one that you get from textbooks, you know, German Idealist, Absolute Idealism, he believed in a kind of a pan-logical view that you can out of the self-movement of a notion you can somehow develop, deduce the entire reality in the sense of absolute knowing, the end of history, all that stuff. Forget about it. Or if you have an idea that somehow the basic as it were matrix of the Hegelian movement, of the self-deployment of Hegelian dialectic is this infamous triad: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Forget about it. Incidentally, I hope you know that's the ABC. Hegel even never used, never used the terms. It's quite breathtaking how people don't take into account this. Hegel never used the term. It's I think, I'm not sure, that it's Karl Rosenkranz, one of the pupils of Hegel, who putatively once uses, uses these terms. So it's quite breathtaking when you take these extremely anti-Hegelian histories of philosophy like the popular one by Bertrand Russell where he automatically assumed thesis, antithesis, synthesis, you find nowhere this, simply nowhere this in Hegel. Also, the idea that Hegel somehow thought that history is over with him, that he comes at the end. It's how should I put it naively, it's empirically not true. For example, if you read closely his philosophy of nature again and again he emphasizes it is too early to say we don't know yet enough about that and so on. Even in the domain of history, for example, it's very interesting to read the most racist Hegel, although I claim it's much more ambiguous, the introduction to his philosophy of history where he deals with so-called geographic, geographic presuppositions of history. Okay, here you have Hegel, I admit it, at his worst Eurocentric because he deals with Black Africans only here as not history proper but geographic presuppositions of history. That's another story. But nonetheless, what is interesting here is that, for example, when he, and remind you this was written in 1810s, when he deals with mentions briefly Russia, Russian Empire, and United States. He says it's too early today, next 20th century will be the century of these two countries. We cannot develop theory now. So at least empirically he wasn't an idiot. No, when he made predictions they were usually good predictions, no. Incidentally, although Marxists are, Marxists are usually dismissed as a kind of, you know, fanatical dogmatics, sometimes they were incredibly, okay I wouldn't say intelligent, maybe just lucky. For example, as far as I know, I read this in an article of a how do you call it, futurolog, guys who deal with future in a scientific way more or less, if you can. He confesses that the only guy who already in the 19th century clearly predicted World War II, not I, was Friedrich Engels. In a letter in already in I think late 1870s or early 1880s when it became clear this tension because of German role wanted more colonies and so on, and then he said not only will probably there be somewhere in the beginning of next century a big European war, but probably Germany will find itself coined between two poles: Anglo-Saxon, French and Russian. It will lose the war and then a decade or two later it will start a new war. No, that's not so bad, no. Okay, but let's go on. Please have patience today. You can complain afterwards and we can move back to obscene stories about cinemas and what other obscenities I like to talk about, structure of toilets or whatever, no. Okay, we have to do it. Let's start. First, Hegel and history. You know what is the standard problem with Hegel. Probably you know this about Hegel and this is even usually I warn you I will consciously move at a very elementary level. If you Hegel is usually perceived as the one who asserted a kind of a universal historicist dialectical movement. Nothing is stable, everything is moving, changing, there is movement not only in the domain of empirical reality but also in the domain of ideas. Ideas develop, you start with being, you go to nothing, becoming, whatever. This kind of an idea of let's call it universal mobilization. And then some wise guys like to say one of the most stupid things for me in the history of thought is that but there is a contradiction in Hegel. How could he, I mean it's not only Friedrich Engels it's already some young Hegelians who started this stupidity, saying but isn't there a contradiction in Hegel? On the one hand dialectic everything moves, genesis, you know to understand a thing means to understand its role place in a global development. So to Hegel it's usually imputed, don't tell me wrong, this developmental evolutionary view that to understand a phenomenon is to understand its genesis. To understand what something is is to understand how this thing came to be. I mean of course it's totally the opposite. Marx is a true Hegelian when he says a statement which may appear teleological but it's deeply non-teleological. You know this quite surprising statement in that methodological introduction to Grundrisse manuscripts when Marx says the anatomy of a man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. That is to say you have first to when you are observing or trying to understand the development of a certain form, you first have to know the end result so that then retroactively backwards you can recognize, trace the elements which led to it. Now you will say this is clear teleology, we begin at the end and then only backwards we can analyze it. No, it's the exact contrary. Marx's point is that precisely because history is contingent, because new always reemerges emerges sorry ex nihilo. No matter how you look into the ape, if you accept okay we can play this ultra-deep ecological view why should man be more developed than ape but if we somehow accept this, no matter how you analyze apes you will not found there some elementary seeds so that you know there is no progress, there are radically contingent cuts. So this so again Hegel is definitely not a historicist. And this idea of some contradiction as they usually put it between dialectic method and Hegelian system. That's it's usually put in classical Marxism as those who criticize Hegel in this way as the contradiction between dialectical method and Hegelian system like method good, you analyze everything in its dynamics, system bad, Hegel that idiot who thought with his Prussian monarchy history was at an end, it didn't and so on. So we have to reject this, but how? Easy to say difficult to do of course. First, Hegel in a way was a historicist, but the main feature of the authentic historical thought proper is not what we may call mobilization, this motive of fluidification or historical relativization of all forms of life. The idea that you know everything is historically conditioned and so on and so on. Which is quite incidentally I also for reasons which will become clear later today I hope, totally oppose this so-called postmodern discursive historicism in the sense of you know in the sense precisely of anti-essentialism, in the sense of all forms of life are are are emerged contingently, symbolic constructs and so on and so on. I will try to develop later why I disagree with this. But again so it's not this general idea of evolutionary mobilization. Nothing is stable, everything moves and so on. I think that where our historical experience begins if I were to be asked what is historical experience at its zero level? It's I claim the experience of a certain impossibility. In the sense of after a true break, a true historical break you cannot return to the past. You cannot go back as if nothing happened. If you do, of course you can empirically, but if you do the same practice acquires a radically changed meaning. For example, this is a nice example from Adorno. He refers to Schoenberg, Arnold Schoenberg, Second Viennese School, atonal revolution in music. And his point, Adorno's, is that of course after this revolution took place of course we can and we do, we have many of these modern kitsch composers, you can go on composing in the traditional tonal way. Like who was doing this exemplarily, I don't know, mostly let's say in Russia somebody like Rachmaninov who consciously tried to stick to this but but Adorno's point is that this new tonal this new tonal music has lost its innocence. It is already mediated by the atonal break and thus functions already as its negation. It's no longer what it was before. What was before let's say an immediate authenticity of tonal music becomes now a kind of a fake kitschy nostalgic imitation. You get my point? It's no longer the thing itself, it's already mediated by the new thing that emerges. And I’m not saying this is always kitsch. There can be very interesting developments here. Not only this, I’m not saying we shouldn't return to the past, Hegel is much more refined here. Sometimes the other side of this thesis is its paradoxical opposite. It is that for Hegel basically the new reemerges emerges almost always in the guise of an illusion of repetition. All really new things emerge as a kind of illusory return to the origins. For example, the greatest revolution in Christianity, Martin Luther, not King but the idiot who was licking the ass of the princes, you know I never forgive him for forgive Luther King for you know when there was Thomas Müntzer the rebellion, the big peasant rebellion, he took sides of the rich guys and said kill them like dogs and so on and so on, no. Although there is an anecdote connected with Martin Luther King which also tells you what is wrong with this general historicism. In East Germany, that's a nice part of the history of ideas, and this here I hope I will be able to show you what is historicist arrogance, where historicism is false. In DDR, East Germany, maybe if some of you know German culture a little bit 20th century you know what happened. Being afraid of losing popularity and legitimacy starting from you know that already in the '70s some kind of economic stagnation of communist regime in Eastern Europe started. Basically till somewhere the Khrushchev era. Khrushchev is an interest it's easy to make fun of Nikita Khrushchev but there is some even nice truthful moment about him. If you read history of Soviet Union you can immediately get it. Khrushchev was basically the last one where you can say that the ruling nomenklatura somehow still believes, not that they are truly a democratic country blah blah nobody believed this, but that somehow progress is on their side. They believed that there is a genuine competition between them and the West and they have a chance of winning. You remember that famous Khrushchev's visit I think already late '50s to the United States where he said your grand your grandsons will be communists and so on. You know if Brezhnev were to say this everybody would just laugh. It was the but what I’m saying is that in this gradual process of losing legitimacy something very interesting as an ideological movement started to happen. They tried to gain supplementary legitimacy by reinterpreting and appropriating their own nationalist past. For example, it's very interesting how the darkest, harshest power in KGB already started to support this Euro-Asian extreme Russian religious Orthodox nationalists, you know, this idea all bad things come from the West. And here again you can see how relative history, how you can manipulate, because I really hate them here you can see the racism of many Western Marxists. You know they have this big problem to explain Marxism which started with such a nice theory global liberation, how could it got so screwed up that it ended with a total catastrophe of Stalinism. The standard answer, totally false I think, is Asiatic mode of production, Asiatic despotism. That the mistake was that the first revolution happened in Russia. Russia was too much part of the Asiatic world and so there the new socialist regime got as it were infused with a dose of Asiatic despotism because of the leading role of Soviet Union in the communist movement they infiltrated others blah blah blah. Totally stupidity, totally totally wrong. But what is interesting I experienced this when I visited Russia is that if you ask Russian nationalists they will tell you exactly the opposite story which I think has more it's closer to truth. That no, that if there is a historical model for Stalinism it's Russian modernizers it's the West. No wonder Stalin liked Peter the Great and those big Tsarist demonstrator sorry modernizers. No, if anything Stalin was the new Peter the Great. You know what Peter the Great is. Abolish Moscow, Petersburg, extremely brutal violent global mobilization imposed modernization. So but let's go on. So after in this period when they start to lose their legitimacy especially in German Democratic Republic they started to invent sorry to reclaim so they basically tried to appropriate the entire history of their part of Germany, eastern part, Prussia to cut a long story short. And it's how very nice how till late '50s or even mid-'60s Frederick the Great was dismissed as you know feudal bourgeois Prussian militarism. All of a sudden even Frederick the Great was rehabilitated as progressive bourgeois modernizer blah blah and so on, no. And of course the key element in this modernization in this re-appropriating the past was Martin Luther. All of a sudden he was big progressive son of our people and I remember seeing in the early '80s I think even also on our TV they did celebrating his I don't know I don't know what anniversary I don't know even of what of life, death probably death I don't know. They did a big like I think six or ten hours mini-series of Luther's life. Of course as communists they had somehow to justify the fact which I mentioned no that Luther turned against the most progressive movement at that point the peasant. Incidentally, Luther did the same with the Jews, no. First, he was totally pro-Jewish claiming that Jews were right to stick to their religion because Catholicism was you know the horror of Babylon and so on which I think today Rome is the horror of Babylon and God it, but that's another story. What I want to say is that so so he thought Jews were right. But his idea was but now that I returned Christianity to its origins Jews should join us, no, should convert. They didn't so he became even more ferociously antisemitic, no. Okay, but let's go on. So they had the problem to account for this. How to rehabilitate him as a truly progressive but nonetheless taking into account his his opposition to to this peasant rebellion. So they have in one installment of this series they have an encounter of Thomas Müntzer, you know the main and incidentally he is very interesting if you deal with theology he's not was not just a great revolutionary leader. Some German friends are telling me Thomas Müntzer is well worth reading as a theological writer. He has a wonderful reading of the Bible as an allegory to be used for ongoing political struggle and so on and so on. So they talk and it's breathtaking naivety historicist. Müntzer said fuck you but you said original Christianity return but that's what we do class blah blah and Luther answers him with some kind of almost a kind of a Marxist avant la lettre where you he tells Müntzer you are right but you want already a further popular worker's revolution. But the forces of production are not yet enough developed for that. We first need a bourgeois revolution with personal freedom property and only after a couple of hundred of years this will develop it will be possible you know this is the impossible position like this is what Hegel strictly prohibits. Hegel's absolute knowledge it's not this, it's precisely this closure when it's clear that you are totally caught in your time, that you cannot there is no way how should I put it to step on your shoulder and and how should I put it to see yourself objectively as what you are. Which is why I think Hegel is much more materialist and in this sense totally but we will come to this later totally incompatible with the standard later orthodox Stalinist historical dialectical materialism where what's the standard position of dialectical historical materialism? It's not an engaged position, it's based on objective knowledge. I think if you can really understand what Stalin was about you should read you get it everywhere on on the internet his big haha philosophical writing on dialectical and historical materialism. Where he explains why Marxist Marxist theories joined the workers and contributed to workers struggle. He said like this, he said that at the end of 19th century the working class was still a minority in Russia. But Marxist scientists saw that although farmers and others were a majority workers had a great future, they saw the future development. They saw which way the history is running so they decided to join the winning side as it were. This is totally anti-authentic Marxist. This idea that first you objectively establish the historical tendency towards end of capitalism working class revolution and then you knowing the tendency of history posit yourself, you as a particular historical agent as an instrument of realizing this historical necessity. This is what Hegel totally prohibits. That's what Hegel aims at with his well-known usually interpreted as conservative saying that you know at the end of his introduction to philosophy of right that the owl of Minerva only takes off in the dusk and so on that this is precisely the non-necessary, the open contingent Hegel. For Hegel an act is always blind. You do something you cannot include into it you cannot include into the act as it were its own result. Not and now we come to the crucial point not because history is too complex and we don't know what but it's not out there that the situation is too complex it's here, you cannot you know it's the problem of self-reference as it were you cannot include yourself into the picture. That's why again you can only discover a necessity retroactively. And this as I will try to show today this is also it's absolutely crucial how to read Hegel's historical necessity. It's always a retroactive necessity. It's not that history is some process which appears to us participants as contingent but there is some kind of a reason in history, absolute hidden subject who very precisely knows it's written in advance what is history and pulls the strings. No, it necessity emerges in a retroactive way. There are how should I put it once things happen they retroactively become necessary. In many of my books especially in this obscenity that you have there I think I quote this wonderful passage from my favorite rational choice theoretician who is really intelligent guy Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Who to establish this kind of a strange link between necessity and contingency quotes a wonderful comment in Le Monde. Okay, years ago there were elections in France it looks for some time that Edouard Balladur who was prime minister under Chirac will maybe blah blah. Okay. So Le Monde wrote something wonderful. It wrote if, if Monsieur Balladur will win the next preliminary election then his victory will be necessary. You know like if something happens but it's contingent if it happens or not, then retroactively the link is established it becomes necessary. Okay, how does this work? We will go on. Let me just go back to that point. So again the zero level of of historicity is this basic division this impossibility. We experience history when we all of a sudden discover that something is no longer possible. The way we were doing thing. Of course it's possible but it becomes a fake in a way. You know okay if you like history of music this would be a wonderful example. Rossini, Rossini is clear regression. Rossini you know that Giacomo Rossini, The Barber of Seville. You know that he was active before and after with boring serious operas but he is well known from his comic operas all written more or less in the era of He was the pure composer of restoration. The whole ideological point of his operas is let's pretend that French Revolution didn't happen. Let's pretend that we still live in the ancien régime. You can detect this clearly if you compare his Barber of Seville with the other figure of this Mozart's. Mozart's Figaro piece is clearly announcing revolution. This one is this pure nostalgia. In this sense of course in this sense it's a fake. Which is why we should be very attentive when philosophers pretend to return. Especially in modern European philosophy, of course everybody knows the big break is Kant, Kant's transcendental revolution. And again and again philosophers try to play the game of let's write as if Kant didn't exist. For example, Deleuze says somewhere this openly. He says my ultimate goal is to to return to the age of Leibniz, Spinoza and so on. To write philosophy to do philosophy in this pre-Kantian systematic way as if Kant didn't exist. Of course it is easy to show in a close analysis that this cannot be done. That that now I come back to this point of Luther that precisely when you do this it can either be kitschy nostalgia or it can announce an even more radical revolution. And this would be the nicest point of Hegelian theory of history that usually the new emerges precisely because you cannot return to the past. When you pretend to return to the past you either are simply an irrelevant historically irrelevant nostalgic kitsch or you really do something radically new. For example, again Luther, as we all know he didn't perceive himself as a revolutionary but on the contrary returning to the original blah blah and he achieved what is arguably the most radical revolution in the history of Christianity. The same goes for example this is a nice example of what is historicity, Pascal. This is why Alain Badiou, Badiou who will torture you in the afternoon, likes Pascal. He wrote I think somewhere in his being and event a very nice analysis of Pascal where he says there was in Pascal's era already this modernity, Galilean science and so on all that. Liberals, early rationalists simply endorsed modernity. Pascal asked a totally different question. His question was how can one be modern while still remain an orthodox Christian? And precisely because he insisted on this paradoxical impossible task, precisely because he didn't simply accept modernity he is much more read today he saw much more. Not only in the sense of he had a better understanding of of modernity he even saw some limits of modernity and so on and so on. It's the same if you know in the history of cinema, this is historicity. You remember when sound was introduced. It is absolutely clear that it's those who were traumatized by sound who resisted to it that got immediately much deeper intuition into what does sound mean in cinema. For example, this is why I love the early Chaplin, sorry the early sound Charlie Chaplin movies. You know that he was totally traumatized by sound and you know how you can exactly isolate in four stages, three or four, the his gradual acceptance of sound. His first formally sound film in the sense that it had a soundtrack was *City Lights*. There it's only music and environmental sounds, you know a car driving, pop a ball falling down, but all the dialogues are mute and so on, he resists sound. Then you get *Modern Times*, a first compromise with speech. You hear speech but if you saw the movie you remember all the speech you hear there is a speech from the media within the narrative. Like you hear someone talking on the radio, you hear someone singing from a from a from a seventy-eight or whatever disc. You don't hear no immediate sounds. The first full sound film in the sense that actors are talking is his *Great Dictator*. But it's worth seeing because there you have a kind of implicit meta-theory of sound. Where you know the movie, I mean it's my God it's one of the absolute movies I think. [Someone in audience: "But doesn't he sing in the end of *Modern Times*?"] Sorry? [Audience member repeated: "He sings in the end of *Modern Times*."] Does he sing? [Audience: "Yes, he sings when he dances in the cabaret."] Okay, the beginning you got me here. You know I talk about movies I don't see them. Okay, okay. But I was right I thought percent that before that he doesn't. [Audience: "He sings and dances in the end in the cabaret. But his voice you hear..."] I'm almost positive it's his voice. Maybe, you got me here. Okay. What happens in did you notice how the figure of the tramp is split into two played by two in in in *The Great Dictator*. You have the poor Jewish barber who is although he talks he is basically the old silent figure, the old tramp and then you have the bad guy played also by Chaplin Hynkel, the Dictator. And it's clear that the opposition