Slavoj Zizek On Jacques Lacan (Full Lecture)
Lecture · Aaron Vo ·
published 2017-01-05 · 4:34:05 · 45,332 words
the date above is when the video was uploaded, no recording date was found
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Žižek argues that Lacan’s reassertion of sexual difference as an ontological feature of incompleteness requires a shift from Kant’s epistemological limitations to Hegel’s ontological antagonism. He illustrates the necessity of fiction in structuring reality using examples from cinema, such as Children of Men and Home Alone, and analyzes Lacan’s formulas of sexuation through Wittgenstein and the card game Yu-Gi-Oh!. The excerpt concludes by examining the Hegelian logic of the exception, using Marx’s Asiatic mode of production and Jesus Christ as absolute examples. Žižek analyzes Lacan’s formulas of sexuation by tracing their roots to Aristotle’s ontology and logic, arguing that Lacan displaces the contradiction from the horizontal to the vertical axis of the logical square. He uses film critiques of Black Swan and The King’s Speech to illustrate the Lacanian tension between symbolic mandate and the 'real' subject, before concluding with a Lubitsch anecdote about 'coffee without cream' to explain the logic of differentiality and the 'non-all'. Žižek argues that sexual difference is not a simple differential opposition (presence/absence of the Phallus) but an asymmetrical structure involving a void or supplement (object a). He uses the example of 'coffee without milk' to illustrate how negation operates, then applies this to Lacan’s logic of 'non-all' and Kant’s infinite judgment. He concludes by interpreting Lacan’s rejection of nominalism through the Lévi-Strauss village example, positing that the 'Real' is the social antagonism or deadlock that structures these symbolic semblances. Žižek argues that Lacan is a realist regarding the universal of global capitalism, rejecting 'alternate modernities' as fascist attempts to bypass antagonism. He analyzes the logic of double negation through jokes and applies it to Lacan's failure with the Borromean knot and sexual non-relationship. Finally, he proposes the Higgs field as a materialist model for the Freudian drive, arguing that 'something costs less than nothing,' thereby inverting the theological question of creation. Žižek argues that the ontological zero-level of reality is not void or nothing, but a 'less than nothing' or 'less than zero' excess, drawing parallels between Democritus/Epicurus, quantum physics (photons), and Lacan's object a. He applies this logic to sexual difference, positing that pure subjectivity is feminine and that the burqa reveals this 'pure subject' rather than mere oppression. He critiques Levinas's ethics of the face, arguing instead for a traumatic, asymmetrical encounter with the Other, and concludes by interpreting Lacan's self-correction as a 'suicide of the master' that generates the real. Žižek argues that antagonism and contradiction precede entities, using political left/right asymmetry and the 'coffee without cream' joke to illustrate how lack functions as a positive feature. He critiques Lacan’s concept of feminine jouissance as non-existent yet operative, linking this to the 'King’s Speech' problem of the Name-of-the-Father. Finally, he distinguishes between differential symbolic logic and the structural tension of the object and its supplement (objet petit a), using meta-Westerns and Kinder Surprise to explain sexual difference. Žižek analyzes Lacan’s asymmetry of sexual difference, arguing that the feminine position is 'non-all' rather than merely the negation of the masculine, a structure he maps onto the proletariat’s relation to the bourgeoisie. He uses Freud’s dream denial and Kant’s infinite judgment to illustrate how negation opens a third, 'undead' domain beyond binary oppositions. Finally, he defends Lacan’s anti-nominalist stance, arguing that the Real is a universal social antagonism (global capitalism) that structures multiple modernities, rejecting the notion of 'Alternate Modernity' as a fascist fantasy. Žižek argues that social antagonism is real and not merely nominalist, using the logic of double negation and paradoxical jokes to illustrate how contradictions are inscribed in capitalism. He critiques Lacan’s failure to fully articulate the 'non-relationship' and the Borromean knot, proposing instead a materialist reading of the Higgs field where 'something costs less than nothing.' This ontological gap between false and true vacuums is linked to the Freudian drive, Democritus’s atoms, and the idea that 'doing nothing costs energy.' Žižek argues that quantum physics, properly understood, is the most materialist science, requiring the abandonment of a consistent, fully existing reality in favor of an incomplete 'not-all' ontology. He draws parallels between the photon's zero-rest-mass paradox and Lacan's object a, while linking Epicurus's clinamen to a primordial excess. The excerpt concludes with audience interaction, including a Q&A on sexual difference formulas. Žižek argues that sexual difference is asymmetrical, with the feminine position corresponding to pure, non-substantial subjectivity (the Cogito) rather than a surplus jouissance outside the symbolic order. He applies this to the burqa, interpreting it not as oppression but as the terrifying emergence of the 'pure subject' or empty gaze. He critiques Levinas’s ethics of the face, aligning instead with Hegel’s traumatic otherness and Lacan’s view that intersubjectivity is not the horizon. Finally, he addresses the relationship between sex, fantasy, and the Real, arguing that sex cannot sustain itself without phantasmatic support. Žižek analyzes Lacan’s concept of the Name-of-the-Father and the logic of differentiality through the example of 'coffee without cream/milk,' arguing that the object's lack (object a) is constitutive rather than merely differential. He extends this to sexual difference, positing that the feminine position is 'non-all' and opens a third domain (the 'un-man'), contrasting this with the masculine differential logic. The excerpt concludes with a reading of Lacan’s rejection of nominalism in favor of dialectical materialism, linking the proper name to the Real. Žižek argues that Lacan is a realist, not a nominalist, by using Lévi-Strauss’s village drawing example to show that the 'Real' is the social antagonism (the deadlock) that structures semblances, rather than the physical reality itself. He critiques the concept of 'Alternate Modernity' as a fascist fantasy of capitalism without its inherent antagonisms, and analyzes Lacan’s failure to resolve the 'Borromean knot' and the 'non-relationship' of sexual difference. Finally, he proposes using the Higgs field as a materialist metaphor for the ontological structure of difference, aligning with Alain Badiou’s staging of philosophy. Žižek argues that quantum physics, specifically the Higgs field and photon properties, provides a materialist ontology where 'something is cheaper than nothing,' undermining the concept of a primordial void. He uses this to reinterpret Freudian drive, Lacan's object a, and Democritus/Epicurus, concluding that existence is 'less than zero.' He then applies this asymmetrical logic to sexual difference, arguing that pure subjectivity is feminine and that the burqa reveals the 'pure subject' rather than mere concealment. Žižek critiques Levinas’s ethics of the face, arguing instead for the psychoanalytic primacy of asymmetry and the 'object' over intersubjectivity, while defending a Hegelian reading of the master-slave struggle as traumatic otherness. He addresses audience questions on Lacan’s 'suicide of the master,' the circular causality of modernity and semblants, and the nature of sexuality, arguing that sex cannot sustain itself and requires phantasmatic support. Finally, he discusses the non-existence of feminine jouissance, critiques feminist-Lacanian fantasies of surplus enjoyment, and defines communism not as a social relationship but as the ontological deadlock that structures all semblances.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 85
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The modern scientific view that strips reality of sexual difference, reducing it to an ontic feature, which Lacan seeks to counter by reasserting its ontological status.
Lacan’s claim that sexual difference is not biological but a formal structure structuring the symbolic universe, implying an ontology of incompleteness.
as “ontology of incompleteness”
The ontological implication of Lacan’s sexual difference: reality itself is structured by a deadlock or failure, rather than being a complete totality.
The feminine side of sexuation, defined by the lack of an exception, resulting in a set that is non-totalized.
as “the non-all (pas-tout)”
Lacan’s concept of feminine sexuation, interpreted by Žižek via Le Gaufey as not being a complementary cosmic duality but a specific logical structure.
as “virtual fiction”
A supplement required to make our experience of reality consistent; reality cannot be grasped without fictions, as removing fiction loses reality itself.
as “exception to every universality”
The first step in Lacan’s logic: every universality contains a particular element that formally belongs but sticks out, not fitting the frame.
as “Hegelian materialism”
The idea that Hegel is a materialist in a radical sense because he focuses on how the example exceeds the idea, rather than measuring the example against an ideal standard.
Hegel’s concept (e.g., Jesus Christ) where an exception to exceptions gives body to universality itself, standing for the whole.
as “part of no-part”
Rancière’s/Badiou’s concept of those without a proper place in the social body who stand for its universality.
Aristotle’s ontological components; Žižek highlights the inconsistency in whether form or matter individualizes entities.
The Lacanian concept where the subject realizes they are the 'same shit' but treated differently due to a change in symbolic position (e.g., Martin Eden's success).
Lacan’s reading of 'Some X are Y' as implying 'Not all X are Y', contradicting universality rather than merely implying it.
The matrix of four propositions (universal affirmative, universal negative, particular affirmative, particular negative) which Lacan restructures.
Lacan’s point that we can have the symbolic function of the father (a universal title) even though nobody can actually be a father (it does not exist).
as “Name-of-the-Father (as function)”
A universal symbolic function that does not exist in reality; one can never fully be a father, only assume the empty sector of the function.
as “coffee without cream”
A dialectical joke illustrating how lack functions as a positive feature; the 'empty place' of a supplement is already there.
as “logic of differentiality”
The principle where the lack itself (the empty glass, the non-being) functions as a positive, registered feature of the system.
Westerns from the late 40s that supplemented the genre with another (musical, noir) to fill in the non-satisfactory part, leading to 'pure' Westerns like Shane where the meta-Western is the Western itself.
The structural tension between an object and its void/supplement, which is not purely differential but involves the object small a.
as “one is never one”
The speculative formulation that 'one is always one and X, more than one but less than two,' referring to the structure of the object and its supplement.
