Slavoj Žižek — On G.W.F. Hegel, Lecture 2 [Remaster]
Lecture · WhereAreWeSeeing ·
2009-08 · 2:36:06 · 20,892 words
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysissexuality-genderphilosophy-generalideologycinema-art-culturereligion-theologycommunism-socialismrace-antisemitismrevolution-violencesubjectivitycapitalismscience-physicseveryday-life
Žižek begins a lecture on Hegel by analyzing the concept of negation and identity, arguing that identity is a reflexive determination involving a signifier. He uses examples from biology (cells, fetuses) and philosophy (Plantinga, Margulis) to illustrate how life and self-relation create the boundary of the object. The discussion shifts to Lacanian psychoanalysis, linking the master signifier to the object petit a and surplus enjoyment, illustrated through an extended, provocative anecdote about codified sexual expressions in pornography and opera. Žižek contrasts a cynical, instrumental view of sex with Lacan’s romantic conception of love as the entry of the Real into the symbolic order. He analyzes the 'jouissance of the other' through film examples like Bergman’s Silence and von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, arguing that eroticism often resides in the narrative of the act rather than the act itself. He extends this logic to hardcore pornography and prostitution, suggesting that money functions as a libidinal barrier to prevent emotional involvement, drawing a parallel to the psychoanalytic fee. Žižek analyzes the Wolfman case study to illustrate the Lacanian concept of the 'big Other' and the structural role of the analyst, before pivoting to a discussion on the ritualized obscenity of male friendship and the nature of love as an encounter with 'something more' (objet petit a). He applies this logic to anti-Semitism, arguing that the anti-Semitic figure is an empty signifier that unifies disparate social fears, using the 'socialism takes the name' joke and the film Jaws as examples of ideological synthesis. The excerpt concludes with a critique of Alain Badiou’s philosophy of identity, contrasting his formalism with Hegel’s concept of self-reflexive identity. Žižek defends Alain Badiou’s theory of the event against the charge that it cannot distinguish between genuine events and pseudo-events (like Nazism). He argues that Badiou’s concept of the 'evental site' or 'symptomal torsion', the point of inconsistency in a structure, provides the necessary ontological distinction. He contrasts the communist revolution, which shifts the non-existent to maximum existence, with Nazism, which mystifies this point by blaming an external agent (Jews). The discussion extends to the nature of multiplicity, the 'one' versus 'zero', and a debate with an audience member regarding whether orgasm or sexual acts can constitute an event, concluding with a re-reading of Lacan’s sexuation formulas. Žižek analyzes Lacan’s concept of 'other jouissance' and the feminine subject, arguing that woman is 'not-all' in language, which implies a radical subjectivity akin to the Cartesian cogito rather than a mysterious excess. He then critiques Alain Badiou’s theory of the 'event,' proposing a Hegelian-Lacanian synthesis where the event’s reality is retroactively constituted by its nomination and the 'patient work of love' of its followers, using Einstein’s curved space as a metaphor for the formal materialism of desire. Žižek argues that the shift from Kant to Hegel mirrors the transition in physics from matter curving space to space curving itself, applying this 'primacy of the formal' to psychoanalysis and politics. He uses the Wolfman case and anti-Semitism to show that trauma is a retroactive filling of a pre-existing structural gap, not an external event. He further illustrates Hegel's 'negation of the negation' through Richard Wagner’s interpretation of Christian ethics and Proudhon’s claim that 'property is theft,' demonstrating how internal contradictions undermine external oppositions. Žižek critiques the 'white guilt' dynamic of political correctness by invoking Frantz Fanon, arguing that renouncing white identity secretly reasserts white universality. He then analyzes Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative realism, specifically the distinction between potentiality and virtuality, to discuss radical contingency and the nature of infinity. Finally, he explains Hegel’s dialectic of the 'example' (Beispiel), arguing that the failure of an empirical instance to match its concept reveals a flaw in the concept itself, illustrated through the 'Unhappy Consciousness' and the concept of abstract labor.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 59
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Hegel's term for identity as a mode of self-relation, where 'A is A' presupposes a self-reflective structure rather than simple being.
as “counting by counting nothing”
The Lacanian/Fregean operation Žižek attributes to Badiou, where the 'one' is arrived at by counting the void/zero.
Hegel's famous saying cited by Žižek to explain how naming extracts identity from the thing, introducing an element of negativity.
as “master signifier (S1)”
Lacan's concept linked to the series of ordinary signifiers, representing the point where the signifier falls into the signified to designate oneness.
as “object small a (objet petit a)”
The mysterious X or surplus enjoyment that serves as the impossible objective counterpart to the name, constituting identity.
Žižek's preferred term for object petit a, described as the mythic property that makes one what they are.
Robert Pfaller's notion (adopted by Žižek) suggesting that transgressive acts like drinking or sex are codified performances done to belong to a group, not spontaneous expressions.
A quote from Yevtushenko (referenced via Borat) used by Žižek to illustrate the sublime and ridiculous nature of the other in love.
as “there is no sexual relationship”
Lacan's thesis cited by Žižek meaning that sex is never just two people; it is always mediated by fantasy.
as “real sex is masturbation with a real partner”
Žižek's paradoxical formulation explaining that in real sex, the structure is that of masturbation because the partner serves as the object of fantasy.
as “love is the way the real of drive descends or gets into the symbolic order”
Žižek’s summary of Lacan’s later view: love is not an illusion but the specific mechanism by which the raw, brutal Real of sexual drive is integrated into the symbolic structure of language and relationship.
as “phallic masturbatory jouissance”
Lacan’s concept of male sexuality, characterized by a self-contained, instrumental loop where the partner serves merely as an instrument for fantasy and masturbation.
The function of payment in both prostitution and analysis: it creates a libidinal barrier that prevents the participant from being drawn into the emotional/traumatic circle of the other.
Žižek’s cynical coinage for psychoanalysts, comparing them to prostitutes who exchange mental labor for money, using the fee to maintain a necessary distance from the patient’s trauma.
The Lacanian question 'What do you want?' that triggers paranoia when the analyst's desire is opaque, as seen in the Wolfman case.
as “big Other”
The symbolic order or external guarantee of meaning; Žižek argues that even intimate transgressions and obscenities are codified by the big Other, not spontaneous.
as “ideological operation”
The process by which a single empty signifier (e.g., the Shark, the Jew) replaces and unifies the inconsistent multiplicity of a subject's fears.
A signifier (like 'the Jew' or 'the Shark') that has no inherent content but unifies a multiplicity of fears/properties by standing in for them all.
Badiou's term for the specific point within a multiplicity where an event emerges, characterized by the 'non-existent'.
as “sur-numéraire”
Badiou’s term for the excess of the set, an element included but not properly counted within the structure.
Badiou’s ontological claim that the many are primary, and 'one' is a secondary result derived from the operation between multiplicity and void/zero.
A concept introduced by Jacques-Alain Miller, referring to the way the subject is stitched into the symbolic order, which Badiou polemically opposed.
Marx’s term which Žižek reinterprets not as a positive historical stage, but as a negative container for societies that do not fit other categories (tribal, slavery, feudalism, capitalism).
A paraphrase of Lenin’s aggressive reply to a protester, illustrating the asymmetry of revolutionary freedom: the right to speak is granted, but the right to be shot for it is retained by the authority.
A concept cited from an audience interjection, suggesting the self-reflexive nature of the event involves both natural and cultural determinations.
as “jouissance is infinite”
Badiou’s view that enjoyment (jouissance) is boundless and formless, distinct from the infinite of the event, and thus not an event in itself.
as “symptal point of inconsistency”
The structural location where a totality fails to fully totalize itself, allowing for the intervention of an event.
as “non-all”
Lacan’s formula for female sexuation (pas tout), meaning no universality but also no exception, which Žižek argues is misread as an 'other jouissance' outside the symbolic.
Žižek’s critique of the standard reading of Lacan: the idea of a woman fully enjoying outside language is a male fantasy, not the actual position of the 'non-all'.
as “feminine jouissance”
Lacan’s concept of a feminine enjoyment beyond phallic logic, which Žižek argues is fully immanent to language rather than an external excess.
as “femininity as a masquerade”
as “Cartesian subject”
as “primacy of the formal”
The idea that the structure (the 'curved space') exists prior to and determines the content (the 'matter'), which is merely a retroactive filling of the gap.
Trauma understood not as a specific event, but as the formal curvature of the symbolic order itself, which specific memories later fill.
as “primacy of inherent self-contradiction”
Hegel's principle that external opposition is secondary to the internal self-contradiction of the thing itself.
as “purely formal real”
The Lacanian Real reinterpreted as an inherent impossibility or structural gap, rather than a substantial, positive entity.
Proudhon’s slogan used by Žižek to illustrate Hegelian dialectics: property contains its own negation (theft) internally, not just externally.
Hegel's mechanism where identity is not simple but a redoubled negation, emerging through self-reflection and the signifier.
as “white man's burden”
The colonial duty to care for colonials, which Žižek argues is now perverted into a modern political stance of taking responsibility for being the 'ultimate bad guys.'
The implicit norm (white Protestant man) against which all other identities are measured; asserting any other identity is seen as worse than Nazi, while approaching this standard triggers suspicion.
as “hidden arrogance in guilt”
The paradox where the position of the 'most guilty' (white men) reserves a universal teaching position, allowing them to dictate how others reassert their identities.
Hegel’s view that founders of states are criminals who impose their crime as universal; the rule of law is a sub-species of crime, not the other way around.
The violent origins of the law, referencing Walter Benjamin’s distinction between divine and mythic violence, which establishes the law through force rather than pure reason.
as “potentiality vs. virtuality”
Meillassoux’s distinction: potentiality is a possibility pre-inscribed within a frame (like a dice roll), whereas virtuality is something emerging ex nihilo that creates its own possibility.
as “miracle as proof of materialism”
Meillassoux’s claim that a miracle proves materialism because it represents something happening that was not included in the eternal matrix of all possible worlds known to God.
The idea that the laws of nature themselves are contingent and could change, with no deeper necessity or reason why they are as they are.
Cantor’s mathematical insight that there is no single all-encompassing infinity; infinities are multiple and cannot be totalized into one supra-infinity, which Meillassoux uses to invalidate probabilistic arguments against contingency.
Hegel’s mystical notion where the movement of cognition is actually the movement of the thing itself; the object contains the imbalance that drives its own development.
Marx’s concept where labor is not just concrete work on an object but pure abstract spending of energy; this abstraction is not just in the mind but inscribed in the reality of bourgeois society.
Hegel’s play on the German word for example (Beispiel - bei + Spiel): the example is not an imperfect copy of the idea, but the truth of the idea; if the example fails, the notion itself is flawed.
A chapter in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit analyzing asceticism, where the attempt to deny the body actually obsessively affirms it, undermining the ascetic’s own position.
Stories he reaches for 10
Žižek notes the irony that Lenin, a revolutionary, lived in Switzerland renting a room from a middle-class artisanal family, yet wrote enthusiastic letters claiming contact with 'ordinary people, workers.'
“Now I see I am in contact with ordinary people, workers. Fuck him, these were no workers, this was typical not even lower middle-class.”
Žižek argues the shark in Jaws is an empty signifier that unifies disparate social fears (banks, immigrants, nature) into one clear object, just as Hitler unified fears into 'the Jew'.
“The point is that of course an average citizen has all these fears... But what the movie does is as it were replace all these fears with one signifier empty.”
Freud pays the Wolfman, losing his neutral position and triggering paranoia ('che vuoi?'); the patient is later cured by Muriel Gardiner, an American psychoanalyst.
“Freud lost this analytically neutral position. So it triggered immediately in Wolfman paranoia activity in the sense of 'why is Freud giving me money?'”
Žižek cites Foucault’s reference to Borges’ fictional Chinese encyclopedia, which includes a category for 'all the dogs which are not included in this list,' illustrating structural reflexivity.
“all the dogs which are not included in this list. That's the structural logic: that you how should I put it there must be a standing-in within a structure of what is not included in the structure.”
Freud treated the Wolfman, a Russian nobleman who lost his wealth after the Revolution. Freud helped him financially, failing to enforce the fee, which Žižek implies was a clinical mistake regarding the symbolic function of payment.
“What was Freud's mistake in his most famous case, the treatment of Wolfman? ... After October Revolution he lost money. And Freud was too good. Freud helped him.”
A poll showed men preferred Cindy Crawford over the 'perfect' Claudia Schiffer because she had a visible imperfection (a mole), which served as the index of 'something more' that triggers love.
“Claudia Schiffer is too perfect. Cindy Crawford has that sign there, like it shouldn't be a perfect woman, there must be a small sign of imperfection.”
Hegel defends the death penalty not as retribution, but as the ultimate recognition of the criminal as a free, autonomous human being, treating them with respect by holding them fully accountable.
“Hegel's defense of death penalty? No, that it's the ultimate recognition of of of the criminal as a free human being. He said the only way to treat a criminal respectfully is to punish him because only by punishing him fully you treat him as a proper autonomous human being.”
Žižek analyzes the film Falling in Love, where two married lovers meet in an empty apartment but stop before having sex. He argues this refusal makes it an 'event' because doing it would have been a 'cheap love affair.'
“They go to an empty apartment... And then they start to embrace and they they stop. They don't do it. This makes it an event, I claim.”
Žižek puns on the Russian name Netrebko ('she doesn't need it' or 'she needs it like the Sahara needs water') to illustrate the 'fatal beauty' who pretends to be bored or superior.
“Netrebko means 'she doesn't need it.'... So it's a wonderful way, the fatal beauty, but to have it in the name inscribed, 'fuck off, I don't need you,' and so on”
An old Polish Jew explains his support for Stalin: despite Stalin's purges, the Communist Party was the only group that shook hands with Jews in pre-war anti-Semitic Poland.
“The only non-Jewish people who always came to us Jews and shook hands and so on were the communists.”
Works invoked 34
Hegel’s work, read by Žižek as a series of existential attitudes (hedonism, asceticism) undermined by their own exemplification.
Philosophy of Right book
Hegel’s work where the state fails to realize its ideal, leading to a religious community.
A theological book of debate co-authored with John Milbank, referenced as a source for the Wagner analysis.
Being and Event book
Badiou’s major work, central to the discussion of events and the non-existent.
Jaws film
Used as a prime example of an 'ideological operation' where the shark acts as an empty signifier unifying diverse social fears.
After Finitude book
Meillassoux’s book, described as an 'excellent book of ontology' and a deep attack on Kantian finitude.
Armageddon film
Claimed to be one of Badiou’s favorite films, illustrating his 'soft spot' for catastrophe movies.
Encore (Seminar XX) other
Lacan’s Seminar, cited for its ambiguous treatment of female jouissance and sexuation.
The Order of Things book
Foucault’s book, cited for its reference to Borges’ classification.
Breaking the Waves film
Used as a primary example to illustrate the distinction between instrumental/masturbatory pleasure and the 'jouissance of the other' (pleasure in the telling).
Claimed to be Badiou’s favorite film, used as a joke about his tastes.
Jesus of Nazareth opera
Wagner's early dramatic plan, used by Žižek to illustrate the dialectic of sex and property.
Persona film
Žižek explicitly states 'which I don't like,' preferring Silence instead. It is mentioned only to contrast with the preferred work.
The French title of The Order of Things.
Cited by Fanon (and Žižek) as a manifesto against political correctness and eternal victimization.
Hegel's Logic book
Used as the primary text to explain identity, negation, and the signifier.
The Silence film
Žižek prefers this film over Persona and uses a specific scene (the orgy report) to illustrate the concept of 'jouissance of the other.'
Borat film
Referenced as the source of the 'manure' quote from Yevtushenko.
She book
Novel by Rider Haggard, featuring an 'absolute woman' in a dark African kingdom.
Falling in Love film
Used as a concrete example of an 'event' where the refusal to consummate the affair makes it an event.
Robert Pfaller's book on interpassivity, which Žižek tries to push for English publication.
A book by a French historian of ideas (Diction), referenced regarding courtly love and transgression.
Pentimento film
A movie with Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, used to identify Muriel Gardiner as the model for the leftist communist psychoanalyst character.
Mentioned by an audience member; Žižek admits he forgot it due to his dislike of the lead actress, Andie MacDowell. He offers a partial reading ('breaks out of this masturbatory circle') but dismisses it to return to his main point.
One of Žižek's early books, which he claims is 'much better than some of my books which are still in print' and contains his analysis of anti-Semitism.
The Deer Hunter film
Mentioned only to distinguish it from Falling in Love.
Used as a setpiece to explain the shift from matter curving space to space curving matter, illustrating formal materialism.
French Revolution other
Used by Badiou as an example of an event, and by Furet as an example of de-eventalization.
Badiou’s work where he claims an event includes its own nomination.
Logic of Essence book
Hegel's work where terms like Identity and Difference are introduced; Žižek notes the debate about whether Hegel presupposes these concepts earlier.
Logiques des mondes book
Badiou’s later work where he drops the claim that an event includes its own nomination, emphasizing the gap between event and nomination.
Solomon's Mines book
Novel by Rider Haggard, cited as an example of male fantasy.
Tarkovsky's Cinema other
Cited as an example of 'materialized spirituality,' where spiritual experience is immersed in earth, dirt, and mud.
Unhappy Consciousness other
A chapter in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit analyzing asceticism.
People invoked 50
Mentioned as an example of a 'more objectivist' sociological approach (social objectivity) compared to psychological interactions.
Fidel Castro positive
Cited as liking Jaws and interpreting the shark as 'great capital,' illustrating how interpreters try to fix the meaning of an empty signifier.
Frantz Fanon positive
Žižek calls him a 'hard-liner' he 'really appreciates,' citing Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as a manifesto against political correctness and eternal victimization.
Ingmar Bergman positive
Žižek explicitly states he does not like Bergman’s Persona and prefers Silence, but he uses a scene from Silence as a perfect illustration of his theoretical point about jouissance.
Lynn Margulis positive
Cited for her work on cells and the emergence of borders/inside-outside distinctions, though Žižek notes her 'bad side' regarding Gaia mythology.
A Jewish anti-Zionist filmmaker and good friend; they share a ritualized, vulgar friendship involving anti-Semitic jokes.
A hypothetical woman used to illustrate how the name 'Christina' refers to 'something more' than just her physical properties.
Lars von Trier positive
Žižek finds von Trier 'a little bit too pretentious' and 'I don't like him too much,' but acknowledges he is 'sometimes not totally stupid' and uses Breaking the Waves as a key example.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Used as an example of revolutionary violence and hypocrisy (living with middle-class artisans while claiming contact with workers).
Mentioned as someone Žižek 'hates' and is 'not my type,' but used to illustrate how a name can carry a mysterious, threatening 'objet petit a'.
Richard Wagner positive
Cited for his interpretation of Christian ethics (sex/property) as a dialectical movement from external opposition to internal corruption (negation of the negation).
Jacques Lacan positive
Central to Žižek's argument; used to explain the master signifier, object petit a, and the structure of sex/fantasy.
Medea positive
Used by Lacan (and Žižek) as a motif for the 'fatal woman' who slaughters her children, illustrating that 'behind every mother there is a Medea.'
Teresa of Ávila negative
Žižek argues against using Saint Teresa as an example of 'other jouissance' outside the symbolic, stating 'She was writing like crazy!'
Žižek admits he dislikes the actress personally, which caused him to forget the film Sex, Lies and Videotape, illustrating how personal aesthetic biases can interfere with intellectual recall.
Author of early thrillers where 'Carla' was the mysterious head of the KGB, used as a humorous example of the power of a name.
Daniel Dennett positive
Cited alongside Dawkins as being 'right' that Darwinism is radically contingent and irrational in the sense of lacking teleology.
Robert Pfaller positive
An Austrian friend who developed the notion of 'interpassivity' and published 'The Illusion of the Others,' arguing that transgressive acts are codified imitations.
Anna Moffo positive
An Italian opera star from the 60s, used in an anecdote about her choosing orgies over her singing career to illustrate 'Lacanian ethics of desire.'
Benedict XVI negative
Criticized for attacking modern science as 'irrational' and claiming Christian logos is more rational than Islamic irrationality. Žižek says he 'didn't do his own homework.'
Yevgeny Yevtushenko positive
A poet whose quote 'love is mutual masturbation in manure' is cited by Žižek (via Borat) to illustrate the sublime/ridiculous nature of love.
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek offers a 'friendly reaction' to Badiou's paper on negation and identity, appreciating his hints.
John Milbank positive
Theologian with whom Žižek co-authored Monstrosity of Christ.
Cited as offering 'the name' (the Jew) to unify the inconsistent multiplicity of fears in late 1920s Germany.
Alvin Plantinga positive
Cited as a 'very good of the modern Catholic philosophers' who makes a 'wonderfully simple point' about objects beginning with living beings.
Actor in Falling in Love, cited in an example.
Joseph Goebbels positive
Noted for his wisdom in producing Nazi musicals and melodramas rather than just propaganda, understanding the population's needs.
Michel Foucault positive
Cited for referencing Borges’ classification of dogs in The Order of Things.
Richard Dawkins positive
Cited alongside Dennett for recognizing the radical contingency of Darwinism.
Martin Heidegger negative
Cited as the example of being 'fascinated, seduced by a pseudo-event' (Nazism) because he looked for a revolution and found it in the Nazi revolution.
Napoleon positive
Cited for his 'great achievement' of politically emancipating Jews, which paradoxically changed the roots of anti-Semitism.
Jacques-Alain Miller positive
Cited as the introducer of the notion of 'suture,' which Badiou wrote a polemic against.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon positive
Cited for the slogan 'property is theft,' which Žižek uses to illustrate Hegelian dialectics.
Dean MacCannell positive
A friend and sociologist/theorist of tourism who conducted a study on codified sexual expressions in pornography.
Gottlob Frege positive
Cited in the context of the debate on 'suture' and counting nothing.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited for his concept of 'mythic violence' as the violent origin of the law.
Quentin Meillassoux positive
Described as an 'incredible speculative talent' and 'half father of speculative realism.' Žižek agrees with his ontological hypothesis of contingency but disagrees with his mathematical argument regarding probability and infinity.
Mentioned in the context of her visit to China and the Chinese president’s toast about British colonization.
Not explicitly named but implied as the 'old communist Jew' from Poland who supported Stalin due to the Communist Party's relative tolerance compared to pre-war Poland.
Georg Cantor positive
Cited for his mathematical discovery of multiple infinities ('non-all'), which Žižek links to Cantor’s personal trauma as a Catholic.
Anna Netrebko positive
A Russian soprano whose name Žižek puns on ('she doesn't need it') to illustrate the 'fatal beauty' who pretends to be bored.
Referenced in the context of the Polish Communist Party purges; the old Jew supported him because communists were the only non-Jews who shook hands with Jews.
Actress in Falling in Love, cited in an example.
Muriel Gardiner positive
An American psychoanalyst and pupil of Freud who cured the Wolfman; model for the character in Pentimento.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for his concept of the 'Asiatic mode of production,' which Žižek reinterprets as a negative container.
Jorge Luis Borges positive
Cited for his famous classification of dogs, illustrating the structural logic of the 'non-included'.
Paul the Apostle positive
Cited via Badiou’s interpretation of the Pauline dialectic of law.
Sigmund Freud negative
Žižek respects Freud’s status ('most famous case') but identifies a specific clinical error in the Wolfman case: Freud’s failure to enforce the fee, which disrupted the symbolic function of money as a barrier.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central philosophical figure; Žižek uses Hegel's concepts of identity, difference, and the Logic of Essence to critique Badiou and explain anti-Semitism.
Immanuel Kant negative
Used as a foil to Hegel; Kant still needs a 'thing-in-itself' (substantial matter) to curve space, whereas Hegel sees the curvature (form) as primary.