here is between the good tramp, the old Chaplin and the new evil figure. Because Hynkel is already introduced as the embodiment of his voice. I think even maybe the first time I'm not sure you see Hynkel when the tramp is taking his girlfriend played by his wife of course Paulette Goddard on on a stroll in in the ghetto and all of a sudden from loudspeakers you hear this terrible obscene voice of Hynkel, Hitler of the Dictator shouting. And it's clear that the sound is precisely and then you see Hitler's Hynkel's face but a kind of a totally distorted face as if a face distorted by sound. It's not in the case of Dictator Hynkel it's not the sound the voice which is emitted by the body it's in the way the body which is controlled or just materializes the sound. And if you read the film in this way it's not such a simple film as it is sometimes dismissed you encounter an incredible amount of wonderful ambiguities. For example, for example how perversely Hynkel relates Hynkel, Hitler figure relates to speech. Remember there are some wonderful scenes, one is where Hynkel dictates his secretary. And Chaplin plays wonderfully on a total gap non-correspondence between his dictation and what happens. For example, once he says three-four words and the secretary types for one minute. Then he goes on for two minutes and the secretary does tat-ta two sounds and then and then as if playing with your spectator the shift expectations the Hynkel figure said oh something is wrong looks at what the girl typed and said oh-oh okay you did it right and so on. Or you remember when Hynkel has a speech, it's a wonderful speech total obscenity of a speech. You don't understand anything only from time to time you identify some totally vulgar common words like Wiener Schnitzel, Apfelstrudel, or things like that and so on. So what what he was aware is that something very deep is that human voice is never simply a property of us as a body. That there is always a kind of a ventriloquist aspect to it. That voice is potentially what Lacan calls what Lacan calls the object a. That how should I put it partial organ within you which controls you a potentially threat destabilizing a foreign foreign intruder who. And this is how he plays with voice. It's a wonderful scene in that beginning when we first hear Hynkel's voice when he is walking with the girl and then a Nazi guy starts to chase them. And then how the whole scene is a kind of a ballet dominated by Hitler's voice, you know when Hitler goes slowly with the voice they walk slow. So this idea of a voice not as a spontaneous realistic expression that's what Chaplin saw already. And it's interesting how other intelligent directors also saw like one of the great early sound movies was Fritz Lang's *Testament of Dr. Mabuse*. Where the topic is exactly the same, Mabuse the arch-criminal is known as a voice. The problem of the entire film is exactly the same as Hitchcock's *Psycho* decades later. You have a free-floating voice to try to find a body for this voice. And this is basically as Michel Chion, a very good theorist elaborated the problem of Hitchcock's *Psycho* is the problem of the voice, mother's voice floating around. And the problem is whose voice is this to find the body to this voice. So you see my point, my point is that Chaplin's idea is very Freudian one naively Freudian that the sound sorry silent movie universe was a kind of oral-anal, pre-sexual, pre-superego flat universe of like cartoons of undead people where life goes on indefinitely, you know. It's a little bit like in cartoons, in all those Mack Sennett comedies, you know you can be hit you can be run over you stand up it always goes on, there is no death, there is no sexuality basically. Although there are and I love them it's maybe my racism and so on but there are such stupid if there is sexuality it's usually reduced to some extremely primitive oral level. For example, I remember this were times when this was still possible in Hollywood, a scene where a lady is taking a bath and of course the black guy the cliché was they are horny all the time who is carrying a big big block of ice takes it up to an apartment and the door is a little bit open sees the lady there naked in the bath and he does [makes bubbling sound] and of course all the ice melts instantly and so on. But you know this is not sexuality, this is more a primitive oral-anal logic logic and again how then it's the. So the important message is
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this
this
Slavoj Žižek
one is that what sound introduces is not more natural, that the basic impact of sound on cinema was not naturalization. It was not before there are just silent
one is that what sound introduces is not more natural, that the basic impact of sound on cinema was not naturalization. It was not before there are just silent
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images now we can see real people acting and so on. No, sound the voice, speech especially, was from the beginning
images now we can see real people acting and so on. No, sound the voice, speech especially, was from the beginning
Slavoj Žižek
this sound talk searching for a body, something haunting you and so on and so on. And this is basically what Lacan is saying for example when he talks about the when he talks about voice as the object small a. [Audience member: "Yes. I don't want to drag you even further from Hegel but is that the issue in *Sunset Boulevard*?"] In *Sunset Boulevard*? You can say yes, you can say that although there is another Billy Wilder, we don't have time to. I would love to go which goes even much more into this dark consequences of this old young split. Did you see his later movie, total failure, *Fedora*? I know it's a totally strange movie about an actress who has appears young, to be young, and everybody thinks she is doing nice plastic operations but at the end you learn that she is really an old totally disfigured lady and that she simply replaced herself by her daughter. And it's such a totally pessimistic totally it's the dark. [Audience: "Did you say it was a box office failure? But does it have any philosophical interest like what you just mentioned?"] Not even, no it didn't even arouse great attention at this level, at this level. [Audience: "Just a curiosity."] No, but I think it should be. I think it, but you know we cinema theorists this is our favorite sport to discover to focus on a failure and then to claim oh but this is the true masterpiece. Like I even once planned with Fred Jameson to do a whole book on Hitchcock's failures. Playing the game of choose a Hitchcock movie which was obviously a failure and prove it's the true Hitchcock. For example, in France there was a whole school in early '50s where the candidate for this failure which is really the masterpiece was a rather embarrassing Australian melodrama did you see it, *Under Capricorn*? You see you didn't don't even know it from I think '52, '53. Totally ridiculous story of Ingrid Bergman living with an ex-convict there, sub-melodrama and so on. There was this school in France this is the true Hitchcock. Fred Jameson's choice is is but I think there it is even a good movie is the one with Marlene Dietrich, *Stage Fright*. You know it's a movie which is famous for a false Hitchcock violates a a rule there you know the the flashback. The rule is that if you show a flashback it should be true. That you cannot lie at the level of flashback. Hitchcock lies you discover at the end. Because at the beginning the hero encounters a girl tells her what is happening at the end we discover not just tells her we see no. Okay, my choice would have been and I still think it's an extraordinary movie is the lowest of the low considered Hitchcock's worst movie, *Topaz*. You know that anti-communist movie Cuba and so on. Okay, but we are getting lost now I admit it. So I what I wanted to tell you is this where we experience a historical break at its purest. With this impossibility and how precisely how should I put it how because of this precisely conservatives who want to stick to the old usually see more, see the uncanny. For example here it was those who thought oh movie sound movie is just a chance to do either musicals or more realistic dramas who are today forgotten. What we are still looking for is precisely those who resisted sound and then tried to use it in different and so on and so on. But let me go on. So okay we have this situation. Now the your first obvious association if you know a little bit of philosophy would have been but isn't Hegel's speculative absolute idealism not precisely the supreme case of such historical impossibility. The idea is that Hegel is the last big example of radical idealism where you can as it were cover the entire reality through the self-deployment self-mediation of the notion, notion in the sense of concept. And the idea is simply that and there is a convincing point to this that after Hegel we have this famous post-Hegelian break. The whole series of figures Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, but also Freud, the rise of mathematical natural sciences that simply after this post-Hegelian break you can no longer be seriously Hegelian. That you know it's simply not possible. It's a fake, an anti-historical illusion if you you basically if you try to be Hegelian today you simply act as if the post-Hegelian break didn't happen. What was this what was this break? It's easy to establish. It was a kind of it was basically what Badiou likes to refer to as anti-philosophy. The idea is that the scene of philosophy of philosophical ideas is perceived as a secondary scene of representation, a screen, and then you assert some real more substantial life process which makes this movement of ideas, sphere of ideas just a kind of a passive secondary illusory reflection. The first one to do this was of course even before Schopenhauer already the late Schelling, Friedrich Schelling, who claimed there is the living reality, irrational abyss of will of willing, the life of will which is more substantial than ideas. And that Hegel is simply cheating. He tries to prove this in detailed analysis. How at the beginning of the logic where Hegel proposes the triad being, nothing, becoming, that becoming if it's to be actual becoming already presupposes some positive being. This is how then Schelling distinguishes between positive and negative philosophy. For him Hegel is a negative philosopher, not in the bad sense just, but in the sense of Hegel just deploys the conceptual structure of reality. What reality is, all possible forms. But something is missing, the positive being of reality. You know as it were the living substance. Hegel provides just in his idealism the gray shadow of reality which is why Schelling focuses on as the greatest Hegel's failure on Hegel's deduction at the end of logic of how idea sorry logic when it fully realizes itself in the shape of absolute idea passes into nature, releases itself into nature. For Schelling this is no deduction at all, Hegel is simply cheating there. He knows all the time that nature exists and he just pretends to deduce nature from the self-movement of concepts and so on and so on. That's Schelling. Then you know Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is the great anti-Hegelian really like personally. He hated Hegel. When he was young he even did he was already Privatdozent this lower level private docent at the same Berlin University as Hegel and I don't know if you know this he was so competitive that he on purpose did his classes at the same time as
this sound talk searching for a body, something haunting you and so on and so on. And this is basically what Lacan is saying for example when he talks about the when he talks about voice as the object small a. [Audience member: "Yes. I don't want to drag you even further from Hegel but is that the issue in *Sunset Boulevard*?"] In *Sunset Boulevard*? You can say yes, you can say that although there is another Billy Wilder, we don't have time to. I would love to go which goes even much more into this dark consequences of this old young split. Did you see his later movie, total failure, *Fedora*? I know it's a totally strange movie about an actress who has appears young, to be young, and everybody thinks she is doing nice plastic operations but at the end you learn that she is really an old totally disfigured lady and that she simply replaced herself by her daughter. And it's such a totally pessimistic totally it's the dark. [Audience: "Did you say it was a box office failure? But does it have any philosophical interest like what you just mentioned?"] Not even, no it didn't even arouse great attention at this level, at this level. [Audience: "Just a curiosity."] No, but I think it should be. I think it, but you know we cinema theorists this is our favorite sport to discover to focus on a failure and then to claim oh but this is the true masterpiece. Like I even once planned with Fred Jameson to do a whole book on Hitchcock's failures. Playing the game of choose a Hitchcock movie which was obviously a failure and prove it's the true Hitchcock. For example, in France there was a whole school in early '50s where the candidate for this failure which is really the masterpiece was a rather embarrassing Australian melodrama did you see it, *Under Capricorn*? You see you didn't don't even know it from I think '52, '53. Totally ridiculous story of Ingrid Bergman living with an ex-convict there, sub-melodrama and so on. There was this school in France this is the true Hitchcock. Fred Jameson's choice is is but I think there it is even a good movie is the one with Marlene Dietrich, *Stage Fright*. You know it's a movie which is famous for a false Hitchcock violates a a rule there you know the the flashback. The rule is that if you show a flashback it should be true. That you cannot lie at the level of flashback. Hitchcock lies you discover at the end. Because at the beginning the hero encounters a girl tells her what is happening at the end we discover not just tells her we see no. Okay, my choice would have been and I still think it's an extraordinary movie is the lowest of the low considered Hitchcock's worst movie, *Topaz*. You know that anti-communist movie Cuba and so on. Okay, but we are getting lost now I admit it. So I what I wanted to tell you is this where we experience a historical break at its purest. With this impossibility and how precisely how should I put it how because of this precisely conservatives who want to stick to the old usually see more, see the uncanny. For example here it was those who thought oh movie sound movie is just a chance to do either musicals or more realistic dramas who are today forgotten. What we are still looking for is precisely those who resisted sound and then tried to use it in different and so on and so on. But let me go on. So okay we have this situation. Now the your first obvious association if you know a little bit of philosophy would have been but isn't Hegel's speculative absolute idealism not precisely the supreme case of such historical impossibility. The idea is that Hegel is the last big example of radical idealism where you can as it were cover the entire reality through the self-deployment self-mediation of the notion, notion in the sense of concept. And the idea is simply that and there is a convincing point to this that after Hegel we have this famous post-Hegelian break. The whole series of figures Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, but also Freud, the rise of mathematical natural sciences that simply after this post-Hegelian break you can no longer be seriously Hegelian. That you know it's simply not possible. It's a fake, an anti-historical illusion if you you basically if you try to be Hegelian today you simply act as if the post-Hegelian break didn't happen. What was this what was this break? It's easy to establish. It was a kind of it was basically what Badiou likes to refer to as anti-philosophy. The idea is that the scene of philosophy of philosophical ideas is perceived as a secondary scene of representation, a screen, and then you assert some real more substantial life process which makes this movement of ideas, sphere of ideas just a kind of a passive secondary illusory reflection. The first one to do this was of course even before Schopenhauer already the late Schelling, Friedrich Schelling, who claimed there is the living reality, irrational abyss of will of willing, the life of will which is more substantial than ideas. And that Hegel is simply cheating. He tries to prove this in detailed analysis. How at the beginning of the logic where Hegel proposes the triad being, nothing, becoming, that becoming if it's to be actual becoming already presupposes some positive being. This is how then Schelling distinguishes between positive and negative philosophy. For him Hegel is a negative philosopher, not in the bad sense just, but in the sense of Hegel just deploys the conceptual structure of reality. What reality is, all possible forms. But something is missing, the positive being of reality. You know as it were the living substance. Hegel provides just in his idealism the gray shadow of reality which is why Schelling focuses on as the greatest Hegel's failure on Hegel's deduction at the end of logic of how idea sorry logic when it fully realizes itself in the shape of absolute idea passes into nature, releases itself into nature. For Schelling this is no deduction at all, Hegel is simply cheating there. He knows all the time that nature exists and he just pretends to deduce nature from the self-movement of concepts and so on and so on. That's Schelling. Then you know Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is the great anti-Hegelian really like personally. He hated Hegel. When he was young he even did he was already Privatdozent this lower level private docent at the same Berlin University as Hegel and I don't know if you know this he was so competitive that he on purpose did his classes at the same time as
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Hegel. Of course nobody came
Hegel. Of course nobody came
Slavoj Žižek
but he was so furious and so on and so on. Although there is one good thing about his family. You know that Hegel, Goethe was married with that Christiane Vulpius the lower-class girl. He loved her and so on it was a very long club finally Hegel married Goethe married her and she was totally ignored by all high society. One must admit that Schopenhauer and especially his mother were honest here. It's a famous saying you know Schopenhauer's mother invited once Hegel, Goethe and his wife and then some other guests protested. She said when this lady is good enough for Goethe's bed she must be good enough for our table. I mean it's a nice saying and
but he was so furious and so on and so on. Although there is one good thing about his family. You know that Hegel, Goethe was married with that Christiane Vulpius the lower-class girl. He loved her and so on it was a very long club finally Hegel married Goethe married her and she was totally ignored by all high society. One must admit that Schopenhauer and especially his mother were honest here. It's a famous saying you know Schopenhauer's mother invited once Hegel, Goethe and his wife and then some other guests protested. She said when this lady is good enough for Goethe's bed she must be good enough for our table. I mean it's a nice saying and
unknown
so on. But what I’m saying is that with Schopenhauer
so on. But what I’m saying is that with Schopenhauer
Slavoj Žižek
you know is the same is the the irrational will, the will. Already Schelling uses it. This idea that before all notional movement and so on there is this positivity of the will, of pure willing which then of course later develops in Lebensphilosophie in life philosophy. Then in a similar although different way it's Kierkegaard. Of course with him it's not this stupid irrational willing, it's the individual with the absurd of believing, this absolute decision, leap of faith and so on. For Kierkegaard also this is the intense actuality of subjective authenticity which cannot in any way be covered up by this abstract Hegelian movement of notions and so on and so on. And why not let's add to this series Marx. Marx. For Marx also you know you have this famous in what is the worst of Marx I think German Ideology that famous phrase that true science of life is with regard to speculative philosophy like real sexual act is to masturbation. Again this idea that Hegel is mystifying reality is describing just some kind of ideal conceptual pseudo-self-movement and then Marx has all this rather primitive reduction to real life. It's not idea which is developing moving itself is it real people who while thinking develop ideas and so on. This old boring idea that Hegel confuses the subject and the predicate. It's not individuals who are predicates or moments in the self-development of the idea, it is idea thinking which is just predicate of a real life-asserting individuals and so on and so on. This is what Badiou refers to as anti-philosophy. That is to say this idea that if at least you construe and then there are of course other elements here where I think a more convincing critique of Hegel can be made. Like you know one problem with Hegel there you really have Hegel's limitation is mathematics. Hegel dismisses mathematics as so-called spurious bad infinity just repetitive. He cannot see there is no space for this modern mathematics which includes all the paradoxes of self-reference and so on. There is no space for this in Hegel. There is the problem of natural sciences. You can claim I think it's more ambiguous that what Hegel does in his critique of Newton is simply he dismisses Newton as a primitive knowledge positive natural sciences at the level of at the level of some kind of a mechanical approach and in a more or less romantic way Hegel tries to provide a more organic account of nature and so on and so on. So again the idea is that all this universe of formalized mathematicized sciences with the incredibly important role in production and so on. Also the Freudian universe of pure repetition, what Freud called Wiederholungszwang. When things repeat themselves without any Hegelian movement of Aufhebung where you know by repetition you are elevated to a higher level, just pure compulsion to repeat, there simply is no place for all this in Hegel. So again that's the post-Hegelian break. And again one can say that this break, this historical break is a fact. You cannot simply play the game as if this didn't happen and let's return to Hegel. I think you can. Now why? How? I think I will first just give you the coordinates then we will return tomorrow to this more in detail. I think that I will not just now give you the demonstration explanation just to provide the coordinates. I think that something different happens here. Namely that what should make you suspicious is how Hegel is this totally ridiculous image of Hegel. Even people who have a certain sympathy for, for example if they are oriented towards the so-called Anglo-Saxon analytic thought. If they have a certain sympathy for so-called continental philosophy, many of them it's very fashionable today, even scientists like to refer for example to Spinoza. You know Damasio wrote a book claiming Spinoza practically proto-brain scientist. So many things and so on. All of them are good. Leibniz, Bertrand Russell liked Leibniz and so on. Kant is usually the limitation. Kant is usually the last that this analytic Anglo-Saxon orientation is ready to swallow. After Kant for them it's just obscenity although yeah yeah yeah. If your mind is as dirty as mine I know you can say but wait a minute he is a philosopher I know the accent is different whose name is an obscenity, no. And this is why when I gave a talk yes I you know I'm well known in my country that whenever in the line of thought there is just a slight opening towards a tasteless obscenity I will take that road you know. Like like but once I was surprised I didn't do it consciously. I gave years ago at Berkeley a talk called Kant and Hitchcock. And then told me oh you have both of them in that this surprised even me I somehow wasn't aware of that. Okay so let's go on. So what I want to say is that what should make you suspicious is when a certain critique paints the enemy as an openly absurd image you know. This image of Hegel absolute knowledge, the one who thought he can penetrate the mind of God because you know somewhere he ironically Hegel characterizes his logic as what went on in the mind of God before the creation of the world and so on. So my hypothesis is the following one. That Hegel is a so-called