The idea that 'one' is never purely one, but always 'one and X' (more than one but less than two), referring to the object a as the excess.
Žižek’s term for the void or lack that remains when the feminine is negated, which is not simply 'man' but a subject-related nothingness.
Freud’s concept of 'negation' or denial; Žižek analyzes it as operating on two levels: denying the content while asserting the existence of the repressed object.
Kant’s distinction where a negative judgment negates a predicate (I am not dead), while an infinite judgment asserts a non-predicate (I am undead), opening a third field.
Žižek’s term for the space beyond binary sexual difference, where woman is 'un-man' or 'non-man', opening a third domain of the living dead.
as “un-bourgeoisie”
The proletariat defined as 'un-bourgeoisie', existing outside the bourgeois logic but defined by its relation to it.
Alain Badiou’s term for his writings on art, which Žižek interprets using Kant’s 'infinite judgment' as a third domain in between.
The idea that a name is not just a label for properties but a tautological name for the unnamable core or void of the subject.
as “nominalism”
The philosophical view that universals are names; Lacan rejects this, arguing the name attaches to the Real, not just a label on properties.
The philosophical framework Lacan aligns with, which requires the name to have a material effect on the Real, opposing nominalist idealism.
The gap or hole in the symbolic order (semblant) that designates the Real; the Real is what opens up a hole in the articulated semblant.
Lacan’s concept of the symbolic order or signifier, which Lacan argues is the only way to access the Real.
Lacan’s concept that the Real is not the empirical reality but the hole or antagonism within the symbolic order (semblant).
The Real is not physical reality but the social deadlock or antagonism that forces subjects to create conflicting 'semblances' or interpretations of the world.
The social antagonism or deadlock (e.g., class struggle) that serves as the Real, which is not simply the physical reality but the cause of the falsified symbolic representations.
Žižek’s critique of the idea that there are multiple, distinct modernities, arguing instead for a single universal modernity defined by global capitalism.
The claim that the Real (antagonism/capitalism) is not a particular among others but the universal framework defining all modernities.
as “class struggle (as three)”
Žižek's reinterpretation: class struggle means classes are never two; 'two is always three,' implying a third term or excess in the struggle.
The debate over whether only particulars exist (nominalism) or if a universal structure (like the antagonism of capitalism) exists independently of its particular manifestations.
as “contradiction is between particular and its universality”
A Hegelian formulation where the conflict is not between particulars within a space, but between a particular and the universal it fails to embody.
as “corporate-fascist capitalism”
A specific historical formation that attempts to control the contradiction/antagonism inscribed into the very notion of capitalism itself.
A balanced, harmonious view of sexual difference that Žižek rejects in favor of radical antagonism and the 'non-relationship'.
An object which positively embodies the absence of relationship; the move from 'there is no relationship' to 'there is a non-relationship' (the non-predicate).
as “there is no sexual relationship”
Lacan's formula indicating the absence of a harmonious complementarity between sexes, which Žižek argues Lacan failed to fully conceptualize.
as “Borromean knot”
Lacan's late metaphor of three interlinked rings (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) where cutting one releases the others, which Lacan ultimately declared inadequate.
The idea that sexual difference (or class struggle) is never a binary relation between two, but involves a third term (the object cause of desire) that disrupts the binary.
The phenomenological horror of the burqa is not that it covers, but that it reveals the 'pure subject' (empty gaze) by removing all social masks, confronting the viewer with the 'not-all' of the feminine.
A physical field whose activation breaks symmetry; Žižek uses it as a materialist metaphor for the Freudian drive and the emergence of difference from the void.
The hypothetical Higgs particle, identified by Žižek as the particle equivalent of object a, which breaks the symmetry of the vacuum.
as “object small a”
The object that fills the lack in the symbolic order, making the differential game possible; here illustrated by the 'supplement' in coffee or the plastic toy in Kinder Surprise.
The state where the Higgs field is switched off (pure symmetry/vacuum); it is 'false' because it requires energy to sustain this zero state.
Used to mean 'it moves nevertheless'; something can be proven non-existent but still operate effectively.
as “Freudian drive”
Defined here by the minimal ontological gap where movement/circulation is cheaper than the zero state of pure void.
The libidinal formulation that the drive operates in the gap where existence is energetically 'cheaper' than the peace of non-existence (Nirvana).
The inverted philosophical question suggesting that 'nothing' is the difficult, costly state to achieve, while 'something' is the default, lower-energy reality.
The ontological status of the zero-level of reality; not void, but a primordial excess or 'less than zero' from which things emerge, preceding the distinction between something and nothing.
as “Democritus's atoms (den)”
Democritus's term for atoms, derived from 'med-en' (nothing/not), meaning 'less than zero' or 'one' in a paradoxical sense, prior to Aristotle's ontologization.
The insight from the Karate Kid movie and physics: maintaining a state of 'stillness' or 'nothing' requires active effort/energy; it is not a passive zero state.
as “quantum physics is maybe the most materialist science there was”
Žižek's claim that quantum mechanics, by destroying the notion of a consistent, observer-independent reality, is inherently materialist, contrary to idealist interpretations.
as “reality must be rendered not-all”
An ontological claim derived from quantum physics/Higgs field: reality is incomplete, lacking a consistent, fully existing substrate, and is defined by its gaps and exceptions.
The parallel between Lacan's object a and the photon: both have zero mass/rest when not moving and exist only as their own excess or movement, having no 'zero level' of being.
Lacan’s logical structures defining the masculine side (universal function with an exception) and the feminine side (non-all, no exception).
Epicurus's concept of the atomic swerve/deviation; Žižek argues this deviation is not a distortion of a straight line but is primordial and original, constituting the excess of things over themselves.
The ontological status of entities (like photons or atoms via clinamen) as defined by their deviation/excess rather than their core substance.
Lacan’s formulation that the feminine position is not defined by its difference to the masculine (differential), but by a 'non-all' quantification where negating woman does not yield man.
as “sexual difference is the name of a deadlock”
The concept that sexual difference is not a difference between two given positions, but a deadlock, with the two positions being attempts to deal with it.
The conclusion that existence is 'less than nothing' (less than zero), contradicting Beckett's 'nothing is more real than nothing,' establishing that the gap/movement is ontologically primary.
as “Cogito is feminine”
The Cartesian subject is a purely non-substantial point of excess/madness; this pure subjectivity is feminine, whereas the male position is always already substantialized.
The claim that the Cogito (pure thinking/subjectivity) is feminine because it is a non-substantial point of excess, whereas the male position is always already 'substantialized' or masked.
Reinterpreted from Freud not as a negative, but as a correct insight: all features are secondary masks, meaning women are closer to being 'pure subjects' than men who believe they are substantial.
The psychoanalytic lesson that the encounter with the Other (burqa) is not about ethical respect for the face, but about confronting the 'pure subject' or the void behind the mask.
Žižek’s characterization of Judaism as inherently communist, prioritizing the collective law over individual ethical recognition.
as “face is originally primordial lying”
A psychoanalytic counter to Levinas: the face is not an authentic ethical call but a mask/illusion; true encounter is asymmetrical and involves the object, not face-to-face intersubjectivity.
as “one plus more than one, less than zero”
The structure of the psychoanalytic subject: not a symmetric 'two', but one subject plus the object a (excess), which is ontologically 'less than zero'.
as “ontological paradox of another absolute”
Hegel’s master-slave dialectic reveals that the Other encountered is not someone we recognize as equal, but a monstrous, traumatic otherness, an absolute subjectivity incompatible with our own.
A reading of Lacan's admission of error not as a mistake, but as a strategic self-elimination (like Zarathustra or Gaddafi) that allows the master to become 'unalive' and thus eternal/unable to be fired.
as “contradiction comes first”
Entities do not pre-exist their conflicts; antagonism is ontologically prior, and entities are secondary effects that obfuscate this contradiction.
Contradiction is prior to entities; entities merely obfuscate contradiction. Modernities (Al-Qaeda, fascism, etc.) are reactions to a primordial trauma of antagonism.
Sexuality is inherently insufficient and must 'spill over' into other spheres (fantasy, symbolism) to be sustained.
as “phantasmatic scene”
The necessary imaginary/support structure that allows sex to function, without which sexual act collapses into absurdity.
The only jouissance that exists in the symbolic order, to which feminine jouissance is related as a non-existent supplement.
as “feminine jouissance doesn't exist”
Lacan’s claim that there is no 'other' jouissance beyond the phallic, though it functions as an operative fantasy.
Badiou’s concept that there is no sexual relationship; similarly, Žižek applies this to politics, where the 'non-relationship' (antagonism) is primary.
Communism is not a positive social form or relationship, but the negative limit/antagonism that all social semblances attempt to resolve.
Stories he reaches for 9
In Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, a waiter offers coffee without milk because they ran out of cream; both result in 'coffee alone' but with different negations.
“Sorry, but we have run out of cream. So can I bring you coffee without milk?”
A Soviet joke where Stalin, asked which deviation is worse (left or right), answers 'They are both worse,' illustrating the concept of 'worse than bad' or having no standard, paralleled with the photon's zero mass.
“Stalin's answer: 'They are both worse,' ... like with no standard, there is nobody who is bad, you begin with worse.”
A rich Rabbi and a rich merchant claim to be 'nothing' before God, but a poor Jew claims the same, prompting the rich men to kick him for daring to be 'nothing' like them.
“But who is he? How does he dare to say that he is nothing?”
Wanting 'coffee without milk' is like wanting 'that chocolate without the stupid plastic thing.' The structure involves a void in the core that must be supplemented by a figure (object small a).
“to say 'I want coffee without milk' is just to say 'I want that chocolate without the stupid plastic thing.'”