Transcript 76 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Okay, copy, let's do it, not to lose time. Again today, as you wanted me to go on with Hegel, just a little bit the same thing but moving forward of course. I would like to begin with a friendly reaction to yesterday's Badiou paper, this problem of negation, the three types of negation he listed. I would like to, I don't have such a—I cannot propose such a precise formalization, but I will just try as an introduction to give you a brief idea what negation of negation means through a couple of examples in Hegel. Let me first tell you, but we will talk about all of this much more later today, that we approached the crucial question at the end when someone—sorry, I forgot who, I think it was a woman's voice, I was tired, half-asleep there—asked Badiou towards the very end about the problem of identity, what happens with identity and so on. And then there we would have approached Hegel. In what sense is every identity already a redoubled negation? Because that's Hegel's point. I mean, if you read, for example, Hegel's logic, it doesn't begin by identity, it begins by being, nothing to do with identity. Identity, as you may have noticed, occurs at the beginning of the logic of essence. It's already what Hegel calls a reflexive determination, that is to say a mode of self-relating. When you say A is A, this already presupposes a kind of self-reflected identity. Hegel even uses, I quote it often, a wonderfully simple example which also includes a kind of logical temporality, trying to demonstrate that in what simple sense identity is the highest form of contradiction. He plays on the tension between form and content. He says, let us say you say "a rose" or "a table is..." then you expect some determination, a predicate. But you are doubly surprised when you get the same thing: "a rose is a rose." And his point is that identity functions as a void, in the sense that identity means, in this sense it's a reflexive determination, you are not just a series of your properties. You are that X, that void, you know. "You are you" means you cannot be reduced to your color, this, that, and so on and so on. In this sense identity is already a redoubling of the thing. And to go a step further, identity always for Hegel involves basically, as Badiou hinted very nicely yesterday, a signifier. It's only a signifier which gives you identity. In what sense can this be understood? Oh, let's speculate a little bit. I appreciate good enemies, intelligent philosophers. Now I forgot his name, it's not Plantinga, another very good of the modern Catholic philosophers, makes a wonderfully simple point which I claim is profoundly Hegelian. His claim is that there are no objects in nature. Objects begin only with living beings. In what sense? Now you will tell me, of course there are objects here: this is a glass, this is a table, and so on and so on. But if you abstract from us perceiving this table as a table, what right do you have, for example, to include, to say "this is a table" and, for example, not to include this glass into the table? You will say "okay, the table holds together." But then, okay, in what sense is the table a unity? Why can't you also say "this piece of wood, that metal part"? You know, what you count as one is not grounded in nature, it's totally arbitrary. This table has no identity in itself. It's totally arbitrary if you say "a table," if you say "no, this is not one object, it's two." The first moment of identity, which is why for Hegel life already involves a minimum of self-reflexivity, is life. And it's something very mysterious in life. I agree here with, I think I mentioned her yesterday, that wonderful—okay, she has good and bad sides—the bad side for me is that she is part of the Gaia mythology, you know, Gaia earth as an organism, Lynn Margulis—I'm never sure, Margulis? Probably, sorry, I was... You know, her idea... She, one of the focuses of her work are cells, cell as... For her, cell is more elementary, prior to animals, plants, and so on. The mystery of the cell is that there must be a minimum of self-reflection in the sense of how is it that through stupid natural interaction a border emerges? There you can really say, you know, cell means the minimal distinction between inside and outside. Like that's inside, that's outside. For a cell, which is the minimal form again of living organism, there you can draw the line. The moment you have life, but life presupposes this kind of minimum of self-relation, which means you relate to others, but relating to others—sorry, yes? [Interjection
Okay, copy, let's do it, not to lose time. Again today, as you wanted me to go on with Hegel, just a little bit the same thing but moving forward of course. I would like to begin with a friendly reaction to yesterday's Badiou paper, this problem of negation, the three types of negation he listed. I would like to, I don't have such a—I cannot propose such a precise formalization, but I will just try as an introduction to give you a brief idea what negation of negation means through a couple of examples in Hegel. Let me first tell you, but we will talk about all of this much more later today, that we approached the crucial question at the end when someone—sorry, I forgot who, I think it was a woman's voice, I was tired, half-asleep there—asked Badiou towards the very end about the problem of identity, what happens with identity and so on. And then there we would have approached Hegel. In what sense is every identity already a redoubled negation? Because that's Hegel's point. I mean, if you read, for example, Hegel's logic, it doesn't begin by identity, it begins by being, nothing to do with identity. Identity, as you may have noticed, occurs at the beginning of the logic of essence. It's already what Hegel calls a reflexive determination, that is to say a mode of self-relating. When you say A is A, this already presupposes a kind of self-reflected identity. Hegel even uses, I quote it often, a wonderfully simple example which also includes a kind of logical temporality, trying to demonstrate that in what simple sense identity is the highest form of contradiction. He plays on the tension between form and content. He says, let us say you say "a rose" or "a table is..." then you expect some determination, a predicate. But you are doubly surprised when you get the same thing: "a rose is a rose." And his point is that identity functions as a void, in the sense that identity means, in this sense it's a reflexive determination, you are not just a series of your properties. You are that X, that void, you know. "You are you" means you cannot be reduced to your color, this, that, and so on and so on. In this sense identity is already a redoubling of the thing. And to go a step further, identity always for Hegel involves basically, as Badiou hinted very nicely yesterday, a signifier. It's only a signifier which gives you identity. In what sense can this be understood? Oh, let's speculate a little bit. I appreciate good enemies, intelligent philosophers. Now I forgot his name, it's not Plantinga, another very good of the modern Catholic philosophers, makes a wonderfully simple point which I claim is profoundly Hegelian. His claim is that there are no objects in nature. Objects begin only with living beings. In what sense? Now you will tell me, of course there are objects here: this is a glass, this is a table, and so on and so on. But if you abstract from us perceiving this table as a table, what right do you have, for example, to include, to say "this is a table" and, for example, not to include this glass into the table? You will say "okay, the table holds together." But then, okay, in what sense is the table a unity? Why can't you also say "this piece of wood, that metal part"? You know, what you count as one is not grounded in nature, it's totally arbitrary. This table has no identity in itself. It's totally arbitrary if you say "a table," if you say "no, this is not one object, it's two." The first moment of identity, which is why for Hegel life already involves a minimum of self-reflexivity, is life. And it's something very mysterious in life. I agree here with, I think I mentioned her yesterday, that wonderful—okay, she has good and bad sides—the bad side for me is that she is part of the Gaia mythology, you know, Gaia earth as an organism, Lynn Margulis—I'm never sure, Margulis? Probably, sorry, I was... You know, her idea... She, one of the focuses of her work are cells, cell as... For her, cell is more elementary, prior to animals, plants, and so on. The mystery of the cell is that there must be a minimum of self-reflection in the sense of how is it that through stupid natural interaction a border emerges? There you can really say, you know, cell means the minimal distinction between inside and outside. Like that's inside, that's outside. For a cell, which is the minimal form again of living organism, there you can draw the line. The moment you have life, but life presupposes this kind of minimum of self-relation, which means you relate to others, but relating to others—sorry, yes? [Interjection
unknown
from audience: "Well then right away there's the problem of a virus, because a virus has all these functions, but only dependent on its relationship to another being."] Yeah, but I
from audience: "Well then right away there's the problem of a virus, because a virus has all these functions, but only dependent on its relationship to another being."] Yeah, but I
Slavoj Žižek
think you can solve this because, for example, even if a child—and I think this I totally agree... sorry, is the lady here yesterday who asked Badiou the question of what about a child being... No? That's good because I totally disagree with her. I think, My God believe me, I have to... child is for me on the side of disaster, catastrophe, event. What I mean is that I like those theories which are now very fashionable—I mean fashionable not in the bad sense, but in biology—to see child in a womb before birth, fetus, not as some kind of you know organic blah-blah, but as a terrorizing intruder. And to explain the placenta as a defense mechanism so that they don't kill each other. That it's a terrifying shock, it's nothing natural of a child and so on, no? Here I agree, at least here, if you are a feminist give a proper due to Lacanians. Lacan's big motif is that woman is not mother at her most fundamental, that as Lacan puts it somewhere so beautifully, behind every mother there is a Medea, you know, who slaughters her children. That's true. Okay, so my answer to you would have been: even if it's a most intense virus or the child, you know, you can draw the line the moment you can show how the fetus, the child's relation to other is mediated by self-relation. Like, you contact the environment because you relate to yourself. Relate to yourself means, my body tells me I need food, this is my "I." You know that like relating—to put it precisely in these Hegelian speculative terms when Hegel says relation to otherness is always self-relation—the living organism is the basic element here. So what I'm saying is that in this sense for Hegel again identity is a category of reflection, in the sense that it's not the most simple thing. You can talk about an identity only when you have the one, but the one as that—how to put it—unifying feature which cannot be reduced to properties. And already in Hegel you find this, where is negativity here, double negation? Ah, for Hegel
think you can solve this because, for example, even if a child—and I think this I totally agree... sorry, is the lady here yesterday who asked Badiou the question of what about a child being... No? That's good because I totally disagree with her. I think, My God believe me, I have to... child is for me on the side of disaster, catastrophe, event. What I mean is that I like those theories which are now very fashionable—I mean fashionable not in the bad sense, but in biology—to see child in a womb before birth, fetus, not as some kind of you know organic blah-blah, but as a terrorizing intruder. And to explain the placenta as a defense mechanism so that they don't kill each other. That it's a terrifying shock, it's nothing natural of a child and so on, no? Here I agree, at least here, if you are a feminist give a proper due to Lacanians. Lacan's big motif is that woman is not mother at her most fundamental, that as Lacan puts it somewhere so beautifully, behind every mother there is a Medea, you know, who slaughters her children. That's true. Okay, so my answer to you would have been: even if it's a most intense virus or the child, you know, you can draw the line the moment you can show how the fetus, the child's relation to other is mediated by self-relation. Like, you contact the environment because you relate to yourself. Relate to yourself means, my body tells me I need food, this is my "I." You know that like relating—to put it precisely in these Hegelian speculative terms when Hegel says relation to otherness is always self-relation—the living organism is the basic element here. So what I'm saying is that in this sense for Hegel again identity is a category of reflection, in the sense that it's not the most simple thing. You can talk about an identity only when you have the one, but the one as that—how to put it—unifying feature which cannot be reduced to properties. And already in Hegel you find this, where is negativity here, double negation? Ah, for Hegel
unknown
this
this
Slavoj Žižek
oneness is the function of the name, either concept or proper name—we will not go into that now, I know it's a crucial debate—to designate that oneness. You say, okay, this may be this, that, and so on, rounded, but basically it's a table. And Hegel's point is that, you know Hegel's famous saying, it was fashionable, he was not the first to say this bombastic rather statement, "the word, the name is the murder of the thing," no? That there is an element of negativity in it precisely if you want from the thing to extract, as it were, its identity. You name it but in a way you kill it in the sense that you extract that... Now of course, now we come to the logic of desire. This is why Lacan links the so-called master signifier, what he calls S1, to the series of what he calls knowledge ordinary signifier, and this is why he links the master signifier to what he calls the object small a, this surplus enjoyment, however we call it, which is precisely the name for that mysterious X which is of course a mythic property which makes you what you are. How does this function? Allow me to repeat some old analysis of mine to make this clear. Lacan has a wonderful definition of a master signifier somewhere where he says something very precise. He says that the master signifier is the point where the signifier falls into the signified. Vaguely, it's not meaning sense, I know they are not the same, I know all this stuff about Sinn, Bedeutung, and so on. But what can this mysterious statement mean? It means that in a reflexive way the name must, as it were, encounter itself in the designated object. It's constitutive of its identity. And that impossible objective feature which would be the counterpart of a name is the object small a. For example, you know even let me put it in extremely naive terms, but which are appropriate here. Sorry, My God, I'm so impossible, I always use some kind of obscene erotic stuff. But don't be afraid, I will not rape any of you. It's probably simply because I'm really getting old and diabetic and you know, when you no longer do it you talk about it. [Interjection from audience: "That's not true, you talked about it more when you were doing it."] Sorry? No, I know what you are saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. As a matter of fact, no, I as a matter of fact, okay, you provoked me, it's your fault. Let me go to the end. I couldn't stand people—okay, in my case I'm not gay, women—who want to talk, you know, "this, darling, say something, blah-blah-blah, how..." No! When you fuck, you fuck, when you talk, you talk. I hate this idea of whispering some... Making love is hard work for me. I have this tendency... it's not bullshit, you do your work, none of that "oh darling" or whatever baggage. And but do you know that this is your choice? You provoked me, it's all his fault, I am pure here, he provoked me, that even it would be nice to build a semiotic square kind of out of—unfortunately it's done only for women, I don't think this is plastic, should have been done not only for men—but it's a wonderful analysis, a friend of mine, Dean MacCannell, I know him because he is the husband of Juliet Flower MacCannell, that San Francisco Lacanian lady. And he did—he is also specialized in... he was the first as it were deconstructionist theorist of tourism. And apart of this, he's a slightly weird guy, he did a very serious sociological, I mean analysis with all the data, of the
oneness is the function of the name, either concept or proper name—we will not go into that now, I know it's a crucial debate—to designate that oneness. You say, okay, this may be this, that, and so on, rounded, but basically it's a table. And Hegel's point is that, you know Hegel's famous saying, it was fashionable, he was not the first to say this bombastic rather statement, "the word, the name is the murder of the thing," no? That there is an element of negativity in it precisely if you want from the thing to extract, as it were, its identity. You name it but in a way you kill it in the sense that you extract that... Now of course, now we come to the logic of desire. This is why Lacan links the so-called master signifier, what he calls S1, to the series of what he calls knowledge ordinary signifier, and this is why he links the master signifier to what he calls the object small a, this surplus enjoyment, however we call it, which is precisely the name for that mysterious X which is of course a mythic property which makes you what you are. How does this function? Allow me to repeat some old analysis of mine to make this clear. Lacan has a wonderful definition of a master signifier somewhere where he says something very precise. He says that the master signifier is the point where the signifier falls into the signified. Vaguely, it's not meaning sense, I know they are not the same, I know all this stuff about Sinn, Bedeutung, and so on. But what can this mysterious statement mean? It means that in a reflexive way the name must, as it were, encounter itself in the designated object. It's constitutive of its identity. And that impossible objective feature which would be the counterpart of a name is the object small a. For example, you know even let me put it in extremely naive terms, but which are appropriate here. Sorry, My God, I'm so impossible, I always use some kind of obscene erotic stuff. But don't be afraid, I will not rape any of you. It's probably simply because I'm really getting old and diabetic and you know, when you no longer do it you talk about it. [Interjection from audience: "That's not true, you talked about it more when you were doing it."] Sorry? No, I know what you are saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. As a matter of fact, no, I as a matter of fact, okay, you provoked me, it's your fault. Let me go to the end. I couldn't stand people—okay, in my case I'm not gay, women—who want to talk, you know, "this, darling, say something, blah-blah-blah, how..." No! When you fuck, you fuck, when you talk, you talk. I hate this idea of whispering some... Making love is hard work for me. I have this tendency... it's not bullshit, you do your work, none of that "oh darling" or whatever baggage. And but do you know that this is your choice? You provoked me, it's all his fault, I am pure here, he provoked me, that even it would be nice to build a semiotic square kind of out of—unfortunately it's done only for women, I don't think this is plastic, should have been done not only for men—but it's a wonderful analysis, a friend of mine, Dean MacCannell, I know him because he is the husband of Juliet Flower MacCannell, that San Francisco Lacanian lady. And he did—he is also specialized in... he was the first as it were deconstructionist theorist of tourism. And apart of this, he's a slightly weird guy, he did a very serious sociological, I mean analysis with all the data, of the
unknown
expression
expression
Slavoj Žižek
on women's faces while they are screwed, while they are doing it, in hardcore pornography. He wasn't interested in the dirty things, what goes on down, but in... and he discovered something very precise, that as we all know, that it has nothing to do with any spontaneity. It's strictly codified. And then, I don't know the terms, he even told me that he contacted some guys who were involved in hardcore industry and they told him
on women's faces while they are screwed, while they are doing it, in hardcore pornography. He wasn't interested in the dirty things, what goes on down, but in... and he discovered something very precise, that as we all know, that it has nothing to do with any spontaneity. It's strictly codified. And then, I don't know the terms, he even told me that he contacted some guys who were involved in hardcore industry and they told him
unknown
they even have technical
they even have technical
Slavoj Žižek
terms for it. So there are four expressions, codified. One is—I cannot even do it properly—one is this simple "ah-ah-ah," mortal, you know this how should we call it, ecstatic trance whatever. This is of course the least interesting. Then the second one is ignorance. You know, some people find it charming when the woman, you know like, fuck it, doesn't concern me. Like you even one of the codified things is even that you, the woman is chewing a gum or whatever, just yawning, bored, like "ha-ha, I ignore it." This ignorance, she is above. And there is something in it: a fatal woman has to pretend to be bored, ignorant. Which is why if some of you know Russian, it's a wonderful irony, all Russian friends of mine know about it. You know every, we opera lovers, every generation we are lucky to encounter a lady singer, soprano, who—My God again my chauvinism—who is not this kind of big fat lady where your worry is "will she manage to make the next step" and you are all the time in anxiety in the opera, who is relatively beautiful, no? And okay, every generation there is one or two. When I was very young in the 60s it was an Italian star called Anna Moffo. And it's all your fault, no, you provoked me, now I will tell you a wonderful detail. I gave a talk at Munich, München opera, and got hold of some old stage manager who knew her. And I heard a rumor about Anna Moffo, this is for me Lacanian ethics of desire, and he told me it's true. You know what was the rumor about her? Her career stopped relatively
terms for it. So there are four expressions, codified. One is—I cannot even do it properly—one is this simple "ah-ah-ah," mortal, you know this how should we call it, ecstatic trance whatever. This is of course the least interesting. Then the second one is ignorance. You know, some people find it charming when the woman, you know like, fuck it, doesn't concern me. Like you even one of the codified things is even that you, the woman is chewing a gum or whatever, just yawning, bored, like "ha-ha, I ignore it." This ignorance, she is above. And there is something in it: a fatal woman has to pretend to be bored, ignorant. Which is why if some of you know Russian, it's a wonderful irony, all Russian friends of mine know about it. You know every, we opera lovers, every generation we are lucky to encounter a lady singer, soprano, who—My God again my chauvinism—who is not this kind of big fat lady where your worry is "will she manage to make the next step" and you are all the time in anxiety in the opera, who is relatively beautiful, no? And okay, every generation there is one or two. When I was very young in the 60s it was an Italian star called Anna Moffo. And it's all your fault, no, you provoked me, now I will tell you a wonderful detail. I gave a talk at Munich, München opera, and got hold of some old stage manager who knew her. And I heard a rumor about Anna Moffo, this is for me Lacanian ethics of desire, and he told me it's true. You know what was the rumor about her? Her career stopped relatively
unknown
early in
early in
Slavoj Žižek
mid-40s. Now I warn you, you can prosecute me for harassment, this is tough. The idea is that she was extremely sexualized, acting in orgies all the time. And her specialty was to do fellatio on a series of men the same evening, swallowing everything. So then she detected troubles with her voice. She went to the doctor and the doctor told her "you have to make a choice: either you continue your singing career or orgies." "No problem," she said, "orgies." That's ethics! Okay, but let's go on. Now more serious. The most beautiful considered today, one of these is the Russian, the dark one, Anna Netrebko. Now it's a wonderful irony if you know a little bit Russian. Netrebko means "she doesn't need it." *Trebovat*, *trebat* is we, even for example in we our Balkan territory, at least means we have "potrebna ko Sahara vode," which means she needs it like Sahara needs water. This is the extremely male chauvinist, vulgar... So it's a wonderful way, the fatal beauty, but to have it in the name inscribed, "fuck off, I don't need you," and so on, no? So again that's the second position. The third position—and they really—is what I would have called in Habermasian terms "instrumental activity," this you know this usually the lips clenched like "uh-uh," My God, hard work, let's do it. Then there is the fourth position which is almost the best for me for turn me on, this kind of dismissive ironic smile. The woman looks you into the eye and smiles, "huh-huh, is this all you can do?" you know this kind of... and the wonder... and again, I spoke with the guys and it's... I even once started, wanted to construct a kind of Habermasian logic of three types of instrumental reason and so on, the whole logic of communication out of this, no and so on. But it really works and the lesson is much deeper than you think. My good friend Robert Pfaller, who did the notion of interpassivity, an Austrian guy—it's sad that you cannot read if you can't German, do it, he now published it as a book—he did a wonderful book called "Illusion of the Others," *Die Illusion der Anderen*, the book I try to push now to be published into English. It did very well in German by Suhrkamp Verlag. The problem is that in art circles, because he is most an art theorist... I don't know if you know it, I thought that we philosophers are the worst, but I discovered that art theorists are even worse, that there is such competition, you know, you belong to one clan, envy and so on. So it was always sabotaged by others and so on. So okay, what he... that he has a very nice idea that the things that we do as a transgression—sex, you get drunk, you swear and so on—you don't... it's not that out of custom you behave properly but then when you can no longer control yourself you explode. That they are basically that it's strictly codified and that you do it to belong to a group, to imitate. It's always an acquired taste. For example, drinking. It can be demonstrated, he told me he spoke with some doctors that, you know—and okay, I'm not only a woman as I said yesterday, I you can see that I'm a little bit crazy and there are two theories in Slovenia, I'm serious now, one is that mentally I am in early puberty, years, the other is that I am like or and the general agreement is that I am regressing backwards. So I tend to agree with him, that for example drinking alcohol. You do get attached to it, but how the way you begin is regularly first you don't like it. It's like out of, you know, to keep up with your peers and so on and so on. It's to be part of a group, to imitate. Smoking is the same. And happily for me, maybe I'm still at that level and not because of any how to put it self-righteous arguments or what, I don't drink and I don't smoke but because I simply don't like the taste, how to put it. I don't get it, what's so good in alcohol. Okay, there is also a Stalinist—while you are looking you think crazy guy didn't yet discover what life is about or what... No, there is also of course another aspect. Privately I am a Stalinist paranoiac and my idea is if you get drunk you lose control and the enemy can attack you, no, one must be on the watch all the time, no? Okay but let me go on. So the idea, beautiful one of Robert Pfaller, is that the same goes even for sexuality and that the intensity—and believe me or not, I read some, sorry, I spoke even with some how do you call them, biologists, sexologists, those who reduce sex, pleasure to organic procedure and try... and they claim that from the purely organic standpoint it's definitely without any doubt that masturbation is more pleasurable. And I can see it, you just sit down you do it, you totally determine the rhythm, that from the pure standpoint of intensity of pleasure, even orgasm and so on, I mean doing it with another human being is impractical, ridiculous and so on and so on. So it's only the phantasmic aspect which sustains of course in reality the much greater pleasure and so on. [Interjection from audience: "Was your experience different? Please tell us how it was to you..."] No, sorry, please don't start. This is called creative classes, new creative teaching. Sorry, and you are following like, where did I finish with this madness... His fault! He's guilty of everything down there, he asked me... No, but it's like what you just said, my right hand was a bit of... no? In Lacan, in *Écrit*, he says that he found with his patients that even when they were having sex with their partners that they love, they were still fantasizing about somebody else or something else. Absolutely, that's the basic thing. Yeah, he said that was almost impossible to avoid so even the sex act itself becomes masturbatory. Like... Oh no, I've written about it, I'm just afraid to repeat, I know that I already repeat myself too much, but that's how you should read... sorry, you have a comment? Would you share—let's pretend we are in California, would you like to share your experience? I'm sorry, I will share Yevtushenko's experience. I heard Yevtushenko recite and he said "love is mutual masturbation in manure." In what? Manure, like shit. Why? Why? This must be a specifically Russian touch. Why manure? Because the other is so sublime and the ridiculous... Ah yeah, yeah, it was in Borat! Yes, yes. No no, what I wanted to say is that this is—but again, that's elementary—this is what Lacan means with "there is no sexual relationship." That it's never you and your partner alone. There has to be a mediation of fantasy. It's almost never—I will explain immediately this almost never—just you and the partner, it's the way you fantasize. But for Lacan in this sense, that's my old joke, if we understand usually masturbation as sex with an imagined partner, you masturbate but you imagine doing it with another. Then real sex is masturbation with a real partner. That is to say, the structure is that of a masturbation. The real partner is the one you dream about and so on and so on, which incidentally explains nicely the experience which I hope you also had, I have it often, that it's horrible. I'm sincere now here but it's getting disgustingly intimate so I can tell you. In the middle of sexual act doesn't it happen to you that you somehow, how should I put it, I hope not too often, you simply disconnect. You lose contact, you start to
mid-40s. Now I warn you, you can prosecute me for harassment, this is tough. The idea is that she was extremely sexualized, acting in orgies all the time. And her specialty was to do fellatio on a series of men the same evening, swallowing everything. So then she detected troubles with her voice. She went to the doctor and the doctor told her "you have to make a choice: either you continue your singing career or orgies." "No problem," she said, "orgies." That's ethics! Okay, but let's go on. Now more serious. The most beautiful considered today, one of these is the Russian, the dark one, Anna Netrebko. Now it's a wonderful irony if you know a little bit Russian. Netrebko means "she doesn't need it." *Trebovat*, *trebat* is we, even for example in we our Balkan territory, at least means we have "potrebna ko Sahara vode," which means she needs it like Sahara needs water. This is the extremely male chauvinist, vulgar... So it's a wonderful way, the fatal beauty, but to have it in the name inscribed, "fuck off, I don't need you," and so on, no? So again that's the second position. The third position—and they really—is what I would have called in Habermasian terms "instrumental activity," this you know this usually the lips clenched like "uh-uh," My God, hard work, let's do it. Then there is the fourth position which is almost the best for me for turn me on, this kind of dismissive ironic smile. The woman looks you into the eye and smiles, "huh-huh, is this all you can do?" you know this kind of... and the wonder... and again, I spoke with the guys and it's... I even once started, wanted to construct a kind of Habermasian logic of three types of instrumental reason and so on, the whole logic of communication out of this, no and so on. But it really works and the lesson is much deeper than you think. My good friend Robert Pfaller, who did the notion of interpassivity, an Austrian guy—it's sad that you cannot read if you can't German, do it, he now published it as a book—he did a wonderful book called "Illusion of the Others," *Die Illusion der Anderen*, the book I try to push now to be published into English. It did very well in German by Suhrkamp Verlag. The problem is that in art circles, because he is most an art theorist... I don't know if you know it, I thought that we philosophers are the worst, but I discovered that art theorists are even worse, that there is such competition, you know, you belong to one clan, envy and so on. So it was always sabotaged by others and so on. So okay, what he... that he has a very nice idea that the things that we do as a transgression—sex, you get drunk, you swear and so on—you don't... it's not that out of custom you behave properly but then when you can no longer control yourself you explode. That they are basically that it's strictly codified and that you do it to belong to a group, to imitate. It's always an acquired taste. For example, drinking. It can be demonstrated, he told me he spoke with some doctors that, you know—and okay, I'm not only a woman as I said yesterday, I you can see that I'm a little bit crazy and there are two theories in Slovenia, I'm serious now, one is that mentally I am in early puberty, years, the other is that I am like or and the general agreement is that I am regressing backwards. So I tend to agree with him, that for example drinking alcohol. You do get attached to it, but how the way you begin is regularly first you don't like it. It's like out of, you know, to keep up with your peers and so on and so on. It's to be part of a group, to imitate. Smoking is the same. And happily for me, maybe I'm still at that level and not because of any how to put it self-righteous arguments or what, I don't drink and I don't smoke but because I simply don't like the taste, how to put it. I don't get it, what's so good in alcohol. Okay, there is also a Stalinist—while you are looking you think crazy guy didn't yet discover what life is about or what... No, there is also of course another aspect. Privately I am a Stalinist paranoiac and my idea is if you get drunk you lose control and the enemy can attack you, no, one must be on the watch all the time, no? Okay but let me go on. So the idea, beautiful one of Robert Pfaller, is that the same goes even for sexuality and that the intensity—and believe me or not, I read some, sorry, I spoke even with some how do you call them, biologists, sexologists, those who reduce sex, pleasure to organic procedure and try... and they claim that from the purely organic standpoint it's definitely without any doubt that masturbation is more pleasurable. And I can see it, you just sit down you do it, you totally determine the rhythm, that from the pure standpoint of intensity of pleasure, even orgasm and so on, I mean doing it with another human being is impractical, ridiculous and so on and so on. So it's only the phantasmic aspect which sustains of course in reality the much greater pleasure and so on. [Interjection from audience: "Was your experience different? Please tell us how it was to you..."] No, sorry, please don't start. This is called creative classes, new creative teaching. Sorry, and you are following like, where did I finish with this madness... His fault! He's guilty of everything down there, he asked me... No, but it's like what you just said, my right hand was a bit of... no? In Lacan, in *Écrit*, he says that he found with his patients that even when they were having sex with their partners that they love, they were still fantasizing about somebody else or something else. Absolutely, that's the basic thing. Yeah, he said that was almost impossible to avoid so even the sex act itself becomes masturbatory. Like... Oh no, I've written about it, I'm just afraid to repeat, I know that I already repeat myself too much, but that's how you should read... sorry, you have a comment? Would you share—let's pretend we are in California, would you like to share your experience? I'm sorry, I will share Yevtushenko's experience. I heard Yevtushenko recite and he said "love is mutual masturbation in manure." In what? Manure, like shit. Why? Why? This must be a specifically Russian touch. Why manure? Because the other is so sublime and the ridiculous... Ah yeah, yeah, it was in Borat! Yes, yes. No no, what I wanted to say is that this is—but again, that's elementary—this is what Lacan means with "there is no sexual relationship." That it's never you and your partner alone. There has to be a mediation of fantasy. It's almost never—I will explain immediately this almost never—just you and the partner, it's the way you fantasize. But for Lacan in this sense, that's my old joke, if we understand usually masturbation as sex with an imagined partner, you masturbate but you imagine doing it with another. Then real sex is masturbation with a real partner. That is to say, the structure is that of a masturbation. The real partner is the one you dream about and so on and so on, which incidentally explains nicely the experience which I hope you also had, I have it often, that it's horrible. I'm sincere now here but it's getting disgustingly intimate so I can tell you. In the middle of sexual act doesn't it happen to you that you somehow, how should I put it, I hope not too often, you simply disconnect. You lose contact, you start to
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observe yourself objectively and you think "what am I doing this stupid gesture," you know like you disconnect. That's where you disconnect from your fantasy.
observe yourself objectively and you think "what am I doing this stupid gesture," you know like you disconnect. That's where you disconnect from your fantasy.