vanishing mediator between traditional metaphysics and the post-Hegelian this turn to actual reality, anti-philosophy. But I think it's not simply as people who try partially to rehabilitate Hegel like Charles Taylor. Incidentally his Hegel is I think one of the worst books on Hegel. It should be burned publicly. It's not in the sense that Hegel was in between. You know still idealist but already moments of historicism, historical description. No, my point is that something unique happened in Hegel and I will spend the rest of the time today and tomorrow to try to give you at least some indications what. That something unique happened there, unthinkable, even today we don't really know what, so that it is not if we try to be Hegelians today that we behave as if the post-Hegelian break didn't happen. It's on the contrary the entire post-Hegelian this anti-philosophy which is one desperate attempt to obliterate what Hegel did. Hegel went too far. And I think that it's this post-anti-philosophy which does this by getting rid of Hegel, how, by way of constructing this ridiculous image of Hegel which for which I think we should use this Freudian term you know Deck-Erinnerung, screen memory. You know screen memory is a false obviously ridiculous figure concealing some truly traumatic excess. I think that Hegel that we know is mostly this kind of Deck-Erinnerung. A very comfortable ridiculous image. It's easy to laugh at him, ho-ho that idiot, a poor employer of the Prussian Ministry of Education who knows who thought he knows everything and so on but was just doing some ridiculous mechanical logical reasoning and if they concede that sometimes Hegel did have bright insights the idea is that yes from time to time he had a sense of observation he made good points but it is all spoiled by his this mechanical application of this dialectical machinery which can swallow which can swallow everything. So again what that will be my thesis to give you some arguments for this opposite reading. That no, it's the post-Hegelian break which misses something in Hegel. And this is also I think in accordance with a more general historical theory which I like. I developed it already in one of my early books *The Fragile Absolute* I think, *For they know not what they do*. This idea I took a turn from Fredric Jameson of vanishing mediator as a crucial figure of historical development. What is vanishing mediator? Vanishing mediator is not simply something which is a little bit here and a little bit there. You know like you pass for example you pass from religious metaphoric universe, divine meaning everywhere, to modern secular gray mechanic universe and then you can nicely show how you have figures which are in between. Usually it is they already use the new terminology but still deal with the old topic. I'm not saying there are not wonderful things which often happen here. For example, my favorite vanishing mediator between medieval universe and modern mechanical materialism is Malebranche. Read him, oh my God he is a genius. It’s a French theologian, a pupil of Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, who radicalized Descartes in a totally crazy way. But as often you can find wonderful bright insights in this total madness. The starting point of Malebranche was you know what was Descartes's idea, this radical dualism, we have two substances: res cogitans, the thinking substance and res extensa, the extendent material substance. Already you can see what is missing here: life. Descartes has no space for life. For Descartes there are only mechanisms and spirit. Which is why all these holists, holistic new agers hate Descartes. He is the big bad guy for all of them from Al Gore downwards. This is the worst of Al Gore when he says Descartes guilty of everything and so on. On the on the contrary I think Descartes is one of the big good guys. But okay. What did Malebranche do? Sorry for making these detours but I’m not losing track they are crucial. Malebranche did something did you know then Descartes had a problem how are the two connected? The for example in us as human beings our soul, the thinking substance and our body. His solution was totally ridiculous. He found you know he like to do the anatomy and so on, so he found this how do you call it pineal gland or what, no. One gland... [Audience: "Pineal."] Pineal, sorry, yes yes. And it drew his attention because it's only one, it was the only one which was one. So he thought this is as it were the point of passage. It's through that gland that our soul gets impressions from the body and returns orders back to the body. Like to put it very simply if you decide to move to raise your hand you think about it, you give an order, an order passes through this stupid gland to your nerves and so on. It's ridiculous, obvious. [Audience: "Didn't he call it the seat of the soul?"] Sorry? [Audience: "Didn't he call it the seat of the soul?"] Yeah, the bodily seat of the soul. Yes. But nonetheless for him the soul was substantially totally different. He was a radical dualist. He would never have accepted that how should I put it the soul really is there. It's a little bit like let me tell you another interesting philosophical story. I always had big debates with theologians. A couple of points I don't get. You know that it's very fashionable especially for Catholics to oppose biogenetic manipulations, no. Their story is no, we are not just we are not just neuronal automata we have an immortal soul so don't mess with the brain. Now I ask them and I still didn't find a good answer, maybe you will give it to me from the theological side. A very simple counter-argument. Isn't this way to reason contradictory? If you are convinced that you are not just a neuronal automata that you have an immaterial immortal soul, why do you worry then what do I do with your brain? You should say fuck off, do whatever there I'm not there I have a soul you know. So why do they say we have an immortal soul but then the conclusion so you shouldn't mess. [Audience: "I think it goes back to natural law what the Catholics believe in natural law."] And what is natural law? [Audience: "God constructed our bodies our nature this way and we shouldn't fuck with it."] Yeah but but okay but but nonetheless yeah but okay but this this is more complex, this already you introduce further hypothesis how should I put it, you have... [Audience: "Yeah well I think there's a better Aristotelian account though. A lot of them will say that the functional dynamics of the body is the condition for you to have an-the immaterial principle of the mind. So if you change the functional dynamics you go-you run the same possibility as killing somebody in terms of manipulating that principle."] That's tricky because you know that here again as if you are truly an orthodox in the good sense now Christian, I think you should reject this okay now this brings us into theological waters but I think that I'm totally anti-Aquinas. I think he was the great Aristotelizer how should I put it of of Christianity and I simply I don't think but so that you will not say that I'm only making fun, one priest gave me an intelligent metaphor here. He said imagine our brain as a radio receiver. Of course our soul is immortal. But in order for our body to receive the message of our soul we need a finely-tuned radio receiver which is our brain. And God created it to receive to con and then the idea is that if we mess with our brain it's just ruining the radio and then you no longer receive the message. This is the most intelligent at least for me that but I have another problem we can talk about it here and it brings us back to Hegel. I think this is another example where we should go further than Hegel but being good Hegelians. Namely Hegel... Another enigma I had and maybe you can help me here with Christianity is why do why does the church advocate this weird notion basically I simplify but nonetheless it is that if sex is only sex for procreation is specifically human. That you just do it out of pure lust it's just animal coupling. My totally naive counter-argument: isn't the exact opposite the true? I mean animals are doing it in this biologically determined rhythm, they don't screw all the time as we at least try to do. They do it just in the season for mating because it has this function and so on and so on. Isn't it that it's absolutely ridiculous to claim that in a true I mean it's even degrading for me for what is not only physical but if you want truly spiritual about a truly intense out-of-love sexual act. It's clearly not just some mechanical lust copulating but it's clearly ridiculous to claim that that more that surplus is somehow it may have it may not have with procreation. What would be your answer here? [Audience: "It seems like there's a weird alliance between Richard Dawkins's notion of the selfish gene. Like we only exist as genes and procreate. And the church's philosophy. And and Haas-as Pinker told me this. Both both do not leave room for choice for affirming one's self, one's sexuality, one's being beyond that reductive principle."] I agree with you and I will tell you something else here. This is why I think Dawkins is inconsistent. You remember that famous passage towards the end if I remember correctly of his *Selfish Gene* where he introduces the famous idea of how do you pronounce it, meme? [Audience: "Meme. M-E-M-E."] Yeah yeah I know I know I pronounced it in my primitive Slavic. Our writing is much simpler, we write [Zizek makes scribbling gesture]. [Audience: "It's meant to rhyme with gene."] I know, of course, that's the point, of course. So when he says but we are not slaves simply of our genes because we can think, we can as it were become master I mean he doesn't he simply postulates a space of freedom for which I think he doesn't account enough in the and he was relatively intelligently criticized here by some other evolutionists. And I'm not here just playing again. What I’m saying, let me and you will see where this brings us back to Hegel. I'm not just playing here the game of who is right. The problem is more complicated. How the properly Hegelian view of sexuality should be I claim much closer to a Freudian one. It is not that simply you have this is how usually how even Hegel himself, but I claim here and we should be here fearless and outdo Hegel where it's necessary, show where Hegel okay as a fanatic I will say the only legitimate criticism of Hegel is to show that Hegel is not Hegelian enough, no. Where? When he talks about sexuality a little bit towards the end of his philosophy of nature and then when he speaks in civil society part about marriage and so on, no. He basically adopts this how should I call it culturalization hypothesis. His idea is that sexuality is a natural substance, no. Animals screw the way they do blah blah. But we gradually civilize it, sublimate it, whatever. No, like sorry I will try to be no like I want to seduce a woman or a man or many women or many men, this I do always to annoy Judith Butler when we talk because she is opposed to binary logic. So I said okay let's be against binary logic why not only one partner more partners and so on. So that instead of just I don't know how animals do smelling your juices there if you are wet and then boom or whatever no, we write poetry we do all the shit we do but basically we are slowly elaborating how should I put it reworking culturalizing natural substance instead of smelling the disgusting smell or what we have perfume instead of those whatever animal sounds we write love letters. The idea is that there is some kind of a natural substance of sexuality which we gradually civilize, culturalize. I claim something is missing here. What is missing is what Freud would have called death drive and it's what in entire German Idealism you already find it in Kant I located it for the first time where Kant talks about in a wonderful they're totally neglected today writing on education. Kant talks mentions some kind of a wilderness of a human being exemplary can be discerned in a wild child. The child whom you cannot discipline. Whom you cannot make obey the orders. And Kant says something absolutely crucial there which then repeats itself in Schelling in Hegel, he says this wild undisciplined character you know a child who resists beats and so on he says this is not animal nature. Animals have instincts they follow the instincts it's a kind of a derailment of instincts it's already denaturalized nature but it's not yet culture. You know and that would be the proper Hegelian view that that excess which we try to civilize through culture is not nature, is the vanishing mediator. It’s an
you know is the same is the the irrational will, the will. Already Schelling uses it. This idea that before all notional movement and so on there is this positivity of the will, of pure willing which then of course later develops in Lebensphilosophie in life philosophy. Then in a similar although different way it's Kierkegaard. Of course with him it's not this stupid irrational willing, it's the individual with the absurd of believing, this absolute decision, leap of faith and so on. For Kierkegaard also this is the intense actuality of subjective authenticity which cannot in any way be covered up by this abstract Hegelian movement of notions and so on and so on. And why not let's add to this series Marx. Marx. For Marx also you know you have this famous in what is the worst of Marx I think German Ideology that famous phrase that true science of life is with regard to speculative philosophy like real sexual act is to masturbation. Again this idea that Hegel is mystifying reality is describing just some kind of ideal conceptual pseudo-self-movement and then Marx has all this rather primitive reduction to real life. It's not idea which is developing moving itself is it real people who while thinking develop ideas and so on. This old boring idea that Hegel confuses the subject and the predicate. It's not individuals who are predicates or moments in the self-development of the idea, it is idea thinking which is just predicate of a real life-asserting individuals and so on and so on. This is what Badiou refers to as anti-philosophy. That is to say this idea that if at least you construe and then there are of course other elements here where I think a more convincing critique of Hegel can be made. Like you know one problem with Hegel there you really have Hegel's limitation is mathematics. Hegel dismisses mathematics as so-called spurious bad infinity just repetitive. He cannot see there is no space for this modern mathematics which includes all the paradoxes of self-reference and so on. There is no space for this in Hegel. There is the problem of natural sciences. You can claim I think it's more ambiguous that what Hegel does in his critique of Newton is simply he dismisses Newton as a primitive knowledge positive natural sciences at the level of at the level of some kind of a mechanical approach and in a more or less romantic way Hegel tries to provide a more organic account of nature and so on and so on. So again the idea is that all this universe of formalized mathematicized sciences with the incredibly important role in production and so on. Also the Freudian universe of pure repetition, what Freud called Wiederholungszwang. When things repeat themselves without any Hegelian movement of Aufhebung where you know by repetition you are elevated to a higher level, just pure compulsion to repeat, there simply is no place for all this in Hegel. So again that's the post-Hegelian break. And again one can say that this break, this historical break is a fact. You cannot simply play the game as if this didn't happen and let's return to Hegel. I think you can. Now why? How? I think I will first just give you the coordinates then we will return tomorrow to this more in detail. I think that I will not just now give you the demonstration explanation just to provide the coordinates. I think that something different happens here. Namely that what should make you suspicious is how Hegel is this totally ridiculous image of Hegel. Even people who have a certain sympathy for, for example if they are oriented towards the so-called Anglo-Saxon analytic thought. If they have a certain sympathy for so-called continental philosophy, many of them it's very fashionable today, even scientists like to refer for example to Spinoza. You know Damasio wrote a book claiming Spinoza practically proto-brain scientist. So many things and so on. All of them are good. Leibniz, Bertrand Russell liked Leibniz and so on. Kant is usually the limitation. Kant is usually the last that this analytic Anglo-Saxon orientation is ready to swallow. After Kant for them it's just obscenity although yeah yeah yeah. If your mind is as dirty as mine I know you can say but wait a minute he is a philosopher I know the accent is different whose name is an obscenity, no. And this is why when I gave a talk yes I you know I'm well known in my country that whenever in the line of thought there is just a slight opening towards a tasteless obscenity I will take that road you know. Like like but once I was surprised I didn't do it consciously. I gave years ago at Berkeley a talk called Kant and Hitchcock. And then told me oh you have both of them in that this surprised even me I somehow wasn't aware of that. Okay so let's go on. So what I want to say is that what should make you suspicious is when a certain critique paints the enemy as an openly absurd image you know. This image of Hegel absolute knowledge, the one who thought he can penetrate the mind of God because you know somewhere he ironically Hegel characterizes his logic as what went on in the mind of God before the creation of the world and so on. So my hypothesis is the following one. That Hegel is a so-called vanishing mediator between traditional metaphysics and the post-Hegelian this turn to actual reality, anti-philosophy. But I think it's not simply as people who try partially to rehabilitate Hegel like Charles Taylor. Incidentally his Hegel is I think one of the worst books on Hegel. It should be burned publicly. It's not in the sense that Hegel was in between. You know still idealist but already moments of historicism, historical description. No, my point is that something unique happened in Hegel and I will spend the rest of the time today and tomorrow to try to give you at least some indications what. That something unique happened there, unthinkable, even today we don't really know what, so that it is not if we try to be Hegelians today that we behave as if the post-Hegelian break didn't happen. It's on the contrary the entire post-Hegelian this anti-philosophy which is one desperate attempt to obliterate what Hegel did. Hegel went too far. And I think that it's this post-anti-philosophy which does this by getting rid of Hegel, how, by way of constructing this ridiculous image of Hegel which for which I think we should use this Freudian term you know Deck-Erinnerung, screen memory. You know screen memory is a false obviously ridiculous figure concealing some truly traumatic excess. I think that Hegel that we know is mostly this kind of Deck-Erinnerung. A very comfortable ridiculous image. It's easy to laugh at him, ho-ho that idiot, a poor employer of the Prussian Ministry of Education who knows who thought he knows everything and so on but was just doing some ridiculous mechanical logical reasoning and if they concede that sometimes Hegel did have bright insights the idea is that yes from time to time he had a sense of observation he made good points but it is all spoiled by his this mechanical application of this dialectical machinery which can swallow which can swallow everything. So again what that will be my thesis to give you some arguments for this opposite reading. That no, it's the post-Hegelian break which misses something in Hegel. And this is also I think in accordance with a more general historical theory which I like. I developed it already in one of my early books *The Fragile Absolute* I think, *For they know not what they do*. This idea I took a turn from Fredric Jameson of vanishing mediator as a crucial figure of historical development. What is vanishing mediator? Vanishing mediator is not simply something which is a little bit here and a little bit there. You know like you pass for example you pass from religious metaphoric universe, divine meaning everywhere, to modern secular gray mechanic universe and then you can nicely show how you have figures which are in between. Usually it is they already use the new terminology but still deal with the old topic. I'm not saying there are not wonderful things which often happen here. For example, my favorite vanishing mediator between medieval universe and modern mechanical materialism is Malebranche. Read him, oh my God he is a genius. It’s a French theologian, a pupil of Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, who radicalized Descartes in a totally crazy way. But as often you can find wonderful bright insights in this total madness. The starting point of Malebranche was you know what was Descartes's idea, this radical dualism, we have two substances: res cogitans, the thinking substance and res extensa, the extendent material substance. Already you can see what is missing here: life. Descartes has no space for life. For Descartes there are only mechanisms and spirit. Which is why all these holists, holistic new agers hate Descartes. He is the big bad guy for all of them from Al Gore downwards. This is the worst of Al Gore when he says Descartes guilty of everything and so on. On the on the contrary I think Descartes is one of the big good guys. But okay. What did Malebranche do? Sorry for making these detours but I’m not losing track they are crucial. Malebranche did something did you know then Descartes had a problem how are the two connected? The for example in us as human beings our soul, the thinking substance and our body. His solution was totally ridiculous. He found you know he like to do the anatomy and so on, so he found this how do you call it pineal gland or what, no. One gland... [Audience: "Pineal."] Pineal, sorry, yes yes. And it drew his attention because it's only one, it was the only one which was one. So he thought this is as it were the point of passage. It's through that gland that our soul gets impressions from the body and returns orders back to the body. Like to put it very simply if you decide to move to raise your hand you think about it, you give an order, an order passes through this stupid gland to your nerves and so on. It's ridiculous, obvious. [Audience: "Didn't he call it the seat of the soul?"] Sorry? [Audience: "Didn't he call it the seat of the soul?"] Yeah, the bodily seat of the soul. Yes. But nonetheless for him the soul was substantially totally different. He was a radical dualist. He would never have accepted that how should I put it the soul really is there. It's a little bit like let me tell you another interesting philosophical story. I always had big debates with theologians. A couple of points I don't get. You know that it's very fashionable especially for Catholics to oppose biogenetic manipulations, no. Their story is no, we are not just we are not just neuronal automata we have an immortal soul so don't mess with the brain. Now I ask them and I still didn't find a good answer, maybe you will give it to me from the theological side. A very simple counter-argument. Isn't this way to reason contradictory? If you are convinced that you are not just a neuronal automata that you have an immaterial immortal soul, why do you worry then what do I do with your brain? You should say fuck off, do whatever there I'm not there I have a soul you know. So why do they say we have an immortal soul but then the conclusion so you shouldn't mess. [Audience: "I think it goes back to natural law what the Catholics believe in natural law."] And what is natural law? [Audience: "God constructed our bodies our nature this way and we shouldn't fuck with it."] Yeah but but okay but but nonetheless yeah but okay but this this is more complex, this already you introduce further hypothesis how should I put it, you have... [Audience: "Yeah well I think there's a better Aristotelian account though. A lot of them will say that the functional dynamics of the body is the condition for you to have an-the immaterial principle of the mind. So if you change the functional dynamics you go-you run the same possibility as killing somebody in terms of manipulating that principle."] That's tricky because you know that here again as if you are truly an orthodox in the good sense now Christian, I think you should reject this okay now this brings us into theological