The paradox that the 'false vacuum' (pure symmetry/nothing) costs energy to sustain, while the 'true vacuum' (broken symmetry/something) costs zero energy, meaning 'something is cheaper than nothing.'
“Literally, the presupposition of Higgs field is that something costs less than nothing.”
Jack London’s protagonist drowns because he cannot accept 'radical decentrement': he is the same person, but treated differently after success.
“He cannot accept precisely what Lacan would have called a radical decentrement.”
Paraphrasing Sherlock Holmes: 'To the curious thing I noticed between her legs.' 'But there was nothing hanging out between her legs.' 'That was the curious thing.'
“To the curious thing I noticed between her legs. But there was nothing hanging out between her legs. That was the curious thing.”
Žižek maps Alain Badiou’s three truth domains (Science, Politics, Art, Love) onto German Idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) to argue that contemporary philosophy is the culmination of this tradition.
“Kant: science. Fichte is politics. Schelling is art. Hegel... love.”
Two groups in a Native American village draw the same village layout differently (divided vs. centered). The 'Real' is not the physical houses but the social antagonism (class distinction) that causes these conflicting representations.
“The real is that X on account of which each member of the tribe falsified the disposition of villages.”
Works invoked 42
Capital book
Marx’s work, referenced for the three moment stages of the expression of the value-form.
Ninotchka film
Praised for a 'purely dialectical magnificent joke' involving coffee without cream/milk.
Referenced as containing Žižek's earlier reasoning on the burqa and the 'pure subject'.
The Republic book
Plato’s work, which Badiou is retranslating into French with the subtitle 'Republic or about Communism.'
Lacan’s seminar, mentioned in the correction of the previous citation's title.
New Left Review journal
The publication venue for Badiou's text on French philosophy.
The King's Speech film
Described as 'maybe watchable' but interesting for its Lacanian problem of assuming a symbolic mandate.
Black Swan film
Critiqued as a male chauvinist dream and 'violently anti-feminist'; 'all bullshit, all that psychology.'
Children of Men film
A film by Alfonso Cuarón, which Žižek praises for showing reality as a magical fiction, though he critiques the director’s lack of philosophical awareness regarding the ending.
Home Alone film
Used as an example of cinema at its best, where realistic shooting is combined with cartoon logic/fiction.
Foucault’s work, noted for quoting Borges’ list of dogs at the beginning.
Silver Blaze film
Referenced as a source for the 'curious accident of the dog' joke, illustrating differential logic.
Totem and Taboo book
Cited for the 'lesson of the Master' who commits suicide to become unalive and alive forever, paralleling Lacan's 'suicide of the master'.
Discourse on Method book
Defended for the Cogito; Žižek argues the passage to res cogitans is illegitimate and that pure subjectivity is feminine.
Looking Awry book
Mentioned as a work Žižek used in his first book, though he jokes that the audience might be too old to remember it.
Martin Eden book
Recommended by Žižek as 'much better than the usual opinion' and 'absolutely more complex'.
Mentioned in a vulgar joke about sex, referencing the anti-Semitic text.
Theory of Fictions book
Jeremy Bentham’s work, recently reprinted by Verso, arguing that fiction is necessary to grasp reality.
Early Wittgenstein’s work, used as an example of the masculine side of sexuation (universal structure with the exception of the mystical).
High Noon film
Cited by Bazin as a model Western where the meta-Western is Western itself, illustrating the structure of a thing and its supplement.
Pursued film
Cited as an example of a 'meta-Western' (Western supplemented by film noir) that Žižek uses to illustrate the structure of a thing and its supplement.
Cited as an example of a 'meta-Western' (Western supplemented by musical) that Žižek uses to illustrate the structure of a thing and its supplement.
Shane film
Cited by Bazin as a model Western where the meta-Western is Western itself, illustrating the structure of a thing and its supplement.
Lacan’s Seminar D’un Discours qui ne Serait pas du Semblant is cited for Lacan’s anti-nominalist stance.
A classical text by Joan Copjec, read by Žižek as identifying Kant as a precursor to Lacan’s notion of sexual difference.
Lacan's Seminar where he discusses the Name-of-the-Father (Session 17th of January).
Le Pas-Tout de Lacan book
Written by Guy Le Gaufey; praised as a 'very good short book' that correctly interprets Lacan.
Cited by Bruce Fink; Žižek calls it 'shitty' and says it makes him 'almost a Goebbelsian' for wanting to burn it.
Ou Pire (Or Worse) book
Lacan’s Seminar 'Ou Pire' (Or Worse) is quoted to support the argument about the asymmetry of sexual difference and the 'non-all'.
Mentioned as the seminar following Identification.
Anxiety book
Mentioned as the seminar following Transference.
Borromean Knot other
Lacan's late metaphor which Žižek argues is 'inadequate' and 'abuses metaphor' because there is no thing supporting the imaginary, symbolic, and real.
Cogito other
Descartes' concept, reinterpreted by Žižek as 'feminine' (pure non-substantial point of excess) rather than a thinking thing.
Marx's doctoral thesis, cited as focusing on the 'clinamen' (difference/swerve) rather than alienation.
The Fall of Saigon book
Žižek mentions reading a book on this topic which contained the anecdote about the propaganda film.
Badiou’s 'Handbook of Inaesthetics' is cited as an example of the Kantian 'in' (third domain) between terms.
I love Badiou book
A text by Badiou in the New Left Review on contemporary French philosophy, which Žižek loves.
The Karate Kid film
Used as a 'nice cheap Hollywood wisdom' example to illustrate that 'being still is not the same as doing nothing,' paralleling the ontological 'less than nothing'.
Le Point journal
A right-wing journal where Françoise Lévy publishes, used to contextualize the debate on the burqa.
White Fang book
Mentioned as extremely popular in the Soviet Union due to Lenin's reading habits.
Yu-Gi-Oh! other
A card game used as an example of the feminine 'non-all' logic, where each card brings its own rule.
Zarathustra book
Cited for the line 'Leave me, betray me, because maybe always I lie to you,' illustrating the master's strategic self-elimination.
People invoked 70
Described as a 'good cinema director but not such a good thinker'; Žižek claims he was unaware of the ambiguity in Children of Men that Žižek highlights.
André Bazin positive
André Bazin’s analysis of 'Shane' and 'High Noon' as 'meta-Westerns' is used to illustrate the structure of a thing and its supplement.
Barbara Cassin positive
French interpreter who demonstrates how Aristotle uses sexual difference to obfuscate an ontological deadlock.
Epicurus positive
Praised for the concept of 'clinamen' (atomic swerve), which Žižek argues is not a distortion but a primordial excess/ deviation, supplementing Democritus.
Strauss negative
Referenced as being 'wrong' about the deadlock; Žižek argues perceptions create the deadlock, not vice versa.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte positive
Identified by Žižek as corresponding to Badiou's 'Politics' domain.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Cited as a Slovene colleague whose expression 'natural sexuality can be sexualized' helps illustrate the formal status of human sexuality.
Referenced in Allais's satire, where she strips off her skin to reveal she is 'naked' underneath.
A journalist for Le Point who expressed feeling 'threatened' by the burqa, used to illustrate the phenomenological horror of the 'pure subject'.
Mentioned as the reason for Descartes' popularity among women, representing an 'emancipatory potential'.
Claude Lévi-Strauss positive
Žižek praises Lévi-Strauss’s insight that the 'Real' is the social antagonism causing the differing symbolic representations, not the physical reality itself.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Mentioned in the context of reading Jack London; Žižek suggests 'maybe Lenin was right'.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
Critiqued as a 'Christian philosopher who masks himself as a Jew' selling 'Christian moral bullshit'; his ethics of the face is rejected in favor of psychoanalytic asymmetry.
Jacques Lacan positive
His concept of object a is paralleled with the photon; his admission of error is read as 'suicide of the master'; his formulas of sexuation are rectified to show asymmetrical sexual difference.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Cited for the idea that 'The final arrogance' is the idea of 'hypocritical modesty' (respecting others' authenticity while excluding them).
Mentioned as the actor playing the hero Theo in Children of Men.
Louis Althusser negative
Lacan is contrasted with Althusser and Foucault, whom he labels as 'nominalists' for Lacan, arguing that nominalism is incompatible with dialectical materialism.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited for writing 'nice lines' about clinamen being original, supporting Žižek's reading.
Actor in Black Swan; Žižek jokes about him playing the ballet director.
Muammar Gaddafi positive
Used as an example of 'suicide of the master' through the claim 'You cannot fire me because always I was no one.'
Lenin’s widow, whose diary entry supposedly made Jack London popular in the USSR.
Woody Allen positive
Inferred from 'Woody, oh you were there, that’s why all the Jewish jokes were about... I was wondering why they were about... okay, but no, I have, I don’t know if I should start with a question... I have some Woody, oh you were there... I’m joking, but Levinas is, you know, the Christian philosopher who masks himself as a Jew, no? I sincerely think Levinas is so popular because he is selling as Jewish wisdom this Christian moral bullshit... Here and then... I have two, two short points... not even questions, I don’t deserve a question. It’s kind of a question... don’t start. One I think about the, the way of reading of Lacan confessing 'I was wrong.' Yeah. It’s a little bit naive to really read it as 'he was wrong.' Really what he’s doing is to commit suicide of the master. It’s exactly like when Zarathustra said, 'Leave me, betray me, because maybe always I lie to you.' So it’s kind of the lesson of the Master from Totem and Taboo: instead of let the other people to kill him, he commit a suicide and then he become unalive and he become alive forever. I would always say it’s like Gaddafi that said 'You cannot fire me because always I was no one.' Yeah. So this is really his trick. Exactly. Nice. Gaddafi’s like the Jewish Rabbi or what? No, he’s like, you know, Lacan, he’s not like the Jew. And the other one is about the, the origin of modernity that you said that 'Oh, the alternative...' If the modernity, if we spoke that the semblants are the one who create the real, yeah, so we have to say that all this multiplicity is the one who create this modernity that is the global, is the global capitalism. And then it’s created back to all those multiplicity around. It’s not that they are all wrong and there is one true modernity.]