Slavoj Žižek
You are back into the stupid—thrown into the stupid reality. So what is... but Lacan's point here, that's
You are back into the stupid—thrown into the stupid reality. So what is... but Lacan's point here, that's
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important, is not here Lacan and me with him we are
important, is not here Lacan and me with him we are
Slavoj Žižek
nonetheless more romantic for love. I claim that in authentic love it's not only that. In authentic love you reach to the other. Authentic love is not merely—or to put it in more romantic... so I don't agree with those like that Chicago
nonetheless more romantic for love. I claim that in authentic love it's not only that. In authentic love you reach to the other. Authentic love is not merely—or to put it in more romantic... so I don't agree with those like that Chicago
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girl, how is she called, Laura Kipnis? who wrote a book
girl, how is she called, Laura Kipnis? who wrote a book
Slavoj Žižek
"Against Love" claiming love is... and it's fashionable in some radical circles to claim that love plays the same role as procreation in standard Catholic doctrine.
"Against Love" claiming love is... and it's fashionable in some radical circles to claim that love plays the same role as procreation in standard Catholic doctrine.
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In standard
In standard
Slavoj Žižek
Catholicism it was sex is illicit if it doesn't at least ultimately lead towards procreation. She claims today's censorship is just displaced. It's love, sorry, sex should be is fully legitimate only if it is an expression of love and so on and so on. Well, I don't think that. If you don't hurt anyone, why not have it and occasional whatever you want. I cannot do it, I am very old-fashioned romantic. But what I want to say is that when Lacan speaks about this, you know, reaching out to the real other and so on and so on, that's Lacan is here very, very romantic. He is as far as possible from this how should I put it cynical pseudo-psychoanalytic view that what we really want is only the brutal raw sex, but that we just sublimate it with all these complicated fantasies. No, for Lacan it's the opposite. It's the brutal raw sex which is not material enough. Because you don't really relate to other, you basically just stage your fantasies and so on and so on. It's very difficult to really accept the other. Not just somebody who how should I put it who fits your fantasy. And for Lacan, and I agree with him, that's love. Love for Lacan, there is a big change here in Lacan. All good interpreters know. Somewhere till the early 60s Lacan reduced love to an imaginary narcissistic illusion. You know all this shit, in loving the other you really love yourself in the other, love... and then Lacan played on imaginary love versus desire. Desire is the authentic thing. But later Lacan changed the view, claiming that in love, love is as he puts it very nicely, love is the way the real of drive descends or gets into the symbolic order. So what you quoted about that in real sexual act we fantasize and so on and so on, this is not again for Lacan this is not... this is not all sex, this is not love. He doesn't devalue love. You know which example I use in one of my books? If you saw the movie you will immediately get it. Why also Lacan says first that especially—he specifies for him this is typical male sexuality—phallic masturbatory jouissance. But for woman it's more, it's more jouissance of the other. And don't confuse this with a false version of Lacan when some people think that Lacan's point is this, that women have some mystical outside language experience. No, there is a movie which makes this point perfectly, or even a couple of movies. Did you see, for example, Bergman's—no no, *Persona*, which I don't like, I prefer *Silence*. But do you remember one, I think some minutes into the movie, Bibi Andersson is telling to the one who is the other who is stay silent, reports on some small orgy on the beach years ago? Bergman was wise enough not to include any flashbacks. And it's an extremely erotic scene. This would be jouissance of the other. That talking about it gives you basically more pleasure almost than the thing itself. You know which movie works in this way? You have very nicely this contradiction... did you see—he's a little bit too pretentious, I don't like him too much, but sometimes he's not totally stupid—did you see Lars von Trier "Breaking the Waves"? You remember the pact that the guy and Emily Watson make? She should screw around to tell him, he exploits her, his pleasure is masturbatory. He needs her as an instrument to provide him with fantasies so that he can masturbate. But for her it's jouissance of the other. As she makes it very clear, while she actually seduces other men it's disgusting for her. Her only pleasure is tell, telling him about that. Yes? [Interjection from audience: "What about the movie Sex, Lies and Videotape?"] I know, I know, but I will not bluff here. I half forgot about that movie. Because I don't like Andie MacDowell. Oh sorry, I'm very vulgar. [Laughter] Yeah, I know, I know, yeah. Yeah, but that's more, but that's more who is the guy, James Spader, no? The way he does it, it's more... okay, you can also read it as a kind of how he the guy slowly breaks out of this masturbatory circle and so on, gets into love. Yeah, you can. But okay, let's nonetheless now we got totally lost, let's go back to the main line. Yes, so my my point... we were where were we? Ah yes, the jump was from this fantasy and so on and then to this point, four types of women's expression. Incidentally this also raises an interesting question, don't be afraid nothing tasteless will follow now, about hardcore pornography, you know. What's your point of identification there? I absolutely don't think that you identify—if you are a man, a heterosexual man, I'm now talking about the elementary situation, heterosexual man watching a heterosexual straight movie—I don't think that the point of identification is... is that you identify with the guy who is... no, that guy is pure instrument, which is why they usually use some sailors with tattoos etc., which incidentally for me is extremely destimulating and so on. Because I... I'm very conservative here. Basically I am against hardcore pornography and I am against even prostitution. I mean, no, woman can do whatever they want. I just don't think... okay, some friends tried to convince me I buy this that maybe—I don't know—there are women who relate to money they earn in prostitution in the same way that psychoanalysts, who are we all know prostitutes of the mind, no, relate to payment. As Lacan puts it very nicely, the function of money is to allow you to keep out of a certain libidinal circle. Why do you have basically to pay the analyst? So that he will not get drawn and become just another of people in whose... of those that circle in whose traumas you are involved and so on and so on. So, I was told, but it's up to women to say, I don't know, that that if you—and I think this is a totally respectable position—if you just want raw sex and hate any involvement, emotional, that maybe that's how money can work. It's a kind of a guarantee of not getting involved. And it works this way. Let me give you—don't be afraid, no obscenity, a pure clinical example. What was Freud's mistake in his most famous case, the treatment of Wolfman? You
Catholicism it was sex is illicit if it doesn't at least ultimately lead towards procreation. She claims today's censorship is just displaced. It's love, sorry, sex should be is fully legitimate only if it is an expression of love and so on and so on. Well, I don't think that. If you don't hurt anyone, why not have it and occasional whatever you want. I cannot do it, I am very old-fashioned romantic. But what I want to say is that when Lacan speaks about this, you know, reaching out to the real other and so on and so on, that's Lacan is here very, very romantic. He is as far as possible from this how should I put it cynical pseudo-psychoanalytic view that what we really want is only the brutal raw sex, but that we just sublimate it with all these complicated fantasies. No, for Lacan it's the opposite. It's the brutal raw sex which is not material enough. Because you don't really relate to other, you basically just stage your fantasies and so on and so on. It's very difficult to really accept the other. Not just somebody who how should I put it who fits your fantasy. And for Lacan, and I agree with him, that's love. Love for Lacan, there is a big change here in Lacan. All good interpreters know. Somewhere till the early 60s Lacan reduced love to an imaginary narcissistic illusion. You know all this shit, in loving the other you really love yourself in the other, love... and then Lacan played on imaginary love versus desire. Desire is the authentic thing. But later Lacan changed the view, claiming that in love, love is as he puts it very nicely, love is the way the real of drive descends or gets into the symbolic order. So what you quoted about that in real sexual act we fantasize and so on and so on, this is not again for Lacan this is not... this is not all sex, this is not love. He doesn't devalue love. You know which example I use in one of my books? If you saw the movie you will immediately get it. Why also Lacan says first that especially—he specifies for him this is typical male sexuality—phallic masturbatory jouissance. But for woman it's more, it's more jouissance of the other. And don't confuse this with a false version of Lacan when some people think that Lacan's point is this, that women have some mystical outside language experience. No, there is a movie which makes this point perfectly, or even a couple of movies. Did you see, for example, Bergman's—no no, *Persona*, which I don't like, I prefer *Silence*. But do you remember one, I think some minutes into the movie, Bibi Andersson is telling to the one who is the other who is stay silent, reports on some small orgy on the beach years ago? Bergman was wise enough not to include any flashbacks. And it's an extremely erotic scene. This would be jouissance of the other. That talking about it gives you basically more pleasure almost than the thing itself. You know which movie works in this way? You have very nicely this contradiction... did you see—he's a little bit too pretentious, I don't like him too much, but sometimes he's not totally stupid—did you see Lars von Trier "Breaking the Waves"? You remember the pact that the guy and Emily Watson make? She should screw around to tell him, he exploits her, his pleasure is masturbatory. He needs her as an instrument to provide him with fantasies so that he can masturbate. But for her it's jouissance of the other. As she makes it very clear, while she actually seduces other men it's disgusting for her. Her only pleasure is tell, telling him about that. Yes? [Interjection from audience: "What about the movie Sex, Lies and Videotape?"] I know, I know, but I will not bluff here. I half forgot about that movie. Because I don't like Andie MacDowell. Oh sorry, I'm very vulgar. [Laughter] Yeah, I know, I know, yeah. Yeah, but that's more, but that's more who is the guy, James Spader, no? The way he does it, it's more... okay, you can also read it as a kind of how he the guy slowly breaks out of this masturbatory circle and so on, gets into love. Yeah, you can. But okay, let's nonetheless now we got totally lost, let's go back to the main line. Yes, so my my point... we were where were we? Ah yes, the jump was from this fantasy and so on and then to this point, four types of women's expression. Incidentally this also raises an interesting question, don't be afraid nothing tasteless will follow now, about hardcore pornography, you know. What's your point of identification there? I absolutely don't think that you identify—if you are a man, a heterosexual man, I'm now talking about the elementary situation, heterosexual man watching a heterosexual straight movie—I don't think that the point of identification is... is that you identify with the guy who is... no, that guy is pure instrument, which is why they usually use some sailors with tattoos etc., which incidentally for me is extremely destimulating and so on. Because I... I'm very conservative here. Basically I am against hardcore pornography and I am against even prostitution. I mean, no, woman can do whatever they want. I just don't think... okay, some friends tried to convince me I buy this that maybe—I don't know—there are women who relate to money they earn in prostitution in the same way that psychoanalysts, who are we all know prostitutes of the mind, no, relate to payment. As Lacan puts it very nicely, the function of money is to allow you to keep out of a certain libidinal circle. Why do you have basically to pay the analyst? So that he will not get drawn and become just another of people in whose... of those that circle in whose traumas you are involved and so on and so on. So, I was told, but it's up to women to say, I don't know, that that if you—and I think this is a totally respectable position—if you just want raw sex and hate any involvement, emotional, that maybe that's how money can work. It's a kind of a guarantee of not getting involved. And it works this way. Let me give you—don't be afraid, no obscenity, a pure clinical example. What was Freud's mistake in his most famous case, the treatment of Wolfman? You
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know
know
Slavoj Žižek
Wolfman the Russian nobleman? After October Revolution he lost money. And Freud was too good. Freud helped him. Instead of Wolfman paying him, Freud
Wolfman the Russian nobleman? After October Revolution he lost money. And Freud was too good. Freud helped him. Instead of Wolfman paying him, Freud
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gave
gave
Slavoj Žižek
him some money to survive. The result was clinically catastrophic. A big regression into paranoia in the sense of, you know, because if you are in this borderline—he's basically some kind of borderline case, you cannot say that he is really paranoic—but it triggered in the twenties regression to paranoia. Because Freud was all of a sudden, by paying him money, Freud lost this analytically neutral position. So it triggered immediately in Wolfman paranoia activity in the sense of "why is Freud giving me money?" this famous Lacanian "che vuoi?", what does he want? It's the kind of plot to control me. Does Freud want me to marry his daughter or whatever, you know. In this is why you have a serious relapse. And then it's only later he got, he got Wolfman in the late mid-20s another analyst, an American one. She made—was made famous by that movie with Jane Fonda, *Pentimento*. You know it, with Jane Fonda plays there the Dashiel Hammett's wife, the writer, what was her name? Lillian Hellman. But the Vanessa Redgrave character, that leftist communist who was also a psychoanalyst in Vienna. You know her? You know who is the model of that? Muriel Gardiner, a pupil of Freud who was in Vienna in the 20s. That's the real-life model of... and she then set things straight, cured she then cured Wolfman and then it was surprising, you know. He survived till till early till early 50s in Vienna and so on, lived quite... But so what I wanted to say is that maybe it works like this. But nonetheless, how should I put it, don't you think there is so much extra and maybe there are some cases, so friends tell me, where you have a—how do you call the guy—maquereau? the guy who controls a prostitute, who... [Audience says: "Pimp."] Pimp, pimp. Maybe there are some ideal relationships of a nice pimp who really protects you but you know, as they say "I would like to see it," no? And I would like to really hear the entire story, how should I put it, no? I am... what I find much more interesting as a problem is male prostitution. Because you know why? Because men had to prove it with erection and so on, no? So how can you link money being... okay, but we are getting lost in it. Let's go back to Hegel and all this stuff. So the point of, that's where we started this digression, the point of Robert Pfaller is how sex all this as it were wild outbursts that they are strictly as Lacan would have put it an affair of the big Other. They are not as it were spontaneous explosions of our innermost blah-blah-blah, we have to learn them. These intimate transgressions are even more codified. And I noticed this with some of my friends, that for... it's a little bit like you remember the tasteless story I was telling you, that Albanian soldier when we went into mother, mother, sister, mother. It was totally ritualized. A little bit of obscenity, it was kind of obscene duty. We have to go through this and and maybe I am a madman here, I accept it. But I notice that that's how these are my relationships with some of my friends. When we meet, for example my good friend the Jewish anti-Zionist filmmaker Udi Aloni. When we meet we first go through obligatory minutes extremely vulgar humiliating each other "you dirty Jew, how are you doing" etc. Just to give you an idea of this really nasty obscenities. He always mocks me and tells me, you know this disgusting myth about Jews of that they eat Christian babies, children. He told me "come to me to come to me to dinner." I told him "no I don't dine with Jews, never be Jew with private." Then he tells me "but I will serve you a good Christian baby." Then I tell him "no, the last time you cheated, you bought a discount refrozen Christian baby." Then he said "I promise you," you know. And we go through this and the perversity is that we both experience it as a kind of ritualistic duty. Then after five minutes we say "okay we did our duty, now we can talk normally," no? I mean you that's how this is what Lacan means, the role of the big Other and so on, the unconscious is outside. If there is a thing Lacan is radically opposed to, it is precisely this idea that your desires or whatever are how should I put it deep within you. Okay, let's now nonetheless go back to the main line: negativity and all that. Where were we? With this self-negation. Ah yes, how the signifier falls into the signified. It is—the way I explained it—in the sense that... okay, let me take a simple example: anti-Semitism. When—I developed this in some of my early books, maybe you you know the joke if you read my book but it's now half-forgotten—but it's sad because I think it's much better than some of my books which are still in print around—daring with the negative—I take dirty example of precisely of anti-Semitism in the sense of what makes you anti-Semitic? If you say "Jews are dirty, exploiting you," whatever, all the properties an anti-Semitic subject attributes to a Jew. It's not enough, I claim, to be anti-Semitic. You must turn it around. You are anti-Semitic if you say "you are dirty, exploiting because you are a Jew." And then if I ask you "but what is that X?", you say "I don't know, is that mysterious something in you more than you." Like that like it's the same joke as with, for example, when you fall in love with a woman (or with a man, or with whatever, no). You know, you know this is an old joke but it's obviously true. You know that if you can, if—you know this eternal question, "tell me why you love me." Of course, the point is that if you can answer the question there is no love. Because the moment you can say "okay, I made a mental account, no: minus, your teeth are not quite straight, your ass is a little bit too narrow, whatever, or wide; plus, your breasts are beautiful, your mouth blah-blah-blah... eh-eh, there are much, much more pluses than minuses so let's do it"... it's out, it's not love. Love must be so that you don't simply say "I love you because this, this, this, this," but all the real properties become in your experience, of course, an expression of "there is some," as Lacan likes to put it, "there is something in you more than you." I don't know what, but on behalf of that X, I love you. With this why the way this is confirmed—this is a nice melodramatic detail, I read it in this kind of, you know, deep love-counseling reply to reader's answer to reader's questions that—this is why and this effectively is the experience of most people, I was told, that let's say you flirt with a guy or a girl and you are still undecided. Symbolically, when do you fell in love, fall in love in the sense of My God I am in love? As a rule it's through an imperfection. It's not that you say "oh my god so many good things now I love him or her," is that you note some small imperfection, a clumsiness, the way she or he spills the milk, too loud stupid laughter. And then it has the form of "fuck it, in spite of that I nonetheless love him." That's how love always emerges as this kind of "in spite of I love." It needs an index of imperfection. So this is why, incidentally, this is a nice vulgar story but it's true. I read some years ago when they were still in—young—a kind of a very stupid opinion poll in one of these shitty journals. They asked thousand men blah-blah like "whom would you prefer as wife, Cindy Crawford or..." the two beautiful at that point... Cindy Crawford or who was the other one? Claudia Schiffer. Cindy Crawford won. And they gave the answer why: Claudia Schiffer is too perfect. Cindy Crawford has that sign there, like it shouldn't be a perfect woman, there must be a small sign of imperfection. But what I want to say is that for Lacan in libidinally relating to other people, that's my point now, the name stands for that X. You are not only that, that, that, you are a name. (Okay, I will try to be objective. I hope is any... is any Carla here, or Christina? Okay, so I can use the name. I will not be accused of...) Like, you know also when you say emphatically "Carla or Christina is not just beautiful, she simply is Christina." The name tautologically refers precisely to that something more. It's the same way when you say "a Jew is a Jew." If you are anti-Semitic, you say "however they appear to be normal, there is something I don't know what in them." And now why does here signifier fall into the signified? Ah, here I will give you an example that I use in that early book and it's still my favorite. You know, in socialism we had a wonderful joke. You know first you should know that it's original from Poland I think this joke. Do you know that—you must know that the maybe you know that part of the official communist ideology was that new socialist society is the synthesis of all that was the best in the entire history. Like... so the joke went like this: Communism, socialism takes from from from tribal primitive societies primitive-ism, it takes from ancient antique societies slavery, it takes from medieval society feudal domination, it takes from capitalism exploitation, and it takes from socialism the name. But you see the point: the name must be included into the series. And I claim exactly the same goes for anti-Semitism. It's clear that the figure of the Jew in anti-Semitism is a kind of an impossible standing-in for for class struggle. (Every... this is elementary Marxism, but I agree with it analysis.) Why? Because if you look closely at the features attributed to the Jew, they are totally inconsistent. They are an impossible combination of upper level and lower level. Jews are rich exploiting class, they are too intellectuals, too hardworking... but at the same time Jews are supposed to be sexually seducing, dirty, not washing themselves and so on and so on. They are literally a fetish, like, you know, like the denial rather disavowal of class struggle. So it's so you can say that of course now I'm talking about the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew, that it's exactly the same there. Anti-Semite in his image of the Jew takes from rich capitalists exploitation, from poor people their dirtiness, from promiscuous people their sex drive and from the Jew the name, no? But again, this reversal when I said it's not just that Jews do this and that in anti-Semitic imagination but you turn it around, "they do this because they... you do this because you are a Jew." This means again what Lacan calls the object small a is produced, that mysterious X something in you, the mystery of what is a Jew and so on and so on, which makes you. I will talk about this a little bit in the evening, because the the mystery here, it's a very interesting one, is if you are looking into the roots of the Holocaust is how things radically change precisely when Jews were—and this is a great achievement of of French Revolution and Napoleon in spite of all other things—when Jews became, how do you call it, politically emancipated, no, at least officially. No longer quotas and so on, although I'm well aware how long de facto apartheid and quotas for the Jews last. For example, did you know that at Princeton University in the United States, I was told it was till early 60s that there were unwritten quotas, not more than so many Jews. Or one of my most tragic but beautiful experiences, and this makes you nonetheless a little bit softer on communism, is I met in Israel an old communist Jew. And still he was celebrating Stalin and so on, privately of course, no. And I asked him "blah-blah, aren't you a little bit crazy? Stalin, God, anti-Semitic, et cetera and so on." And he told me something very primitive—very simple but beautiful. He told me that he was a Polish Jew from Poland and that he told me we cannot imagine how anti-Semitic Poland—incidentally it still is today, very much, no—was just before World War Two. He told me that there were at Warsaw University where he was studying, if you have this big lecture hall, on the top left reserved benches for the Jews. Up there. And also and just nonetheless nice, he told me "the only non-Jewish people who always came to us Jews and shook hands and so on were the communists." That's nice. Nonetheless. He told me simply "whatever you say against communists..." Okay, now you can here defend communists but still be against Stalin when you take into account that—I don't know if you know this—that the fate of the Polish Communist Party in those purges of the late 30s is probably the most terrible of them all. You know when Stalin was doing the purges in different communist parties, he usually killed most of the leadership. But with regard—I don't know, was he already planning the division of Poland with Hitler or what—but his his plan was a little bit more specific with the Polish communists: he simply wanted to kill them all. Basically, apart from a couple of hundred to the entire Polish Communist Party, all the members he could hold on was they were all killed by Stalin. But what I want to say, let me go back, is that again is that how you see, or let me give you another example to see how ideology works which I also like very much. It's the same mechanism of master signifier. You saw the movie, I hope, *Jaws*. I like it very much, Spielberg. Now you know that interpreters dwell in this stupid problem "what does the killing shark symbolize, what does it stand for?" Is it I don't know, you have leftist readings where they say it stands for I don't know big capital whatever. You have rightist readings where they claim it's either fear of natural catastrophe, it's fear of immigrants whatever. Incidentally you know that Fidel Castro likes the movie and he says "it's not so clear to me, it's clear, it's the sharks mean the sharks of the great capital, it's American..." whatever. But I claim that it's wrong to ask this question. The point is that it means all and nothing. It does an exemplary ideological operation, the movie. The point is that of course an average citizen has all these fears. You fear being screwed up like now in this financial crisis by the banks, you fear immigrants who will attack it, if you are racist you fear I don't know what, you fear earthquake nature. But what the movie does is as it were replace all these fears with one signifier empty. It's like the Jew, the shark, which the point is precisely that you can have one clear object, things become clear and but still you can which unites the inconsistent multiplicity of your fears. It's exactly the same again with anti-Semitism. Imagine Germany in the late 20s. Economic crisis and so on. People had had all types of fears. They were afraid of being exploited, ruined by banks. They were afraid of sexual promiscuity blah-blah whatever you want. What Hitler did was to offer them one, the name, by saying "behind all this there is a Jewish plot." It means all these fears can be focused in this one figure. And this is what Lacan means, nothing mysterious by "signifier without signified." This—it's empty because as I told you a propos of the Jew and so on, or socialism, all the actual properties are taken from here and there. The only thing that is original added, added to it is the name and the empty name: the Jew. Of course, Jews are not empty, now I'm talking about anti-Semitic image of the Jew. And it's an extremely delicate question but interesting, you know this historical question, how should I put it, why were the Jews chosen to be Jews? That is to say, why were the real Jews chosen, elevated unfortunately to play the role of the Jew in the anti-Semitic imagination? One can say a lot here, but it's a dangerous topic. Why? Because on the one hand, it's too easy to say "it's totally contingent, it could have been anyone else." On the other hand, if you give reasons in the wrong way you may end up half justifying... it's a it's a tricky question, I know. But to go back, all I wanted to show to you is how this would be the Hegelian point about identity as self-reflexive, about how you have a multitude of real properties like socialism: you live miserable, people exploit you and so on. You add just the name, the name unites it all into the one. The name is an empty name, not empty in the sense it means nothing, but in the sense that what it adds is just performatively itself as a name. All content is taken from elsewhere. Now you will say "but names do designate something. There must be something which is the objective counterpart to this empty signifier." That's what Lacan calls object small a. The... and you know this is how again we operate when, again, when you say "I love"—who was my choice minutes ago? Christina? Carla? No, Carla is, you know why I avoided Carla? I really love it too too first I hate Carla Bruni, she is not my type, to make it very clear. But point two, it raises too many real hopes with me like I still like those early thrillers by John Le Carré, you know, where the big enemy was Carla. Carla was the name of that mysterious head of KGB who did it and so on, so don't mess with Carla, there is real love there. But what I mean is that, you know, all I when you say this pathetically, "Carla is Carla," it means it's not just the bunch of properties, it's the one as it were. And this, so this, in this sense we have here, if you want, a negation of negation. You start with an object which doesn't yet have full identity, that would have been the position, but it's nothing. It even doesn't yet have the identity. Then you this mess is negated—every determination is negation—through determinate properties: beautiful, nicely... sorry... blah-blah-blah. And then you negate the negation: "Christina" or whatever. You you add a name. The name in this sense, signifier, the name falls into the signified. In this sense for Hegel, for example, the identity is a reflexive category. Now I'm sorry we don't have time to go into this because many critics have noted and this is a serious debate in Hegel studies, the problem is that Hegel introduces terms as concepts—Identity, Difference—only at the beginning of the second book of logic, *Logic of Essence*. But he uses them from the very beginning. So what does this mean? Is Hegel inconsistent? Should we say that from the very beginning he presupposes something, some conceptual determinations that he didn't effectively bring—I mean this brings us to this to me intricate topic of the consistency of Hegel's logic and so on and so on, which which would have been too much. But that's my first point that