waters but I think that I'm totally anti-Aquinas. I think he was the great Aristotelizer how should I put it of of Christianity and I simply I don't think but so that you will not say that I'm only making fun, one priest gave me an intelligent metaphor here. He said imagine our brain as a radio receiver. Of course our soul is immortal. But in order for our body to receive the message of our soul we need a finely-tuned radio receiver which is our brain. And God created it to receive to con and then the idea is that if we mess with our brain it's just ruining the radio and then you no longer receive the message. This is the most intelligent at least for me that but I have another problem we can talk about it here and it brings us back to Hegel. I think this is another example where we should go further than Hegel but being good Hegelians. Namely Hegel... Another enigma I had and maybe you can help me here with Christianity is why do why does the church advocate this weird notion basically I simplify but nonetheless it is that if sex is only sex for procreation is specifically human. That you just do it out of pure lust it's just animal coupling. My totally naive counter-argument: isn't the exact opposite the true? I mean animals are doing it in this biologically determined rhythm, they don't screw all the time as we at least try to do. They do it just in the season for mating because it has this function and so on and so on. Isn't it that it's absolutely ridiculous to claim that in a true I mean it's even degrading for me for what is not only physical but if you want truly spiritual about a truly intense out-of-love sexual act. It's clearly not just some mechanical lust copulating but it's clearly ridiculous to claim that that more that surplus is somehow it may have it may not have with procreation. What would be your answer here? [Audience: "It seems like there's a weird alliance between Richard Dawkins's notion of the selfish gene. Like we only exist as genes and procreate. And the church's philosophy. And and Haas-as Pinker told me this. Both both do not leave room for choice for affirming one's self, one's sexuality, one's being beyond that reductive principle."] I agree with you and I will tell you something else here. This is why I think Dawkins is inconsistent. You remember that famous passage towards the end if I remember correctly of his *Selfish Gene* where he introduces the famous idea of how do you pronounce it, meme? [Audience: "Meme. M-E-M-E."] Yeah yeah I know I know I pronounced it in my primitive Slavic. Our writing is much simpler, we write [Zizek makes scribbling gesture]. [Audience: "It's meant to rhyme with gene."] I know, of course, that's the point, of course. So when he says but we are not slaves simply of our genes because we can think, we can as it were become master I mean he doesn't he simply postulates a space of freedom for which I think he doesn't account enough in the and he was relatively intelligently criticized here by some other evolutionists. And I'm not here just playing again. What I’m saying, let me and you will see where this brings us back to Hegel. I'm not just playing here the game of who is right. The problem is more complicated. How the properly Hegelian view of sexuality should be I claim much closer to a Freudian one. It is not that simply you have this is how usually how even Hegel himself, but I claim here and we should be here fearless and outdo Hegel where it's necessary, show where Hegel okay as a fanatic I will say the only legitimate criticism of Hegel is to show that Hegel is not Hegelian enough, no. Where? When he talks about sexuality a little bit towards the end of his philosophy of nature and then when he speaks in civil society part about marriage and so on, no. He basically adopts this how should I call it culturalization hypothesis. His idea is that sexuality is a natural substance, no. Animals screw the way they do blah blah. But we gradually civilize it, sublimate it, whatever. No, like sorry I will try to be no like I want to seduce a woman or a man or many women or many men, this I do always to annoy Judith Butler when we talk because she is opposed to binary logic. So I said okay let's be against binary logic why not only one partner more partners and so on. So that instead of just I don't know how animals do smelling your juices there if you are wet and then boom or whatever no, we write poetry we do all the shit we do but basically we are slowly elaborating how should I put it reworking culturalizing natural substance instead of smelling the disgusting smell or what we have perfume instead of those whatever animal sounds we write love letters. The idea is that there is some kind of a natural substance of sexuality which we gradually civilize, culturalize. I claim something is missing here. What is missing is what Freud would have called death drive and it's what in entire German Idealism you already find it in Kant I located it for the first time where Kant talks about in a wonderful they're totally neglected today writing on education. Kant talks mentions some kind of a wilderness of a human being exemplary can be discerned in a wild child. The child whom you cannot discipline. Whom you cannot make obey the orders. And Kant says something absolutely crucial there which then repeats itself in Schelling in Hegel, he says this wild undisciplined character you know a child who resists beats and so on he says this is not animal nature. Animals have instincts they follow the instincts it's a kind of a derailment of instincts it's already denaturalized nature but it's not yet culture. You know and that would be the proper Hegelian view that that excess which we try to civilize through culture is not nature, is the vanishing mediator. It’s an
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and I think that the
and I think that the
Slavoj Žižek
Freudian name for this excess is death drive or or sexuality what is sexuality what are we humans? Our sexuality is not the animal coupling you eat you shit you sleep and incidentally when I'm in a bad mood I almost would like to be there. I read a story about some stupid bears or what animals who in the winter they grow fat and then for the six months of winter they sleep every month they awaken they go to
Freudian name for this excess is death drive or or sexuality what is sexuality what are we humans? Our sexuality is not the animal coupling you eat you shit you sleep and incidentally when I'm in a bad mood I almost would like to be there. I read a story about some stupid bears or what animals who in the winter they grow fat and then for the six months of winter they sleep every month they awaken they go to
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urinate
urinate
Slavoj Žižek
drink and fuck and go to sleep again for some this is as close as I can imagine happiness if you ask me frankly. But what I'm saying is as everybody will tell you human desire is denaturalized it's eternalized how should I put it it goes on and on and on never and Kant says very nicely something crucial there. He says that it is because of this excess of of instinct which is no longer the natural instinct which just directs you towards survival, mating time you should mate you should kill other animals to eat whatever, it's a kind of a much more excessive disorder to use Shakespeare out-of-joint wilderness. And then Kant says this is why we humans need masters and he provides a wonderful definition of man. He says man is an animal who needs a master. Precisely to tame this excess which again which is not animal which is not animal. And you find the same in Schelling even in Hegel at the beginning of his philosophy of spirit that I already mentioned anthropology when he talks about madness this excess of madness
drink and fuck and go to sleep again for some this is as close as I can imagine happiness if you ask me frankly. But what I'm saying is as everybody will tell you human desire is denaturalized it's eternalized how should I put it it goes on and on and on never and Kant says very nicely something crucial there. He says that it is because of this excess of of instinct which is no longer the natural instinct which just directs you towards survival, mating time you should mate you should kill other animals to eat whatever, it's a kind of a much more excessive disorder to use Shakespeare out-of-joint wilderness. And then Kant says this is why we humans need masters and he provides a wonderful definition of man. He says man is an animal who needs a master. Precisely to tame this excess which again which is not animal which is not animal. And you find the same in Schelling even in Hegel at the beginning of his philosophy of spirit that I already mentioned anthropology when he talks about madness this excess of madness
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as the zero level of subjectivity. And for Hegel our culture which begins at the most elementary level with
as the zero level of subjectivity. And for Hegel our culture which begins at the most elementary level with
Slavoj Žižek
habits and Hegel has a wonderful developments there where he say that we humans are totally being of habit. We even die out of habit we live out of habit and so
habits and Hegel has a wonderful developments there where he say that we humans are totally being of habit. We even die out of habit we live out of habit and so
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on. So again I think this is what we should take into account with regard to sexuality. It's not directly nature-culture. The lesson of psychoanalysis is there is something in between, this excess that Freud calls death drive and so on and so on. Because and you find it in all big erotic myths. I mean for example *Tristan and Isolde*. What is this? Their love is obviously it's formulated like this it's trans-cultural you know they want to drown in this excess of absolute drive absolute enjoyment
on. So again I think this is what we should take into account with regard to sexuality. It's not directly nature-culture. The lesson of psychoanalysis is there is something in between, this excess that Freud calls death drive and so on and so on. Because and you find it in all big erotic myths. I mean for example *Tristan and Isolde*. What is this? Their love is obviously it's formulated like this it's trans-cultural you know they want to drown in this excess of absolute drive absolute enjoyment
Slavoj Žižek
violating all social rules blah blah. But it's also not nature, it's clear you don't find this excess in nature. So the result to arrive at at this level is that the it's not directly that culture breaks with nature. You have in between some kind of what Freud calls Todestrieb death drive a kind of how should I call it absolute insistence, impossible insistence, which is why it has to repeat itself indefinitely and the problem of culture is again to symbolize to restabilize that. And this if you allow me another Hegelian reflection, this brings me back to you asked me yesterday Steven Pinker. You know what is the big problem of this kind of how to call them, this is why I'm on the side of Stephen Jay Gould, so-called utilitarian accounts of of of of mind and language and so on. The problem is to account for this mystery that why are we doing so many things which do not have any survival adaptive utilitarian value. Okay I know that quite often they are successful very successful here. For example in explaining there is a wonderful book I quote it I think in my was it is it in the second part of *Parallax View* even at the end, yeah yeah yeah I think that no no no I'm not good at titles anymore my God. The behavioral biologist who tries to account for this sex-for the in adaptive terms why this totally non-functional excess of parade of displaying in sexual seduction. For example, you know something like how you call I always forget the English name, who is that stupid animal with big big [Audience: "Peacock?"] Peacock, yes. Why peacock? I mean from the adaptive standpoint of view it's stupidity. It's the most irrational thing to do he cannot even properly move and so on. He provides a nice account for that that's the message: I'm so strong that I can afford it. You know it's in the same way to seduce a girl with a ring for one million dollars. Like I know it has no function but I can afford. Okay but what I'm saying is that Pinker is weak at another level. You remember if you know we are talking about Steven Pinker no not the it this is the guy who sees red who has a Goebbels reaction if you mention France, French talk and so on, structure deconstruction whatever. Okay. He asks a simple question which is a rational question. Why he he tries to, you know there is a big debate among brain scientists of why can't we understand how our mind
violating all social rules blah blah. But it's also not nature, it's clear you don't find this excess in nature. So the result to arrive at at this level is that the it's not directly that culture breaks with nature. You have in between some kind of what Freud calls Todestrieb death drive a kind of how should I call it absolute insistence, impossible insistence, which is why it has to repeat itself indefinitely and the problem of culture is again to symbolize to restabilize that. And this if you allow me another Hegelian reflection, this brings me back to you asked me yesterday Steven Pinker. You know what is the big problem of this kind of how to call them, this is why I'm on the side of Stephen Jay Gould, so-called utilitarian accounts of of of of mind and language and so on. The problem is to account for this mystery that why are we doing so many things which do not have any survival adaptive utilitarian value. Okay I know that quite often they are successful very successful here. For example in explaining there is a wonderful book I quote it I think in my was it is it in the second part of *Parallax View* even at the end, yeah yeah yeah I think that no no no I'm not good at titles anymore my God. The behavioral biologist who tries to account for this sex-for the in adaptive terms why this totally non-functional excess of parade of displaying in sexual seduction. For example, you know something like how you call I always forget the English name, who is that stupid animal with big big [Audience: "Peacock?"] Peacock, yes. Why peacock? I mean from the adaptive standpoint of view it's stupidity. It's the most irrational thing to do he cannot even properly move and so on. He provides a nice account for that that's the message: I'm so strong that I can afford it. You know it's in the same way to seduce a girl with a ring for one million dollars. Like I know it has no function but I can afford. Okay but what I'm saying is that Pinker is weak at another level. You remember if you know we are talking about Steven Pinker no not the it this is the guy who sees red who has a Goebbels reaction if you mention France, French talk and so on, structure deconstruction whatever. Okay. He asks a simple question which is a rational question. Why he he tries to, you know there is a big debate among brain scientists of why can't we understand how our mind
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works. Why are we the then you know some of them like I don't know McGinn or who try to claim that in a materialist way they are not idealists but they'll claim that that's how our how our mind is structured. It's a priori structured in such a way that it cannot understand
works. Why are we the then you know some of them like I don't know McGinn or who try to claim that in a materialist way they are not idealists but they'll claim that that's how our how our mind is structured. It's a priori structured in such a way that it cannot understand
Slavoj Žižek
itself. And Pinker tries to provide a totally evolutionary account. He says I quote him almost literally here I not simplify. He says that that it's for the same reason that a rabbit cannot do I don't know differential calculus or what. Our mind was created for certain survival adaptive reasons. It wasn't created it didn't emerge develop to understand itself. It emerged to to to construct tools, to deal with nature for mating or cooperation, deal with
itself. And Pinker tries to provide a totally evolutionary account. He says I quote him almost literally here I not simplify. He says that that it's for the same reason that a rabbit cannot do I don't know differential calculus or what. Our mind was created for certain survival adaptive reasons. It wasn't created it didn't emerge develop to understand itself. It emerged to to to construct tools, to deal with nature for mating or cooperation, deal with
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and that's why it was created
and that's why it was created
Slavoj Žižek
and it can do of course things for which it was created. And in the same so in the same way that rabbit doesn't need for his survival differential mathematics and so on we don't need for our survival to understand immateriality, God, soul, you know you just look for what the mind was created. Even if this is true I have as I developed in this book one big naive problem. But there is one big difference between a rabbit and us. Rabbit doesn't even bother about differential calculus. Why do we humans always bother with impossible tasks? Why why are we from the very beginning try to ask metaphysical questions to put it this way. Why don't we simply say okay we can't understand it let's drop it. And I think that we can go even further. One can show that all great inventions, utilitarian inventions like new machines and so on that the usual logic of discovery was not oh we have a problem we should invent it. First it was always that you invented something out of pure metaphysical speculation useless and then application always comes secondary. So it's not this primitive Marxist economic reductionism which says we we developed machines for production and then rich people can use them as toys and so on. You know the history of modern machinery in the 17th century already you had I don't know how many machineries in the court of Louis XIV and so on. They were used to produce rain, spectacles, dolls and so on. First they were widely constructed for just for amusement to fascinate, application came came afterwards and so on. So my point is that I would I'm tempted to link this with what I was saying before. The true mystery for me as it were is that again back to sexuality that's Hegel. It's not that we have our natural sexuality which is gradually civilized and so on and so on. No, natural sexuality gets denaturalized in some kind of deadly passion, crazy insistence. This is what was the enigma for Freud from the very beginning. How is it that and incidentally even I know some brain scientists or rather behavioral scientists who are doing things with apes and told me some interesting even empirical data at this level. A guy whom I know a Turkish name Güven Güzeldere in at Duke University he is doing experiments not cruel ones not the one where you do horror with with apes and he told me that it's interesting how is there a difference between ape and human being when you pose is that apes are generally more rational even. In the sense of if you make with an ape the experiment of simply the experiment of let's say very primitive experiment he told me. You propose to a male ape a beautiful very attractive sexual partner and a B-level sexual partner. First the ape tries to get to the more attractive partner. But after some time when the ape see he cannot do it he says okay fuck off he goes to the he it's very rational calculation while with men we are much more we persist to the end. You never you know the more it is impossible the more you stick to it and so on and so on. This let's call it internalisation of desire which then produces something which and that's how I read Freud brings us to death drive. Death drive has nothing to do whatsoever that's the ABC I hope you know it with that Nirvana shit and so on. Death drive is exactly the opposite. I claim if you read Freud closely death drive is Freudian name for immortality. What Freud calls death drive is some something that insists as it were beyond life and death. Figures of death drive are like vampires, living death and so on and so on. And my thesis which I develop repeatedly in my books without this you cannot understand not only Hegel but none of the classical philosophy is that this is what explodes in German Idealism that and that's what I'm trying to do basically in all my work reading mutually like German Idealism to psychoanalysis not in order to reduce German Idealism just to psychology but to elevate Freud to a thinker. For example, sorry if you know this line but it's wonderful works I want to repeat it it works wonderfully. The best account of death drive I found is just in a small like some little deduction in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason where he mentions Immanuel Kant two types of negation. He mentions the he distinguishes negative judgment and infinite judgment. It's very simple to understand. Kant says negative judgment negates a predicate a infinite judgment asserts affirms a non-predicate. You will say what's the point is the same shit. No it's not. Why not. Let's go to Stephen King territory and you will see why not. Let us negate the predicate dead. First as a negative judgment. If I say you are not dead. What does this mean? You are alive, nothing special no. We have just the space of life-death you are not dead you are alive. Okay but think about let us say not you are not dead but you are undead. Ah this means something quite different. This doesn't mean you are simply alive, it means you are alive as dead, you are a living dead. You know a third domain is opened of some obscene life which insists beyond life and death and so on. And my claim this vampiric as it were undead all the vampires and so on this this space is this space is opened by Kant and this is the space of this absolute negativity death drive and so on and so on which was conceptualized by by German Idealism. And this is the excess with which culture, dialectical formulation, dialectical mediation tries to deal. And with Hegel now you will say but wait a minute for Hegel this is only a starting point. But at the end we have this perfect reconciliation all in peace and so on. No, that's what I will try to prove to you more tomorrow than today. Hegel was well aware that that this excess of negativity cannot ever be culturalized but which is why for example just to give you one hint in contrast to Kant, Hegel didn't believe in eternal peace. Because he thought that you know the way Hegel is presented perfect modern bourgeois society all the particular interests are harmonized in the common good, you reconcile with society and so on. Hegel thinks that not because he was a militarist but he thought that there always is the threat that this radical negativity this excess will explode again and again. And again this excess is neither life nor nor neither life nor the or neither nature nor culture. So you see now we already got the first abstract idea of how the Hegelian progress let's put it in this way looks. It's not simply you have a natural substratum and then progressively you develop more and more culture. No, once you are in culture retroactively you denaturalize nature. You know culture doesn't only civilize natural instincts, the price we pay to move into culture is that what before was a simple natural instinct like I want to screw one month a year when smells tells me this is a mating season or what becomes an absolute eternal suicidal repetitive drive which is crucial for Freudian notion of death drive. That it's a repetitive drive, repetitive in the sense that as Lacan puts it puts it very precisely in this distinction he uses English terms here Lacan between aim and goal. Goal is what you officially want. Let's say to achieve something. But for Lacan the true satisfaction of the drive is the circular movement of the drive itself. You don't want to achieve it's like boomerang. You don't want to hit it. You want it to come back and try again and again and the true satisfaction is provided by this very circular movement and so on and so on. Which is why for Freud who is here a good Hegelian, which is why for Freud sexual satisfaction it's always you know it's no when Freud talks about this foreplay. It's never simply foreplay is a goal to the final goal big penetration whatever sexual act. There is always a danger that the foreplay will turn into a self-goal how should I put it. I want to tell you here a story told to me by nice British Lacanian very good popularizer of Lacan but also independently