Referenced in the anecdote about the editor who refused to take a holiday.
Not explicitly named, but 'e pur si muove' is attributed to Galileo. The text says 'Lacan makes it absolutely clear... e pur si muove'. I will attribute the quote to Galileo in works if needed, but here it's a concept.
Saul Kripke positive
Žižek cites Kripke’s theory of names against Russell’s descriptive theory, using it to argue that a name aims at the unnamable core.
Jesus Christ positive
Cited by Hegel as an 'absolute example' or 'absolute exception' that gives body to universality.
Galileo Galilei positive
Referenced via the phrase 'e pur si muove' (and yet it moves), used to illustrate that something can be non-existent theoretically but operate practically.
Mentioned as one of several physicists (along with many-worlds and spiritualist interpretations) trying to resolve quantum enigma, which Žižek views as 'semblances' failing to confront Bohr's paradox.
Not explicitly named, but the 'tribe in North America' with the dream theory is likely a reference to Geertz’s work on Balinese culture or similar anthropological examples.
Described as a 'good friend'; sympathizes with his rehabilitation of Plato but notes problems with Plato’s corporate notion of justice.
Jean-Claude Milner negative
Described as 'too weak' in reading Lacan’s formulas as a cosmic duality.
Bertrand Russell negative
Cited as the target of Kripke’s theory of names, which Žižek uses to argue against the idea that a name is just a combination of properties.
Al-Qaeda positive
Cited as an example of a 'semblant' or modernity that creates/reacts to the deadlock of global capitalism.
Fredric Jameson positive
Agrees with Jameson that multiple modernities relate to the same real (global capitalism).
Zoroaster positive
Cited from Nietzsche for the line 'Leave me, betray me, because maybe always I lie to you,' illustrating the master's strategic self-elimination.
Alphonse Allais positive
Cited for his satirical version of Salome's dance, used to explain the burqa's horror as revealing the 'pure subject'.
Samuel Beckett positive
Cited for the laconic idea that 'nothing is more real than nothing', which Žižek contrasts with his own point that 'something more real than nothing' (less than zero) exists.
Bruce Fink negative
Quoted a book ('Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus') that Žižek finds disappointing and 'shitty'.
Stephen King positive
Stephen King’s 'undead' is used as a pop-culture example of Kant’s infinite judgment.
Werner Heisenberg negative
Criticized in the context of quantum physics for reading the uncertainty principle epistemologically (limitation of knowledge) rather than ontologically.
Democritus positive
Rehabilitated for his term 'den' (atom) meaning 'med-en' (nothing/not-being), which Žižek argues is a 'total neologism' and 'less than zero', correcting the Aristotelian ontologization of atoms as small things in void.
Guy Le Gaufey positive
Cited as applying the logic of exception to the psychoanalytic clinic, showing cases are never simple illustrations of general propositions.
Mentioned as quoting Borges’ list of dogs at the beginning of Les Mots et les Choses.
Jack London positive
Author of Martin Eden and White Fang; Žižek recommends rereading Martin Eden.
Sherlock Holmes positive
Sherlock Holmes is used as a source for a joke about differential logic ('the dog did nothing').
Jacques Rancière positive
Cited for conceptualizing 'that part of the social body, the part of no-part,' which stands for universality.
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Director of Ninotchna; Žižek praises the 'purely dialectical magnificent joke' from his film.
Mentioned as a regular publisher in Le Point, linking the journal to Lacanian circles.
Cited as one of the women who found Descartes' philosophy immensely popular and emancipatory.
Star of Ninotchka; mentioned in passing.
Mentioned in the context of 'the guy before' (likely a mis-transcription or reference to a previous speaker/questioner, but 'Mao' is not explicitly named, only 'The guy before' and 'The guy in front' are mentioned. However, 'Gaddafi' is explicitly named. I will stick to Gaddafi.
Diogenes Laërtius negative
Cited alongside Aristotle for 'ontologizing' Democritus.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Identified by Žižek as corresponding to Badiou's 'Art' domain; Žižek notes Schelling consciously posed art as a higher level of knowledge.
Jeremy Bentham positive
Cited for his Theory of Fictions, paradoxically arguing that removing fiction means losing reality itself, a lesson Lacan was aware of.
Joan Copjec positive
Cited for her text The Euthanasia of Reason, which identifies Kant as a precursor to Lacan’s notion of sexual difference.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Mentioned alongside Hegel as knowing that the King must accept the stupidity of his title.
Niels Bohr positive
Described as 'the good guy' in the quantum debate for emphasizing that the impossibility of measuring complementary properties is in the thing itself (ontological).
Mentioned in the context of 'deadlock' and 'semblants' creating modernity.
Not explicitly named, but 'Strauss' likely refers to Leo Strauss or Carl Schmitt in the context of political theology/modernity.
Joseph Stalin negative
Used in a joke to illustrate 'worse than bad'; also dismissed as a 'proto-Stalinist' label for Marx's early work on alienation.
Discussed in contrast to Hegel; for Plato, examples are deficient relative to the idea, whereas for Hegel, the example exceeds the idea.
Mentioned only in the context of Badiou’s rehabilitation of Plato against him.
Karl Marx positive
Cited as the 'true young Marx' who focused on the difference between Democritean and Epicurean atomism (clinamen) rather than alienation, which Žižek dismisses as 'stupid boring proto-Stalinist meditations'.
Jorge Luis Borges positive
Cited for the famous list of categorization of dogs, used to illustrate the concept of the negative container/exception.
René Descartes positive
Defended as philosophically 'for the Cogito'; Žižek argues the Cogito is feminine and that the passage to res cogitans is illegitimate.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the link of femininity and masquerade, which Žižek argues is a 'correct insight' meaning all features are secondary masks, allowing women to be 'pure subjects'.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Defended against 'anarco-recognition Hegelians'; his master-slave dialectic is interpreted as revealing the 'monstrous, traumatic otherness' rather than mutual recognition.
Immanuel Kant positive
Mapped to 'Science' in Badiou's/Žižek's staging of philosophy.
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
Referenced via Zarathustra’s instruction to 'Leave me, betray me,' illustrating the master's strategic self-erasure.
Ludwig Wittgenstein positive
Used as an example of Lacan’s sexuation: early Wittgenstein (Tractatus) represents the masculine universal with an exception (the mystical), while late Wittgenstein represents the feminine non-all (family resemblances).
Transcript 57 turns
Slavoj Žižek
accessible to mathematized science and the subjective universe of meaning which we project onto reality, but underlying this gap is a desexualization of reality. And I think it is against this background that one should measure Lacan’s achievement. He reasserts the ontological status of sexual difference. The problem is how can he, in a way, resexualize the universe without regressing into a pre-scientific mythology? Because for all modern transcendental philosophy, sexual difference is deontologized; it’s reduced to an ontic feature of some entities—human race, some animals, and so on. Of course, if one ontologizes sexual difference, one is immediately accused of anthropomorphism. So again, how does Lacan do it? Okay, the first answer is clear—that’s the first formula, then we will go much deeper—the first, for Lacan, sexual difference is purely formal, in the sense that sexual difference, the way it structures our symbolic universe, for Lacan, the way sexual difference functions in the human universe is not immediately linked to biological functions of sexuality. So that even—I use here the expression of my Slovene colleague Alenka Zupančič—even natural sexuality can be sexualized. There you can see the formal status of properly human sexuality. Like, you can imagine a biological—what do I mean by this gap between formal structure and immediate reality? You can well imagine a couple making love or, to put it more brutally, copulating, but without any excitement, doing it as a pure instrumental activity. Just, it’s literally—I can imagine, maybe it even happened to me, I’m not sure, but—you know, doing love in a totally non-sexual way. On the other hand, I can imagine—we all know this—doing things which have nothing to do with sexuality, I mean in the biological sense, but they can be somehow sexualized. Okay, maybe you heard it, the example I like to use is that of—imagine I meet one of you and imagine a very simple act: I squeeze your hand. We shake hands. That’s normal. But imagine that after the first squeeze, I don’t let your hand go, but I—I still hold it and go on squeezing it rhythmically. Admit it, your first association would be: there is something perverted in it, what does he want, and so on. No, you see the point: a purely nothing directly erotic about it, but this pure act of protraction, repetition, somehow sexualizes it. But this brings us already to the first key point of Lacan: that this ability of sexuality to spill over different spheres is for Lacan not the sign of the strength of sexuality but the sign of its weakness, precisely because it never works, as it were, in its own domain, it has to—it has to expand. So, the first indication should be the following one, I think: for Lacan, to sexualize the universe—insofar as for Lacan sexuality is inherently linked to failure, incompleteness, and so on—to sexualize the universe means that we should opt for a different ontology, an ontology of incompleteness, of a deadlock and so on, which is why I think Joan Copjec was right when, in her classical text *The Euthanasia of Reason*, she read as the first philosopher who came close, without knowing it, to Lacan’s notion of sexual difference, Immanuel Kant with his two sets of antinomies: mathematical antinomies, dynamical antinomies. The idea being there that it’s exactly, in a way, the Lacanian non-all. You know, Lacan’s point is that if you extrapolate concepts we use or we are forced to use—they are our transcendental a priori—to describe reality, we get into a deadlock. This impossibility of getting it all, of to totalize our notion of reality. And I claim that the truly subversive thing that Lacan compels us to do is—sorry if I sound pretentious, I don’t have time to dwell on all this now, but I will try—is that one has to make here a step from Kant to Hegel. Which means Kant remains too epistemological; he still presupposes some objective reality out there, just because of the limitation of our categories, we cannot get at it. Hegel’s step is: what if we transpose this structure of failure, hindrance, you cannot get it, you get involved in antagonism into the thing itself? It’s a little bit like, you know—and I will conclude with, sorry for this megalomania, quantum physics. I was here imprecise till now. You know that there is—I was convinced now reading closer, more closely stuff—there is a gap between Heisenberg and Bohr. Bohr is the good guy, I am more and more convinced. And don’t be afraid, I will not quote you now the eleventh time that boring story about why do you have a horseshoe above your door. No, no. What I want to say is that precisely Heisenberg, in his uncertainty principle, still basically reads this impossibility to get—to get position and velocity, whatever, movement at the same time, two complementary properties—still reads it in an epistemological