I want to make to Badiou. And here we don't have time to go to it, but please don't misunderstand me: Alain is my best friend. But you know what's for me a true definition of friendship? I saw a German—I love them—Nazi melodrama. You know that the big hit and Goebbels was wise here, in Nazi Germany were musicals and melodramas. Goebbels knew very well you shouldn't feed the population just with stupid propaganda, no? Okay, and in one of them the actress is a kind of spoiled girl who has a fiancé and she humiliates him, mocks him all the time. Fiancé is a rich guy from upper classes, so the father of this girl tells her "you shouldn't treat him like this, he will drop you whatever, I want you to marry him." You know what she answers? "But I love him, and if I love him I can do whatever I want to him." I mean, how should I put it, there is an element of truth in it. So in other words I love Badiou, so let me say all the things I want about him. No, seriously. All that stuff that he was making with intensity and so on and so on. I claim that a little bit a lesson of Hegel would not hurt him. You know what I mean? That that this aspect of, although he knows about it, we have a long debate here. You remember how at the end answering he said "yes identity in that the bad world the the intuitionist world, yes identity is symbolic" and so on and so on. But he oscillates here. For example, in this also would have been the answer to one of your questions. Ask him this, and it's a friendly question I mean he will be glad to answer you, because one of you—I don't know if you are here—asked him a simple but precise question. And I like this simple precise questions because they are the nastiest in the sense of they are the really hard questions. Like, "how do you know that an event is an event?" This is the eternal question that Badiou is attacked for. Like, "how do you distinguish an event from a pseudo-event?" Usually politically what is behind here is Heidegger. Because for Badiou Heidegger is an example of getting fascinated, seduced by a pseudo-event: looking for a revolution, he thought he found it in the Nazi revolution. So how do you distinguish it? I don't think that you can really catch him here. He has, read him closely, a precise definition of a site when where an event emerges. You know when he said when what he didn't develop yesterday—and please press him on this, not to catch him, but this is Badiou at his best—when he distinguishes within the multiplicity of a world what he calls a "world," a so-called "evental site." What what he called minimally "the non-existent." The—he once even sometimes uses the wonderful name of symptom of of "symptomal torsion." An element which is formally part of the set, but lacks any definite properties to be properly located within the set. It's as if the excess of the set. Sometimes he uses the term "sur-numéraire" or whatever. You know, it cannot be—it is included but cannot be properly counted. So in other words, that's crucial to understand him. It's not just that just a multitude—sorry, multiplicity, he would have shot me for multiplicity—no, no, no it's a multiplicity. Incidentally did you get his his wonderful point there a propos multiplicity? It's a very nice position, I think he is right there. His idea is that, and it's again a very Hegelian, is that multiplicity is original. Ontologically, you don't start with one and then you say "okay we have one, one, two ones, we go on-on." No, originally the many, the multiple is original. And now you will say "but fuck it," I'm sorry, now I will be really nasty, I'm using these expressions and gestures so that you will be able to understand me too. Now you will say, but wait a minute, if you have multiple it must, multiple is by definition many ones. No, his point is no, it goes endlessly. You analyze the multiple, you go further, there are always many. You never—and if anything today's quantum physics makes exactly the same point—that you you will never reach the atomic zero level. So his very nice theory is that the correlate of multiple is not one but void, zero. And then you—that one comes after, one is the result. You must do very specific operation between—he describes them—between multiple and zero. Basically this would be the Lacanian solution—I'm not sure he agrees to it—that you arrive at one if you count by counting nothing. By by counting nothing. Okay, but that's more the problem of Frege. I don't know if you know this, it's a wonderful crucial debate, the notion of "suture" (*suture*) which was introduced by Miller, way back in Jacques-Alain Miller and then Badiou wrote a polemics against it, this is I think the big debate. But let me go on. So as—so again I don't think that this reproach holds because the way to distinguish pseudo-event from event is precisely how they relate to this point of symptomal torsion, point of inconsistency. That's the first ontological premise which he sometimes elaborates maybe not enough, is that every totality has its symptomal point. And this can be put wonderfully in Lacanian notions. It means what? It means that every structure is self-reflexive, which means that it in—let's take a classification. You know at the beginning of his—what's the stupid English title, *The Order of Things*, *Les Mots et les choses*—that Foucault refers to that Borges' famous classification of dogs: "white dogs, fat dogs, all dogs which are owned by the emperor," etc. And then at the end, "all the dogs which are not included in this list." That's the structural logic: that you how should I put it there must be a standing-in within a structure of what is not included in the structure. You must have this minimal reflexivity. Now you will tell me this is high theory, what does it mean? Ah, I will give you a nasty example which I use sometimes in my work from Marxism itself. I claim that what is called "Asiatic mode of production" is such an empty reflexive sign. That is to say, it is clear if you read Marx really close, in detail. It is clear that what really fits his conceptual scheme are the standard well-known how do you call it pre-class societies (tribal whatever), slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and whatever shit comes after, who knows, no. But then of course Marx has specific ideas of despotism and so on. But if you look at closely at it, what he calls Asiatic mode of production is basically a container where he throws practically everything which doesn't fit any of the others. You know like everything goes there from ancient China to Egypt to Latin—I mean ancient Inca and so on, Latin American empires. So you see the paradox: this is a term which appears to refer to something positive, but it's really just a negative container. The only ultimately all this wealth of determinations—yes, Chinese empire, Hindu whatever—shouldn't deceive you, it's basically just a negative container. And this would have been then the symptomal... this excessive symptomal point. So I think that the reproach—and I'm not here dropping my topic because this is how Hegel's logic works. This is Hegelian reflexivity. The way Badiou, I think, can answer triumphantly this reproach... but how do you know, let's be concrete for example, how do you know that why October Revolution was an event if it was? For me it was, I give you freedom of choice, but I am here... you know that wonderful aggressive statement of Lenin where some guy protested "Oh, can I have the freedom of choice to say what I want?" You know what Lenin answers: "I definitely give you the freedom of choice to say the stupidities you want to say, but then I take to myself a freedom of choice to shoot you for what you are saying." [Laughter] Okay. Sorry, let me go on. So it's clearly that they relate differently to what Badiou called yesterday "this the non-existent." Because this what he calls shift from non-existence to the maximum existence happens only in an event. In Nazism, the symptomal point is just mystified cover-up. In other words, class struggle—at least in principle, let's forget about the shit that actually happens—in a communist revolution, workers effectively—I am not saying they do—should become or whatever, you know, they set the standard. Those... it's not that all others should be killed. Because if there were all other classes, if this were to be the case, then Lenin should have begun by killing himself, no? Incidentally, it's clear that he was a typical even upper-middle class guy who really had no idea of real working classes. Like the irony is if you look at some Lenin's letters, you know for some time he was living in Switzerland and he was staying by some middle-class artisanal family who had a house, they rented him a room blah-blah. And Lenin wrote enthusiastic letters to friends: "Now I see I am in contact with ordinary people, workers." Fuck him, these were no workers, this was typical not even lower middle-class, you know. That's... But nonetheless, what I want to say is that in Nazism also confronts the same problem: class struggle. But it doesn't do this operation: let's shift the non-existent to the maximum intensity. On the contrary, it just wants to control the struggle by imputing the cause of the struggle to an external agent. It's not because society is itself in itself antagonistic, it's because the Jews from outside introduced chaos and so on and then to impose on it some kind of hierarchic order and so on and so on. Where workers are still down but they are taken care of at least officially. You know all this shit, the relationship between capital and work shouldn't be just one of financial exploitation, capitalist should be a kind of a father taking care of blah-blah-blah, all this idea of sentimental more authentic relations between master and servant and so on and so on. So again, the moment you don't just say "multiplicity and then miracle of the event," but the moment you take into account that event is very precisely defined as where, how an event can intervene. Which is why maybe sometimes Badiou doesn't accentuate this enough: an event is purely structural. You can do the same thing, but if you do it a little bit too late it's no longer an event. You know what I mean? You must do it at the right time. Sorry, did you want to or did you just... sorry, you know this is the semantic misunderstanding. Often it happens to me, I don't know if the guy is scratching his head, not you or... both. Both? Okay, sorry. Ah, this is called overdetermination of nature and culture. Sorry, please. [Interjection from audience: "Talking about the self-reflexive nature of the event... isn't it that he's trying to get at that it's either zero or infinity, pretty much, that there is no self-reflexiveness?"] We would have to go here to what he means by self-reflexiveness. It's good that you touch this topic because he—he, I think that even now he struggles a little bit with this. And for his own good it would be good if in a debate—and again, I am not slandering him behind his back, you can report anything you want, like all the dirty things that I can tell you. For example, this is my standard joke about him. No, I will immediately return to it, I will not forget what you said. For example, do you know which movies he likes? This is a standing joke between us and he knows that I always spread this slander, but it's true. *Bridges of Madison County*. He thinks it's a really great film. Then he has a soft spot for *Armageddon*, you know this kind of catastrophe. Nobody is perfect, I would say, no. Sorry but let's go on with this infinity and event and so on. Yes? One zero self-reflexive? Yes, yeah, yeah. Self in the sense that in *Being and Event* he still claims that an event includes its own nomination. That is to say, this is another way to say that an event is an event only for those who participate in it. For example, if you look objectively— [Interjection from audience: "Come down to your level maybe. Let's take the orgasm as an event that..."] Why should it be an event? No, here I am conservative. Why should orgasm be an event? [Interjection from audience: "The event that causes us to want infinite number of events."] Ah yeah, okay, but why should this be an event? Like, okay let me be extremely vulgar. Let's say I'm a sadist, let's say I'm a sadist, let's say I will go back, sorry, to tested waters. Let's say I am a sadist and I want to I want to to I don't know cut a needle into your eye. What if I discover the desire to do it infinitely? I doubt this would count as an, you know what I mean? [Interjection from audience: "Let's talk about my example then. Orgasm. The event that inspires an infinite number of events, like we always want more of it. Right?"] Orgasm is not an event. Yeah, but how should I put it? Yeah, okay. So what's the point? Do you think this is enough of a—again for Badiou, let's be precise, event is something which intervenes at that point of symptomal torsion, the non-existent of the structure. Where do you have this in orgasm? I tend more to agree with Badiou who—you know when he defines a situation, he says that every situation have this not infinite in the positive sense like the infinity of the event, but the measureless. For him enjoyment, jouissance, is infinite in the more better Hegelian sense of the it's boundless. And as such it's open to this or that use. Which is why for example Badiou, I agree here with him, opposes opposes both standard versions of you know this old boring topic sexuality and revolution. On the one hand the conservative revolutionaries like sexuality is the last trap of bourgeois ideology to catch us and you know the true revolutionary must forget about his sexuality, be ascetic. Or on the other hand this '68 stuff, you know, those in power rule us through sexual oppression, sexual liberation is blah-blah. I I spontaneously to me sexual enjoyment is more this formless act-neutral— [Interjection from audience: "Outside of love... let's go back to your thing about love and procreation. Let's say an orgasm can be an event inside of the idea of procreation."] Why? Why not? What makes procreation more than just the animal— [Interjection from audience: "Well you were making a point about sex outside of marriage no longer being illicit, right? Inside of the idea of love."] Yeah, but nonetheless it doesn't make it in itself more authentic. How should I put it? That's a nice question you touch here. I am so sad we cannot go endlessly into this but I I had a great debate with Badiou here, very personal not in any nasty sense, and he also agreed with me that you know in the West we have you know that famous book—how is the guy who wrote it? I forgot, My God, *L'Amour et l'Occident*, "Love in the Western World," that great—it will come to me the name, he's a great French historian of ideas—it's even the great reference to Lacan on the notion of courtly love, where the idea is true love is not possible within marriage, the true love has to be transgressive. I totally I'm opposed to this idea. So back to you, okay it can be outside marriage, but it's not a condition. [Interjection from audience: "It's just a framework for the event. You're trying to
him some money to survive. The result was clinically catastrophic. A big regression into paranoia in the sense of, you know, because if you are in this borderline—he's basically some kind of borderline case, you cannot say that he is really paranoic—but it triggered in the twenties regression to paranoia. Because Freud was all of a sudden, by paying him money, Freud lost this analytically neutral position. So it triggered immediately in Wolfman paranoia activity in the sense of "why is Freud giving me money?" this famous Lacanian "che vuoi?", what does he want? It's the kind of plot to control me. Does Freud want me to marry his daughter or whatever, you know. In this is why you have a serious relapse. And then it's only later he got, he got Wolfman in the late mid-20s another analyst, an American one. She made—was made famous by that movie with Jane Fonda, *Pentimento*. You know it, with Jane Fonda plays there the Dashiel Hammett's wife, the writer, what was her name? Lillian Hellman. But the Vanessa Redgrave character, that leftist communist who was also a psychoanalyst in Vienna. You know her? You know who is the model of that? Muriel Gardiner, a pupil of Freud who was in Vienna in the 20s. That's the real-life model of... and she then set things straight, cured she then cured Wolfman and then it was surprising, you know. He survived till till early till early 50s in Vienna and so on, lived quite... But so what I wanted to say is that maybe it works like this. But nonetheless, how should I put it, don't you think there is so much extra and maybe there are some cases, so friends tell me, where you have a—how do you call the guy—maquereau? the guy who controls a prostitute, who... [Audience says: "Pimp."] Pimp, pimp. Maybe there are some ideal relationships of a nice pimp who really protects you but you know, as they say "I would like to see it," no? And I would like to really hear the entire story, how should I put it, no? I am... what I find much more interesting as a problem is male prostitution. Because you know why? Because men had to prove it with erection and so on, no? So how can you link money being... okay, but we are getting lost in it. Let's go back to Hegel and all this stuff. So the point of, that's where we started this digression, the point of Robert Pfaller is how sex all this as it were wild outbursts that they are strictly as Lacan would have put it an affair of the big Other. They are not as it were spontaneous explosions of our innermost blah-blah-blah, we have to learn them. These intimate transgressions are even more codified. And I noticed this with some of my friends, that for... it's a little bit like you remember the tasteless story I was telling you, that Albanian soldier when we went into mother, mother, sister, mother. It was totally ritualized. A little bit of obscenity, it was kind of obscene duty. We have to go through this and and maybe I am a madman here, I accept it. But I notice that that's how these are my relationships with some of my friends. When we meet, for example my good friend the Jewish anti-Zionist filmmaker Udi Aloni. When we meet we first go through obligatory minutes extremely vulgar humiliating each other "you dirty Jew, how are you doing" etc. Just to give you an idea of this really nasty obscenities. He always mocks me and tells me, you know this disgusting myth about Jews of that they eat Christian babies, children. He told me "come to me to come to me to dinner." I told him "no I don't dine with Jews, never be Jew with private." Then he tells me "but I will serve you a good Christian baby." Then I tell him "no, the last time you cheated, you bought a discount refrozen Christian baby." Then he said "I promise you," you know. And we go through this and the perversity is that we both experience it as a kind of ritualistic duty. Then after five minutes we say "okay we did our duty, now we can talk normally," no? I mean you that's how this is what Lacan means, the role of the big Other and so on, the unconscious is outside. If there is a thing Lacan is radically opposed to, it is precisely this idea that your desires or whatever are how should I put it deep within you. Okay, let's now nonetheless go back to the main line: negativity and all that. Where were we? With this self-negation. Ah yes, how the signifier falls into the signified. It is—the way I explained it—in the sense that... okay, let me take a simple example: anti-Semitism. When—I developed this in some of my early books, maybe you you know the joke if you read my book but it's now half-forgotten—but it's sad because I think it's much better than some of my books which are still in print around—daring with the negative—I take dirty example of precisely of anti-Semitism in the sense of what makes you anti-Semitic? If you say "Jews are dirty, exploiting you," whatever, all the properties an anti-Semitic subject attributes to a Jew. It's not enough, I claim, to be anti-Semitic. You must turn it around. You are anti-Semitic if you say "you are dirty, exploiting because you are a Jew." And then if I ask you "but what is that X?", you say "I don't know, is that mysterious something in you more than you." Like that like it's the same joke as with, for example, when you fall in love with a woman (or with a man, or with whatever, no). You know, you know this is an old joke but it's obviously true. You know that if you can, if—you know this eternal question, "tell me why you love me." Of course, the point is that if you can answer the question there is no love. Because the moment you can say "okay, I made a mental account, no: minus, your teeth are not quite straight, your ass is a little bit too narrow, whatever, or wide; plus, your breasts are beautiful, your mouth blah-blah-blah... eh-eh, there are much, much more pluses than minuses so let's do it"... it's out, it's not love. Love must be so that you don't simply say "I love you because this, this, this, this," but all the real properties become in your experience, of course, an expression of "there is some," as Lacan likes to put it, "there is something in you more than you." I don't know what, but on behalf of that X, I love you. With this why the way this is confirmed—this is a nice melodramatic detail, I read it in this kind of, you know, deep love-counseling reply to reader's answer to reader's questions that—this is why and this effectively is the experience of most people, I was told, that let's say you flirt with a guy or a girl and you are still undecided. Symbolically, when do you fell in love, fall in love in the sense of My God I am in love? As a rule it's through an imperfection. It's not that you say "oh my god so many good things now I love him or her," is that you note some small imperfection, a clumsiness, the way she or he spills the milk, too loud stupid laughter. And then it has the form of "fuck it, in spite of that I nonetheless love him." That's how love always emerges as this kind of "in spite of I love." It needs an index of imperfection. So this is why, incidentally, this is a nice vulgar story but it's true. I read some years ago when they were still in—young—a kind of a very stupid opinion poll in one of these shitty journals. They asked thousand men blah-blah like "whom would you prefer as wife, Cindy Crawford or..." the two beautiful at that point... Cindy Crawford or who was the other one? Claudia Schiffer. Cindy Crawford won. And they gave the answer why: Claudia Schiffer is too perfect. Cindy Crawford has that sign there, like it shouldn't be a perfect woman, there must be a small sign of imperfection. But what I want to say is that for Lacan in libidinally relating to other people, that's my point now, the name stands for that X. You are not only that, that, that, you are a name. (Okay, I will try to be objective. I hope is any... is any Carla here, or Christina? Okay, so I can use the name. I will not be accused of...) Like, you know also when you say emphatically "Carla or Christina is not just beautiful, she simply is Christina." The name tautologically refers precisely to that something more. It's the same way when you say "a Jew is a Jew." If you are anti-Semitic, you say "however they appear to be normal, there is something I don't know what in them." And now why does here signifier fall into the signified? Ah, here I will give you an example that I use in that early book and it's still my favorite. You know, in socialism we had a wonderful joke. You know first you should know that it's original from Poland I think this joke. Do you know that—you must know that the maybe you know that part of the official communist ideology was that new socialist society is the synthesis of all that was the best in the entire history. Like... so the joke went like this: Communism, socialism takes from from from tribal primitive societies primitive-ism, it takes from ancient antique societies slavery, it takes from medieval society feudal domination, it takes from capitalism exploitation, and it takes from socialism the name. But you see the point: the name must be included into the series. And I claim exactly the same goes for anti-Semitism. It's clear that the figure of the Jew in anti-Semitism is a kind of an impossible standing-in for for class struggle. (Every... this is elementary Marxism, but I agree with it analysis.) Why? Because if you look closely at the features attributed to the Jew, they are totally inconsistent. They are an impossible combination of upper level and lower level. Jews are rich exploiting class, they are too intellectuals, too hardworking... but at the same time Jews are supposed to be sexually seducing, dirty, not washing themselves and so on and so on. They are literally a fetish, like, you know, like the denial rather disavowal of class struggle. So it's so you can say that of course now I'm talking about the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew, that it's exactly the same there. Anti-Semite in his image of the Jew takes from rich capitalists exploitation, from poor people their dirtiness, from promiscuous people their sex drive and from the Jew the name, no? But again, this reversal when I said it's not just that Jews do this and that in anti-Semitic imagination but you turn it around, "they do this because they... you do this because you are a Jew." This means again what Lacan calls the object small a is produced, that mysterious X something in you, the mystery of what is a Jew and so on and so on, which makes you. I will talk about this a little bit in the evening, because the the mystery here, it's a very interesting one, is if you are looking into the roots of the Holocaust is how things radically change precisely when Jews were—and this is a great achievement of of French Revolution and Napoleon in spite of all other things—when Jews became, how do you call it, politically emancipated, no, at least officially. No longer quotas and so on, although I'm well aware how long de facto apartheid and quotas for the Jews last. For example, did you know that at Princeton University in the United States, I was told it was till early 60s that there were unwritten quotas, not more than so many Jews. Or one of my most tragic but beautiful experiences, and this makes you nonetheless a little bit softer on communism, is I met in Israel an old communist Jew. And still he was celebrating Stalin and so on, privately of course, no. And I asked him "blah-blah, aren't you a little bit crazy? Stalin, God, anti-Semitic, et cetera and so on." And he told me something very primitive—very simple but beautiful. He told me that he was a Polish Jew from Poland and that he told me we cannot imagine how anti-Semitic Poland—incidentally it still is today, very much, no—was just before World War Two. He told me that there were at Warsaw University where he was studying, if you have this big lecture hall, on the top left reserved benches for the Jews. Up there. And also and just nonetheless nice, he told me "the only non-Jewish people who always came to us Jews and shook hands and so on were the communists." That's nice. Nonetheless. He told me simply "whatever you say against communists..." Okay, now you can here defend communists but still be against Stalin when you take into account that—I don't know if you know this—that the fate of the Polish Communist Party in those purges of the late 30s is probably the most terrible of them all. You know when Stalin was doing the purges in different communist parties, he usually killed most of the leadership. But with regard—I don't know, was he already planning the division of Poland with Hitler or what—but his his plan was a little bit more specific with the Polish communists: he simply wanted to kill them all. Basically, apart from a couple of hundred to the entire Polish Communist Party, all the members he could hold on was they were all killed by Stalin. But what I want to say, let me go back, is that again is that how you see, or let me give you another example to see how ideology works which I also like very much. It's the same mechanism of master signifier. You saw the movie, I hope, *Jaws*. I like it very much, Spielberg. Now you know that interpreters dwell in this stupid problem "what does the killing shark symbolize, what does it stand for?" Is it I don't know, you have leftist readings where they say it stands for I don't know big capital whatever. You have rightist readings where they claim it's either fear of natural catastrophe, it's fear of immigrants whatever. Incidentally you know that Fidel Castro likes the movie and he says "it's not so clear to me, it's clear, it's the sharks mean the sharks of the great capital, it's American..." whatever. But I claim that it's wrong to ask this question. The point is that it means all and nothing. It does an exemplary ideological operation, the movie. The point is that of course an average citizen has all these fears. You fear being screwed up like now in this financial crisis by the banks, you fear immigrants who will attack it, if you are racist you fear I don't know what, you fear earthquake nature. But what the movie does is as it were replace all these fears with one signifier empty. It's like the Jew, the shark, which the point is precisely that you can have one clear object, things become clear and but still you can which unites the inconsistent multiplicity of your fears. It's exactly the same again with anti-Semitism. Imagine Germany in the late 20s. Economic crisis and so on. People had had all types of fears. They were afraid of being exploited, ruined by banks. They were afraid of sexual promiscuity blah-blah whatever you want. What Hitler did was to offer them one, the name, by saying "behind all this there is a Jewish plot." It means all these fears can be focused in this one figure. And this is what Lacan means, nothing mysterious by "signifier without signified." This—it's empty because as I told you a propos of the Jew and so on, or socialism, all the actual properties are taken from here and there. The only thing that is original added, added to it is the name and the empty name: the Jew. Of course, Jews are not empty, now I'm talking about anti-Semitic image of the Jew. And it's an extremely delicate question but interesting, you know this historical question, how should I put it, why were the Jews chosen to be Jews? That is to say, why were the real Jews chosen, elevated unfortunately to play the role of the Jew in the anti-Semitic imagination? One can say a lot here, but it's a dangerous topic. Why? Because on the one hand, it's too easy to say "it's totally contingent, it could have been anyone else." On the other hand, if you give reasons in the wrong way you may end up half justifying... it's a it's a tricky question, I know. But to go back, all I wanted to show to you is how this would be the Hegelian point about identity as self-reflexive, about how you have a multitude of real properties like socialism: you live miserable, people exploit you and so on. You add just the name, the name unites it all into the one. The name is an empty name, not empty in the sense it means nothing, but in the sense that what it adds is just performatively itself as a name. All content is taken from elsewhere. Now you will say "but names do designate something. There must be something which is the objective counterpart to this empty signifier." That's what Lacan calls object small a. The... and you know this is how again we operate when, again, when you say "I love"—who was my choice minutes ago? Christina? Carla? No, Carla is, you know why I avoided Carla? I really love it too too first I hate Carla Bruni, she is not my type, to make it very clear. But point two, it raises too many real hopes with me like I still like those early thrillers by John Le Carré, you know, where the big enemy was Carla. Carla was the name of that mysterious head of KGB who did it and so on, so don't mess with Carla, there is real love there. But what I mean is that, you know, all I when you say this pathetically, "Carla is Carla," it means it's not just the bunch of properties, it's the one as it were. And this, so this, in this sense we have here, if you want, a negation of negation. You start