of this not an idiot Darian Leader. In his I think one of the first books he it's a very simple example I mention it in one of my books. He quotes the example of very simple one I mention in one of my books of how one of his patients you want to blackmail me or what did he gave you this one? I mean with like this nasty horrible sorry that told him of a strange a strange slip of tongue that happened to him. He took a lady to a restaurant with the obvious goal of seducing her later. And while approaching and reserving a table he made the obvious slip of tongue. Instead of saying table for two please he said a bed for two please to the waiter. Now the primitive pseudo-Freudian interpretation would have been of course his mind was was already up there blah blah blah. Ah Darian Leader proposed a totally different interpretation. That he was afraid that how should I put it that the foreplay would overshadow the official goal itself as it were. He was afraid that in this in this hierarchical order we go to eat just it's just a pretext to go to bed later, that he will enjoy too much what should be following the official hierarchy of seduction just the preparatory step. So it was more a defense against enjoying too much the foreplay the beginning. He wanted to convince himself and no no no it's not eating I really want to it's really about you know. It's I think a much more intelligent explanation. Which is why just to conclude the first part with lovingly racist joke about maybe if you the two of you from ex-Yugoslavia you know those wonderful jokes some of them are metaphysical two Bosnians Mujo and Haso no. One of them I saw you know that in Slovenia they are extremely popular we did a movie series like you get a DVD some hundreds of their their wonderfully vulgar but some of them very metaphysical jokes. And one of them has the same logic, this is what I was talking about, this is human desire. Sorry if I put it I don't mean it it says that Mujo and his Fata is his wife they want to make love and Fata wants to excite him to do fellatio and he says now I will do fellatio I masturbate him now I will I will how do you put it I will I will how do you put it I will make it sweet like a cake then to eat your penis no and he says now here I put cream whipped cream on it I put a cherry on it and and then she wants to start to suck and Mujo says no this is so nice I want to I want to how do you put it I want to [makes eating noise]. You know like ah that's the Balkan wisdom. You will never you know that was what the patient first was afraid there how should I put it no. Okay we didn't say a lot about Hegel we will go on in part two okay now we do the short break. [Break] Yeah although no no no I see it look here you got me because as you know first I share Lacan's big distrust of Nietzsche. Because you know that this is there are a couple of mysteries in Jacques Lacan. For example practically total absence of Nietzsche. He mentions Nietzsche just a couple of times and usually in a dismissive way. Like I think in the ethical strategies he said that to speak about beyond good and evil it's it's saying too much you say exactly the same if you just say beyond the good and so on. So it's more this kind of a nasty aggressiveness I think he was wrong but I somehow I don't know could then then okay I can make propaganda for my friend my part of my Slovene gang Alenka Zupancic. She did that book *The Shortest Shadow* she practically she practically converted me converted me to Nietzsche no. Although you know I'm very interested in this problem Nietzsche and Wagner because you know it's much more ambiguous Nietzsche really didn't get rid of Wagner up to the end. You know that when Nietzsche collapsed got crazy the text he was working on was this there are two: *Der Fall Wagner*, *Nietzsche contra Wagner* what where he tried to sorry and *Antichrist* yeah yeah where he tried to prove that he was always against Wagner and so on. So obviously this was a problem this was a problem for Nietzsche but again I mean of course I'm still working on that in the sense that... [Audience: "Nietzsche also talks about the same thing and the return..."] Yeah there are some with some other with a different one but Nietzsche just popped up in the conversation. Yeah I know yeah. Okay so you know what let's do another line where we will reach Hegel only at the end and then this is an endless task tomorrow we shall go on and so on and so on. First I want to begin I did some of this stuff in my books but I will don't worry I will give a different twist at the end. I will try to account for what Hegel means with concrete universality. This is usually taken as Hegel at his craziest no. You know this idea that you our usual nominalist view is we all know there is full concrete reality from which we abstract some features like I look at people I say I'm a freak you are nicer blah blah blah but there are some features we share two legs whatever blah blah that's the but Hegel this is how it is usually perceived that Hegel was a crazy guy who thought that somehow you can develop the entire concrete content out of just abstract self-movement of the universal notion. So was he crazy what did he mean by this. I want to give you some examples here let's hope we will finish it. I want to begin with the great anti-Hegelian. Hegel is a tricky guy often you should look for truly Hegelian insights into when you get a guy who is absolutely explicitly anti-Hegel but then says something with okay I would like to go to Deleuze. You know this that if there is an anti-Hegel it's Deleuze. I would like to start with Deleuze's notion of pure difference linked with repetition. The idea of pure difference is a repetition which is repetition absolutely of the same. Nothing changes. You repeat the same and there you produce a pure difference, radical difference. This is how Deleuze I claim in a very Hegelian view argues how new emerges out of a repetition. I would like to give you two examples I use them in some of my books I will try to give again a different twist at least to them here. I like classical music I like Robert Schumann. One of the masterpieces by Schumann is *Humoreske*. There he does something wonderful. I do we have here I even I will play this game I hate this posting with the screens and so on but I will [Zizek makes drawing gesture on a chalkboard] oh it looks bad everything will collect no it will not. Okay you know this piece of piano is something does something very strange. It's written on three lines of notes. You have left hand, right hand and then you have something very mysterious which was popular in German romantic music so-called Augenmusik, music just for the eye. So let's say one note line, the middle one, the lower. Let's say this is what you play with the left hand, what you play with the right hand, and what you play here. Of course his idea a typically romantic one was that when you play it's very Deleuzian idea of virtual, virtuality. And you know the precise nature of what Deleuze calls virtual. Virtual it's not just possible what may be. Virtual is something which as possible as non-actual already exerts an efficiency of its own. So his idea was that the true great piano pianist [Audience correct pronunciation: "Pianist."] Pianist, I see. Not penis, penis, I see. Not penis or what, penis because you know that wonderful obscene joke when General de Gaulle retired General de Gaulle retired an American journalist asked his wife what she is looking for now and she said happiness but she pronounce it in this French way she says appiness, no. I found that so vulgar and now we have more of you. So I had this kind of penis problems. Okay. So of course it's clear what Schumann wanted to say that the way he wanted to do it is a kind of variations without a melody. That the two lines should be perceived as variations implicitly referring to a melodic line which should remain only for the eyes which you don't hear. So the point is that again a truly great piano pianist [Audience laughter at mispronunciation] must know how to play it so that somehow this absent but precisely the virtual absent point of reference is evoked. But then something more mysterious happens. My source is it's always good to confess which is the source of your bluffing so that no it's a wonderful book I really appreciate him maybe he is the greatest musicologist to know you know Charles Rosen who did this *The Classical Style* and then he did maybe even better second volume as it were *The Romantic Generation* where he covers Schubert Schumann Chopin all those guys. Okay. He does this. First you have the whole part segment written in this way. A melody here oh melody the line of notes here the line of notes here with Augenmusik a third line here. Then something strange happens. He repeats exactly the same notes up and down but here it's empty. And this is the true challenge to the piano player. This would be the Deleuzian pure repetition. Because nothing changes at the level of reality. By reality I simply mean the actual notes to be played. What changes is just the virtual background. The virtual echoing, no. You should play I don't know how this works I listened to some recordings I imagined that I heard the difference but probably because I wanted to hear it and but you see the art the artist you repeat exactly the same line but in such a way that what changes is not what you hear but what you don't hear. You should play it once so that this somehow don't ask me how resonates in it the other time that it doesn't resonate in it. This I think can be perfectly referred to as what Deleuze means by a quote I have here by Deleuze that there are significant differences in the virtual intensities expressed in our actual sensations. These differences do not correspond to actual recognizable differences. It is that the only change is the change of the virtual relations and so on and so on. So my point is that we can maybe apply even the same to ideology. Maybe the true ideological revolution much more difficult to achieve is not to change this is what I was talking I don't know yesterday or before it's not just the change in what you explicitly in explicit or you know like for example as I was talking yesterday if I say you shouldn't do this it has this virtual background do I mean you really shouldn't do this do and blah blah and maybe a much more difficult revolution than to change the explicit rules is the revolution in this background so that I'm saying the same thing but the virtual resonance what Deleuze calls virtuality behind is a different one. Again this is how in this sense the radical change is this change where nothing happens in reality in reality the same is repeated but there you discover the radical pure difference which is no longer just a difference concrete difference that you can pin down but somehow everything is different. Now let me give you another example which I like even more maybe you know it it's such an evil example that I really love. It really happened to me that's why I repeat it all the time. It's from my experience with Doctorow's novel *Billy Bathgate*. Maybe you know the novel and the movie. Okay let me tell you what happened to me. I first saw a movie which I so-so didn't like too much but my impression was oh my god you can see how much better the novel must have been and how they failed you know the then you know sometimes when you do a movie from a masterpiece and it's a bad movie you can still see the traces of the great point of reference literary whatever masterpiece and oh my god what a shame couldn't they recapture blah blah. But then something mysterious happened to me. I said okay let's then read the novel. To cut a long story short the novel was even worse. So some this would be another way to mention the Deleuzian repetition. We have the real repetition. First we have the novel which okay let's agree for the sake of argument you don't have to that it's a bad novel and incidentally I don't have anything against Doctorow. I some of his works I liked tremendously like his *The Book of Daniel* did you see *The Book of Daniel* story I think you should see the book of Daniel I think and so on. No no no it's a lesser known novel so nothing against him but this novel I don't like no and the movie I don't know if you saw it was with Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman and so on whatever okay. So we have a failed novel, not too good novel. We have a failed repetition a movie. Both are let's accept it for the sake of the argument both are failures but the repetition itself retroactively generates a purely virtual spectral presence of the true novel as it should have been. And this is what Deleuze is saying, this is how I read a wonderful passage from Deleuze, the absolute Deleuze. Forget about all that anti-Oedipal step when I take power those books will be burned you know I'm really a totalitarian. When people tell me about the Nazis burning books I say of course we should condemn this but let's not as they put it viciously let's not throw out the baby with the dirty water. The principle of burning books was good they just burned the wrong books. I serious think are the two absolute Deleuze books are I think *Difference and Repetition* and *The Logic of Sense*. There they are miracles for me. So look what he writes here. I quote. He speaks about two presents or two series. While it may seem that the two presents are successive at a variable distance apart in the series of reals, in fact, in fact, they form rather two real series which coexist in relation to a virtual object of another kind, one which constantly circulates and is displaced in them. Repetition is not constituted is constituted not from one present to another but between the two coexistent series that these presents form in function of the virtual object. So again back to *Billy Bathgate*, the film does not repeat the novel on which it is based. It it is rather that they both repeat the unrepeatable virtual X the true novel whose specter is engendered by the passage from the actual novel to the actual to the actual film. And let's be more precise here. It's not that we should simply conceive the starting point, Doctorow's novel as as they put it an open work full of possibilities which can be deployed later actualized in later versions. Or even worse that we should conceive the original work as a pretext which can later be contextualized in different contexts giving a different meaning and so on and so on. What is missing here is some retroactive movement which another quote that I repeat all the time but I think this is again absolutely crucial to understand Hegel a movement described again I mention it in in some of my books what happened in this movement. It is something which was as far as I know first conceptualized by Henri Bergson in his *Two Sources of Morality and Religion*. Bergson describes the strange sensation he experienced when the First World War was declared on August He wrote: in spite of my turmoil and although a war, even a victorious one appeared to me as a catastrophe, I experienced what William James spoke about, a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from the abstract to the concrete. Who would have thought that such a formidable event can emerge in reality with so little fuss. So what he is dealing with is the following point. That when the war exploded what happened? Before everybody knew or expected in at the level of abstract knowledge. Everybody knew about it, expected it. You know how it looked for the last years all Europe was obsessed by the prospect of the war. But nonetheless nobody believed in truly that it really can happen. This is why it was such a shock. It was a clear example of this fetishist disavowal, *je sais bien, mais quand même*. I know very well but nonetheless I don't believe it can really happen. Now what was such a surprise for Bergson was that first it was probable but impossible, this is how it was subjectively experienced. Then when it happened it suddenly became real and possible. That is to say once it happened it retroactively became totally acceptable possible. And I I think the subjective experience described here is quite quite correct. I remember the same for example when I the first weeks I admit were traumatic when I did the military service. I was there and in advance I knew it would be terrifying and I knew it will be horrible but I somehow blocked it as a serious possibility. When I went to the army it's not the shock was not only that I was there but how all of a sudden it was totally naturalized. Did it happen to you that I it was on the contrary already after a week or two that the life in the normal non-military society became a kind of a vague memory and so on. So what happens here? That's the beautiful formula by Bergson is that there is the logic we have here is not the standard linear logic of a possibility of we have a situation A here which has certain possibilities, this can happen, that can happen and so on, then one of these possibilities is realized and so on and so on. No is that something that we consider here of course not logically but in the symbolic space impossible happens and when it happens it retroactively becomes possible. In the sense that oh my god how couldn't we seen it it's quite normal. This would be incidentally the best definition you can imagine of what Jacques Lacan means an act. You do something which appears impossible but it retroactively as it were creates its own conditions of possibility. I will even give you so that you will not excuse me again of trying to do some communist propaganda or what a very common example. You remember the Cold War, Russia so-so sorry Russia so-so in Nixon era but Mao's China total madness they want World War. Then Nixon's visit to China. How when it happened it immediately looked normal. Of course no break of course it's rational politics and so on and so on. So here is another beautiful quote from Bergson where he accounts for this mechanism. He says I never pretended that one can insert reality into the past and thus work backwards in time. However, one can without any doubt insert there the possible, or rather at every moment the possible inserts itself there. Insofar as unpredictable and new reality creates itself its image reflects itself behind itself in the indefinite past. This new reality finds itself all the time having been possible. But it is only at the precise moment of its actual emergence that it begins to always already have been. That's the wonderful formulation. And this is why I say that its possibility which does not precede its reality will have preceded it once this reality emerges. You know it's like it's like this how should I put it, sorry immediately I'll just to finish the line I'm senile old just to finish. It's like you know when you are in love. You are in love and then somehow all of a sudden it appears as if all your previous life is structured as if it was waiting for this moment. Please. [Audience member: "Where did you quote from?"] Ah good idea. It the quote the quote is was it here or there? I will give you the precise quote four yeah. I quote from I quote from from from I wanted to be precise from *Oeuvre* blah blah blah but basically it's from his text it should be translated as one of his big texts *Two Sources of Morality and Religion*. And if I know it correctly it's not a mega thick book so it should be easy to all I know is that my official quote is from *Oeuvre* works you know this Pléiade crazy edition in one volume page and But that's not realistic, look into look into that one. But but to admit but where I really quote from, I don't bluff with you, I tell you openly is as always intellectuals do it, I'm really quoting from that wonderful I forgot which one Jean-Pierre Dupuy whom I mentioned to you yesterday. He is this wonderful rational choice theorist but with a great dialectical sense. For example, he has a wonderful theory of how you should confront a catastrophe. That it doesn't work if you say okay there is still a possibility to you say you must accept catastrophe as inevitable and then change the very past so that you know like you must work in this way. So what I so so what has this to do with ah now we go to the crucial point what has this to do with Hegel? I claim that what the Hegelian temporality when Hegel speaks about rational totality and so on and so on, when Hegel speaks about eternity. It's always done in this way. It's not for example you know you have all these formulas in Hegel which may sound like this absolute metaphysical closure where the atemporal structure has priority over temporal development. Hegel does say for example in development a thing becomes what it always already was. As if you know in previous so as if we have a closed circle of potentials possibilities and this effectively Hegel may appear to be this kind of a totally closed structure. But I think the way we should read the Hegelian notion of totality is more in this Bergson way and I will give you here let's proceed a little bit fast so that we don't lose time you must know again the conservatives that I like. There is another Deleuze's notion which is crucial here. It's the strange notion of what Deleuze calls a pure past. An absolute past a kind of a atemporal eternal texture where, quote from Deleuze, where all events including those that have since without trace are stored and remembered as they're passing away and so on and so on. So again this idea that whatever goes on just realizes what potentially is always already there in an atemporal structure. But is Hegel really saying this? I think Hegel is effectively saying something much closer to I will not quote it to you you must know it a wonderful passage I like conservatives again from T.S. Eliot you know that *Tradition and the Individual Talent*. You know when he has this idea that every truly new work of art retroactively changes the past itself. Of course he is not an idiot like Bergson his point is not that the magic travel in the past but that for example I don't know how to put it after a certain new work of art classical arts themselves are structured perceived in a different way. The idea is here what in structuralism it was called the priority of synchrony over diachrony in the sense that at every historical moment we don't have just the present, the present is always also the entire past the way it forms what Deleuze calls this virtual pure past. All the traces the way they are structured. So again this is how we should distinguish common changes and a true radical change. Common changes just explore possibilities within this structure of the past. A radical change restructures in this sense the past itself. How does this work? Again let me give you a wonderful quote from Borges. I don't always like Borges he is sometimes too too smart for his own good or whatever in this paradox. But he in his short essay in *Other Inquisitions* on Kafka Borges develops a wonderful idea. He says that with ordinary authors you can play the game who were their influences you know like that idiot was influenced by Dostoevsky this up and down and his claim it apropos Kafka but not only Kafka but truly great artists is not simply that they didn't have any predecessors. But that how should I put it but that a truly great author creates his or her precursors. That is to say he says that we can say of course Kafka you find traces in we could play the usual game William Blake, Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe whatever you want and others. But his point is yes but we can see the way these guys had influence on Kafka only once Kafka is already here. That is to say Kafka how should I put it it is Kafka himself with his achievement now I'm back to Bergson who put back into Edgar Allan Poe, Dostoevsky and so on as it were the possibility of Kafka. So how again each new event if it's an event retroactively recreates its own possibility. And that's what Hegel calls totalizing. It's not we are just element in the totality. Totalizing rather means radically open contingent history. Totalizing means that here we touch what Hegel means with this absolute self-relating idealism. It doesn't simply mean you are influenced by the past. It means in a retroactive movement you also change the past of course not the real past but the past as it exists now. putting into it the possibilities of the way it influence you. Again Dostoevsky didn't only influence Kafka. If it's only through Kafka that that dimension of Dostoevsky became discernible for us and so on and so on. This is Hegelian totality. Of course we have this atemporal totality all the time here but this totality is all the time retroactively