way. While Bohr emphasizes this in a very refined critique of Heisenberg: that Heisenberg didn’t get the point, that this impossibility is in the thing itself. Okay. First, how does all this appear within psychoanalysis, this incompleteness of society? In a Kantian way, we can say that the incompleteness of ontology, of the structure of reality, means that in order to make our experience of reality consistent, we have to supplement our experience by some kind of a virtual fiction. This, as Lacan was aware, this was already a lesson done by Bentham, whose—again—Theory of Fictions, I think it is even now recently reprinted in the *Radical Classics* or whatever by Verso. Don’t underestimate it. He is precisely not doing what you would have expected a simple British empiricist to do. His point is not that we should aim at getting rid of fictions to see reality in a nominalist way, the way it really is. His point is a nicely paradoxical one: yes, we can distinguish what is fiction and what is reality, but if we take away the fiction, we lose reality itself. It’s impossible to describe, to grasp reality without fictions. I think that this same point was made in a beautiful way by, again, haha, my old guy G.K. Chesterton, where when he says—a wonderful quote—literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. So, what do I mean by this necessity of fictional supplement? Years ago, I remember seeing a caricature in a German weekly publication—I’m not sure, I think it was *Stern*, *Der Stern*, but this was like thirty, forty years ago—it, of course, it mocked the male hypocrisy. It showed five men, each of them asked in a caricature: "What would you like to do during your summer holiday?" And each of them gives an answer, but then in this kind of a cloud, you know, it shows what he really thinks. Each—for example, one says, "I would like finally to have time to read a good philosophical book." The cloud shows a naked woman. The other one said, "I would like to go to a serious music concert." The cloud shows a naked woman, and so on and so on. So it's this tasteless point that, you know, don't bluff, we all want to do just like that. I claim this is strictly wrong. I claim that we all know that we want to do that, but the question is in what precise way do we want to do that? So, much closer to the truth would have been the opposite caricature: you ask five men what would you like to do and probably you will get a sincere answer, "screw many ladies" whatever, but then the cloud should show, you know, one of them wants to seduce a lady while reading a book, the other one while walking on a beach, and so on and so on. No, it's precisely that you cannot do it directly. You need a fiction. You need a fiction to do it. And I think that even when we are in reality, this fiction has somehow to supplement reality. In what way? Here we come to the beauty of things. I'm not claiming that, oh, part of our reality doesn't really exist, it's fictional. I claim almost something of the opposite: that even if all we perceive is reality, part of it—the way we perceive it in our psychic economy—is structured like or functions as a fiction. And I think this is cinema at its best—as I already mentioned once maybe here—this is cinema at its best. Not to reproduce so well a fiction, stage it so well that we mistake fiction for reality, but to show only reality but to make us experience it as a magical fiction. I will give you immediately an example about the film to which, haha, my small moment of glory, you buy the DVD, you will get comments by me—Alfonso Cuarón’s *Children of Men*. But now I’m a bad guy, I always talk bad against the—behind their back on people—so I would say that, first, of course, I’m a Hegelian. This means when I made those comments, I didn’t see the film. No, I don’t need the reality. But more important, when I saw the film, I discovered something which demonstrates that Cuarón is a good cinema director but not such a good thinker. He did something very nice, but I checked it up with him, he wasn’t aware of it. Namely, if you saw the movie—you know, Clive Owen, infertility, blah, blah, blah—at the very end of the film, Clive Owen, the hero, Theo or whatever, and the Black girl, who is the first after I don’t know how many years in the entire humanity of getting pregnant, go out on a small boat to a sea where some kind of—some kind of ship with laboratories in it, called "Tomorrow," where allegedly they will solve the problem of fertility, is awaiting them. And Clive Owen, wounded, dies. And the idea is, nonetheless, she, the Black girl who is pregnant, will get to the ship where they will analyze her, she will save humanity, restore fertility. Now, to me it seemed so obvious that although it is shot like reality, that the proper way to read it—no ship, of course, that this was—this is the dying dream of the hero. No? That the ship is pure appearance. Cuarón wasn’t aware of this ambiguity, but strangely enough, most of my friends were. Almost most of the people that I talked to claimed that they liked precisely this radical ambiguity. Although it’s shot like reality, it functions like a magic *deus ex machina* apparition. Or to give you another example that I already used in my books—I watched them three, four times, they are boring because of my son—those *Home Alone* series. Did you notice something? Like, two-thirds of the film is more or less, not quite, realistic. But then the reason we watch—at least I do—this kind of films is that, you know, for usually it’s the last twenty minutes when the small kid sets the trap and then all horrible things, you know, happen to the two bad guys. Now, that is pure cartoon logic. Physically impossible. Like, you know, the bad guy—his head starts burning. So he runs to the toilet, puts his head into the toilet bowl. But the—the small evil child predicted this, so of course instead of water there is oil, there is gasoline there, so alcohol, so the head explodes like anything but—again, what I like is how it’s still shot realistically. In the sense of supposed to be part of reality, but somehow we know we passed from reality to fiction in a way. This I think again is, for me at least, the cinematic art at its best. And this is again how our reality is structured. So, okay, let’s now go on patiently about how Lacan tries to formalize sexual difference. Of course, we—you probably know the ABC, which is: Lacan proposed the so-called formulas of sexuation, where the masculine side is defined by the universal function and its exception. Like all X, all entities are submitted to a certain function, but then there is one which is, at least one which is the exception—masculine side. The feminine side, you have the paradox of non-all, *le pas-tout*. There is no exception, but for that very reason the set is non-all, non-totalized. To give you a simple philosophical example of this, I think that for Lacan the passage from early to late Wittgenstein would have been a clear example. The early Wittgenstein is masculine, you know, it proposes his *Tractatus*, a certain universal structure with the exception of the mystical and so on and so on. What the late Wittgenstein does is—he no longer talks about this mystical exception. There is no exception, but for this reason you cannot totalize language. Instead of simple universal structure, you get only these partial family resemblances and so on and so on. So again, you get first universality with an exception, then you get this irreducible plurality of language games. There is nothing outside them, but they are not all, you cannot totalize them. It’s a little bit like another reference to my terrifying experiences with children. For five years I’m totally terrorized, I spent hundreds of dollars for—if some of you have also the misfortune of having children or knowing them—do you know what is *Yu-Gi-Oh!*? Those magic cards, blah, blah, no? My son doesn’t have too many of them, just around ten thousand, I would say, no? And but what fascinates me—and I think we adults are already too senile, too stupid even to understand—is that I think they are a nice example of the feminine non-all. Because in contrast to a standard either card game or chess game, where you have certain universal rules and then you have elements and you have to use them obeying those rules, the madness—you really must be a child with your far superior to us memory—is that here each card in a way brings its own rule. You know, it’s—the point is not that you have a card which is simply worth more than another card within a certain set of rules. No, you must look closely at those small letters which say: "If you have this card and if you have an attack card, you see it on the opponent’s side, then you can revive another card and kill all the opponents on condition that the opponent doesn’t have that"—it’s absolute nightmare, I think. But I like this idea. It’s incredibly complex. And I just admire small children. They can—they can remember thousands of cards, literally all these double, triple tricks. Okay, let’s go on. Lacan’s logic of universality and its constitutive exception is not as simple as it may appear. It’s not simply, you know, this old wisdom, haha, an exception to every universality. No, no, it’s not wisdom. Lacan is very precise here. First, it goes still—we will go much more in detail later, no—first at an abstract level. First, I think we have three steps here. First, there is Lacan’s thesis: an exception to every universality. Every universality contains a particular element which, while formally belonging to this universality, sticks out, doesn’t fit its frame. I will not bore you with the examples that I am already bored by them, that I always use, like in Marx, for example, I claim that in the Marxian classification of the modes of production, obviously the—and here I am an honest anti-Eurocentrist—that the so-called Asiatic mode of production is this kind of exception. I mean, if you read Marx closely, you will see what is going on, no? Marx originally did propose just the Eurocentric series, that is to say, primitive, whatever you call them, tribal societies, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and whatever the hell is maybe coming after. Now, then Marx—honestly, he was honest enough to notice that there are some societies, social formations, modes of production which fit neither of this. And I claim a close analysis demonstrates that the so-called Asiatic mode of production is not really a positive—it appears to be a positive concept, but in reality it's just a kind of a negative container. Marx simply threw into that one what didn't fit the others. You know, it's like that joke from Borges quoted at the beginning of Foucault's *Les Mots et les Choses*, where you have that famous list of categorization of dogs, at the end you have all the dogs which doesn't belong to this list or whatever. I mean, of course, it's not as simple as that. But you can see how Marx was struggling and wasn't himself wasn't sure if you can really put Ancient Egypt, Ancient Incas, Ancient China at all, if you can really put them within the same umbrella. So again, we have the exception. Then you have to do the next step. And I hope you will notice if you know Marx here, the parallel between this gradual expansion of the exception and the so-called three moment stages of the expression of the value-form at the beginning of Marx's *Capital*. Then you of course discover that everything is an exception. That every—and this is the basic rule of Hegel. I already made this point, I would like to repeat it, this is what I like about Hegel. You know, here you can see that Hegel was a materialist in a radical sense. For Plato, Platonists—and here I have a problem with my good friend Alain Badiou—I totally sympathize with his rehabilitation of Plato against Aristotle. But I think there are some problems, like, you know, if Plato's state is something, it's a—based on a corporate image of society. The