with an object which doesn't yet have full identity, that would have been the position, but it's nothing. It even doesn't yet have the identity. Then you this mess is negated—every determination is negation—through determinate properties: beautiful, nicely... sorry... blah-blah-blah. And then you negate the negation: "Christina" or whatever. You you add a name. The name in this sense, signifier, the name falls into the signified. In this sense for Hegel, for example, the identity is a reflexive category. Now I'm sorry we don't have time to go into this because many critics have noted and this is a serious debate in Hegel studies, the problem is that Hegel introduces terms as concepts—Identity, Difference—only at the beginning of the second book of logic, *Logic of Essence*. But he uses them from the very beginning. So what does this mean? Is Hegel inconsistent? Should we say that from the very beginning he presupposes something, some conceptual determinations that he didn't effectively bring—I mean this brings us to this to me intricate topic of the consistency of Hegel's logic and so on and so on, which which would have been too much. But that's my first point that I want to make to Badiou. And here we don't have time to go to it, but please don't misunderstand me: Alain is my best friend. But you know what's for me a true definition of friendship? I saw a German—I love them—Nazi melodrama. You know that the big hit and Goebbels was wise here, in Nazi Germany were musicals and melodramas. Goebbels knew very well you shouldn't feed the population just with stupid propaganda, no? Okay, and in one of them the actress is a kind of spoiled girl who has a fiancé and she humiliates him, mocks him all the time. Fiancé is a rich guy from upper classes, so the father of this girl tells her "you shouldn't treat him like this, he will drop you whatever, I want you to marry him." You know what she answers? "But I love him, and if I love him I can do whatever I want to him." I mean, how should I put it, there is an element of truth in it. So in other words I love Badiou, so let me say all the things I want about him. No, seriously. All that stuff that he was making with intensity and so on and so on. I claim that a little bit a lesson of Hegel would not hurt him. You know what I mean? That that this aspect of, although he knows about it, we have a long debate here. You remember how at the end answering he said "yes identity in that the bad world the the intuitionist world, yes identity is symbolic" and so on and so on. But he oscillates here. For example, in this also would have been the answer to one of your questions. Ask him this, and it's a friendly question I mean he will be glad to answer you, because one of you—I don't know if you are here—asked him a simple but precise question. And I like this simple precise questions because they are the nastiest in the sense of they are the really hard questions. Like, "how do you know that an event is an event?" This is the eternal question that Badiou is attacked for. Like, "how do you distinguish an event from a pseudo-event?" Usually politically what is behind here is Heidegger. Because for Badiou Heidegger is an example of getting fascinated, seduced by a pseudo-event: looking for a revolution, he thought he found it in the Nazi revolution. So how do you distinguish it? I don't think that you can really catch him here. He has, read him closely, a precise definition of a site when where an event emerges. You know when he said when what he didn't develop yesterday—and please press him on this, not to catch him, but this is Badiou at his best—when he distinguishes within the multiplicity of a world what he calls a "world," a so-called "evental site." What what he called minimally "the non-existent." The—he once even sometimes uses the wonderful name of symptom of of "symptomal torsion." An element which is formally part of the set, but lacks any definite properties to be properly located within the set. It's as if the excess of the set. Sometimes he uses the term "sur-numéraire" or whatever. You know, it cannot be—it is included but cannot be properly counted. So in other words, that's crucial to understand him. It's not just that just a multitude—sorry, multiplicity, he would have shot me for multiplicity—no, no, no it's a multiplicity. Incidentally did you get his his wonderful point there a propos multiplicity? It's a very nice position, I think he is right there. His idea is that, and it's again a very Hegelian, is that multiplicity is original. Ontologically, you don't start with one and then you say "okay we have one, one, two ones, we go on-on." No, originally the many, the multiple is original. And now you will say "but fuck it," I'm sorry, now I will be really nasty, I'm using these expressions and gestures so that you will be able to understand me too. Now you will say, but wait a minute, if you have multiple it must, multiple is by definition many ones. No, his point is no, it goes endlessly. You analyze the multiple, you go further, there are always many. You never—and if anything today's quantum physics makes exactly the same point—that you you will never reach the atomic zero level. So his very nice theory is that the correlate of multiple is not one but void, zero. And then you—that one comes after, one is the result. You must do very specific operation between—he describes them—between multiple and zero. Basically this would be the Lacanian solution—I'm not sure he agrees to it—that you arrive at one if you count by counting nothing. By by counting nothing. Okay, but that's more the problem of Frege. I don't know if you know this, it's a wonderful crucial debate, the notion of "suture" (*suture*) which was introduced by Miller, way back in Jacques-Alain Miller and then Badiou wrote a polemics against it, this is I think the big debate. But let me go on. So as—so again I don't think that this reproach holds because the way to distinguish pseudo-event from event is precisely how they relate to this point of symptomal torsion, point of inconsistency. That's the first ontological premise which he sometimes elaborates maybe not enough, is that every totality has its symptomal point. And this can be put wonderfully in Lacanian notions. It means what? It means that every structure is self-reflexive, which means that it in—let's take a classification. You know at the beginning of his—what's the stupid English title, *The Order of Things*, *Les Mots et les choses*—that Foucault refers to that Borges' famous classification of dogs: "white dogs, fat dogs, all dogs which are owned by the emperor," etc. And then at the end, "all the dogs which are not included in this list." That's the structural logic: that you how should I put it there must be a standing-in within a structure of what is not included in the structure. You must have this minimal reflexivity. Now you will tell me this is high theory, what does it mean? Ah, I will give you a nasty example which I use sometimes in my work from Marxism itself. I claim that what is called "Asiatic mode of production" is such an empty reflexive sign. That is to say, it is clear if you read Marx really close, in detail. It is clear that what really fits his conceptual scheme are the standard well-known how do you call it pre-class societies (tribal whatever), slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and whatever shit comes after, who knows, no. But then of course Marx has specific ideas of despotism and so on. But if you look at closely at it, what he calls Asiatic mode of production is basically a container where he throws practically everything which doesn't fit any of the others. You know like everything goes there from ancient China to Egypt to Latin—I mean ancient Inca and so on, Latin American empires. So you see the paradox: this is a term which appears to refer to something positive, but it's really just a negative container. The only ultimately all this wealth of determinations—yes, Chinese empire, Hindu whatever—shouldn't deceive you, it's basically just a negative container. And this would have been then the symptomal... this excessive symptomal point. So I think that the reproach—and I'm not here dropping my topic because this is how Hegel's logic works. This is Hegelian reflexivity. The way Badiou, I think, can answer triumphantly this reproach... but how do you know, let's be concrete for example, how do you know that why October Revolution was an event if it was? For me it was, I give you freedom of choice, but I am here... you know that wonderful aggressive statement of Lenin where some guy protested "Oh, can I have the freedom of choice to say what I want?" You know what Lenin answers: "I definitely give you the freedom of choice to say the stupidities you want to say, but then I take to myself a freedom of choice to shoot you for what you are saying." [Laughter] Okay. Sorry, let me go on. So it's clearly that they relate differently to what Badiou called yesterday "this the non-existent." Because this what he calls shift from non-existence to the maximum existence happens only in an event. In Nazism, the symptomal point is just mystified cover-up. In other words, class struggle—at least in principle, let's forget about the shit that actually happens—in a communist revolution, workers effectively—I am not saying they do—should become or whatever, you know, they set the standard. Those... it's not that all others should be killed. Because if there were all other classes, if this were to be the case, then Lenin should have begun by killing himself, no? Incidentally, it's clear that he was a typical even upper-middle class guy who really had no idea of real working classes. Like the irony is if you look at some Lenin's letters, you know for some time he was living in Switzerland and he was staying by some middle-class artisanal family who had a house, they rented him a room blah-blah. And Lenin wrote enthusiastic letters to friends: "Now I see I am in contact with ordinary people, workers." Fuck him, these were no workers, this was typical not even lower middle-class, you know. That's... But nonetheless, what I want to say is that in Nazism also confronts the same problem: class struggle. But it doesn't do this operation: let's shift the non-existent to the maximum intensity. On the contrary, it just wants to control the struggle by imputing the cause of the struggle to an external agent. It's not because society is itself in itself antagonistic, it's because the Jews from outside introduced chaos and so on and then to impose on it some kind of hierarchic order and so on and so on. Where workers are still down but they are taken care of at least officially. You know all this shit, the relationship between capital and work shouldn't be just one of financial exploitation, capitalist should be a kind of a father taking care of blah-blah-blah, all this idea of sentimental more authentic relations between master and servant and so on and so on. So again, the moment you don't just say "multiplicity and then miracle of the event," but the moment you take into account that event is very precisely defined as where, how an event can intervene. Which is why maybe sometimes Badiou doesn't accentuate this enough: an event is purely structural. You can do the same thing, but if you do it a little bit too late it's no longer an event. You know what I mean? You must do it at the right time. Sorry, did you want to or did you just... sorry, you know this is the semantic misunderstanding. Often it happens to me, I don't know if the guy is scratching his head, not you or... both. Both? Okay, sorry. Ah, this is called overdetermination of nature and culture. Sorry, please. [Interjection from audience: "Talking about the self-reflexive nature of the event... isn't it that he's trying to get at that it's either zero or infinity, pretty much, that there is no self-reflexiveness?"] We would have to go here to what he means by self-reflexiveness. It's good that you touch this topic because he—he, I think that even now he struggles a little bit with this. And for his own good it would be good if in a debate—and again, I am not slandering him behind his back, you can report anything you want, like all the dirty things that I can tell you. For example, this is my standard joke about him. No, I will immediately return to it, I will not forget what you said. For example, do you know which movies he likes? This is a standing joke between us and he knows that I always spread this slander, but it's true. *Bridges of Madison County*. He thinks it's a really great film. Then he has a soft spot for *Armageddon*, you know this kind of catastrophe. Nobody is perfect, I would say, no. Sorry but let's go on with this infinity and event and so on. Yes? One zero self-reflexive? Yes, yeah, yeah. Self in the sense that in *Being and Event* he still claims that an event includes its own nomination. That is to say, this is another way to say that an event is an event only for those who participate in it. For example, if you look objectively— [Interjection from audience: "Come down to your level maybe. Let's take the orgasm as an event that..."] Why should it be an event? No, here I am conservative. Why should orgasm be an event? [Interjection from audience: "The event that causes us to want infinite number of events."] Ah yeah, okay, but why should this be an event? Like, okay let me be extremely vulgar. Let's say I'm a sadist, let's say I'm a sadist, let's say I will go back, sorry, to tested waters. Let's say I am a sadist and I want to I want to to I don't know cut a needle into your eye. What if I discover the desire to do it infinitely? I doubt this would count as an, you know what I mean? [Interjection from audience: "Let's talk about my example then. Orgasm. The event that inspires an infinite number of events, like we always want more of it. Right?"] Orgasm is not an event. Yeah, but how should I put it? Yeah, okay. So what's the point? Do you think this is enough of a—again for Badiou, let's be precise, event is something which intervenes at that point of symptomal torsion, the non-existent of the structure. Where do you have this in orgasm? I tend more to agree with Badiou who—you know when he defines a situation, he says that every situation have this not infinite in the positive sense like the infinity of the event, but the measureless. For him enjoyment, jouissance, is infinite in the more better Hegelian sense of the it's boundless. And as such it's open to this or that use. Which is why for example Badiou, I agree here with him, opposes opposes both standard versions of you know this old boring topic sexuality and revolution. On the one hand the conservative revolutionaries like sexuality is the last trap of bourgeois ideology to catch us and you know the true revolutionary must forget about his sexuality, be ascetic. Or on the other hand this '68 stuff, you know, those in power rule us through sexual oppression, sexual liberation is blah-blah. I I spontaneously to me sexual enjoyment is more this formless act-neutral— [Interjection from audience: "Outside of love... let's go back to your thing about love and procreation. Let's say an orgasm can be an event inside of the idea of procreation."] Why? Why not? What makes procreation more than just the animal— [Interjection from audience: "Well you were making a point about sex outside of marriage no longer being illicit, right? Inside of the idea of love."] Yeah, but nonetheless it doesn't make it in itself more authentic. How should I put it? That's a nice question you touch here. I am so sad we cannot go endlessly into this but I I had a great debate with Badiou here, very personal not in any nasty sense, and he also agreed with me that you know in the West we have you know that famous book—how is the guy who wrote it? I forgot, My God, *L'Amour et l'Occident*, "Love in the Western World," that great—it will come to me the name, he's a great French historian of ideas—it's even the great reference to Lacan on the notion of courtly love, where the idea is true love is not possible within marriage, the true love has to be transgressive. I totally I'm opposed to this idea. So back to you, okay it can be outside marriage, but it's not a condition. [Interjection from audience: "It's just a framework for the event. You're trying to
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establish the
establish the
Slavoj Žižek
framework."] But what would have been event here? Yes, you are after—I know. [Interjection from audience: "The event would have been the inception I guess."] But why? What give me a precise definition, what is what makes inception— [Interjection from audience: "Of life... as an event?"] Yeah, but again why? I'm here more a Badiouian idealist. I mean I think that you identify event too much with something beautiful new which happens. That's not enough. [Interjection from audience: "Well isn't that a materialist view though that it's related to..."] Yeah, but again for Badiou, again I'm returning to my old point, for Badiou to have an event it must intervene into the symptomal point, this torsion whatever of a situation. As he emphasizes again and again, there
framework."] But what would have been event here? Yes, you are after—I know. [Interjection from audience: "The event would have been the inception I guess."] But why? What give me a precise definition, what is what makes inception— [Interjection from audience: "Of life... as an event?"] Yeah, but again why? I'm here more a Badiouian idealist. I mean I think that you identify event too much with something beautiful new which happens. That's not enough. [Interjection from audience: "Well isn't that a materialist view though that it's related to..."] Yeah, but again for Badiou, again I'm returning to my old point, for Badiou to have an event it must intervene into the symptomal point, this torsion whatever of a situation. As he emphasizes again and again, there
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are
are
Slavoj Žižek
no universal events. [Interjection from audience: "I said it must be indiscernible for an event."] Yeah. [Interjection from audience: "Indiscernible?"] Yeah, that's sorry, that's the term I was using, I was—I was missing. Yes you are right that for him jouissance is indiscernible. [Interjection from audience: "And the subject somehow sucks this out of a meaning out of the indiscernible?"] Yeah, yeah. So for him an event would have been if orgasm becomes through love you know that it's—"there is always the fantasy in the in the in the in the you know in the orgasm in a sense the
no universal events. [Interjection from audience: "I said it must be indiscernible for an event."] Yeah. [Interjection from audience: "Indiscernible?"] Yeah, that's sorry, that's the term I was using, I was—I was missing. Yes you are right that for him jouissance is indiscernible. [Interjection from audience: "And the subject somehow sucks this out of a meaning out of the indiscernible?"] Yeah, yeah. So for him an event would have been if orgasm becomes through love you know that it's—"there is always the fantasy in the in the in the in the you know in the orgasm in a sense the
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object is the fantasy, there's no indiscernible object you've already created the object in the fantasy." Yeah, but
object is the fantasy, there's no indiscernible object you've already created the object in the fantasy." Yeah, but
Slavoj Žižek
nonetheless... okay, we cannot go into it. I'm tempted to say that it's— [Interjection from audience: "There is no object. I
nonetheless... okay, we cannot go into it. I'm tempted to say that it's— [Interjection from audience: "There is no object. I
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mean you're... no object."] I don't know, one should be more
mean you're... no object."] I don't know, one should be more
Slavoj Žižek
tricky here, I mean how should I put it... you know it's mystery. I I I it's complex what really happens, not in biological sense, but— [Interjection from audience: "I just don't think that the notion of orgasm fits into Badiou's... well I mean I think it would if you included like all the conditions for sexuality going out to dinner, you know under on drive and stuff like that. They could create the conditions for an event."] You know what what
tricky here, I mean how should I put it... you know it's mystery. I I I it's complex what really happens, not in biological sense, but— [Interjection from audience: "I just don't think that the notion of orgasm fits into Badiou's... well I mean I think it would if you included like all the conditions for sexuality going out to dinner, you know under on drive and stuff like that. They could create the conditions for an event."] You know what what
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which—maybe this is my melodramatic mind—but you know which situations interest me as potentially event? Did you
which—maybe this is my melodramatic mind—but you know which situations interest me as potentially event? Did you
Slavoj Žižek
see a shitty melodrama, but which is not totally bad? I liked it when I was younger, with Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro (not *The Deer Hunter*), *Falling in Love*. Where they they are both married, they start to meet, and then they decide to do it. They go to an empty apartment that is given to Robert De Niro to use it by a friend. And then they start to embrace and they they stop. They don't do it. This makes it an event, I claim. Because they are well aware that by doing it at that moment, at that precise moment, it would have meant it's just a cheap love affair. By not doing it they assert it as— [Interjection from audience: "So zero?"] No, I know you are back, yeah. You are, I have you in my mind, yeah. [Interjection from audience: "This is a very good conversation because the event has to introduce some form of rupture with all the grounds that have already been established with laws and norms and so on. But the connection with sexuality because the event what it does is opens up the field of possibilities like Badiou said yesterday. It so it introduces infinity to a finite situation and..."] Yeah, but not the infinity of
see a shitty melodrama, but which is not totally bad? I liked it when I was younger, with Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro (not *The Deer Hunter*), *Falling in Love*. Where they they are both married, they start to meet, and then they decide to do it. They go to an empty apartment that is given to Robert De Niro to use it by a friend. And then they start to embrace and they they stop. They don't do it. This makes it an event, I claim. Because they are well aware that by doing it at that moment, at that precise moment, it would have meant it's just a cheap love affair. By not doing it they assert it as— [Interjection from audience: "So zero?"] No, I know you are back, yeah. You are, I have you in my mind, yeah. [Interjection from audience: "This is a very good conversation because the event has to introduce some form of rupture with all the grounds that have already been established with laws and norms and so on. But the connection with sexuality because the event what it does is opens up the field of possibilities like Badiou said yesterday. It so it introduces infinity to a finite situation and..."] Yeah, but not the infinity of
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the indiscernible again. Lacan said that the only thing that is infinite
the indiscernible again. Lacan said that the only thing that is infinite
Slavoj Žižek
is the woman's orgasm. The only thing that is infinite...
is the woman's orgasm. The only thing that is infinite...
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Yeah. Yeah, but I I I I have I must... now we are entering another domain. I, with all
Yeah. Yeah, but I I I I have I must... now we are entering another domain. I, with all
Slavoj Žižek
my admiration for Lacan's *Encore*, his Seminar I claim that he oscillates there, getting dangerously close sometimes to this idea of men are fully within the symbolic order, but there is—but women not fully, there is some aspect of infinite, incredible intense enjoyment that we men can only—you know this to use that term precisely of "subject supposed to know," as if woman is the subject supposed to enjoy fully. Lacan is here much more ambiguous. I claim he—as it is always with Lacan, he cheats like crazy, but that's why I like him because he is truly creative in the sense that he is experimenting, taking one path going back the next one or... Okay, to simplify it very much. I claim Lacan oscillates there between the two versions of "how are we to understand the so-called..." you know we are talking now about these so-called formulas of sexuation, male-female. To put it very simply and elementary for Lacan, the
my admiration for Lacan's *Encore*, his Seminar I claim that he oscillates there, getting dangerously close sometimes to this idea of men are fully within the symbolic order, but there is—but women not fully, there is some aspect of infinite, incredible intense enjoyment that we men can only—you know this to use that term precisely of "subject supposed to know," as if woman is the subject supposed to enjoy fully. Lacan is here much more ambiguous. I claim he—as it is always with Lacan, he cheats like crazy, but that's why I like him because he is truly creative in the sense that he is experimenting, taking one path going back the next one or... Okay, to simplify it very much. I claim Lacan oscillates there between the two versions of "how are we to understand the so-called..." you know we are talking now about these so-called formulas of sexuation, male-female. To put it very simply and elementary for Lacan, the
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male formula of sexuation
male formula of sexuation
Slavoj Žižek
is universality with an exception. You assert
is universality with an exception. You assert
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universality
universality
Slavoj Žižek
but universality is founded in an exception. For women it's "non-all" (*pas tout*), which means no universality but—this is what people tend to forget—also no exception. Now how do you read this? The way I read it, the way it is usually read is: men are fully within the phallic symbolic order, their jouissance
but universality is founded in an exception. For women it's "non-all" (*pas tout*), which means no universality but—this is what people tend to forget—also no exception. Now how do you read this? The way I read it, the way it is usually read is: men are fully within the phallic symbolic order, their jouissance
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is phallic, which means already mediated
is phallic, which means already mediated
Slavoj Žižek
by the signifier, symbolic fantasies blah-blah. Women are only partially—only a part of a woman is involved in this edipal symbolic castration dynamic. You also have an aspect of this unspeakable other jouissance which is absolute
by the signifier, symbolic fantasies blah-blah. Women are only partially—only a part of a woman is involved in this edipal symbolic castration dynamic. You also have an aspect of this unspeakable other jouissance which is absolute
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as exemplified
as exemplified
Slavoj Žižek
in the mystical trance of Saint Teresa and so on and so on. I—I think this is a misreading and I think that in so far as we understand... [Interjection from
in the mystical trance of Saint Teresa and so on and so on. I—I think this is a misreading and I think that in so far as we understand... [Interjection from
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audience:
audience:
Slavoj Žižek
"So the danger would be the... you're talking about the danger of Badiou's theory here would be the
"So the danger would be the... you're talking about the danger of Badiou's theory here would be the
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reduction to an answer, a universality,
reduction to an answer, a universality,
Slavoj Žižek
right?"] No, no, no, sorry. Now I'm making another point, I even don't see directly the link
right?"] No, no, no, sorry. Now I'm making another point, I even don't see directly the link
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with Badiou. The point about... okay, I will explain. Now I have the link
with Badiou. The point about... okay, I will explain. Now I have the link
Slavoj Žižek
with with Badiou, but it's more... if you want to get an idea of this phallic male position it would have been in Saint Paul, the way Badiou interprets wonderfully Saint Paul, that Pauline dialectic of law and its
with with Badiou, but it's more... if you want to get an idea of this phallic male position it would have been in Saint Paul, the way Badiou interprets wonderfully Saint Paul, that Pauline dialectic of law and its
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transgression. It is the excess transgression which grounds the law
transgression. It is the excess transgression which grounds the law
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and it's the law which grounds transgression. That would be the male dynamic as it were. And and so for me love, the way Paul understands love, would be formally in this purely
and it's the law which grounds transgression. That would be the male dynamic as it were. And and so for me love, the way Paul understands love, would be formally in this purely
Slavoj Žižek
formalized term on the feminine side, non-all and so on and so on. But let me just finish please the previous line because it's important. What I am tempted to say is that the way I read it is that if the male position is the position of within the symbolic order but with an exception, then precisely the idea of a woman who is this absolute woman outside language who fully enjoys in a trance is a male fantasy. This is the ultimate male fantasy. This is not the non-all and so on. Even Lacan can be here—one can argue against Lacan through his own example which is very unfortunate for him, Saint Teresa. Fuck him, read Saint Teresa! She was in no way outside the symbolic. She was writing like crazy! All her—you know how much
formalized term on the feminine side, non-all and so on and so on. But let me just finish please the previous line because it's important. What I am tempted to say is that the way I read it is that if the male position is the position of within the symbolic order but with an exception, then precisely the idea of a woman who is this absolute woman outside language who fully enjoys in a trance is a male fantasy. This is the ultimate male fantasy. This is not the non-all and so on. Even Lacan can be here—one can argue against Lacan through his own example which is very unfortunate for him, Saint Teresa. Fuck him, read Saint Teresa! She was in no way outside the symbolic. She was writing like crazy! All her—you know how much
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she was writing. Her mystical experience, as nice analysis I think by Roland Barthes and others demonstrated, her mystical experience is all in her writing also. [Interjection from audience: "Well isn't it a Saint Teresa statue, isn't it the Bernini statue? And it's Bernini's Saint Teresa, the saint..."] Yeah, that's yeah. That's also a male fantasy, of course. Yeah, of course, yeah, yeah. Bernini and... you know the greatest movie of last year, the total shit—My God it's not good and I wanted to like it—"The Demons and Angels,"
she was writing. Her mystical experience, as nice analysis I think by Roland Barthes and others demonstrated, her mystical experience is all in her writing also. [Interjection from audience: "Well isn't it a Saint Teresa statue, isn't it the Bernini statue? And it's Bernini's Saint Teresa, the saint..."] Yeah, that's yeah. That's also a male fantasy, of course. Yeah, of course, yeah, yeah. Bernini and... you know the greatest movie of last year, the total shit—My God it's not good and I wanted to like it—"The Demons and Angels,"
Slavoj Žižek
you also there... we are all
you also there... we are all
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waiting for the...
waiting for the...