reconstructed if you want to put it in this way and that's the true historicity. The true historicity changes changes the past itself. So let's make a step further here before concluding for today. This brings us to to the properly Hegelian relationship between necessity and contingency. We have the stupid common sense notion. If you ask people necessity contingency in Hegel, the common idea is this so-called stupid dialectic of them in the sense of the underlying structure of reality is necessary but it realizes it in contingent ways. The classical boring example from the history of Marxism is the way that Russian first great Marxist Plekhanov explained Napoleon. He said there was a historical necessity for the passage from republic to empire. But it was a contingent fact that it was exactly Napoleon. It could have been something you know like necessity is a general tendency necessity or you know this simple statistic game. You know like like sorry I'm vulgar guy like we fuck each other we multiply but who fucks whom is contingent but the general necessity sorry. That's my nature. But you know that I will my only excuse is once you can imagine teaching where was it this I think in Minneapolis which is one of the capitals of political correctness they attacked me and you know what saved me? Their politically correct racism. I learned afterwards that at some committee they already thought of firing me but then somebody says listen these guys come from Balkan you know real tough you shouldn't you didn't understand it at least racism worked for me sorry. So what I’m saying is that so again the standard notion is of the dialectics of necessity and contingency is simply that there is a necessity of contingency. In the sense of a global necessary tendency realizes itself through many contingencies and a step further that Hegel deduces also strictly the necessity of contingency. Like why necessity has to realize itself that's his whole philosophy of nature externality of notion to blah blah. But I claim this is only one side of Hegel. If you read Hegel really closely you discover something much more radical. Not the necessity of contingency but the contingency of necessity. That is to say the Hegelian dialectical process is not a process which is in its overall structure necessary but then it realizes itself through contingency. But if you read Hegel really closely against the background of what I just developed is that something is is not net things become necessary. But things become necessary in a way which is ultimately contingent. In the sense that for example remember yesterday I quoted to you that wonderful example: if Balladur wins the election it will be his victory will be necessary and so on and so on. That's how one should read also and this is a nice example quoted by Dupuy and by Gerard Lebrun a good reader of Hegel crossing the Rubicon. Now if you read Hegel in the wrong metaphysical way is that it was eternally written in the destiny of Hegel his fate and it was all predestined. No the idea is once Hegel contingently decided to cross Rubicon his victory became necessary how should I put it no. It was it was this this this again this retroactive structure is crucial again retroactive structure in the sense of of course at every historical point we live in a totality which is necessary. But this necessary totality is all the time in a contingent way retroactively reconstructed. So that again necessity Hegel's narrative is not a necessary narrative but is a narrative of the very rise of necessity. A narrative of how something in a contingent way becomes necessary. I you wanted to okay immediately just I finish the line I'm senile old just to finish the line. This is why now you will say but I'm dreaming no I'm not this is why this brings me to my eternal point of obsession. This is why for Hegel he insists on monarchy on constitutional monarchy. I think this is the most progressive intelligent aspect of Hegel. He is not a reactionary Hegel. Hegel knew Hegel was well aware of something that exactly what people attributed him is a nonsense. This idea of a totally rational state where everything is rationally regulated. The reason and Hegel was aware that in order to have a rational totality you have to have on the top a contingent element on the top. And this is how Hegel accounts for the king. The king is for Hegel an idiot. He says it openly. He says the function of the king is to sign his name and so on and so on the less he knows all the better. He basically repeats Kierkegaard here who you know this story the Danish king asked Kierkegaard what should the king know and he expected Kierkegaard to tell him wisdom know history. Kierkegaard told him good manners, nice smile blah blah nothing more. So Hegel's point is that you have state as a rational totality but on the top you must have element an element of radical contingency. That's why Hegel was against elections. For Hegel elections were already too too rational qualities decider. You must have total contingency and even ancient Greeks knows knows this. I'm more and more think that authentic democracy should have an element of how do you call the way the ancient Greeks did to throw a dice to lottery. [Audience member: "Lottery."] Yeah lottery contingency. So this is a very nice point this again this is a very nice point of Hegel. So okay also if now we are moving at a very general level. But if you want to be convinced about this just think if you know how Hegel's logic is structured. Hegel doesn't begin with essence and then the essence externalizing itself. Hegel begins with being. The multiplicity of being is a domain of pure contingency. And the story of his logic is the story of how out of this interaction of the totally contingent multiplicity of being essence necessity arises and so on and so on. [Audience member: "Just a very simple explanation. It seems to me that the contingency of necessity is if you look at behavior very simply ABC it's the consequences that create the behavior not the antecedents."] Yeah you can also put it in this way yeah. [Audience member continues: "But I have a question for you. Is Zizek creating the Hegel he needs? So do you need you need this certain Hegel today for your theory so you are contingently creating a necessary Hegel in the past for your theory?"] No wait a minute now we can of course relativize it in the sense that I'm not saying the past is totally contingent we are just projecting back into it and so on. What I'm basically trying to say here maybe we can talk about this tomorrow. Maybe I can improvise a little bit about this now. Is that the the ontological implication premise of this is a very radical one. It's the opposite of ontological closure. And here you can see Hegel's true greatness is that reality is not fully constituted. What do I mean by this. You know that Walter Benjamin has somewhere a wonderful passage when he says often great works of art are like shots on a film for which the developer was not yet discovered at that time. So that this hermeneutic problem can we really mean what did Sophocles mean, fuck him who cares. If you come later it's not an obstacle. You can there are things which you can properly understand only only with a delay, no. So in this sense okay maybe I can should conclude maybe you know the story. Just two more things till one I want to say. First how I perceive in a very radical way this ontological openness. I think this is the ultimate Hegel's position. I read recently maybe you know the story a wonderful idea in a otherwise rather shitty introduction to philosophy. The idea is the following one. You know the old problem how to interpret quantum physics even today it's not solved. The uncertainty principle and so on. Is it just epistemological or is it ontological. That is to say does the fact that we cannot measure at the same time the velocity and the position of an electron whatever does it only mean we cannot measure it or is this in itself indeterminate. Of course we know the point Heisenberg's and blah blah Bohr's position was this radical one. The open ontological openness is in the thing itself. Why do I mention this? I think that the idea we get out of this is and here I refer to some shitty book I think the author is Nicholas Fearn. But here didn't he evoke the following example? He says what if we approach the problem of this ontological status of uncertainty principle what if we approach it through video games? Ah you see he's talking my language no. He said that in video games you have the same incompleteness of reality. You are immersed in a game in the background you have a house. You cannot enter. It's not part of the game to enter the house. So of course there is no program for the inside of the house. Why? Because the programmers knew that this is not part of the game no. Or for example you have some blurred trees in the background. These trees are blurred in themselves because it's not again part of the game that you will come close to them and so on and so on. So even you know if you play games when you kill someone with a knife you can see how you don't see it well because again the inside of a person is not so again we have a reality which is not perfectly fully ontologically constructed. If as it were you come too close to things reality blurs like it can happen in some older not so well programmed games that when you come too close to a soldier it's no longer even a face is just some kind of a square and so on it gets I it's a pretty terrifying experience as it is. Okay now the wonderful... [Audience member: "But there is no developer in this game."] No. [Audience member: "Developer."] Oh you mean that... [Audience: "Actual... I thought if you go there it fills in the programmer. What do you mean by developer?"] [Audience member: "In this game there is no developer."] [Zizek: "And what is a developer? I'm an idiot."] [Audience member: "Programmer."] [Zizek: "The programmer. What do they do?"] [Audience member: "In which game?"] [Audience member: "This is reality."] Ah now we come to the point yes. Now of course okay the first idea which I like of this guy Nicholas Fearn is that what if the lesson of quantum physics is that it's exactly the same with God and our reality. God was a programmer he programmed reality for us and he was simply too lazy in the same way that in a video game why program the inside of a house you will not go there, God thought that the structure of an atom is the limit that we humans are too stupid to go beyond so he said why should I bother programming all those details so that we were a little bit too bright for God how should I put it no. Now you will say but wait a minute this works only if we accept God as a creator. Does this mean a theological view? Ah I claim no I claim this is for me materialism today. The difficult task is to think reality how reality does not collapse in itself can consist precisely as ontologically imperfect. This idea of you know like you look closely it's nothing it blurs that real and this is I think the best argument that I can imagine against reductionism. I mean you say reductionism can we reduce mind to matter matter to but there is no zero level. There is no the more you go down you encounter nothing, void, some blurred quasi-reality what you were down there and you saw something or what? [Audience member: "Yeah well so you mean to say in more like um my brother's studying to be a video game programmer and um with the other students they do this thing well they'll they'll program something there will be a house they'll program a house in the background you can't go into and then somebody else will say well why can't you go in the house and then they'll program the inside of the house something more like that where yes there's no like God created the game but once you're in the game the trees are blurred maybe that's ideology for some reason we need..."] No but again what interests me is that it's against our common sense of reality. We think that reality has to have a certain fullness to stand on its own. That you can play this game of incompleteness only if you subjectivize reality that no I claim no I claim if there is a lesson and it's a truly still not fully taken into account lesson of quantum physics is this incompleteness of reality in itself. And that's as I will develop
and it can do of course things for which it was created. And in the same so in the same way that rabbit doesn't need for his survival differential mathematics and so on we don't need for our survival to understand immateriality, God, soul, you know you just look for what the mind was created. Even if this is true I have as I developed in this book one big naive problem. But there is one big difference between a rabbit and us. Rabbit doesn't even bother about differential calculus. Why do we humans always bother with impossible tasks? Why why are we from the very beginning try to ask metaphysical questions to put it this way. Why don't we simply say okay we can't understand it let's drop it. And I think that we can go even further. One can show that all great inventions, utilitarian inventions like new machines and so on that the usual logic of discovery was not oh we have a problem we should invent it. First it was always that you invented something out of pure metaphysical speculation useless and then application always comes secondary. So it's not this primitive Marxist economic reductionism which says we we developed machines for production and then rich people can use them as toys and so on. You know the history of modern machinery in the 17th century already you had I don't know how many machineries in the court of Louis XIV and so on. They were used to produce rain, spectacles, dolls and so on. First they were widely constructed for just for amusement to fascinate, application came came afterwards and so on. So my point is that I would I'm tempted to link this with what I was saying before. The true mystery for me as it were is that again back to sexuality that's Hegel. It's not that we have our natural sexuality which is gradually civilized and so on and so on. No, natural sexuality gets denaturalized in some kind of deadly passion, crazy insistence. This is what was the enigma for Freud from the very beginning. How is it that and incidentally even I know some brain scientists or rather behavioral scientists who are doing things with apes and told me some interesting even empirical data at this level. A guy whom I know a Turkish name Güven Güzeldere in at Duke University he is doing experiments not cruel ones not the one where you do horror with with apes and he told me that it's interesting how is there a difference between ape and human being when you pose is that apes are generally more rational even. In the sense of if you make with an ape the experiment of simply the experiment of let's say very primitive experiment he told me. You propose to a male ape a beautiful very attractive sexual partner and a B-level sexual partner. First the ape tries to get to the more attractive partner. But after some time when the ape see he cannot do it he says okay fuck off he goes to the he it's very rational calculation while with men we are much more we persist to the end. You never you know the more it is impossible the more you stick to it and so on and so on. This let's call it internalisation of desire which then produces something which and that's how I read Freud brings us to death drive. Death drive has nothing to do whatsoever that's the ABC I hope you know it with that Nirvana shit and so on. Death drive is exactly the opposite. I claim if you read Freud closely death drive is Freudian name for immortality. What Freud calls death drive is some something that insists as it were beyond life and death. Figures of death drive are like vampires, living death and so on and so on. And my thesis which I develop repeatedly in my books without this you cannot understand not only Hegel but none of the classical philosophy is that this is what explodes in German Idealism that and that's what I'm trying to do basically in all my work reading mutually like German Idealism to psychoanalysis not in order to reduce German Idealism just to psychology but to elevate Freud to a thinker. For example, sorry if you know this line but it's wonderful works I want to repeat it it works wonderfully. The best account of death drive I found is just in a small like some little deduction in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason where he mentions Immanuel Kant two types of negation. He mentions the he distinguishes negative judgment and infinite judgment. It's very simple to understand. Kant says negative judgment negates a predicate a infinite judgment asserts affirms a non-predicate. You will say what's the point is the same shit. No it's not. Why not. Let's go to Stephen King territory and you will see why not. Let us negate the predicate dead. First as a negative judgment. If I say you are not dead. What does this mean? You are alive, nothing special no. We have just the space of life-death you are not dead you are alive. Okay but think about let us say not you are not dead but you are undead. Ah this means something quite different. This doesn't mean you are simply alive, it means you are alive as dead, you are a living dead. You know a third domain is opened of some obscene life which insists beyond life and death and so on. And my claim this vampiric as it were undead all the vampires and so on this this space is this space is opened by Kant and this is the space of this absolute negativity death drive and so on and so on which was conceptualized by by German Idealism. And this is the excess with which culture, dialectical formulation, dialectical mediation tries to deal. And with Hegel now you will say but wait a minute for Hegel this is only a starting point. But at the end we have this perfect reconciliation all in peace and so on. No, that's what I will try to prove to you more tomorrow than today. Hegel was well aware that that this excess of negativity cannot ever be culturalized but which is why for example just to give you one hint in contrast to Kant, Hegel didn't believe in eternal peace. Because he thought that you know the way Hegel is presented perfect modern bourgeois society all the particular interests are harmonized in the common good, you reconcile with society and so on. Hegel thinks that not because he was a militarist but he thought that there always is the threat that this radical negativity this excess will explode again and again. And again this excess is neither life nor nor neither life nor the or neither nature nor culture. So you see now we already got the first abstract idea of how the Hegelian progress let's put it in this way looks. It's not simply you have a natural substratum and then progressively you develop more and more culture. No, once you are in culture retroactively you denaturalize nature. You know culture doesn't only civilize natural instincts, the price we pay to move into culture is that what before was a simple natural instinct like I want to screw one month a year when smells tells me this is a mating season or what becomes an absolute eternal suicidal repetitive drive which is crucial for Freudian notion of death drive. That it's a repetitive drive, repetitive in the sense that as Lacan puts it puts it very precisely in this distinction he uses English terms here Lacan between aim and goal. Goal is what you officially want. Let's say to achieve something. But for Lacan the true satisfaction of the drive is the circular movement of the drive itself. You don't want to achieve it's like boomerang. You don't want to hit it. You want it to come back and try again and again and the true satisfaction is provided by this very circular movement and so on and so on. Which is why for Freud who is here a good Hegelian, which is why for Freud sexual satisfaction it's always you know it's no when Freud talks about this foreplay. It's never simply foreplay is a goal to the final goal big penetration whatever sexual act. There is always a danger that the foreplay will turn into a self-goal how should I put it. I want to tell you here a story told to me by nice British Lacanian very good popularizer of Lacan but also independently of this not an idiot Darian Leader. In his I think one of the first books he it's a very simple example I mention it in one of my books. He quotes the example of very simple one I mention in one of my books of how one of his patients you want to blackmail me or what did he gave you this one? I mean with like this nasty horrible sorry that told him of a strange a strange slip of tongue that happened to him. He took a lady to a restaurant with the obvious goal of seducing her later. And while approaching and reserving a table he made the obvious slip of tongue. Instead of saying table for two please he said a bed for two please to the waiter. Now the primitive pseudo-Freudian interpretation would have been of course his mind was was already up there blah blah blah. Ah Darian Leader proposed a totally different interpretation. That he was afraid that how should I put it that the foreplay would overshadow the official goal itself as it were. He was afraid that in this in this hierarchical order we go to eat just it's just a pretext to go to bed later, that he will enjoy too much what should be following the official hierarchy of seduction just the preparatory step. So it was more a defense against enjoying too much the foreplay the beginning. He wanted to convince himself and no no no it's not eating I really want to it's really about you know. It's I think a much more intelligent explanation. Which is why just to conclude the first part with lovingly racist joke about maybe if you the two of you from ex-Yugoslavia you know those wonderful jokes some of them are metaphysical two Bosnians Mujo and Haso no. One of them I saw you know that in Slovenia they are extremely popular we did a movie series like you get a DVD some hundreds of their their wonderfully vulgar but some of them very metaphysical jokes. And one of them has the same logic, this is what I was talking about, this is human desire. Sorry if I put it I don't mean it it says that Mujo and his Fata is his wife they want to make love and Fata wants to excite him to do fellatio and he says now I will do fellatio I masturbate him now I will I will how do you put it I will I will how do you put it I will make it sweet like a cake then to eat your penis no and he says now here I put cream whipped cream on it I put a cherry on it and and then she wants to start to suck and Mujo says no this is so nice I want to I want to how do you put it I want to [makes eating noise]. You know like ah that's the Balkan wisdom. You will never you know that was what the patient first was afraid there how should I put it no. Okay we didn't say a lot about Hegel we will go on in part two okay now we do the short break. [Break] Yeah although no no no I see it look here you got me because as you know first I share Lacan's big distrust of Nietzsche. Because you know that this is there are a couple of mysteries in Jacques Lacan. For example practically total absence of Nietzsche. He mentions Nietzsche just a couple of times and usually in a dismissive way. Like I think in the ethical strategies he said that to speak about beyond good and evil it's it's saying too much you say exactly the same if you just say beyond the good and so on. So it's more this kind of a nasty aggressiveness I think he was wrong but I somehow I don't know could then then okay I can make propaganda for my friend my part of my Slovene gang Alenka Zupancic. She did that book *The Shortest Shadow* she practically she practically converted me converted me to Nietzsche no. Although you know I'm very interested in this problem Nietzsche and Wagner because you know it's much more ambiguous Nietzsche really didn't get rid of Wagner up to the end. You know that when Nietzsche collapsed got crazy the text he was working on was this there are two: *Der Fall Wagner*, *Nietzsche contra Wagner* what where he tried to sorry and *Antichrist* yeah yeah where he tried to prove that he was always against Wagner and so on. So obviously this was a problem this was a problem for Nietzsche but again I mean of course I'm still working on that in the sense that... [Audience: "Nietzsche also talks about the same thing and the return..."] Yeah there are some with some other with a different one but Nietzsche just popped up in the conversation. Yeah I know yeah. Okay so you know what let's do another line where we will reach Hegel only at the end and then this is an endless task tomorrow we shall go on and so on and so on. First I want to begin I