notion of justice that you find there is precisely this corporate notion of justice means each at his or her own place. And I claim that you—there is nonetheless no way to—although Badiou is now, as you probably know, retranslating Plato's *Republic*—it's almost finished incidentally—into French with the subtitle "Republic or about Communism," no? Trying to reread it as a com—it's a wonderful thing what he is doing. He is, for example, replacing when Plato says a sophist is trying to seduce the crowd, Alain put into—translated as a corrupted bourgeois journalist who is publishing an article and so on in the popular press. But I think that here you get a problem. So, for Plato, example is always deficient with regard to an idea, no? Like, examples are imperfect... but for Hegel, there also is always a gap between an idea and the way you try to exemplify it. But for Hegel, it's the opposite that it's true. You exemplify an idea and there is more in the example than in the idea itself. So that the example which is supposed to illustrate an idea effectively always undermines it. And one can even say that this is one of the basic matrices of the Hegelian process. How do things go on in Hegel's dialectic? You have a certain notion, form of life, and Hegel doesn't criticize it so that he measures it by an ideal standard. He just says: let's exemplify it, let's look how it works. And then the example itself gives more. You probably know, again, one of the great moments of Hegelian what Lacan calls *la langue*, reference to wordplay, contingency of language. Hegel does here a consciously wrong etymology. You know that the German term for example is *Beispiel*, something which, as it were, plays itself along. And for Hegel, this is precisely example. Like, I want only this, but that shitty example comes along and ruins it, no? I mean, I get more than I asked for in an example. Okay, so then we have this paradox that every example is an exception. But then we have the third stage, which would have fitted somehow this notion of universal equivalent in Marx, in Hegel: that nonetheless all examples, like exceptions, are not equal. That if all examples are exceptions, there is always an exception to exceptions, which is an example which precisely as a double exception immediately gives body to universality as such. And in this precise sense, Hegel, for example—you should be careful to know these details—he calls Jesus Christ an example of examples or an absolute example. Precisely in this sense that, you know, everything is an example, but then you get an absolute example, an absolute exception, which is precisely the place where, in the guise of its opposite, universality itself comes to exist. Okay, the classical example, again, known to all of you, what Jacques Rancière, even more than Badiou, conceptualizes as "that part of the social body, the part of no-part," which is those who are without proper place within the social body and as such stand for its universality. Okay, but let’s go on. So, the starting point of Lacan’s formulas of sexuation is Aristotle. Why? Aristotle, as you know—this is the ABC of history of philosophy—you all know that for Aristotle an entity, ontological unit, as it were, something existing is composed of form and matter. *Morphe*, *hyle*, whatever, I’m not good at that. Now there is a problem here, as all perspicuous readers of Aristotle noticed. On—you find, to put it very simply, an inconsistency or contradiction here which undermines as such the very foundation of Aristotelian ontology. On the one hand, in a more traditional Platonic mode, Aristotle claims that form is universal while matter, *hyle*, is the individualizing element, no? Like, to put it very simply, these are chairs, their idea is the same. They all—this chair and that chair or if there were to be others—the same, they all imitate, copy, realize the same universal idea. What makes them different is the stuff, the matter. The, no? Otherwise, if you take away the matter, this and this would be absolutely the same, namely, the same idea. Matter multiplies them. At the same time, Aristotle—nonetheless a serious philosopher—is intelligent and honest enough to also pursue the opposite path. Namely that precisely if you take the form away from this and that chair, all you get is the—is the formless universal matter. So you see the point: that it’s precisely—you can also claim that it’s precisely the opposite. If I take the form away, we just get the neutral base stuff, matter. So that it is form, not matter, which is the individualizing principle. Of course, Hegel is absolutely for this second solution because it’s much closer to his idealism: that the plurality, the concrete content, comes out of the self-movement of the form, of the notional content. But now—I don't have time, this would have meant another hour at least, to develop it—but some very good interpreters, French ones now, for example, the good friend of Badiou—she is worth reading—Barbara Cassin, demonstrate that how it is in order to resolve or not so much resolve but rather obfuscate this deadlock that Aristotle mobilizes sexual difference. To blur it out, he says, "Oh, but basically is like man, masculine-feminine, masculine is form, feminine is matter." But what is crucial here again is that it’s too easy to say that Aristotle simply regresses to the ancient, pre-philosophical sexualized cosmology. No, no, cosmology enters—sorry, sexual difference enters in order to resolve a certain ontological deadlock, a certain oscillation. And then, okay, I don't have time to go into it now to show how—what kind of a paradox always sexual difference is for philosophers starting with Aristotle. Because, you know, the frame of traditional philosophy is always this hierarchic subdivision: genus, species, subspecies, and so on. The problem is always how to read against this background, how to locate sexual difference. Because, you know, like the only consistent way would have been to say, "Humanity, we humans are a genus with two species: male, female." But it doesn't work, of course. Because the definition of a species is that it reproduces itself and so on and so on. So this is why this simple definition always has to be supplemented by some paradoxes. For example, yeah yeah, the traditional male chauvinist way, yeah yeah, male and female, men and women are two species, but it's only man who is really truly human, the species, and so on. Or whatever, you can even do it the opposite. But you know what I mean, what I mean simply is that you always have a problem here. So again, how do Lacan’s formulas of sexuation relate to Aristotle? Lacan’s starting point is—and this is what I was not attentive enough when I previously referred to Aristotle—sorry, to when I previously tried to elaborate Lacan’s formulas of sexuation—Lacan’s starting point is the Aristotelian so-called logical square. I mean, you all know it or heard of it. It’s that this matrix of four propositions: universal affirmative judgment, universal negative judgment, particular—like, all swans are white, some swans are white, all swans are non-white, some swans are non-white. Okay, so you will say what’s the problem here? There is already in Aristotle—as good, very good new readings have demonstrated—Aristotle and for a brief moment, not so much Aristotle as some of his commentators have noticed it, Aristotle here—it’s not Lacan who introduces some eccentricity—it’s Aristotle, in order for Aristotle for this to function in the way he wants it to function, he has to violate the spontaneous use of language. Namely, the problem is here, everything begins here. Some of the swans are white. And I hate the movie *Black Swan*, I’m not making propaganda for that one. It’s all bullshit, all that psychology. I mean, don’t you think that—here I try to be a good feminist—that this is the worst male chauvinist dream. You know, I let me improvise this, I didn’t think I did two days ago. Namely, isn’t this—it’s one of the most violently—so I hope I will convince you I am not totally bad, just making bad jokes about women—it’s secretly, I’d claim, one of the most violently anti-feminist films I’ve seen. Because the thesis ultimately it’s very simple. As a man—implicitly it’s clear, like take as a man the master of Natalie Portman, that whatever ballet director or whatever, played by I think that French guy Vincent Cassel or whatever—for a man, it’s not a problem. You can be fully dedicated to your job and still screw women or whatever, have sex. A woman, if she fully dedicates to her job task, it’s death. She cannot do it. It’s way—isn’t this the basic thesis, very simply? It’s an—again, you see how—and people say no, no ideology today. I even wanted to do—but I don’t have time—a text on comparing the two films—I mean this was one of the worst Hollywood years in the history of humanity, from prehistoric, from ancient prehistoric times, you know, Hollywood didn’t produce such bad movies—because I think that, you know what’s, I wonder what is your attitude towards *King’s Speech*? Mine is: maybe watchable, but what—what’s the joke? Is this the best movie? Like, you know, like—sorry, I cannot resist being vulgar—like, if you seduce a girl and you somehow perform, no, sex? And the girl says—justified, I’m on a girl’s side here—"Okay, okay, you did satisfy me, but is this it?" Like, "Is this it?" Like, you know what I mean, like what’s the point? It’s... but there is nonetheless something interesting: how sexual difference and in the very male chauvinist patriarchal sense was inscribed into this duality. The two big winners: *Black Swan* is a male chauvinist dream about a woman who, you know, if she dedicates herself to her task, it means no sexuality, death, suicide. And on the other hand, a typical *King’s Speech* male problem, the problem—very Lacanian problem even—of assuming a symbolic mandate. It’s clear that the stuttering problem is—it’s almost I would have said a sign of intelligence of this king. He knows secretly that it’s all bullshit. He knows that to act as a king, you must be stupid. To really believe that you are a king. And you know, he has this—he knows what Hegel knew, what Kierkegaard knew. And I will give you another surprising example: I came to this example via Lenin. You know that in Soviet Union Jack London, *White Fang* and so on, was extremely popular, millions of copies were printed. You know why? Only because Nadezhda Krupskaya, London—Lenin’s widow, wrote in her diary and was published that one evening she was reading to Lenin, who was very ill, some of Jack London’s short stories, and London liked some of them, sorry, Lenin liked some of them. Oh, you got it. Okay, but maybe Lenin was right. Because read—it’s much better than the usual opinion—read *Martin Eden*. It’s worth reading. I reread it recently. It’s absolutely more complex than it may appears. You know, a guy who wants to be a writer, becomes a successful writer, then drowns—not, sorry, not like this—drowns at the end. Why? It's a purely Lacanian problem, precisely this problem. When he succeeds, he notices that people who before—you know, I see you there, I quickly cross to the other side of the street not to—that people, even the woman who allegedly loves him, all of a sudden treated him differently. And he cannot accept this. Like, "But I’m exactly the same person as before. All the works for which I am now famous, I wrote them before." He cannot accept precisely what Lacan would have called a radical decentrement. Like, "I am the same shit as before, people before treated me as a shit, now they don’t." And I think to be a good king, you must accept this radical decentrement. You are piece of shit, your title is your title, you have nothing to do with your title and so on and so on. Again, the film here, I think, is again mystifying. Even again, like *Black Swan*, it is mystifying false in its own terms. I don’t think you become a good king the way this guy becomes, where