Slavoj Žižek
is it out in one month from now, the new... [Interjection from audience: "The new one? The new Dan Brown? Don't you follow world culture?"] Okay, let's stop this objectivity, sorry. No, but seriously. What I want to say that the way I read it is that the very idea of behind the very idea that there is one side of woman, the mask, the civilized woman, but that beneath there is the true absolute woman, you know she like "She" with capital S, like you know that famous male chauvinist Rider Haggard, the author of *Solomon's Mines* novel. He also wrote a novel *She* where in the middle of Africa a dark kingdom where an absolute woman... this is the male fantasy. So the way I read Lacan is that this "other jouissance" he is talking about, it's not outside language but it's on the contrary fully in language. That woman is more in language than man. The fact that woman is not-all in language doesn't mean part of her is out. It means she has no exception. As Lacan puts it, "non-all" at the same time means there is nothing which is not in, which is outside. Lacan is much more paradoxical here. So I claim that Lacan's point is that universality needs a founding exception. Once once you are on the feminine side, you no longer need an exception. So I think again all this topic—even Kristeva falls for it, you know... [Interjection from audience: "How do you relate that to infinity infinity and zero though? I mean your very example right there?"] I think, I'm not good enough here, my simple answer—it's an extremely simple answer—would have been that in order to do this properly (but I'm too stupid and confused now to do it) would have been to relate to all this—it wasn't My God Frege, who did that? Who did the the different infinities, Badiou likes him... Cantor! To go to Cantor different types of infinity. That the to put it in very stupid terms, male infinity, this phallic, the phallic orgasm that you mentioned is still I would say no that... Okay, I'll put it in this way. When you said when you have one orgasm you want to go on and on. But the
is it out in one month from now, the new... [Interjection from audience: "The new one? The new Dan Brown? Don't you follow world culture?"] Okay, let's stop this objectivity, sorry. No, but seriously. What I want to say that the way I read it is that the very idea of behind the very idea that there is one side of woman, the mask, the civilized woman, but that beneath there is the true absolute woman, you know she like "She" with capital S, like you know that famous male chauvinist Rider Haggard, the author of *Solomon's Mines* novel. He also wrote a novel *She* where in the middle of Africa a dark kingdom where an absolute woman... this is the male fantasy. So the way I read Lacan is that this "other jouissance" he is talking about, it's not outside language but it's on the contrary fully in language. That woman is more in language than man. The fact that woman is not-all in language doesn't mean part of her is out. It means she has no exception. As Lacan puts it, "non-all" at the same time means there is nothing which is not in, which is outside. Lacan is much more paradoxical here. So I claim that Lacan's point is that universality needs a founding exception. Once once you are on the feminine side, you no longer need an exception. So I think again all this topic—even Kristeva falls for it, you know... [Interjection from audience: "How do you relate that to infinity infinity and zero though? I mean your very example right there?"] I think, I'm not good enough here, my simple answer—it's an extremely simple answer—would have been that in order to do this properly (but I'm too stupid and confused now to do it) would have been to relate to all this—it wasn't My God Frege, who did that? Who did the the different infinities, Badiou likes him... Cantor! To go to Cantor different types of infinity. That the to put it in very stupid terms, male infinity, this phallic, the phallic orgasm that you mentioned is still I would say no that... Okay, I'll put it in this way. When you said when you have one orgasm you want to go on and on. But the
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male formula would have been this, the simple pre-Cantorian infinity:
male formula would have been this, the simple pre-Cantorian infinity:
Slavoj Žižek
on, more, on, more, more, more, more. It's still it's kind of a linear simple infinity. You need to get the infinity of feminine jouissance, you need a different type of— [Interjection from audience: "Wait my example though was an idealist finite more or less idea I was trying to..."] I know, but okay. What I wanted to aim at (but we will not have time to go deep today) would be the Hegelian notion of infinity as self-relating without exception. I wanted to to come at this later. But again, the point, let's at least conclude with this. What I wanted to conclude here is that again, beware how you read Lacan, that don't fall into this trap of you know feminine jouissance some mysterious feminine excess and so on and so on. Which is why I think women should like that apparently anti-feminist idea of (although it was proposed by a woman as you must know) of "femininity as a masquerade." This means precisely that woman is more of a subject. Masquerade means like onion, you know, you just have layers of masks, in the middle it's nothing. What's this nothing? This nothing is the Cartesian subject, who is a nothing. And if you read German idealists at its deepest, for example Schelling somewhere have the whole idea where he claims subjectivity at its most radical is feminine. This is why incidentally I'm pro-Cartesian. You know that the standard feminist line unfortunately is Descartes is a male chauvinist, his Cogito may appear neutral but is in reality masculine. I think on the
on, more, on, more, more, more, more. It's still it's kind of a linear simple infinity. You need to get the infinity of feminine jouissance, you need a different type of— [Interjection from audience: "Wait my example though was an idealist finite more or less idea I was trying to..."] I know, but okay. What I wanted to aim at (but we will not have time to go deep today) would be the Hegelian notion of infinity as self-relating without exception. I wanted to to come at this later. But again, the point, let's at least conclude with this. What I wanted to conclude here is that again, beware how you read Lacan, that don't fall into this trap of you know feminine jouissance some mysterious feminine excess and so on and so on. Which is why I think women should like that apparently anti-feminist idea of (although it was proposed by a woman as you must know) of "femininity as a masquerade." This means precisely that woman is more of a subject. Masquerade means like onion, you know, you just have layers of masks, in the middle it's nothing. What's this nothing? This nothing is the Cartesian subject, who is a nothing. And if you read German idealists at its deepest, for example Schelling somewhere have the whole idea where he claims subjectivity at its most radical is feminine. This is why incidentally I'm pro-Cartesian. You know that the standard feminist line unfortunately is Descartes is a male chauvinist, his Cogito may appear neutral but is in reality masculine. I think on the
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contrary
contrary
Slavoj Žižek
it's feminine. Which is why incidentally, I don't know if you know this, it's simply a historical data. Do you know that Descartes' first and most enthusiastic public were... not only the Queen Christina in Sweden but... Okay, but nonetheless let's go back to point, maybe this will
it's feminine. Which is why incidentally, I don't know if you know this, it's simply a historical data. Do you know that Descartes' first and most enthusiastic public were... not only the Queen Christina in Sweden but... Okay, but nonetheless let's go back to point, maybe this will
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bring
bring
Slavoj Žižek
it closer to Badiou, Badiou then Badiou event. Okay, so again I think you can deliver Badiou, you can save Badiou from that standard reproach by look always remembering it's not an inherent property which makes an event an event. It's the way it intervenes into a structure. Where I... so again in his *L'Être et l'Événement* ("Being and Event") he still has this theory that an event includes its own nomination. Which means in another way that an event is an event only for those who are engaged in the event. His own example is, for example, French Revolution. If you are an objective historian, you will never discover there was something "the great French Revolution." Then you can play the game by that—how she called, François Furet—the great liberal historian, French, whose whole point (Badiou knows this) is to de-eventalize, how should I put it, to un-event the French Revolution, to show it wasn't a big thing, it was just some local French confusion because blah-blah and so on. So no, this is why Badiou is very precise here when he refers to event as a grace, miracle. And but the way he understands miracle is in the in the Jansenist and Calvinist sense. You know how? You know that it's a very beautiful theory of a miracle where they claim miracle doesn't violate the the the laws of nature. Miracle appears as a miracle only to those who believe in it. They don't... miracle is not something that you can convince like, "you don't believe, I do, okay I will show you a miracle, I can stand on my feet and jump up meters." No, no, no,
it closer to Badiou, Badiou then Badiou event. Okay, so again I think you can deliver Badiou, you can save Badiou from that standard reproach by look always remembering it's not an inherent property which makes an event an event. It's the way it intervenes into a structure. Where I... so again in his *L'Être et l'Événement* ("Being and Event") he still has this theory that an event includes its own nomination. Which means in another way that an event is an event only for those who are engaged in the event. His own example is, for example, French Revolution. If you are an objective historian, you will never discover there was something "the great French Revolution." Then you can play the game by that—how she called, François Furet—the great liberal historian, French, whose whole point (Badiou knows this) is to de-eventalize, how should I put it, to un-event the French Revolution, to show it wasn't a big thing, it was just some local French confusion because blah-blah and so on. So no, this is why Badiou is very precise here when he refers to event as a grace, miracle. And but the way he understands miracle is in the in the Jansenist and Calvinist sense. You know how? You know that it's a very beautiful theory of a miracle where they claim miracle doesn't violate the the the laws of nature. Miracle appears as a miracle only to those who believe in it. They don't... miracle is not something that you can convince like, "you don't believe, I do, okay I will show you a miracle, I can stand on my feet and jump up meters." No, no, no,
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miracle
miracle
Slavoj Žižek
is... and in this same sense there is no—there are no neutral events. Events are events only for the engaged. But—but let me go on. The problem... and then you can counter-fact. I just want where you should do to Badiou, you know, you showed me, you that famous image of balls hanging, no? It's not famous but yeah, okay. Okay, but you should maybe do a little bit of this procedure to Badiou for his own good, no? Squeeze his balls a bit. So one later in his *Logiques des mondes* ("Logics of Worlds") he drops this. He no longer claims that an event includes its own nomination. What—he now on the one hand tends more and more to emphasize a gap between an event and its nomination. An event is something that just explodes and then, for example in examples of Christianity, Christ's resurrection—it doesn't matter it happened or not—is the event. But it became an event only through its proper nomination with with Paul, not even in the gospels, with Paul. Now the problem here is the following one, and Badiou knows it. Is there an—and I claim maybe I am wrong that he tends to oscillate here a little bit. Is an event already in itself an event, or does an event only retroactively through its nomination and through fidelity of its followers, what Badiou calls in this religious-Marxist terms "the patient work of love" where you work to inscribe the event into the order of being? Here I claim he is looking for different ways like sometimes he sounds almost for me a little bit too close to deconstructionism in the sense that an event is only a retroactive effect of its nomination. That something happens, it can be nothing, retroactively it becomes an event. [Interjection from audience: "Infinite possibility or nothing... there's the paradox."] Right. Yeah, but but again if you say this it— [Interjection from audience: "Which equals one?"] Yeah, then I think you get a little bit too close to this standard— [Interjection from audience: "There's the danger, right? Yeah, the danger, no?"] Because sometimes he sounds again as if it's only the nomination which retroactively creates event. On the other hand, sometimes he plays on an event as some traumatic occurrence for which we always look for a proper nomination but we find it difficult even to find a proper name for it. For example when he writes about about 20th century or 19th century revolutions, sometimes he says that maybe all this Marxist terminology of class struggle is a wrong name. But fuck it, a wrong name for what? So is it as if... this you know he as it were oscillates oscillates oscillates between these two. So my solution here is—his prior work... he wouldn't agree, no, it's of course the Hegelian-Lacanian both at the same time. My solution is even very... is that no I want to avoid both deviations as a Stalinist: right-wing and left-wing. Right-wing deviation would be a naive substantialism: there really is an event, a miracle happens whatever, and then we try to catch up with it, what it is blah-blah, but as we like to say there is a remainder we never can do it blah-blah. Then the other deviation, left-wing, would be this deconstructionist game: all there is is only a flux game language and retroactively but in a totally contingent way some things are elevated into the status of event and so on. My—well— [Interjection from audience: "Well I quote what he said last night and that seems to be the deviation... he said this, you know this theory of his is basically against the brutal use of dualism. So I think that that's the opposite shift I mean..."] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And okay so let me go on. So my—but let's go back to event. My solution would be the following one. Again maybe you know this, I often this example but I found it beautiful. In my books what happens in Einstein... I simplify very much, I know, but to simplify. In Einstein's passage from special to general theory of relativity. As you probably know, the key one of the key moments of Einstein there is this—how do you pronounce it in English?—curved space, curvature of space. That the space is not straight blah-blah, no? Okay, incidentally this has wonderful uses for psychoanalysis because what Lacan calls desire, you know the paradox—to put it in very simplistic terms—of curved space is that precisely sometimes the shortest way to get from A to B is not the straight line. But because the space is curved it's faster if you go around. But that's desire. Isn't the whole point of human desire that—sorry again I cannot—I love Christina, if I just jump on her and screw her, no, you must you know the whole point is to make a detour, no? In other words the space of desire is a curved space, no? Okay, but you know what's the shift, how to account for this curvature curved space in Einstein? Einstein first defines matter in the inertia of matter, stuff, as that which curves space. To put it very simply, without matter, empty space would have been like geometrical flat. Then you put like, let's say it would be like this, you put some matter here and it curves the space. So that the curvature of the space is the effect of matter. Ah, but then comes the Hegelian genius, no? You know what is then Einstein's move? To turn things around. To say that no, the curvature of the space is original and matter is just an effect of the curved space. I love this. Purely formal materialism. You can get rid of this—you know I hate this vulgar materialism where you think oh it must smell, you must feel it like the inertia inertia of matter. I claim that today, and here I agree with Badiou, let me go back to that point of infinity and so on. Did you notice something very strange how in the 20th century it started with Heidegger,
is... and in this same sense there is no—there are no neutral events. Events are events only for the engaged. But—but let me go on. The problem... and then you can counter-fact. I just want where you should do to Badiou, you know, you showed me, you that famous image of balls hanging, no? It's not famous but yeah, okay. Okay, but you should maybe do a little bit of this procedure to Badiou for his own good, no? Squeeze his balls a bit. So one later in his *Logiques des mondes* ("Logics of Worlds") he drops this. He no longer claims that an event includes its own nomination. What—he now on the one hand tends more and more to emphasize a gap between an event and its nomination. An event is something that just explodes and then, for example in examples of Christianity, Christ's resurrection—it doesn't matter it happened or not—is the event. But it became an event only through its proper nomination with with Paul, not even in the gospels, with Paul. Now the problem here is the following one, and Badiou knows it. Is there an—and I claim maybe I am wrong that he tends to oscillate here a little bit. Is an event already in itself an event, or does an event only retroactively through its nomination and through fidelity of its followers, what Badiou calls in this religious-Marxist terms "the patient work of love" where you work to inscribe the event into the order of being? Here I claim he is looking for different ways like sometimes he sounds almost for me a little bit too close to deconstructionism in the sense that an event is only a retroactive effect of its nomination. That something happens, it can be nothing, retroactively it becomes an event. [Interjection from audience: "Infinite possibility or nothing... there's the paradox."] Right. Yeah, but but again if you say this it— [Interjection from audience: "Which equals one?"] Yeah, then I think you get a little bit too close to this standard— [Interjection from audience: "There's the danger, right? Yeah, the danger, no?"] Because sometimes he sounds again as if it's only the nomination which retroactively creates event. On the other hand, sometimes he plays on an event as some traumatic occurrence for which we always look for a proper nomination but we find it difficult even to find a proper name for it. For example when he writes about about 20th century or 19th century revolutions, sometimes he says that maybe all this Marxist terminology of class struggle is a wrong name. But fuck it, a wrong name for what? So is it as if... this you know he as it were oscillates oscillates oscillates between these two. So my solution here is—his prior work... he wouldn't agree, no, it's of course the Hegelian-Lacanian both at the same time. My solution is even very... is that no I want to avoid both deviations as a Stalinist: right-wing and left-wing. Right-wing deviation would be a naive substantialism: there really is an event, a miracle happens whatever, and then we try to catch up with it, what it is blah-blah, but as we like to say there is a remainder we never can do it blah-blah. Then the other deviation, left-wing, would be this deconstructionist game: all there is is only a flux game language and retroactively but in a totally contingent way some things are elevated into the status of event and so on. My—well— [Interjection from audience: "Well I quote what he said last night and that seems to be the deviation... he said this, you know this theory of his is basically against the brutal use of dualism. So I think that that's the opposite shift I mean..."] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And okay so let me go on. So my—but let's go back to event. My solution would be the following one. Again maybe you know this, I often this example but I found it beautiful. In my books what happens in Einstein... I simplify very much, I know, but to simplify. In Einstein's passage from special to general theory of relativity. As you probably know, the key one of the key moments of Einstein there is this—how do you pronounce it in English?—curved space, curvature of space. That the space is not straight blah-blah, no? Okay, incidentally this has wonderful uses for psychoanalysis because what Lacan calls desire, you know the paradox—to put it in very simplistic terms—of curved space is that precisely sometimes the shortest way to get from A to B is not the straight line. But because the space is curved it's faster if you go around. But that's desire. Isn't the whole point of human desire that—sorry again I cannot—I love Christina, if I just jump on her and screw her, no, you must you know the whole point is to make a detour, no? In other words the space of desire is a curved space, no? Okay, but you know what's the shift, how to account for this curvature curved space in Einstein? Einstein first defines matter in the inertia of matter, stuff, as that which curves space. To put it very simply, without matter, empty space would have been like geometrical flat. Then you put like, let's say it would be like this, you put some matter here and it curves the space. So that the curvature of the space is the effect of matter. Ah, but then comes the Hegelian genius, no? You know what is then Einstein's move? To turn things around. To say that no, the curvature of the space is original and matter is just an effect of the curved space. I love this. Purely formal materialism. You can get rid of this—you know I hate this vulgar materialism where you think oh it must smell, you must feel it like the inertia inertia of matter. I claim that today, and here I agree with Badiou, let me go back to that point of infinity and so on. Did you notice something very strange how in the 20th century it started with Heidegger,
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finitude become
finitude become
Slavoj Žižek
more and more the last resort of spiritualism, idealism? Before in the 19th century, to be for finitude was usually the vulgar materialism: only finite real material things exist, infinity is a metaphysical dream and so on and so on. But then today more and more it is science in its pure formalism which gets more and more infinities. And here Badiou is right as far as I can understand—I talked with some mathematicians partially I hope I understood them—that this was the result of Cantor revolution where you know what's the point? Till Cantor infinity was linked to the one. Infinity was the transcending one and so on. From Cantor you have a material in multiple infinity, infinity of the multiple. But what I'm saying is that for example look at the cinema. Isn't it strange that the author who is maybe the most spiritualist movie maker of the 20th century, the Russian guy Tarkovsky, is at the same time the most materialist? You do you remember how a spiritual experience looks in Tarkovsky? It's not up heaven. You immerse yourself deeply into the earth: all the dirt, mud, water and so on. This idea of materialized spirituality. So I think that in this sense we live in paradoxical times where finitude no longer acts but to emphasize that we humans are thrown into a world always a finite situation. Precisely this limitation opens then up a space for some divine spiritual otherness. Of course, as they will say, this is a post-metaphysical otherness. You know all this crap, I don't like it maybe you do, pseudo-Levinasian or whatever where you say of course there is no God as a positive entity, but there is a void of otherness and out of this void some X is
more and more the last resort of spiritualism, idealism? Before in the 19th century, to be for finitude was usually the vulgar materialism: only finite real material things exist, infinity is a metaphysical dream and so on and so on. But then today more and more it is science in its pure formalism which gets more and more infinities. And here Badiou is right as far as I can understand—I talked with some mathematicians partially I hope I understood them—that this was the result of Cantor revolution where you know what's the point? Till Cantor infinity was linked to the one. Infinity was the transcending one and so on. From Cantor you have a material in multiple infinity, infinity of the multiple. But what I'm saying is that for example look at the cinema. Isn't it strange that the author who is maybe the most spiritualist movie maker of the 20th century, the Russian guy Tarkovsky, is at the same time the most materialist? You do you remember how a spiritual experience looks in Tarkovsky? It's not up heaven. You immerse yourself deeply into the earth: all the dirt, mud, water and so on. This idea of materialized spirituality. So I think that in this sense we live in paradoxical times where finitude no longer acts but to emphasize that we humans are thrown into a world always a finite situation. Precisely this limitation opens then up a space for some divine spiritual otherness. Of course, as they will say, this is a post-metaphysical otherness. You know all this crap, I don't like it maybe you do, pseudo-Levinasian or whatever where you say of course there is no God as a positive entity, but there is a void of otherness and out of this void some X is
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addressing
addressing
Slavoj Žižek
us and so on, you know all this again and so on and so on. So in this sense I totally agree with Badiou when he claimed that today this kind of what Einstein did this kind of that this is a very materialist move, not idealist. This idea that it's not that you need some substantial reality which curves the space but that curved space comes first and the inertia of matter is just some kind of illusory imaginary perception of curved space. Now you will say I am dreaming here. Let me conclude with—and we are back to Hegel here because my idea—ah you thought I lost my track I often do but this time exceptionally I again we are back at Hegel—because I think that this passage to put it in very simplistic terms, this passage from first the special theory of relativity, that is to say the space is curved because of the presence of matter, to the second stage where the curvature of the space is original is in philosophical terms the the the the shift from Kant to Hegel. Kant still needs the thing-in-itself which as it were curves the space. For Hegel and this is the prime—and now you will say but these are totally abstract stupid associations, what this has to do with reality? You allow me to conclude then you get your shitty break or whatever. Two examples: one from politics, the other from psychoanalyst. Trauma. How does Freud relate to trauma? Let's take the most classical example although I don't see what is so traumatic about it I would rather like to see it if it would not make me throw out, you know. Wolfman again, you know Freud reconstructs the trauma of at one year and the half or on well the small boy observing parents copulating *a tergo*. But look closely at what Freud says there. His point is not the guy was doing nice and then "oh my god he saw this father screwing my mom, what does this mean," whatever and he was traumatized. It's totally read Freud! He says that when the child saw this, one and the half year or it doesn't matter, there was absolutely nothing traumatic about it. He simply registered it as a total nothing, neutral. It remains but as totally latent, not even as a latent trauma, but just as some kind of neutral trace. Then only later, to be precise at when, I don't know, when does it start I think around four five six, that children start to bother about the origin of how did children and when they start to develop this sexual so-called children sexual theories. At that point, being perplexed by what is sexuality, he retraumatized this neutral experience. He elevated it as an answer, it was elevated resuscitated as a traumatic fantasy. So you see the point: the point is first there was let's say vaguely that a trauma curves the space of our mental perception. In what sense? In even in almost literal primitive sense. Let's say you have a certain straight geometrical classification of space: left-right, up-down, apples whatever, a neutral category. Then let's say the something traumatic happens, like sorry for the tasteless, you were you saw something horrible or you were attacked, beaten, raped, whatever, I don't know... an apple was stuck up onto your—on the fourth floor in a certain part of the city. Then of course this would have literally curved your space. You would probably blank how should I put it erase that and you know it would no longer be straight. But for Freud—this is the lesson of when it the so-called traumatic fact, the small boy observing the parent screwing *a tergo*, didn't curve his space. His mental space got curved by a totally symbolic (it means within the symbolic order) enigma of sexuality. He had blanks there. So you get my point? He was—his space was curved, and then he mobilized the stuff, the matter of this memory as a trauma to fill in the gap. So the trauma is first formal trauma in the sense of the mental space is curved. Now you will say what can this mean politically? Ah, I give you a very simple example, the one we were already talking about: anti-Semitism. Precisely, fascists are Kantians, Marxists should be Hegelians. In what sense? For fascists clearly the social space is symmetrical, non-curved in an ideal sense. If you have a nice Aryan or whatever, for example Tibetan—do you know that Nazis loved Tibet? You know why? Their dream was that all the lands down is already penetrated by by Semitic corruption and that you have to go up. For for them Tibet was even more than Nordic Europe the island of not yet corrupted by by Semitic decadence society. Okay, but let me go on. So here you have the idea is then, we have a nice harmonious social edifice, Jew is the matter which intervenes and curves the space, introducing imbalance blah-blah. For a Marxist, the social space is curved originally because of class struggle and so on, antagonism, and the Jew as the trauma comes second as a fake to fill it in, to fill in to fill in the gap and so on and so on. The last conclusion to be drawn from this is that this I think it's crucial to read the Lacanian notion of the real in this way. It's not a substantial real. It's not I'm here nice and then something terribly in... it's it's kind of a purely formal real. It's just some inherent impossibility. You know, it's a very dialectical Hegelian thought. It's not I would have been fully what I am but something prevents me, an obstacle from being. No, it's I am blocked in myself and every positive cause comes secondary already fills in the gap of a certain inherent impossibility. What has this to do with Hegel? That's the whole point of what Hegel calls the primacy of internal of sorry inherent self-contradiction with regard to external opposition. For Hegel external opposition always comes second with regard to inherent self-contradiction and so on and so on. You know what? Let's make a break and then we go on. [Break background noise] Okay, so we did a little bit of identity. Let me go on with what does Hegel mean just a couple of simple examples just that you get the motion. What does Hegel mean by negation of negation? It's a self-related negation but in a very precise sense. It's not simply you know if as Badiou explained yesterday you have let's say two possibilities only A or B, there is no third, so if you negate A you get B, if you negate B you get are back to A. No no no, it's something different. One can even say that only the negation of negation is a radical, is a true negation. Or one can also put it in this way: the first negation moves within a certain field, it's only in a negation of negation that the field itself is negated. What I mean by this... okay okay let's go to examples. I think I use a little bit of this, if you know it, but it's not so popular which I like, this theological book of debate that I'm engaged with, *Monstrosity of Christ* with that theologian John Milbank. I think I refer there to Wagner, Richard Wagner. He wrote already in when he was relatively young a piece of drama which he then planned to put the opera *Jesus of Nazareth*. And there I think he interprets in a wonderful way this you know these big formulas of Jesus: this radicalization of the simple Jewish injunctions like you know it's not only if you if you if you have sex with a woman I mean with a non—illegitimate—I mean outside marriage sex that you sin, it's already if you desire that or all these famous asymmetrical formulas, or if somebody—not eye for an eye, but if somebody... how does Wagner interpret this? He gives a wonderful example for example of sex. Wagner starts with the simple opposition between sex within marriage, let's call it legal sex, and how should we call it illegitimate sex, cheating or whatever. And then he does he says of course first one is the domain of the law, legal sex. And then he says but not only is illegitimate sex sinful, but sex within marriage which is not grounded in love is even a greater sin. And then he does a wonderful rhetorical turn where he says: "Because illegitimate sex doesn't undermine marriage from within. It's just from the outside it transgresses marriage. But he says sex in marriage without love ruins the idea of marriage from within." It's a kind of a corruption from within. Which is why this is the true... you get my point? If for Wagner the sex outside marriage is a simple negation of a proper sex, sex in marriage without love is the negation of a negation in the sense of radical destruction, the true catastrophe. And then very nicely in a way with reference to Proudhon, Wagner does the same with property and theft. He says "Okay, we have legal property, of course it's bad to steal." But then he says "if you have legal property with which you exploit others, it's even worse than theft because you undermine the ethical foundations of the notion of property from within." So you see this this would be at a very elementary level what Hegel aims at with his negation of negation. You start with an external opposition, let's say legal marriage sin. But then you discover that the legal term already contains its own much more radical negation which as it were explodes, undermines the entire field. In other words, at the level of for example property: we have property and theft, but the ultimate result is (you know the saying of Proudhon) that property as such already is theft. It means you you isolate it, steal it from the collective and so on and so on. This is the mechanism: that first you have the external negation and then you discover how the first term already is in this sense its own negation. "Property already is theft." How does—in Hegel you find this, and that's the whole point of Hegel, in a wonderfully precise way a propos the dialectic of law and crime. The elementary relationship