did some of this stuff in my books but I will don't worry I will give a different twist at the end. I will try to account for what Hegel means with concrete universality. This is usually taken as Hegel at his craziest no. You know this idea that you our usual nominalist view is we all know there is full concrete reality from which we abstract some features like I look at people I say I'm a freak you are nicer blah blah blah but there are some features we share two legs whatever blah blah that's the but Hegel this is how it is usually perceived that Hegel was a crazy guy who thought that somehow you can develop the entire concrete content out of just abstract self-movement of the universal notion. So was he crazy what did he mean by this. I want to give you some examples here let's hope we will finish it. I want to begin with the great anti-Hegelian. Hegel is a tricky guy often you should look for truly Hegelian insights into when you get a guy who is absolutely explicitly anti-Hegel but then says something with okay I would like to go to Deleuze. You know this that if there is an anti-Hegel it's Deleuze. I would like to start with Deleuze's notion of pure difference linked with repetition. The idea of pure difference is a repetition which is repetition absolutely of the same. Nothing changes. You repeat the same and there you produce a pure difference, radical difference. This is how Deleuze I claim in a very Hegelian view argues how new emerges out of a repetition. I would like to give you two examples I use them in some of my books I will try to give again a different twist at least to them here. I like classical music I like Robert Schumann. One of the masterpieces by Schumann is *Humoreske*. There he does something wonderful. I do we have here I even I will play this game I hate this posting with the screens and so on but I will [Zizek makes drawing gesture on a chalkboard] oh it looks bad everything will collect no it will not. Okay you know this piece of piano is something does something very strange. It's written on three lines of notes. You have left hand, right hand and then you have something very mysterious which was popular in German romantic music so-called Augenmusik, music just for the eye. So let's say one note line, the middle one, the lower. Let's say this is what you play with the left hand, what you play with the right hand, and what you play here. Of course his idea a typically romantic one was that when you play it's very Deleuzian idea of virtual, virtuality. And you know the precise nature of what Deleuze calls virtual. Virtual it's not just possible what may be. Virtual is something which as possible as non-actual already exerts an efficiency of its own. So his idea was that the true great piano pianist [Audience correct pronunciation: "Pianist."] Pianist, I see. Not penis, penis, I see. Not penis or what, penis because you know that wonderful obscene joke when General de Gaulle retired General de Gaulle retired an American journalist asked his wife what she is looking for now and she said happiness but she pronounce it in this French way she says appiness, no. I found that so vulgar and now we have more of you. So I had this kind of penis problems. Okay. So of course it's clear what Schumann wanted to say that the way he wanted to do it is a kind of variations without a melody. That the two lines should be perceived as variations implicitly referring to a melodic line which should remain only for the eyes which you don't hear. So the point is that again a truly great piano pianist [Audience laughter at mispronunciation] must know how to play it so that somehow this absent but precisely the virtual absent point of reference is evoked. But then something more mysterious happens. My source is it's always good to confess which is the source of your bluffing so that no it's a wonderful book I really appreciate him maybe he is the greatest musicologist to know you know Charles Rosen who did this *The Classical Style* and then he did maybe even better second volume as it were *The Romantic Generation* where he covers Schubert Schumann Chopin all those guys. Okay. He does this. First you have the whole part segment written in this way. A melody here oh melody the line of notes here the line of notes here with Augenmusik a third line here. Then something strange happens. He repeats exactly the same notes up and down but here it's empty. And this is the true challenge to the piano player. This would be the Deleuzian pure repetition. Because nothing changes at the level of reality. By reality I simply mean the actual notes to be played. What changes is just the virtual background. The virtual echoing, no. You should play I don't know how this works I listened to some recordings I imagined that I heard the difference but probably because I wanted to hear it and but you see the art the artist you repeat exactly the same line but in such a way that what changes is not what you hear but what you don't hear. You should play it once so that this somehow don't ask me how resonates in it the other time that it doesn't resonate in it. This I think can be perfectly referred to as what Deleuze means by a quote I have here by Deleuze that there are significant differences in the virtual intensities expressed in our actual sensations. These differences do not correspond to actual recognizable differences. It is that the only change is the change of the virtual relations and so on and so on. So my point is that we can maybe apply even the same to ideology. Maybe the true ideological revolution much more difficult to achieve is not to change this is what I was talking I don't know yesterday or before it's not just the change in what you explicitly in explicit or you know like for example as I was talking yesterday if I say you shouldn't do this it has this virtual background do I mean you really shouldn't do this do and blah blah and maybe a much more difficult revolution than to change the explicit rules is the revolution in this background so that I'm saying the same thing but the virtual resonance what Deleuze calls virtuality behind is a different one. Again this is how in this sense the radical change is this change where nothing happens in reality in reality the same is repeated but there you discover the radical pure difference which is no longer just a difference concrete difference that you can pin down but somehow everything is different. Now let me give you another example which I like even more maybe you know it it's such an evil example that I really love. It really happened to me that's why I repeat it all the time. It's from my experience with Doctorow's novel *Billy Bathgate*. Maybe you know the novel and the movie. Okay let me tell you what happened to me. I first saw a movie which I so-so didn't like too much but my impression was oh my god you can see how much better the novel must have been and how they failed you know the then you know sometimes when you do a movie from a masterpiece and it's a bad movie you can still see the traces of the great point of reference literary whatever masterpiece and oh my god what a shame couldn't they recapture blah blah. But then something mysterious happened to me. I said okay let's then read the novel. To cut a long story short the novel was even worse. So some this would be another way to mention the Deleuzian repetition. We have the real repetition. First we have the novel which okay let's agree for the sake of argument you don't have to that it's a bad novel and incidentally I don't have anything against Doctorow. I some of his works I liked tremendously like his *The Book of Daniel* did you see *The Book of Daniel* story I think you should see the book of Daniel I think and so on. No no no it's a lesser known novel so nothing against him but this novel I don't like no and the movie I don't know if you saw it was with Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman and so on whatever okay. So we have a failed novel, not too good novel. We have a failed repetition a movie. Both are let's accept it for the sake of the argument both are failures but the repetition itself retroactively generates a purely virtual spectral presence of the true novel as it should have been. And this is what Deleuze is saying, this is how I read a wonderful passage from Deleuze, the absolute Deleuze. Forget about all that anti-Oedipal step when I take power those books will be burned you know I'm really a totalitarian. When people tell me about the Nazis burning books I say of course we should condemn this but let's not as they put it viciously let's not throw out the baby with the dirty water. The principle of burning books was good they just burned the wrong books. I serious think are the two absolute Deleuze books are I think *Difference and Repetition* and *The Logic of Sense*. There they are miracles for me. So look what he writes here. I quote. He speaks about two presents or two series. While it may seem that the two presents are successive at a variable distance apart in the series of reals, in fact, in fact, they form rather two real series which coexist in relation to a virtual object of another kind, one which constantly circulates and is displaced in them. Repetition is not constituted is constituted not from one present to another but between the two coexistent series that these presents form in function of the virtual object. So again back to *Billy Bathgate*, the film does not repeat the novel on which it is based. It it is rather that they both repeat the unrepeatable virtual X the true novel whose specter is engendered by the passage from the actual novel to the actual to the actual film. And let's be more precise here. It's not that we should simply conceive the starting point, Doctorow's novel as as they put it an open work full of possibilities which can be deployed later actualized in later versions. Or even worse that we should conceive the original work as a pretext which can later be contextualized in different contexts giving a different meaning and so on and so on. What is missing here is some retroactive movement which another quote that I repeat all the time but I think this is again absolutely crucial to understand Hegel a movement described again I mention it in in some of my books what happened in this movement. It is something which was as far as I know first conceptualized by Henri Bergson in his *Two Sources of Morality and Religion*. Bergson describes the strange sensation he experienced when the First World War was declared on August He wrote: in spite of my turmoil and although a war, even a victorious one appeared to me as a catastrophe, I experienced what William James spoke about, a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from the abstract to the concrete. Who would have thought that such a formidable event can emerge in reality with so little fuss. So what he is dealing with is the following point. That when the war exploded what happened? Before everybody knew or expected in at the level of abstract knowledge. Everybody knew about it, expected it. You know how it looked for the last years all Europe was obsessed by the prospect of the war. But nonetheless nobody believed in truly that it really can happen. This is why it was such a shock. It was a clear example of this fetishist disavowal, *je sais bien, mais quand même*. I know very well but nonetheless I don't believe it can really happen. Now what was such a surprise for Bergson was that first it was probable but impossible, this is how it was subjectively experienced. Then when it happened it suddenly became real and possible. That is to say once it happened it retroactively became totally acceptable possible. And I I think the subjective experience described here is quite quite correct. I remember the same for example when I the first weeks I admit were traumatic when I did the military service. I was there and in advance I knew it would be terrifying and I knew it will be horrible but I somehow blocked it as a serious possibility. When I went to the army it's not the shock was not only that I was there but how all of a sudden it was totally naturalized. Did it happen to you that I it was on the contrary already after a week or two that the life in the normal non-military society became a kind of a vague memory and so on. So what happens here? That's the beautiful formula by Bergson is that there is the logic we have here is not the standard linear logic of a possibility of we have a situation A here which has certain possibilities, this can happen, that can happen and so on, then one of these possibilities is realized and so on and so on. No is that something that we consider here of course not logically but in the symbolic space impossible happens and when it happens it retroactively becomes possible. In the sense that oh my god how couldn't we seen it it's quite normal. This would be incidentally the best definition you can imagine of what Jacques Lacan means an act. You do something which appears impossible but it retroactively as it were creates its own conditions of possibility. I will even give you so that you will not excuse me again of trying to do some communist propaganda or what a very common example. You remember the Cold War, Russia so-so sorry Russia so-so in Nixon era but Mao's China total madness they want World War. Then Nixon's visit to China. How when it happened it immediately looked normal. Of course no break of course it's rational politics and so on and so on. So here is another beautiful quote from Bergson where he accounts for this mechanism. He says I never pretended that one can insert reality into the past and thus work backwards in time. However, one can without any doubt insert there the possible, or rather at every moment the possible inserts itself there. Insofar as unpredictable and new reality creates itself its image reflects itself behind itself in the indefinite past. This new reality finds itself all the time having been possible. But it is only at the precise moment of its actual emergence that it begins to always already have been. That's the wonderful formulation. And this is why I say that its possibility which does not precede its reality will have preceded it once this reality emerges. You know it's like it's like this how should I put it, sorry immediately I'll just to finish the line I'm senile old just to finish. It's like you know when you are in love. You are in love and then somehow all of a sudden it appears as if all your previous life is structured as if it was waiting for this moment. Please. [Audience member: "Where did you quote from?"] Ah good idea. It the quote the quote is was it here or there? I will give you the precise quote four yeah. I quote from I quote from from from I wanted to be precise from *Oeuvre* blah blah blah but basically it's from his text it should be translated as one of his big texts *Two Sources of Morality and Religion*. And if I know it correctly it's not a mega thick book so it should be easy to all I know is that my official quote is from *Oeuvre* works you know this Pléiade crazy edition in one volume page and But that's not realistic, look into look into that one. But but to admit but where I really quote from, I don't bluff with you, I tell you openly is as always intellectuals do it, I'm really quoting from that wonderful I forgot which one Jean-Pierre Dupuy whom I mentioned to you yesterday. He is this wonderful rational choice theorist but with a great dialectical sense. For example, he has a wonderful theory of how you should confront a catastrophe. That it doesn't work if you say okay there is still a possibility to you say you must accept catastrophe as inevitable and then change the very past so that you know like you must work in this way. So what I so so what has this to do with ah now we go to the crucial point what has this to do with Hegel? I claim that what the Hegelian temporality when Hegel speaks about rational totality and so on and so on, when Hegel speaks about eternity. It's always done in this way. It's not for example you know you have all these formulas in Hegel which may sound like this absolute metaphysical closure where the atemporal structure has priority over temporal development. Hegel does say for example in development a thing becomes what it always already was. As if you know in previous so as if we have a closed circle of potentials possibilities and this effectively Hegel may appear to be this kind of a totally closed structure. But I think the way we should read the Hegelian notion of totality is more in this Bergson way and I will give you here let's proceed a little bit fast so that we don't lose time you must know again the conservatives that I like. There is another Deleuze's notion which is crucial here. It's the strange notion of what Deleuze calls a pure past. An absolute past a kind of a atemporal eternal texture where, quote from Deleuze, where all events including those that have since without trace are stored and remembered as they're passing away and so on and so on. So again this idea that whatever goes on just realizes what potentially is always already there in an atemporal structure. But is Hegel really saying this? I think Hegel is effectively saying something much closer to I will not quote it to you you must know it a wonderful passage I like conservatives again from T.S. Eliot you know that *Tradition and the Individual Talent*. You know when he has this idea that every truly new work of art retroactively changes the past itself. Of course he is not an idiot like Bergson his point is not that the magic travel in the past but that for example I don't know how to put it after a certain new work of art classical arts themselves are structured perceived in a different way. The idea is here what in structuralism it was called the priority of synchrony over diachrony in the sense that at every historical moment we don't have just the present, the present is always also the entire past the way it forms what Deleuze calls this virtual pure past. All the traces the way they are structured. So again this is how we should distinguish common changes and a true radical change. Common changes just explore possibilities within this structure of the past. A radical change restructures in this sense the past itself. How does this work? Again let me give you a wonderful quote from Borges. I don't always like Borges he is sometimes too too smart for his own good or whatever in this paradox. But he in his short essay in *Other Inquisitions* on Kafka Borges develops a wonderful idea. He says that with ordinary authors you can play the game who were their influences you know like that idiot was influenced by Dostoevsky this up and down and his claim it apropos Kafka but not only Kafka but truly great artists is not simply that they didn't have any predecessors. But that how should I put it but that a truly great author creates his or her precursors. That is to say he says that we can say of course Kafka you find traces in we could play the usual game William Blake, Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe whatever you want and others. But his point is yes but we can see the way these guys had influence on Kafka only once Kafka is already here. That is to say Kafka how should I put it it is Kafka himself with his achievement now I'm back to Bergson who put back into Edgar Allan Poe, Dostoevsky and so on as it were the possibility of Kafka. So how again each new event if it's an event retroactively recreates its own possibility. And that's what Hegel calls totalizing. It's not we are just element in the totality. Totalizing rather means radically open contingent history. Totalizing means that here we touch what Hegel means with this absolute self-relating idealism. It doesn't simply mean you are influenced by the past. It means in a retroactive movement you also change the past of course not the real past but the past as it exists now. putting into it the possibilities of the way it influence you. Again Dostoevsky didn't only influence Kafka. If it's only through Kafka that that dimension of Dostoevsky became discernible for us and so on and so on. This is Hegelian totality. Of course we have this atemporal totality all the time here but this totality is all the time retroactively reconstructed if you want to put it in this way and that's the true historicity. The true historicity changes changes the past itself. So let's make a step further here before concluding for today. This brings us to to the properly Hegelian relationship between necessity and contingency. We have the stupid common sense notion. If you ask people necessity contingency in Hegel, the common idea is this so-called stupid dialectic of them in the sense of the underlying structure of reality is necessary but it realizes it in contingent ways. The classical boring example from the history of Marxism is the way that Russian first great Marxist Plekhanov explained Napoleon. He said there was a historical necessity for the passage from republic to empire. But it was a contingent fact that it was exactly Napoleon. It could have been something you know like necessity is a general tendency necessity or you know this simple statistic game. You know like like sorry I'm vulgar guy like we fuck each other we multiply but who fucks whom is contingent but the general necessity sorry. That's my nature. But you know that I will my only excuse is once you can imagine teaching where was it this I think in Minneapolis which is one of the capitals of political correctness they attacked me and you know what saved me? Their politically correct racism. I learned afterwards that at some committee they already thought of firing me but then somebody says listen these guys come from Balkan you know real tough you shouldn't you didn't understand it at least racism worked for me sorry. So what I’m saying is that so again the standard notion is of the dialectics of necessity and contingency is simply that there is a necessity of contingency. In the sense of a global necessary tendency realizes itself through many contingencies and a step further that Hegel deduces also strictly the necessity of contingency. Like why necessity has to realize itself that's his whole philosophy of nature externality of notion to blah blah. But I claim this is only one side of Hegel. If you read Hegel really closely you discover something much more radical. Not the necessity of contingency but the contingency of necessity. That is to say the Hegelian dialectical process is not a process which is in its overall structure necessary but then it realizes itself through contingency. But if you read Hegel really closely against the background of what I just developed is that something is is not net things become necessary. But things become necessary in a way which is ultimately contingent. In the sense that for example remember yesterday I quoted to you that wonderful example: if Balladur wins the election it will be his victory will be necessary and so on and so on. That's how one should read also and this is a nice example quoted by Dupuy and by Gerard Lebrun a good reader of Hegel crossing the Rubicon. Now if you read Hegel in the wrong metaphysical way is that it was eternally written in the destiny of Hegel his fate and it was all predestined. No the idea is once Hegel contingently decided to cross Rubicon his victory became necessary how should I put it no. It was it was this this this again this retroactive structure is crucial again retroactive structure in the sense of of course at every historical point we live in a totality which is necessary. But this necessary totality is all the time in a contingent way retroactively reconstructed. So that again necessity Hegel's narrative is not a necessary narrative but is a narrative of the very rise of necessity. A narrative of how something in a contingent way becomes necessary. I you wanted to okay immediately just I finish the line I'm senile old just to finish the line. This is why now you will say but I'm dreaming no I'm not this is why this brings me to my eternal point of obsession. This is why for Hegel he insists on monarchy on constitutional monarchy. I think this is the most progressive intelligent aspect of Hegel. He is not a reactionary Hegel. Hegel knew Hegel was well aware of something that exactly what people attributed him is a nonsense. This idea of a totally rational state where everything is rationally regulated. The reason and Hegel was aware that in order to have a rational totality you have to have on the top a contingent element on the top. And this is how Hegel accounts for the king. The king is for Hegel an idiot. He says it openly. He says the function of the king is to sign his name and so on and so on the