he finally starts to believe in himself. No, a good king must be deeply aware of the utter stupidity of his title. That it has nothing to do with him and so on and so on. Sorry, so okay, now you will see what this has to do with Aristotle and so on. So at the level of everyday language, so as I said, the problem is this particular affirmative judgment which is, let us say, stupid example, I’m embarrassed, some swans are white. And maybe you know, if you know a little bit of history of logic, there was a great debate after Aristotle about how to read the particular affirmative judgment. There is a minimal and the maximal way called. The minimal way—namely, the problem is this one: precisely how particular judgment relates to universal one. "Some swans are white." Does this mean "But some are not," or does this mean "At least some, but maybe all are white"? And as already early Aristotelians noticed, because for the need of logical consistency, Aristotle opts for the minimal reading, that is to say, non-exclusive reading, like "Some swans are white" doesn't exclude that all are white. It only means "Some are." But as a minimum of sense, common sense sensitivity for language tells you, in our ordinary language, it's rather the opposite. When you say "Some men are beautiful," it usually means "But some are stinking pigs" how shall I put it, you know what I mean. Precisely the implication is stronger, is that not all are. So this is—this is the first thing Lacan is, does, and maybe this is the beginning of it all—is to just return to ordinary language here. To read the particular, instead of, you know, with Aristotle contradiction or contrariness is here, they are not tautological but here the relationship is one of implication. If all swans are white then of course some of them are white. If all of them are not white then of course also some of them are not white. For Lacan, no, the contradiction goes here. That is to say, "Some swans are white" means that not all are white. So this is Lacan's first—Lacan's first option. Lacan's first change—that he reads this particular affirmation in a maximal way. And then, okay, we will come gradually at the other—at the other changes. Okay, but let’s go quickly through them. So, Lacan: this is the same as Aristotle. All X are subsumed to the function X. Then for Lacan, you have here the exception. There is one X which is the exception. Again, here the other change by Lacan: in the universal negative judgment, he puts the negation here. Not all X are, whatever, white swans and so on. And here you have the double negation. There is no X which is not X. What does this mean? Now let me go immediately to the point. First, you saw how with Lacan contradiction is displaced. Again, as I already said, in the Aristotelian logical square, contradiction is vertical. Between the left side, "All X are, all swans are white, some swans are white," and the right side, "All swans are not white, some of them are not white." While the diagonals are contradictory, the two diagonals. "Some particular negation, some swans are not white," is in contradiction with "They all are white," and so on. Furthermore, yes, I already said, the relation between each universal and particular is one of implication. If all swans are white then also some swans are white. Okay. In the square rewritten by Lacan, the contradiction, the only contradiction, the contradiction is here, not here. This is the—the beauty of Lacan. That—the contradiction is not here between left and right side, but it’s between the upper and the lower level. That is to say, if all X are FX... no, sorry, here I of course confused things, doesn't matter. If all X are FX then of course there is no X which is, you know, if all swans are white then there is no swan which is not white. Or if there is one swan at least which is not white, then not all are white and so on. Why is this important? You will see it immediately. But you can already guess what’s going on here. The first hint: insofar as this is for Lacan how he conceives sexual difference—masculine-feminine—you see the beauty, which is that Lacan totally leaves behind all this shitty Yin-Yang topic, you know, men active, women passive, complementing with each other, but at the same time the eternal struggle of sexual differences, there will never be, you know, all this. But some people, they really disappointed me here, like Bruce Fink even quoted that shitty book which makes me almost a Goebbelsian, like burning it in public—"Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus," you know, this idea of the eternal struggle. No, for Lacan, there is no struggle here. I mean, this is the same as this, this is the same as this. The only struggle is within. You see, it’s not that men are intelligent, women are emotional. This is—this is bullshit for Lacan. It’s just that what defines each sex is not a set of features opposed to the other sex’s features. Like, I don’t know all this male chauvinist bullshit: intelligent men versus and so on. No, in each sex there is as constitutive of sexual difference, coming earlier than it, there is a—a certain radical contradiction. For Lacan, it's ultimately the tension between big Other and *jouissance*. And what accounts for sexual difference again is the different ways just to assume this contradiction. Now, let’s go on. Now comes the true beauty. So the first thing—and this is very important because here I agree with a guy called—if you read French you should read him, he is not an idiot—Guy Le Gaufey. He wrote a very good—very good short book on *Le Pas-Tout de Lacan*, the Lacanian non-all, where he shows—and I must say even against some Millerians successfully, especially Jean-Claude Milner is too weak here—how what they do is they still read Lacan’s formulas of sexuation as a new, more formalized modern way of the same—of the same old this cosmic duality, you know, we have masculine-feminine principle. They miss this crucial point. But then we go on. Now comes the true beauty. It’s not only that particular existence, like some—some swans are white—for Lacan contradicts universality. Lacan insists on another point which again is implicit in Aristotle but wasn’t taken into account by him. And Lacan connects it to the first mistake by Aristotle, which is—you must know it if you know minimally about logic, and as you can see, I do know minimally about logic—it's that the problem of existence, no? That from universal statement, even if it is true, no existence follows. But here—so in other words, if you say "Unicorns have one horn," this statement is true even if there are no unicorns. But if you say "Some unicorns have one horn," this means they must exist. And Lacan takes this absolutely literally: that universality does not imply existence. Now you will say, "Okay, so what’s the big deal?" Ah, Lacan gives here a very—this is the *King’s Speech* problem, no—that imagine instead of universality a universal title that you have, like "I am a father" or whatever. And Lacan’s point is that we have the symbolic function of the father, but it doesn’t exist. Nobody can be a father. You cannot—let me give you, okay, an a nice short quote from Lacan’s seminar *Identification* from January I quote: "The order of the function which we introduce here as that of the name of the father is something which has universal value, but simultaneously puts on you the charge to control if there is or not a father who fits this function. If there is no such father, it still remains true that the father is God; it is simply that this formula is confirmed only by the empty sector of the—of the square." So here Lacan reads this tension between particular existence and inexistent universality as of deep relevance to psychoanalysis. As Lacan puts it, you cannot be a good father. You know, father is always too much or too little. You try to assert... father is, again, an impossible. "Do you have a page reference for your quote?" "I do have but, haha, now I will make it easy for myself, haha, it’s not published. No, no, no, but I can give it to you. Do not some guys in Ireland publish the complete translation? All I can give you is the date. It’s *Identification*, The session is 17th of January "Identification is isn’t it?" "No, no, no, it must be something different because *Ethics* is *Transference* Yeah, yeah, sorry, it is. Because then comes *Anxiety*, no? Yeah, yeah. 17th of January Yes." Okay. So now you will say again, but what’s the point of all of this? Ah, now comes—I wouldn’t say an amusing part, but for me at least, philosophically, the most interesting part. I here rely, I must openly admit when I steal stuff from others, to my Slovene colleague party member Alenka Zupančič, who—who brought into circulation, as it were, an—a magnificent—I’m so mad at myself that I didn’t noticed it because of course I saw the movie five times—purely dialectical magnificent joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s *Ninotchka*. No, nothing to do with communism, Greta Garbo, sex, but there is a scene in that film where the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. And you know what the waiter answers? It’s wonderful. The waiter replies, "Sorry, but we have run out of cream. So can I bring you coffee without milk? Because we have milk, you know." So again, in both cases, either coffee without cream or coffee without milk, you get coffee alone. But this coffee, one, is each time accompanied by a different negation: coffee with no cream, coffee with no milk. And this has even, I claim, political meaning. For example, when East Europeans in they did not simply want democracy, they were cheated in the same way that this waiter tries to cheat. They were—they wanted democracy without communism, but they also wanted democracy without capitalism, and they got the wrong one. Okay, let’s go on. So what we encounter here is—it appears to be—the logic of differentiality, where the lack itself functions as a positive feature. Again, the paradox rendered nicely by an old Yugoslav joke about a Montenegrin—don’t be afraid, I will not repeat the twentieth time a joke how the Montenegro people masturbate, it’s a different one here—who are supposed to be lazy. The question is the joke: Why does a Montenegrin guy when he goes to sleep, why does he put at the side of his bed two glasses, one full and one empty, of water? Because he is too lazy to think in advance if he will be thirsty or not during the night. You see the paradox? Common sense tells you just put the glass there if you use it or not. But the differential logic tells you, no, also the non-being thirsty should be marked, should be there registered as an—as an empty—as an empty glass. That is to say, the second, the negative fact itself has to be taken note of. But now I come to the crucial point which will bring us to the key of sexual difference and so on for Lacan. Can this logic really be reduced to symbolic differentiality, you know, where differences matter, so the absence of something is also a positive feature? Is coffee without coffee? What basically the waiter is offering to the customer is coffee with without milk instead of coffee with without cream. They both want a kind of a coffee with a negative predicate, no? Justified by him: "I cannot give you coffee without cream because we have no cream, so I can only give you coffee with coffee with without milk because we have milk." Is this differentiality? It may appear so. In both cases, what we really get is exactly the same plain coffee. The difference resides only in the purely differential fact that the absence which defines coffee is first the absence of cream, then the absence of milk. Now what complicates the issue nonetheless is, I claim, the double negation at work in coffee with no milk. This coffee is not just with no milk, but also with—but also not with no cream. And this second negation, I claim, is not purely symbolic. It is coffee with milk which would have functioned