us and so on, you know all this again and so on and so on. So in this sense I totally agree with Badiou when he claimed that today this kind of what Einstein did this kind of that this is a very materialist move, not idealist. This idea that it's not that you need some substantial reality which curves the space but that curved space comes first and the inertia of matter is just some kind of illusory imaginary perception of curved space. Now you will say I am dreaming here. Let me conclude with—and we are back to Hegel here because my idea—ah you thought I lost my track I often do but this time exceptionally I again we are back at Hegel—because I think that this passage to put it in very simplistic terms, this passage from first the special theory of relativity, that is to say the space is curved because of the presence of matter, to the second stage where the curvature of the space is original is in philosophical terms the the the the shift from Kant to Hegel. Kant still needs the thing-in-itself which as it were curves the space. For Hegel and this is the prime—and now you will say but these are totally abstract stupid associations, what this has to do with reality? You allow me to conclude then you get your shitty break or whatever. Two examples: one from politics, the other from psychoanalyst. Trauma. How does Freud relate to trauma? Let's take the most classical example although I don't see what is so traumatic about it I would rather like to see it if it would not make me throw out, you know. Wolfman again, you know Freud reconstructs the trauma of at one year and the half or on well the small boy observing parents copulating *a tergo*. But look closely at what Freud says there. His point is not the guy was doing nice and then "oh my god he saw this father screwing my mom, what does this mean," whatever and he was traumatized. It's totally read Freud! He says that when the child saw this, one and the half year or it doesn't matter, there was absolutely nothing traumatic about it. He simply registered it as a total nothing, neutral. It remains but as totally latent, not even as a latent trauma, but just as some kind of neutral trace. Then only later, to be precise at when, I don't know, when does it start I think around four five six, that children start to bother about the origin of how did children and when they start to develop this sexual so-called children sexual theories. At that point, being perplexed by what is sexuality, he retraumatized this neutral experience. He elevated it as an answer, it was elevated resuscitated as a traumatic fantasy. So you see the point: the point is first there was let's say vaguely that a trauma curves the space of our mental perception. In what sense? In even in almost literal primitive sense. Let's say you have a certain straight geometrical classification of space: left-right, up-down, apples whatever, a neutral category. Then let's say the something traumatic happens, like sorry for the tasteless, you were you saw something horrible or you were attacked, beaten, raped, whatever, I don't know... an apple was stuck up onto your—on the fourth floor in a certain part of the city. Then of course this would have literally curved your space. You would probably blank how should I put it erase that and you know it would no longer be straight. But for Freud—this is the lesson of when it the so-called traumatic fact, the small boy observing the parent screwing *a tergo*, didn't curve his space. His mental space got curved by a totally symbolic (it means within the symbolic order) enigma of sexuality. He had blanks there. So you get my point? He was—his space was curved, and then he mobilized the stuff, the matter of this memory as a trauma to fill in the gap. So the trauma is first formal trauma in the sense of the mental space is curved. Now you will say what can this mean politically? Ah, I give you a very simple example, the one we were already talking about: anti-Semitism. Precisely, fascists are Kantians, Marxists should be Hegelians. In what sense? For fascists clearly the social space is symmetrical, non-curved in an ideal sense. If you have a nice Aryan or whatever, for example Tibetan—do you know that Nazis loved Tibet? You know why? Their dream was that all the lands down is already penetrated by by Semitic corruption and that you have to go up. For for them Tibet was even more than Nordic Europe the island of not yet corrupted by by Semitic decadence society. Okay, but let me go on. So here you have the idea is then, we have a nice harmonious social edifice, Jew is the matter which intervenes and curves the space, introducing imbalance blah-blah. For a Marxist, the social space is curved originally because of class struggle and so on, antagonism, and the Jew as the trauma comes second as a fake to fill it in, to fill in to fill in the gap and so on and so on. The last conclusion to be drawn from this is that this I think it's crucial to read the Lacanian notion of the real in this way. It's not a substantial real. It's not I'm here nice and then something terribly in... it's it's kind of a purely formal real. It's just some inherent impossibility. You know, it's a very dialectical Hegelian thought. It's not I would have been fully what I am but something prevents me, an obstacle from being. No, it's I am blocked in myself and every positive cause comes secondary already fills in the gap of a certain inherent impossibility. What has this to do with Hegel? That's the whole point of what Hegel calls the primacy of internal of sorry inherent self-contradiction with regard to external opposition. For Hegel external opposition always comes second with regard to inherent self-contradiction and so on and so on. You know what? Let's make a break and then we go on. [Break background noise] Okay, so we did a little bit of identity. Let me go on with what does Hegel mean just a couple of simple examples just that you get the motion. What does Hegel mean by negation of negation? It's a self-related negation but in a very precise sense. It's not simply you know if as Badiou explained yesterday you have let's say two possibilities only A or B, there is no third, so if you negate A you get B, if you negate B you get are back to A. No no no, it's something different. One can even say that only the negation of negation is a radical, is a true negation. Or one can also put it in this way: the first negation moves within a certain field, it's only in a negation of negation that the field itself is negated. What I mean by this... okay okay let's go to examples. I think I use a little bit of this, if you know it, but it's not so popular which I like, this theological book of debate that I'm engaged with, *Monstrosity of Christ* with that theologian John Milbank. I think I refer there to Wagner, Richard Wagner. He wrote already in when he was relatively young a piece of drama which he then planned to put the opera *Jesus of Nazareth*. And there I think he interprets in a wonderful way this you know these big formulas of Jesus: this radicalization of the simple Jewish injunctions like you know it's not only if you if you if you have sex with a woman I mean with a non—illegitimate—I mean outside marriage sex that you sin, it's already if you desire that or all these famous asymmetrical formulas, or if somebody—not eye for an eye, but if somebody... how does Wagner interpret this? He gives a wonderful example for example of sex. Wagner starts with the simple opposition between sex within marriage, let's call it legal sex, and how should we call it illegitimate sex, cheating or whatever. And then he does he says of course first one is the domain of the law, legal sex. And then he says but not only is illegitimate sex sinful, but sex within marriage which is not grounded in love is even a greater sin. And then he does a wonderful rhetorical turn where he says: "Because illegitimate sex doesn't undermine marriage from within. It's just from the outside it transgresses marriage. But he says sex in marriage without love ruins the idea of marriage from within." It's a kind of a corruption from within. Which is why this is the true... you get my point? If for Wagner the sex outside marriage is a simple negation of a proper sex, sex in marriage without love is the negation of a negation in the sense of radical destruction, the true catastrophe. And then very nicely in a way with reference to Proudhon, Wagner does the same with property and theft. He says "Okay, we have legal property, of course it's bad to steal." But then he says "if you have legal property with which you exploit others, it's even worse than theft because you undermine the ethical foundations of the notion of property from within." So you see this this would be at a very elementary level what Hegel aims at with his negation of negation. You start with an external opposition, let's say legal marriage sin. But then you discover that the legal term already contains its own much more radical negation which as it were explodes, undermines the entire field. In other words, at the level of for example property: we have property and theft, but the ultimate result is (you know the saying of Proudhon) that property as such already is theft. It means you you isolate it, steal it from the collective and so on and so on. This is the mechanism: that first you have the external negation and then you discover how the first term already is in this sense its own negation. "Property already is theft." How does—in Hegel you find this, and that's the whole point of Hegel, in a wonderfully precise way a propos the dialectic of law and crime. The elementary relationship
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Slavoj Žižek
of course one of transgression: we have property, we have the law and we have its violation, crime. But... and then people usually think that the Hegelian dialectics is a kind of a negation of negation through judicial punishment, no? Like rule of law, somebody breaks the law (negation), punishment is the negation of negation, the rule of law is re-established. No! I find very thing many things very important here where I'm fully a Hegelian up to the point of madness. For example to shock you, you know what is Hegel's defense of death penalty? No, that it's the ultimate recognition of of of the criminal as a free human being. He said the only way to treat a criminal respectfully is to punish him because only by punishing him fully you treat him as a proper autonomous human being. And incidentally, reading sometimes some kind of weird politically correct stuff, I tend almost to agree with it because it sounds very politically correct maybe this duality which you sometimes find. You know how for example if a white man does something horrible, it's bad. If a black guy does it, it's oh victims, slaves, circumstances, blah-blah. Of course this is true. But all I'm saying is—we are walking in dangerous waters there—because it's also you are also depriving him or her of the autonomy. This is what is always false in this self-flagellation self-humiliation of whites, you know. We want to be guilty for everything. Even if there is now a civil war in some African independent states, these are still our consequences of our colonialism et cetera. It is as if we whites sometimes it reads
of course one of transgression: we have property, we have the law and we have its violation, crime. But... and then people usually think that the Hegelian dialectics is a kind of a negation of negation through judicial punishment, no? Like rule of law, somebody breaks the law (negation), punishment is the negation of negation, the rule of law is re-established. No! I find very thing many things very important here where I'm fully a Hegelian up to the point of madness. For example to shock you, you know what is Hegel's defense of death penalty? No, that it's the ultimate recognition of of of the criminal as a free human being. He said the only way to treat a criminal respectfully is to punish him because only by punishing him fully you treat him as a proper autonomous human being. And incidentally, reading sometimes some kind of weird politically correct stuff, I tend almost to agree with it because it sounds very politically correct maybe this duality which you sometimes find. You know how for example if a white man does something horrible, it's bad. If a black guy does it, it's oh victims, slaves, circumstances, blah-blah. Of course this is true. But all I'm saying is—we are walking in dangerous waters there—because it's also you are also depriving him or her of the autonomy. This is what is always false in this self-flagellation self-humiliation of whites, you know. We want to be guilty for everything. Even if there is now a civil war in some African independent states, these are still our consequences of our colonialism et cetera. It is as if we whites sometimes it reads
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Slavoj Žižek
this want to say: "if we can no longer be white man's burden in the sense of we take care for and are good colonials that at least we want to be the ultimate bad guys, like whatever happens we are responsible for." But I claim that often how should I put it there is a hidden arrogance in this. You know who wrote one—okay so that I don't get lost in it again—read the one whom I really appreciate, and he is not a soft liberal if there was a hard-liner it's him, Frantz Fanon. Read the last pages of his *Black Skin, White Masks* where he says—it's a wonderful I claim manifesto *avant la lettre* against political correctness, where he open where he says "I find no satisfaction in eternally putting the blame on the white man and so on and so on." He sees the utter falsity of this eternal victimization, "are you aware you are guilty for slavery five..." and he even in advance attacks that Black Athena stuff where he said "I know it would be wonderful to discover that there was somewhere in Egypt let us say years before Christ a philosopher who was in constant dialogue with Plato and to prove that Plato stole ideas for him." But he says brutally "it matters nothing for liberation politically today and so on and so on and so on." So again, I fully subscribe to Fanon, you know where Fanon is much more problematic for some people: all he said about liberating force of violence and so on and so on. I'm not a soft guy here. All I'm saying is beware of this how should I call it—beware of this—you know there is a way to humiliate yourself which is really a perverted way to reassert your priority. For example, look at how in the politically correct universe de facto how it works how you are allowed to assert your identity. Did you notice how the zero-level standard is, was, a white Protestant man? There, if you assert your identity, if you say "I want my culture, my rituals," you are worse than Nazi. Then the logic is that—I'm very brutal here but unfortunately I claim it works like this in reality—the further you go, the more they are allowed. If Inuit or Native Americans assert their identity, wonderful that they do they do. Then the more you approach it, the worse it goes. Blacks, it's still okay, suspicion begins. Then with Italians, ah-ah, no? Mexicans is okay, Italians suspicion began, Catholics... eh-eh... but with white... Now this you will say "but this is correct, the people who are closer as in racist way who were more oppressive should..." It is true. But the problem is that this position of the most guilty one, like also reserves to you the universal position. These same white people who are ready to renounce their identity, "yes we are guilty, the worst exploitors, we do not have right to celebrate our identity" and so on, these same white people nonetheless usually act as the one who are to put it bluntly teaching all others how to reassert their identity. You know, there is always again this lie that in renouncing your particularity as a white man you secretly reassert your universality. There is a trick there. So I claim that the best anti-this is the true victory over colonialism when (of course they did it with a little bit of irony) I remember when Margaret Thatcher visited China (I don't know when it happened, when she was or even after, I think it was after her) the Chinese president in a toast celebrated, said "we should be nonetheless in spite of all the horrors be grateful to British colonization of Hong Kong, Shanghai; it did shake us out of our lethargy and so on and so on." Only the one who is already free can do this. The message was "we can say this because you are really no longer our master, we are in now." They no longer need to play this game "oh but" and so on and so on and so on, no? So—okay, but nonetheless. So to go back to my point with Hegel. Yes I was with punishment and so on. This is not the main point of Hegel, that you have the law, the law gets alienated or negated in the crime and then the negation of negation, the punishment, the rule of law is re-established. This dialectic is as it were and if you look at when Hegel speaks about founding of states, great heroes and so on with another much more interesting dialectics, which is the opposite dialectics: that it is not that crime is a sub-species of law part of the same self-mediation dialectic of law in the sense of law-transgression of the law-crime-re-establishment. No, it is that law itself is a moment of crime, in the sense of law is universalized crime. Law is the crime—with Hegel, for example, he is very open here when he speaks (it can be quite brutal there) about great heroes, founders of state. He said these are criminals who impose their crime as universal. And at that point, so that it is rather law, the rule of law, which is a sub-species of crime, as it were. And again, that's the you can study it in detail about how Hegel is very clear that every power at the origin (you know as Benjamin would have put it and all that stuff, not divine but but but mythic violence and so on) this idea of violent origins of the law and so on and so on. In other words, it's it's—okay maybe this is enough for today. I would prefer to go into this stuff more in detail tomorrow. We already did all that retroactivity stuff. Let's go a little bit on as far as we can and then tomorrow we conclude Hegel if it's okay with you and then the last day we can maybe do some general stuff which is still connected with Hegel: ethics of psychoanalysis and so on, all that stuff. Okay, one way to make clear what I was aiming at in this reading of Hegel would have been the distinction between potentiality and virtuality. You know that pupil—okay he refers to Badiou—the half father of this speculative term, speculative realism, Quentin Meillassoux. Maybe you know his book, it's an excellent book of ontology, *After Finitude*. It's one deep attack against this Kantian transcendental horizon, finitude thinking. Okay, but let's not go into this. What interests me is the way this guy Meillassoux proposes a distinction between potentiality and virtuality. His idea is that potentiality is a and along the same lines he distinguishes between chance and contingency. Potentiality is something possible that can happen but it is as such already inscribed as a possibility within the frame of what is possible at a certain level. For example if you throw a dice, how do you call it, no, with six numbers? You have one-six that it will be I don't know which number, one to six or whatever, no? So of course you can say that if you analyze it in detail it's not it's not a chance, but let us say at least it appears so. So you throw it, one of the numbers will appear. It's a chance and it's a potentiality. But possibilities are realized which pre-exist. For him virtuality is when something emerges as it were *ex nihilo* from nothing, in the sense that it's genuinely new. It's literally a product of time, you cannot reduce it to its causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it in very nice term, that it's the actualization: something happening which creates its own possibility. You cannot isolate it in advance as possible. And then, of course I love this, in so far as we do as we usually do, in so far as we understand God as this eternal atemporal set network of all possible worlds—God knew everything in advance—for him, I love this, "miracle is the ultimate proof of materialism." Because miracle means precisely that something happened which was not yet included into this matrix of all this eternal matrix of all possibilities by God. Okay, what all I wanted to tell you is that then the great problem here, and here I disagree with Meillassoux... Incidentally his reasoning is much more complex here. Because—sorry, Meillassoux... [Writing on board] no it's one s I think, M-E-I-L-L-A-S-S-O-U-X, yes. Although it's difficult to pronounce in English. In contrast to many French people, his English is very good. Like he is anti-Badiou at this level. Although again a friendly step I cannot resist it, I think Badiou is acting there a little bit. You know it what sense? Did you notice how selective his French or English pronunciation is? Like in grammar with verbs and so on he goes into English. But with fundamental terms he prefers the "what about the possibilité of..." You notice this how as if he wants to... he wants to speak there to it... Okay but that's another point. No, what I want to say is that okay I have other problems with him, but he is an incredible speculative talent. His idea is the one of course radical contingency. The contingency of laws of nature, not only in the sense of that the laws are contingent in the sense of there is no reason why we, for example, we know this Newton's law of whatever acceleration, but why is it like this? Why not two times faster or whatever? I mean, there is no reason for the law itself. In this sense Meillassoux is right to say that every that modern science is irrational in this sense. And in this sense, these are very interesting debates. You know when the Pope, this Benedict, when he had that unfortunate debate with with Muslims and he attacked modern science as irrational? I mean, okay he attacked the Muslims claiming that Islamic religion by allowing for a totally irrational God beyond who can give you totally crazy orders—kill whatever—it's too dangerous. He claimed that the Christian emphasis on logos as reason, the idea being that nonetheless you can count on God that how should I put it that God with all his crazy orders will retain a certain decency, how should I put it, no? That that it's it's much more rational and so on. I'm I'm here totally opposed to what he says. He didn't do his own homework, as it were. Because it's crucial to see how for when he explains what he means with irrationality, Benedict the Pope quotes refers for example to Darwinism as irrational. Why? Because it's purely contingent, no progress development, and people like Dennett, Dawkins and so on good here they are right. I mean Darwinism is very radical still today because true Darwinism is not what we think, a kind of a you know progressive evolutionary adaptation. It's just total contingency. It's the lesson is not the strong the stronger the most better adapted one wins, the lesson is that the process is totally contingent, there is no general adaptation. Like you develop in this way, then circumstances can change, some catastrophe, and another guy who was weaker is stronger and there is no teleology, history could have taken a totally different turn and so on and so on. So this is for him irrational. In this sense, again I repeat it, irrationality only in the sense in which irrationality rather in the sense of radical contingency. That's the point of Meillassoux. And then he wonderfully solves here all the problems in a very Hegelian way I claim, all the problems of how can we know things in themselves. He also gives a very problematic but very intelligent Cantorian, referring to Cantorian notion of infinity, answer to the big reproach that you can address him. The reproach is the following one: If everything is radically contingent—not only in the sense that we cannot ground the laws of nature, that laws are just what they are contingent—then Meillassoux goes even further. He says we have no guarantee Hume was right that laws themselves will not be suspended and things will start to behave in a different way, following different laws. So laws are also contingent in this way. But now the reproach, obvious reproach to Meillassoux is the problem of probability. If the universe is totally contingent, no no deeper natural necessity, it can go this or that way, why nonetheless do we observe such a strong uniformity? Why? Why does a stone always fall, atoms, electrons always? Why nonetheless such an uniformity? It's to give an example that he himself gives: isn't this the same thing as if we would we were to claim that when you throw a dice it's contingent, but then almost always the same number would have popped up, no? Wouldn't this make you suspicious? Is it really contingent? Isn't the dice somehow malformed or whatever? Can it really be contingent if always the same number pops out? He he makes here a line of reasoning which is intelligent but I don't think it works. His idea is the following one: that this probabilistic argument against contingency—again if something is relatively uniform it's very improbable that it's fully contingent. Again if you throw the dice, if it's always the same number it's probably isn't almost isn't contingent. He claims that this works only if you move in a pre-Cantorian universe. That is to say, if you are dealing with a finite set, not even infinity, of possibilities. Only within this it's meaningful to talk about probability. If you have if you can define the whole field and say like in this as in this case, the probability for number six to pop up is I don't know one-sixth of a percent, what is this, around and something, yes. Then for him it's crucial that you have to totalize. You must have the ability, the capacity, the possibility to totalize, to see all the possibilities, to define the probability and then based on this you can say contingent—you can say that uniformity is improbable so it's not contingency. But he claims if we accept reality, that reality is structured as a as an in the Cantorian way where as you know Cantor claims you can always build infinities from infinities themselves, higher level infinities and so on, in other words infinities are non-all (*pas-tout*). You never can have an infinity as a concept enveloping, unifying all other infinities. In other words, there is no God as infinite one, which incidentally explains wonderfully even Cantor's personal traumas. You probably know the story that he was deeply Catholic and he was terribly tortured because he suspected that he is doing something horrible with his discovery of this okay Cantorian infinities, no. That and he was right: he was ruining this link of infinite one all-encompassing by by introducing non-all a multiplicity within the very field of infinity. Again you have this infinity, that infinity, they can be related to each other but you cannot formulate one supra-infinity. So again Meillassoux's point: because you have this multiple infinities, you cannot even formulate the possibility. You cannot say this natural you cannot form even as an abstract concept a totality of all possibilities with regard to which you could then say this is very improbable. And his idea is that because that this makes the probabilistic argument improbable, sorry invalid, which is why we shouldn't be surprised if nature behaves in the same way. We should be surprised only if we do it. I think the argument doesn't work, frankly. I don't think that to claim that something is improbable you don't you don't have to know the entire field of possibilities. You know what I mean? Like... sorry yes? [Interjection from audience: "But perhaps this is the interjection of the subjective element? Because it is what exists, which is the infinite of infinity, and then it is the count of this, which is a human operation. Which for us it is difficult to consider infinity in every situation, so we like was said yesterday as Plato, there exists multiple but in the end our eyes is one. And on this we based the study of probabilities. It is our finite study of probabilities."] It's a wonderful argument. The problem is that if I remember it correctly (and maybe you know better than me) isn't it that the way I remember it that Meillassoux confronts this problem but his point is—and I as a Hegelian agree with him here—his point is that how should I put it, ultimately he rejects this gap between epistemology and ontology. For him you cannot play to the end this game of claiming that things only because the standard Humean or natural scientist answer would have been of course things are contingent, but they appear to us contingent not fully grounded because of the limitation of our cognitive abilities, no? Like we don't know why so it appears to us even but if we were to have a complete knowledge of reality there would have been no contingency and so on and so on. So so for him the key point, his ontological hypothesis is that contingency and so on all that is not only subjective, it's also objective. It's in the thing itself. And I think this is a deeply Hegelian move, where you establish... that's the big trick, that's the ultimate (as I tried to improvise yesterday) the trump card that Hegel is playing again and again. That what you should... that's the whole point of Hegel's teaching of contradictions and so on. Let me give you a simple example again, and this will also give us a first introduction into what Hegel means with this mysterious notion which appears so mystical, self-movement, self-deployment of a notion. Let's say you have a certain phenomenon. You analyze something: a society, let us say. Let's say you approach it gradually. You follow a certain path of knowledge, you reach a dead end, you follow a different path, you read you reach a dead end. So the naive realist view would have been there is out there reality—you know this asymptotic view—we can just infinitely approach it. There is out there reality we will never know it fully, so all this movement of first you try the hypothesis—I don't know if we deal with society as the example I was giving you yesterday—first we try the hypothesis of, I don't know, social reality is built of the interaction of individuals. Okay, we stuck to a limit, then we go to what if society is an objective almost natural mechanism? What if our free interaction is only our subjective illusion? You do this, it doesn't work, you try another. So the idea then is that's all we can do. We cannot ever reach the object itself, we can only approach it in this way, in that way, but the concrete object with all the infinite wealth of determinations escapes us. The Hegelian solution would have been to accept this mutually exclusive different versions the way, for example, we moved from psychological dimension: we try to reconstruct society (you know these imaginary zero-level scenarios: a couple of primitive people met, they started to interact then through some phenomenological genesis out of the interaction you construct a minimum of reification through repetition habits). When this doesn't go, you start you make a shift to a more objectivist like Durkheim: some kind of social objectivity and so on. Again in the standard view these movements are just the movements of your cognition. But what if you say that what appeared to you as your cognition is a movement in the thing itself? What do I mean by this? Let me maybe give you another example, this is a pure Marxist example but it's Marx at his best. You know how Marx speaks about abstract labor, abstract work. He says concrete labor it's concrete work always on a determinate object, abstract labor is just pure abstract spending energy and so on and so on. Now you will say this is purely our cognitive approach. We only have in reality real concrete people and we abstract, abstraction is all only in our mind. An abstraction is just an abstract part of the full reality (you know this idea: objects in themselves are full, this basic nominalist idea; we abstract a feature: apple is many things, but the power of our reason is to abstract being green, being soft, being whatever you want). But Marx will say: let's take let's take let's take, for example, a bourgeois society. When you go on the market you there