less he knows all the better. He basically repeats Kierkegaard here who you know this story the Danish king asked Kierkegaard what should the king know and he expected Kierkegaard to tell him wisdom know history. Kierkegaard told him good manners, nice smile blah blah nothing more. So Hegel's point is that you have state as a rational totality but on the top you must have element an element of radical contingency. That's why Hegel was against elections. For Hegel elections were already too too rational qualities decider. You must have total contingency and even ancient Greeks knows knows this. I'm more and more think that authentic democracy should have an element of how do you call the way the ancient Greeks did to throw a dice to lottery. [Audience member: "Lottery."] Yeah lottery contingency. So this is a very nice point this again this is a very nice point of Hegel. So okay also if now we are moving at a very general level. But if you want to be convinced about this just think if you know how Hegel's logic is structured. Hegel doesn't begin with essence and then the essence externalizing itself. Hegel begins with being. The multiplicity of being is a domain of pure contingency. And the story of his logic is the story of how out of this interaction of the totally contingent multiplicity of being essence necessity arises and so on and so on. [Audience member: "Just a very simple explanation. It seems to me that the contingency of necessity is if you look at behavior very simply ABC it's the consequences that create the behavior not the antecedents."] Yeah you can also put it in this way yeah. [Audience member continues: "But I have a question for you. Is Zizek creating the Hegel he needs? So do you need you need this certain Hegel today for your theory so you are contingently creating a necessary Hegel in the past for your theory?"] No wait a minute now we can of course relativize it in the sense that I'm not saying the past is totally contingent we are just projecting back into it and so on. What I'm basically trying to say here maybe we can talk about this tomorrow. Maybe I can improvise a little bit about this now. Is that the the ontological implication premise of this is a very radical one. It's the opposite of ontological closure. And here you can see Hegel's true greatness is that reality is not fully constituted. What do I mean by this. You know that Walter Benjamin has somewhere a wonderful passage when he says often great works of art are like shots on a film for which the developer was not yet discovered at that time. So that this hermeneutic problem can we really mean what did Sophocles mean, fuck him who cares. If you come later it's not an obstacle. You can there are things which you can properly understand only only with a delay, no. So in this sense okay maybe I can should conclude maybe you know the story. Just two more things till one I want to say. First how I perceive in a very radical way this ontological openness. I think this is the ultimate Hegel's position. I read recently maybe you know the story a wonderful idea in a otherwise rather shitty introduction to philosophy. The idea is the following one. You know the old problem how to interpret quantum physics even today it's not solved. The uncertainty principle and so on. Is it just epistemological or is it ontological. That is to say does the fact that we cannot measure at the same time the velocity and the position of an electron whatever does it only mean we cannot measure it or is this in itself indeterminate. Of course we know the point Heisenberg's and blah blah Bohr's position was this radical one. The open ontological openness is in the thing itself. Why do I mention this? I think that the idea we get out of this is and here I refer to some shitty book I think the author is Nicholas Fearn. But here didn't he evoke the following example? He says what if we approach the problem of this ontological status of uncertainty principle what if we approach it through video games? Ah you see he's talking my language no. He said that in video games you have the same incompleteness of reality. You are immersed in a game in the background you have a house. You cannot enter. It's not part of the game to enter the house. So of course there is no program for the inside of the house. Why? Because the programmers knew that this is not part of the game no. Or for example you have some blurred trees in the background. These trees are blurred in themselves because it's not again part of the game that you will come close to them and so on and so on. So even you know if you play games when you kill someone with a knife you can see how you don't see it well because again the inside of a person is not so again we have a reality which is not perfectly fully ontologically constructed. If as it were you come too close to things reality blurs like it can happen in some older not so well programmed games that when you come too close to a soldier it's no longer even a face is just some kind of a square and so on it gets I it's a pretty terrifying experience as it is. Okay now the wonderful... [Audience member: "But there is no developer in this game."] No. [Audience member: "Developer."] Oh you mean that... [Audience: "Actual... I thought if you go there it fills in the programmer. What do you mean by developer?"] [Audience member: "In this game there is no developer."] [Zizek: "And what is a developer? I'm an idiot."] [Audience member: "Programmer."] [Zizek: "The programmer. What do they do?"] [Audience member: "In which game?"] [Audience member: "This is reality."] Ah now we come to the point yes. Now of course okay the first idea which I like of this guy Nicholas Fearn is that what if the lesson of quantum physics is that it's exactly the same with God and our reality. God was a programmer he programmed reality for us and he was simply too lazy in the same way that in a video game why program the inside of a house you will not go there, God thought that the structure of an atom is the limit that we humans are too stupid to go beyond so he said why should I bother programming all those details so that we were a little bit too bright for God how should I put it no. Now you will say but wait a minute this works only if we accept God as a creator. Does this mean a theological view? Ah I claim no I claim this is for me materialism today. The difficult task is to think reality how reality does not collapse in itself can consist precisely as ontologically imperfect. This idea of you know like you look closely it's nothing it blurs that real and this is I think the best argument that I can imagine against reductionism. I mean you say reductionism can we reduce mind to matter matter to but there is no zero level. There is no the more you go down you encounter nothing, void, some blurred quasi-reality what you were down there and you saw something or what? [Audience member: "Yeah well so you mean to say in more like um my brother's studying to be a video game programmer and um with the other students they do this thing well they'll they'll program something there will be a house they'll program a house in the background you can't go into and then somebody else will say well why can't you go in the house and then they'll program the inside of the house something more like that where yes there's no like God created the game but once you're in the game the trees are blurred maybe that's ideology for some reason we need..."] No but again what interests me is that it's against our common sense of reality. We think that reality has to have a certain fullness to stand on its own. That you can play this game of incompleteness only if you subjectivize reality that no I claim no I claim if there is a lesson and it's a truly still not fully taken into account lesson of quantum physics is this incompleteness of reality in itself. And that's as I will develop
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it
it
Slavoj Žižek
tomorrow this is absolutely crucial for Hegel. This is almost I would have put it put this way the basic operation of Hegel. That you have a certain epistemological limitation and then that's the basic Hegelian trick you solve the problem not by solving it but by showing how the problem itself is its own solution. Let me give you an example I'm embarrassed to give it to you I repeat it all the time
tomorrow this is absolutely crucial for Hegel. This is almost I would have put it put this way the basic operation of Hegel. That you have a certain epistemological limitation and then that's the basic Hegelian trick you solve the problem not by solving it but by showing how the problem itself is its own solution. Let me give you an example I'm embarrassed to give it to you I repeat it all the time
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but it's still the best one. For example Adorno approaches one of his texts about the relationship between psychic and social he claims that it is impossible
but it's still the best one. For example Adorno approaches one of his texts about the relationship between psychic and social he claims that it is impossible
Slavoj Žižek
to find a global unified theory which
to find a global unified theory which
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would have covered the individual or collective psychological dynamic and the objective social dynamic.
would have covered the individual or collective psychological dynamic and the objective social dynamic.
Slavoj Žižek
He claims you cannot reduce one to the other, that all these attempts to somehow ground individual psychic dynamic in some anonymous global mechanisms so that you can say our phenomenal interaction is just a surface event the only true reality are objective social laws. Or the opposite, what some phenomenologists try to do, to take direct interpersonal reaction as the only ultimate reality and that to deduce objective social structures as you know all this reification, sedimentation, alienation whatever objectivization of what originally was first I have problems with this phenomenological view for a very precise Lacanian reason. I claim that if there is a lesson from Lacanian psychoanalysis is that there is no phenomenological zero level of authentic experience which is then sedimented. Let me give you an elementary example that I repeat all the time. Let's say we begin with shaking hands. We know the genesis, you know that if I know it correctly maybe I'm wrong it was a gesture of in the sense of proving that you don't have a knife in your hand or whatever no. Or for example all these ritualized forms of greeting you can say today these are empty clichés but originally you really meant there was no? I don't think you need to presuppose this zero level of originality I think the gap is there from the very beginning. Okay but that's another story. What I want to say back to Adorno is that so we have these two irreducible levels and then Adorno provides a wonderful solution where he says it's wrong to ask oneself can we get a unified theory? Why can't we? We should try to. Does this mean that we cannot know society, that our knowledge of society is partial? He said no, the result of this epistemological deadlock is the deadlock between again individual psychic experience of directly experienced interaction and objective anonymous social structures. And then he says but what is this gap itself is the fundamental social fact itself. So that what we misperceive as the limitation of our knowledge of reality is the basic feature of social reality itself. That's this brings us close to what Hegel means as an and if you allow me just one-two minutes to finish for today, concrete universality. Let's go back to that *Billy Bathgate*. Concrete universality would have been that the absolute novel the eternal also story and then we have these two versions. What does this mean? Let let me give you an example which I use in some of my books to annoy my politically correct anti-colonial friends. The so-called notion which is I think totally ideological wrong of alternate modernity.
He claims you cannot reduce one to the other, that all these attempts to somehow ground individual psychic dynamic in some anonymous global mechanisms so that you can say our phenomenal interaction is just a surface event the only true reality are objective social laws. Or the opposite, what some phenomenologists try to do, to take direct interpersonal reaction as the only ultimate reality and that to deduce objective social structures as you know all this reification, sedimentation, alienation whatever objectivization of what originally was first I have problems with this phenomenological view for a very precise Lacanian reason. I claim that if there is a lesson from Lacanian psychoanalysis is that there is no phenomenological zero level of authentic experience which is then sedimented. Let me give you an elementary example that I repeat all the time. Let's say we begin with shaking hands. We know the genesis, you know that if I know it correctly maybe I'm wrong it was a gesture of in the sense of proving that you don't have a knife in your hand or whatever no. Or for example all these ritualized forms of greeting you can say today these are empty clichés but originally you really meant there was no? I don't think you need to presuppose this zero level of originality I think the gap is there from the very beginning. Okay but that's another story. What I want to say back to Adorno is that so we have these two irreducible levels and then Adorno provides a wonderful solution where he says it's wrong to ask oneself can we get a unified theory? Why can't we? We should try to. Does this mean that we cannot know society, that our knowledge of society is partial? He said no, the result of this epistemological deadlock is the deadlock between again individual psychic experience of directly experienced interaction and objective anonymous social structures. And then he says but what is this gap itself is the fundamental social fact itself. So that what we misperceive as the limitation of our knowledge of reality is the basic feature of social reality itself. That's this brings us close to what Hegel means as an and if you allow me just one-two minutes to finish for today, concrete universality. Let's go back to that *Billy Bathgate*. Concrete universality would have been that the absolute novel the eternal also story and then we have these two versions. What does this mean? Let let me give you an example which I use in some of my books to annoy my politically correct anti-colonial friends. The so-called notion which is I think totally ideological wrong of alternate modernity.
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You know
You know
Slavoj Žižek
this dream you Europeans did it in your way modernization we can do it in a
this dream you Europeans did it in your way modernization we can do it in a
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different
different
Slavoj Žižek
way. I totally agree with
way. I totally agree with
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Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson
Slavoj Žižek
who claims that this is an ideological short circuit at work here. That let's be clear modernization is a code name another word for capitalism. The dream beneath if you look at it closer the dream beneath this idea of we Indians we Latin American can do it in another way is to have another alternate capitalism, to have its pure ideological dream it's to have a capitalism without as it were paying the price for capitalism, without social alienation whatever and so on and so on. It's too it appears historicizing. It appears that you say no we shouldn't universalize the European model we have multiple historically conditioned capitalism modernities. But what the real ideological stake of this operation is to localize the antagonism is to claim antagonism is not in the very notion of capitalism it's just a Western liberal deviation. No wonder that and that's my big argument against alternate modernity sorry guys but in 20th century we in
who claims that this is an ideological short circuit at work here. That let's be clear modernization is a code name another word for capitalism. The dream beneath if you look at it closer the dream beneath this idea of we Indians we Latin American can do it in another way is to have another alternate capitalism, to have its pure ideological dream it's to have a capitalism without as it were paying the price for capitalism, without social alienation whatever and so on and so on. It's too it appears historicizing. It appears that you say no we shouldn't universalize the European model we have multiple historically conditioned capitalism modernities. But what the real ideological stake of this operation is to localize the antagonism is to claim antagonism is not in the very notion of capitalism it's just a Western liberal deviation. No wonder that and that's my big argument against alternate modernity sorry guys but in 20th century we in
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Europe we did have one big alternate
Europe we did have one big alternate
Slavoj Žižek
modernity it was called fascism no. We know what fascism was exactly this. They wanted modernity industry everything but without all you know the alienation blah blah the way they solve it is we attribute this to a foreign intruder to Jews and so on and so on. So what is wrong here? The relationship between universal and particular. Where I do agree with partisans advocates of alternate modernity is that of course there is not one capitalism. All that really exist are historically specific modes of capitalism: Western liberal capitalism, Asian values capitalism, Latin American populist capitalism, European, okay I don't want to be accused of some bias. There are many capitalisms. But how should we perceive the relationship between these particular forms of capitalism and the general notion of capitalism. The standard nominalist way would have been to conceive capitalism as an abstract universality. To say we have some universal features which all capitalist formations share and then we have different forms which struggle with each other like I don't know fascist capitalism against liberal capitalism welfare state against that one blah blah. So we have the universal notion which is just a kind of an empty general container and we have multiple particular content struggling with each other. The Hegelian unity here is again close to Deleuze paradoxically. Deleuze has a wonderful passage in *Difference and Repetition* again where he says that we should reconceptualize the relationship between universal and particular as the relationship between question and answer. That there is always an excess of universal over particular not in the sense of some naive Plato's idealism but that universal is rather a deadlock, a problem, a question and particular are the answers. And this is how we should in a truly Marxist historical way conceive capitalism. Capitalism you know what I mean that the struggle is not at the particular level. The general definition of capitalism its very notion is a certain contradiction antagonism whatever and then we should conceive particular forms of capitalism not simply as more specific examples of this universality but as attempts to resolve this deadlock. For example, capitalism has this tendency towards crisis imbalance fascist capitalism or today Asian values is an attempt to counteract the antagonism through corporate organization and so on and so on. Liberal capitalism thinks with enough liberal individualism you can and so on and so on. So you see the paradox here: the struggle is not between the particulars, the struggle is between each particular and the universal. Universality is not just a neutral general frame. Universality is a certain deadlock and all each particular form is a way to resolve that deadlock. This I think is the best the simplest example I can imagine of what Hegel meant with concrete universality. Where again universality is not just the abstract neutral universality but it's concrete in the sense that it's in this active antagonistic so that it's not only and this is the false view of Hegel you know thesis antithesis two particulars united in a universality. No, the struggle is not between particulars with an encompassing universality. The struggle is between universality and its particular content. Okay enough for today we go on tomorrow. Just tell me when you get enough of this Hegelian stuff I have more of it and so on. You know what was my secret dream? I report on it in my book maybe in this one to do a Hegelian system of sexuality through this negation like to say elementary form would be animal copulation then you turn around then normal copulation multiple self-negation homosexuality and so on. This is kind of a perfect too nice to be true but. Okay so we go on tomorrow. Thank you very much. [Audio ends]
modernity it was called fascism no. We know what fascism was exactly this. They wanted modernity industry everything but without all you know the alienation blah blah the way they solve it is we attribute this to a foreign intruder to Jews and so on and so on. So what is wrong here? The relationship between universal and particular. Where I do agree with partisans advocates of alternate modernity is that of course there is not one capitalism. All that really exist are historically specific modes of capitalism: Western liberal capitalism, Asian values capitalism, Latin American populist capitalism, European, okay I don't want to be accused of some bias. There are many capitalisms. But how should we perceive the relationship between these particular forms of capitalism and the general notion of capitalism. The standard nominalist way would have been to conceive capitalism as an abstract universality. To say we have some universal features which all capitalist formations share and then we have different forms which struggle with each other like I don't know fascist capitalism against liberal capitalism welfare state against that one blah blah. So we have the universal notion which is just a kind of an empty general container and we have multiple particular content struggling with each other. The Hegelian unity here is again close to Deleuze paradoxically. Deleuze has a wonderful passage in *Difference and Repetition* again where he says that we should reconceptualize the relationship between universal and particular as the relationship between question and answer. That there is always an excess of universal over particular not in the sense of some naive Plato's idealism but that universal is rather a deadlock, a problem, a question and particular are the answers. And this is how we should in a truly Marxist historical way conceive capitalism. Capitalism you know what I mean that the struggle is not at the particular level. The general definition of capitalism its very notion is a certain contradiction antagonism whatever and then we should conceive particular forms of capitalism not simply as more specific examples of this universality but as attempts to resolve this deadlock. For example, capitalism has this tendency towards crisis imbalance fascist capitalism or today Asian values is an attempt to counteract the antagonism through corporate organization and so on and so on. Liberal capitalism thinks with enough liberal individualism you can and so on and so on. So you see the paradox here: the struggle is not between the particulars, the struggle is between each particular and the universal. Universality is not just a neutral general frame. Universality is a certain deadlock and all each particular form is a way to resolve that deadlock. This I think is the best the simplest example I can imagine of what Hegel meant with concrete universality. Where again universality is not just the abstract neutral universality but it's concrete in the sense that it's in this active antagonistic so that it's not only and this is the false view of Hegel you know thesis antithesis two particulars united in a universality. No, the struggle is not between particulars with an encompassing universality. The struggle is between universality and its particular content. Okay enough for today we go on tomorrow. Just tell me when you get enough of this Hegelian stuff I have more of it and so on. You know what was my secret dream? I report on it in my book maybe in this one to do a Hegelian system of sexuality through this negation like to say elementary form would be animal copulation then you turn around then normal copulation multiple self-negation homosexuality and so on. This is kind of a perfect too nice to be true but. Okay so we go on tomorrow. Thank you very much. [Audio ends]