this want to say: "if we can no longer be white man's burden in the sense of we take care for and are good colonials that at least we want to be the ultimate bad guys, like whatever happens we are responsible for." But I claim that often how should I put it there is a hidden arrogance in this. You know who wrote one—okay so that I don't get lost in it again—read the one whom I really appreciate, and he is not a soft liberal if there was a hard-liner it's him, Frantz Fanon. Read the last pages of his *Black Skin, White Masks* where he says—it's a wonderful I claim manifesto *avant la lettre* against political correctness, where he open where he says "I find no satisfaction in eternally putting the blame on the white man and so on and so on." He sees the utter falsity of this eternal victimization, "are you aware you are guilty for slavery five..." and he even in advance attacks that Black Athena stuff where he said "I know it would be wonderful to discover that there was somewhere in Egypt let us say years before Christ a philosopher who was in constant dialogue with Plato and to prove that Plato stole ideas for him." But he says brutally "it matters nothing for liberation politically today and so on and so on and so on." So again, I fully subscribe to Fanon, you know where Fanon is much more problematic for some people: all he said about liberating force of violence and so on and so on. I'm not a soft guy here. All I'm saying is beware of this how should I call it—beware of this—you know there is a way to humiliate yourself which is really a perverted way to reassert your priority. For example, look at how in the politically correct universe de facto how it works how you are allowed to assert your identity. Did you notice how the zero-level standard is, was, a white Protestant man? There, if you assert your identity, if you say "I want my culture, my rituals," you are worse than Nazi. Then the logic is that—I'm very brutal here but unfortunately I claim it works like this in reality—the further you go, the more they are allowed. If Inuit or Native Americans assert their identity, wonderful that they do they do. Then the more you approach it, the worse it goes. Blacks, it's still okay, suspicion begins. Then with Italians, ah-ah, no? Mexicans is okay, Italians suspicion began, Catholics... eh-eh... but with white... Now this you will say "but this is correct, the people who are closer as in racist way who were more oppressive should..." It is true. But the problem is that this position of the most guilty one, like also reserves to you the universal position. These same white people who are ready to renounce their identity, "yes we are guilty, the worst exploitors, we do not have right to celebrate our identity" and so on, these same white people nonetheless usually act as the one who are to put it bluntly teaching all others how to reassert their identity. You know, there is always again this lie that in renouncing your particularity as a white man you secretly reassert your universality. There is a trick there. So I claim that the best anti-this is the true victory over colonialism when (of course they did it with a little bit of irony) I remember when Margaret Thatcher visited China (I don't know when it happened, when she was or even after, I think it was after her) the Chinese president in a toast celebrated, said "we should be nonetheless in spite of all the horrors be grateful to British colonization of Hong Kong, Shanghai; it did shake us out of our lethargy and so on and so on." Only the one who is already free can do this. The message was "we can say this because you are really no longer our master, we are in now." They no longer need to play this game "oh but" and so on and so on and so on, no? So—okay, but nonetheless. So to go back to my point with Hegel. Yes I was with punishment and so on. This is not the main point of Hegel, that you have the law, the law gets alienated or negated in the crime and then the negation of negation, the punishment, the rule of law is re-established. This dialectic is as it were and if you look at when Hegel speaks about founding of states, great heroes and so on with another much more interesting dialectics, which is the opposite dialectics: that it is not that crime is a sub-species of law part of the same self-mediation dialectic of law in the sense of law-transgression of the law-crime-re-establishment. No, it is that law itself is a moment of crime, in the sense of law is universalized crime. Law is the crime—with Hegel, for example, he is very open here when he speaks (it can be quite brutal there) about great heroes, founders of state. He said these are criminals who impose their crime as universal. And at that point, so that it is rather law, the rule of law, which is a sub-species of crime, as it were. And again, that's the you can study it in detail about how Hegel is very clear that every power at the origin (you know as Benjamin would have put it and all that stuff, not divine but but but mythic violence and so on) this idea of violent origins of the law and so on and so on. In other words, it's it's—okay maybe this is enough for today. I would prefer to go into this stuff more in detail tomorrow. We already did all that retroactivity stuff. Let's go a little bit on as far as we can and then tomorrow we conclude Hegel if it's okay with you and then the last day we can maybe do some general stuff which is still connected with Hegel: ethics of psychoanalysis and so on, all that stuff. Okay, one way to make clear what I was aiming at in this reading of Hegel would have been the distinction between potentiality and virtuality. You know that pupil—okay he refers to Badiou—the half father of this speculative term, speculative realism, Quentin Meillassoux. Maybe you know his book, it's an excellent book of ontology, *After Finitude*. It's one deep attack against this Kantian transcendental horizon, finitude thinking. Okay, but let's not go into this. What interests me is the way this guy Meillassoux proposes a distinction between potentiality and virtuality. His idea is that potentiality is a and along the same lines he distinguishes between chance and contingency. Potentiality is something possible that can happen but it is as such already inscribed as a possibility within the frame of what is possible at a certain level. For example if you throw a dice, how do you call it, no, with six numbers? You have one-six that it will be I don't know which number, one to six or whatever, no? So of course you can say that if you analyze it in detail it's not it's not a chance, but let us say at least it appears so. So you throw it, one of the numbers will appear. It's a chance and it's a potentiality. But possibilities are realized which pre-exist. For him virtuality is when something emerges as it were *ex nihilo* from nothing, in the sense that it's genuinely new. It's literally a product of time, you cannot reduce it to its causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it in very nice term, that it's the actualization: something happening which creates its own possibility. You cannot isolate it in advance as possible. And then, of course I love this, in so far as we do as we usually do, in so far as we understand God as this eternal atemporal set network of all possible worlds—God knew everything in advance—for him, I love this, "miracle is the ultimate proof of materialism." Because miracle means precisely that something happened which was not yet included into this matrix of all this eternal matrix of all possibilities by God. Okay, what all I wanted to tell you is that then the great problem here, and here I disagree with Meillassoux... Incidentally his reasoning is much more complex here. Because—sorry, Meillassoux... [Writing on board] no it's one s I think, M-E-I-L-L-A-S-S-O-U-X, yes. Although it's difficult to pronounce in English. In contrast to many French people, his English is very good. Like he is anti-Badiou at this level. Although again a friendly step I cannot resist it, I think Badiou is acting there a little bit. You know it what sense? Did you notice how selective his French or English pronunciation is? Like in grammar with verbs and so on he goes into English. But with fundamental terms he prefers the "what about the possibilité of..." You notice this how as if he wants to... he wants to speak there to it... Okay but that's another point. No, what I want to say is that okay I have other problems with him, but he is an incredible speculative talent. His idea is the one of course radical contingency. The contingency of laws of nature, not only in the sense of that the laws are contingent in the sense of there is no reason why we, for example, we know this Newton's law of whatever acceleration, but why is it like this? Why not two times faster or whatever? I mean, there is no reason for the law itself. In this sense Meillassoux is right to say that every that modern science is irrational in this sense. And in this sense, these are very interesting debates. You know when the Pope, this Benedict, when he had that unfortunate debate with with Muslims and he attacked modern science as irrational? I mean, okay he attacked the Muslims claiming that Islamic religion by allowing for a totally irrational God beyond who can give you totally crazy orders—kill whatever—it's too dangerous. He claimed that the Christian emphasis on logos as reason, the idea being that nonetheless you can count on God that how should I put it that God with all his crazy orders will retain a certain decency, how should I put it, no? That that it's it's much more rational and so on. I'm I'm here totally opposed to what he says. He didn't do his own homework, as it were. Because it's crucial to see how for when he explains what he means with irrationality, Benedict the Pope quotes refers for example to Darwinism as irrational. Why? Because it's purely contingent, no progress development, and people like Dennett, Dawkins and so on good here they are right. I mean Darwinism is very radical still today because true Darwinism is not what we think, a kind of a you know progressive evolutionary adaptation. It's just total contingency. It's the lesson is not the strong the stronger the most better adapted one wins, the lesson is that the process is totally contingent, there is no general adaptation. Like you develop in this way, then circumstances can change, some catastrophe, and another guy who was weaker is stronger and there is no teleology, history could have taken a totally different turn and so on and so on. So this is for him irrational. In this sense, again I repeat it, irrationality only in the sense in which irrationality rather in the sense of radical contingency. That's the point of Meillassoux. And then he wonderfully solves here all the problems in a very Hegelian way I claim, all the problems of how can we know things in themselves. He also gives a very problematic but very intelligent Cantorian, referring to Cantorian notion of infinity, answer to the big reproach that you can address him. The reproach is the following one: If everything is radically contingent—not only in the sense that we cannot ground the laws of nature, that laws are just what they are contingent—then Meillassoux goes even further. He says we have no guarantee Hume was right that laws themselves will not be suspended and things will start to behave in a different way, following different laws. So laws are also contingent in this way. But now the reproach, obvious reproach to Meillassoux is the problem of probability. If the universe is totally contingent, no no deeper natural necessity, it can go this or that way, why nonetheless do we observe such a strong uniformity? Why? Why does a stone always fall, atoms, electrons always? Why nonetheless such an uniformity? It's to give an example that he himself gives: isn't this the same thing as if we would we were to claim that when you throw a dice it's contingent, but then almost always the same number would have popped up, no? Wouldn't this make you suspicious? Is it really contingent? Isn't the dice somehow malformed or whatever? Can it really be contingent if always the same number pops out? He he makes here a line of reasoning which is intelligent but I don't think it works. His idea is the following one: that this probabilistic argument against contingency—again if something is relatively uniform it's very improbable that it's fully contingent. Again if you throw the dice, if it's always the same number it's probably isn't almost isn't contingent. He claims that this works only if you move in a pre-Cantorian universe. That is to say, if you are dealing with a finite set, not even infinity, of possibilities. Only within this it's meaningful to talk about probability. If you have if you can define the whole field and say like in this as in this case, the probability for number six to pop up is I don't know one-sixth of a percent, what is this, around and something, yes. Then for him it's crucial that you have to totalize. You must have the ability, the capacity, the possibility to totalize, to see all the possibilities, to define the probability and then based on this you can say contingent—you can say that uniformity is improbable so it's not contingency. But he claims if we accept reality, that reality is structured as a as an in the Cantorian way where as you know Cantor claims you can always build infinities from infinities themselves, higher level infinities and so on, in other words infinities are non-all (*pas-tout*). You never can have an infinity as a concept enveloping, unifying all other infinities. In other words, there is no God as infinite one, which incidentally explains wonderfully even Cantor's personal traumas. You probably know the story that he was deeply Catholic and he was terribly tortured because he suspected that he is doing something horrible with his discovery of this okay Cantorian infinities, no. That and he was right: he was ruining this link of infinite one all-encompassing by by introducing non-all a multiplicity within the very field of infinity. Again you have this infinity, that infinity, they can be related to each other but you cannot formulate one supra-infinity. So again Meillassoux's point: because you have this multiple infinities, you cannot even formulate the possibility. You cannot say this natural you cannot form even as an abstract concept a totality of all possibilities with regard to which you could then say this is very improbable. And his idea is that because that this makes the probabilistic argument improbable, sorry invalid, which is why we shouldn't be surprised if nature behaves in the same way. We should be surprised only if we do it. I think the argument doesn't work, frankly. I don't think that to claim that something is improbable you don't you don't have to know the entire field of possibilities. You know what I mean? Like... sorry yes? [Interjection from audience: "But perhaps this is the interjection of the subjective element? Because it is what exists, which is the infinite of infinity, and then it is the count of this, which is a human operation. Which for us it is difficult to consider infinity in every situation, so we like was said yesterday as Plato, there exists multiple but in the end our eyes is one. And on this we based the study of probabilities. It is our finite study of probabilities."] It's a wonderful argument. The problem is that if I remember it correctly (and maybe you know better than me) isn't it that the way I remember it that Meillassoux confronts this problem but his point is—and I as a Hegelian agree with him here—his point is that how should I put it, ultimately he rejects this gap between epistemology and ontology. For him you cannot play to the end this game of claiming that things only because the standard Humean or natural scientist answer would have been of course things are contingent, but they appear to us contingent not fully grounded because of the limitation of our cognitive abilities, no? Like we don't know why so it appears to us even but if we were to have a complete knowledge of reality there would have been no contingency and so on and so on. So so for him the key point, his ontological hypothesis is that contingency and so on all that is not only subjective, it's also objective. It's in the thing itself. And I think this is a deeply Hegelian move, where you establish... that's the big trick, that's the ultimate (as I tried to improvise yesterday) the trump card that Hegel is playing again and again. That what you should... that's the whole point of Hegel's teaching of contradictions and so on. Let me give you a simple example again, and this will also give us a first introduction into what Hegel means with this mysterious notion which appears so mystical, self-movement, self-deployment of a notion. Let's say you have a certain phenomenon. You analyze something: a society, let us say. Let's say you approach it gradually. You follow a certain path of knowledge, you reach a dead end, you follow a different path, you read you reach a dead end. So the naive realist view would have been there is out there reality—you know this asymptotic view—we can just infinitely approach it. There is out there reality we will never know it fully, so all this movement of first you try the hypothesis—I don't know if we deal with society as the example I was giving you yesterday—first we try the hypothesis of, I don't know, social reality is built of the interaction of individuals. Okay, we stuck to a limit, then we go to what if society is an objective almost natural mechanism? What if our free interaction is only our subjective illusion? You do this, it doesn't work, you try another. So the idea then is that's all we can do. We cannot ever reach the object itself, we can only approach it in this way, in that way, but the concrete object with all the infinite wealth of determinations escapes us. The Hegelian solution would have been to accept this mutually exclusive different versions the way, for example, we moved from psychological dimension: we try to reconstruct society (you know these imaginary zero-level scenarios: a couple of primitive people met, they started to interact then through some phenomenological genesis out of the interaction you construct a minimum of reification through repetition habits). When this doesn't go, you start you make a shift to a more objectivist like Durkheim: some kind of social objectivity and so on. Again in the standard view these movements are just the movements of your cognition. But what if you say that what appeared to you as your cognition is a movement in the thing itself? What do I mean by this? Let me maybe give you another example, this is a pure Marxist example but it's Marx at his best. You know how Marx speaks about abstract labor, abstract work. He says concrete labor it's concrete work always on a determinate object, abstract labor is just pure abstract spending energy and so on and so on. Now you will say this is purely our cognitive approach. We only have in reality real concrete people and we abstract, abstraction is all only in our mind. An abstraction is just an abstract part of the full reality (you know this idea: objects in themselves are full, this basic nominalist idea; we abstract a feature: apple is many things, but the power of our reason is to abstract being green, being soft, being whatever you want). But Marx will say: let's take let's take let's take, for example, a bourgeois society. When you go on the market you there
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act as abstract. The difference between you as a concrete worker, concrete worker, and you as an abstract worker is the reality of the market because when you are paid, you are paid as abstract and so on, your work gets more—so you see the distinction which appeared
act as abstract. The difference between you as a concrete worker, concrete worker, and you as an abstract worker is the reality of the market because when you are paid, you are paid as abstract and so on, your work gets more—so you see the distinction which appeared
Slavoj Žižek
epistemological, purely conceptual, we abstract the notion of state from concrete states. This is inscribed into reality itself as the internal the internal imbalance of any notion of state. Which is why Hegel's conclusion is here a radical one: is that there is a state which fully fits its notion, but it's no longer a state, it's a religious community. Which is why at the end of his history of philosophy of history, or of his philosophy of right, you know what happens: you have a state but then things go back, you have world history and war and then you pass to absolute spirit: art, religion and so on. So this brings us to another wonderful Hegelian paradox, which is that in the dialectic between universal and its examples, exemplifications, Hegel is—if I in a tasteless way, I know I repeated the joke here already two-three times, you know me as a woman who likes examples and so on—Hegel is ultra-woman then here. Because you know what is the basic movement of Hegel? You know the standard Platonic idealist notion is that there is always more in the pure idea than in its examples, exemplifications. You have a pure idea of a table, we can only make tables which approach their idea, that material models as it were exemplifications are just attempts to imitate to come close to the pure idea. For Hegel it's exactly the opposite. And he wonderfully plays on this ambiguity—he knows it's a wrong etymology, but it's a wonderful one—you know the German word for example is *Beispiel*. *Spiel*, *spielen* to play, *bei* what happens hangs along, what comes by, comes on the top of it as it were. For Hegel, example is never just an example, imperfect example; example is the truth of an idea. Example insofar as an example (in the sense of actualization, materialization of a notion) doesn't fit the notion, it always means "all the worse for the notion itself." The failure to exemplify a notion indicate or—so to put it in another way for Hegel: if the state, an empirical state, never reaches up, can realize fully the ideal of the state, this means there is some crack, the failure in the state itself. So this is how, sorry, immediately—this is how, for example, you should read Hegel when especially in *Phenomenology of Spirit* you can see this. How does Hegel undermine a certain position? *Phenomenology* can be read—it's way too simple I know but—as a series of certain (let's call them naively) existential attitudes. For example, you have the attitude of a hedonist: you say "my goal is just to enjoy life." You have the attitude of asceticism, ascetic, where you say "my body is sinful, I must get rid of my body, purify myself blah-blah." How does Hegel undermine each of these positions? Not by criticizing it from outside, not by imposing an external measure by saying "but this is not how it is." Well, fuck it, how do you know how it is? All we have are these different positions. Hegel literally exemplifies each position and tries to show how the very exemplification, when you do what you claim you are doing, you are always doing something more, you undermine the idea. For example, it's extremely simple one, but that's why I'm mentioning it. His to simplify to the utmost, in the chapter of this famous chapter of—how do you call it—*unglückliche*, "Unhappy Consciousness," his critique of asceticism is that the official position as it were of an ascetic is "my body is sinful, I must get rid of my body" and so on and so on. "My body is unimportant, disgusting," so they whip themselves, torture blah-blah. But Hegel's point here is extremely simple: is that but what they are doing is that what they are day and night they are obsessed, they work on their body. So through the very practice of what they are doing, they are undermining the position. You see, it's crucial to notice this. Hegel only proceeds in this way of how shall I call it of immanent self-criticism. He always takes you at your word. "You claim you are doing this. Okay, let's test you. Go to the end, do it." And then his wager is that when you go to the end, doing what you claim you are doing, you you will undermine and a new figure will emerge and so on and so on and so on. [Transcription Ends]
epistemological, purely conceptual, we abstract the notion of state from concrete states. This is inscribed into reality itself as the internal the internal imbalance of any notion of state. Which is why Hegel's conclusion is here a radical one: is that there is a state which fully fits its notion, but it's no longer a state, it's a religious community. Which is why at the end of his history of philosophy of history, or of his philosophy of right, you know what happens: you have a state but then things go back, you have world history and war and then you pass to absolute spirit: art, religion and so on. So this brings us to another wonderful Hegelian paradox, which is that in the dialectic between universal and its examples, exemplifications, Hegel is—if I in a tasteless way, I know I repeated the joke here already two-three times, you know me as a woman who likes examples and so on—Hegel is ultra-woman then here. Because you know what is the basic movement of Hegel? You know the standard Platonic idealist notion is that there is always more in the pure idea than in its examples, exemplifications. You have a pure idea of a table, we can only make tables which approach their idea, that material models as it were exemplifications are just attempts to imitate to come close to the pure idea. For Hegel it's exactly the opposite. And he wonderfully plays on this ambiguity—he knows it's a wrong etymology, but it's a wonderful one—you know the German word for example is *Beispiel*. *Spiel*, *spielen* to play, *bei* what happens hangs along, what comes by, comes on the top of it as it were. For Hegel, example is never just an example, imperfect example; example is the truth of an idea. Example insofar as an example (in the sense of actualization, materialization of a notion) doesn't fit the notion, it always means "all the worse for the notion itself." The failure to exemplify a notion indicate or—so to put it in another way for Hegel: if the state, an empirical state, never reaches up, can realize fully the ideal of the state, this means there is some crack, the failure in the state itself. So this is how, sorry, immediately—this is how, for example, you should read Hegel when especially in *Phenomenology of Spirit* you can see this. How does Hegel undermine a certain position? *Phenomenology* can be read—it's way too simple I know but—as a series of certain (let's call them naively) existential attitudes. For example, you have the attitude of a hedonist: you say "my goal is just to enjoy life." You have the attitude of asceticism, ascetic, where you say "my body is sinful, I must get rid of my body, purify myself blah-blah." How does Hegel undermine each of these positions? Not by criticizing it from outside, not by imposing an external measure by saying "but this is not how it is." Well, fuck it, how do you know how it is? All we have are these different positions. Hegel literally exemplifies each position and tries to show how the very exemplification, when you do what you claim you are doing, you are always doing something more, you undermine the idea. For example, it's extremely simple one, but that's why I'm mentioning it. His to simplify to the utmost, in the chapter of this famous chapter of—how do you call it—*unglückliche*, "Unhappy Consciousness," his critique of asceticism is that the official position as it were of an ascetic is "my body is sinful, I must get rid of my body" and so on and so on. "My body is unimportant, disgusting," so they whip themselves, torture blah-blah. But Hegel's point here is extremely simple: is that but what they are doing is that what they are day and night they are obsessed, they work on their body. So through the very practice of what they are doing, they are undermining the position. You see, it's crucial to notice this. Hegel only proceeds in this way of how shall I call it of immanent self-criticism. He always takes you at your word. "You claim you are doing this. Okay, let's test you. Go to the end, do it." And then his wager is that when you go to the end, doing what you claim you are doing, you you will undermine and a new figure will emerge and so on and so on and so on. [Transcription Ends]