differentially the same as coffee with no cream. And within this space, coffee with not with no cream is simply coffee with cream. Again, you get my point: if the relationships were to be purely differential then a double negation would bring us back to positivity: coffee not without—not without cream—doubly negated would have been simply coffee with cream. But no, coffee not without cream, in this case, is—coffee not without cream is coffee with—with no milk. So, this—I claim that this last opposition is not differential. Why? Because you must include the function of the object small a. That is to say, for this field to function, obviously the premise is that coffee cannot stand alone. Coffee is, even if you want coffee without milk, the empty place of a supplement of something to add is already there. You, in order for coffee to be attractive, you need something to fill in its lack, you know, like coffee with something, which makes it desirable. That would have been the object small a. And then the whole game is then a differential one: what will fill in this—what will fill in this excess. Which is why coffee without cream is not the same as straight coffee. Why not? Because you know, this—it's already mediated through negation. Or even now you will tell me, "But what if I really like just plain coffee?" I claim that if you analyze the semantic structure closely, you will see that coffee is already redoubled, that coffee functions as its own supplement. And this—there is nothing paradoxical about it. Let me evoke you a similar example to get the point. I used it in my first book, so I hope you are stupid old enough to forget it, or in *Looking Awry*, I don’t know where. You know that when Western got into crisis—Western the movies—from late 40s, what emerged were so-called meta-Westerns. They tried to supplement the Western dimension with another genre. For example, I don’t know, you know *Seven Brides for Seven Brothers*, whatever. It’s Western supplemented by musical. You have, for example, *Pursued* with Robert Mitchum and so on. It’s Western supplemented by film noir, and so on and so on. So again, they—they did so-called meta-Westerns: Westerns which inherently relied to another genre to fill in the non-satisfactory part, whatever. But then—I refer here to André Bazin—who had this idea at this very time where Western was already in crisis, there emerged two model Westerns: *Shane* and *High Noon*. And he claims no, these are not simply Westerns. These are Westerns where the meta-Western is Western itself. Westerns which relate to an otherness but this otherness is, again, the otherness of—the otherness of Western itself. So let me go on a little bit here. What I’m aiming at is the example that I used already, you know it all, years ago I was using it a lot, that of those stupid eggs, Kinder Surprise, no? And to say "I want coffee without milk" is just to say "I want that chocolate without the stupid plastic thing." But again, the structure is already that one. And what I’m saying is that this structure of a thing and its excess is not differential. It is differential to say "no milk," "yes," and so on and so on. What is not differential is this tension between a thing and a void in its core. A void which has to be supplemented by a figure of what Lacan calls object small a and so on and so on. Because again, what I'm claiming is that meta-Western is the same as when somebody offers you like "You don't need to add milk, sugar; this is already just plain best coffee." There again, self-reflexivity is already at—at—at work. So let me go on. So what has this to do with sexual difference, you will ask. Sexual difference precisely for Lacan is not differential. When Lacan privileges Phallus, this does not mean that sexual difference is structured along the axis of presence or absence of Phallus, like man has it, woman doesn’t have it. So of course you can read it in this way. And even now I will be really evil, paraphrase the famous Sherlock Holmes passage, you know, from *Silver Blaze*, I think. Do you remember "the curious accident of the dog," "but the dog did nothing," "that was the curious accident." The most famous lines of Sherlock Holmes. You can apply the same to the differential notion of sexual difference. "Is there any other point about seeing your sister naked to which you wish to draw my attention?" asks—if Sherlock Holmes is asked, Sherlock Holmes says "To the curious thing I noticed between her legs." "But there was nothing hanging out between her legs." "That was the curious thing," and so on, whatever. I mean, but—but I think this precisely is what Lacan doesn't want to say. The early Lacan till the 60s, yes, there one has to admit it, it’s simply a male-centered universe where the presence of or absence of Phallus in a differential way stands for sexual difference. But now, again, what Lacan does is something—is something different. His point is not to structure it in this way, but what? What is more in it? Ah, okay. Not to get too lost, let me go a step further. The crucial conclusion of Lacan from this asymmetry of excess and so on is again that the structure that I tried to isolate, that of an object one and its supplement—to put it in very speculative term, shortly, one is never one, one is always one and X, more than one but less than two, one and—and the object small a—that masculine and feminine position refer in a different way to this excess. How? Ah, now comes what I consider a little bit more interesting. The asymmetry between masculine and feminine for Lacan is that the masculine position is differential. That is to say, a differential relationship would have been where each sexual position is defined by its difference to the other: woman is not man, man is not woman. If somebody is not woman, he is man; if somebody is not man, she is a woman. But the way Lacan reads this non-all—not all of X is FX—is he introduces—and that's the beauty—the asymmetry among the sexes. That is to say, "no man" means woman; we men are stupid differential. If you are not a man, you are a woman. But if you are not a woman, you are not a man. That's the point of Lacan. If you are—that is to say, there is something of—and here is a beautiful quote which I think it’s really crucial from Lacan. This time is the—the seminar *Ou Pire* (Or Worse) from session May the 10th. "Since woman is non-all, why should all that is not woman be men?" You see that non-all of a woman means that if in a double negation you negate woman, you still get a woman. And that this—what again I will try to go—so for Lacan... and this, of course, this doesn’t mean there is some deep transsexual substance in woman and so on. That’s the beauty of it. It is still that there is—there is—there is nothing which is outside, which is not, but this spectral nothingness can be called the nothingness of the subject or whatever you want and so on and so on. So let me give you another line of thought here, a philosophical one, which will make this clear. We are dealing here with a negation of negation which again doesn’t bring you back to the first position. It’s not "You negate man, you get woman; you negate woman, you get man." No. Woman is much closer to negativity. Woman is its own negation. In the same way, ah, now you will say I’m crazy, I don’t care about it, what has this to do with progressive politics? I think—to give you a first hint—it is crucial to read class struggle like this. That is to say, a non-bourgeois is proletarian but a non-proletarian is not bourgeois. Marx says this. How? When he says—you must remember the details—that—that—that bourgeoisie is the only pure class in the history of humanity. Before bourgeoisie, capitalists, we have classes which are not yet fully classes. But working class is already a class which has to abolish itself as a class to assert itself. You see, you already have this double "no" in it. Okay, but—now let me go a little bit further to account for this stuff. You know Freud’s legendary example—everybody knows it—of a patient who told Freud when asked about "Who is this woman in your dream?" "I do not know who this woman in my dream is, but I am sure of one thing: this is not my mother." Of course, we all know, haha, like this simple logic, haha, why did you mention it, this precisely means that it is your mother. But I think that if we—if we read closely this example, things are much more paradoxical. "This is not my mother" means at two different level its exact opposite. First, again, it’s the obvious level of denial. In the patient’s unconscious, the figure is of course his mother. And denial is the price the patient has to pay to bring this maternal figure to consciousness. But this is not all. There is another level at which "This is not my mother" asserts the existence of mother. Because we know that in the Freudian space, mother stands for the impossible incestuous object and so on and so on. So, we can also say that "This is not my mother," it's not just a lie, you know, a lie in the sense of "It really is my mother but I don’t want to admit it that I was dreaming screwing my mother" whatever. It also can mean "Mother is impossible, inaccessible." Like the idea being: this miserable figure cannot be my mother. And now, here we come to this more complex paradoxes. I claim that the problem with denying "this is not my mother" asserts mother even too much, because it still implies that there is a mother but even if this woman in the dream is my mother, it cannot be that mother, the incestuous mother, whatever. So, the paradox here is that if we were to get, instead of this Freudian conservative patient, a more open permissive patient who would have said, "So what’s the problem? Okay, this is my mother, I wanted to screw my mother," for a strict Freudian the repression would have been even stronger here. Because saying "This is my mother" is a lie. It cannot be. This is the pervert illusion: that you can get—that you can get the object. So, again, negation operates here at two levels. First, there is the simple *verneinung*, denial. "This is not my mother." Then there is the other as the impossible real object of—of desire. Like, then you can say "Even if it is mother, it’s not yet mother." And again, the result should be here the double negation: not not mother, and so on. So, again, what does this mean for sexual difference? That it paradoxically precedes the two terms whose difference it is. Sexual difference is not—this would have been Lacan’s speculative formula—sexual difference is not a difference between two given positions. But sexual difference is the name of a deadlock, and two given positions are two attempts to deal with this—with to deal with this deadlock. Let me first give you here another example of this which maybe you know from my work but I think it fits perfectly here. You know, I spoke years ago a lot about this, about this Kantian distinction—no wonder Kant was the first, I think, to conceptualize sexual difference in his antinomies—Kantian distinction between infinite and—or indefinite and negative judgment. You know the story: negative judgment negates a predicate; infinite judgment asserts a non-predicate. Negative judgment, for example, if I am alive, negative—sorry, if I am—alive, negative judgment is "I am not dead." I negate a predicate, "dead." Infinite judgment is not "I am not dead," but "I am undead." And here you see what's the difference if you know Stephen King and so on, of course. "I am not dead," it's not—it's simply "I am alive." The space is here that of binary differential opposition. If I am not dead, I am alive; if I am alive, I am not dead. But if you say "I am undead," you open up a third infinite field of the living dead, undead, neither dead nor alive. And for Lacan, again, this is the structure—you know, woman is not "not man." Woman—you cannot say woman isn't man. Man isn't woman, that's okay. But with woman it's different. It's not "Woman isn't man." Woman is un-man or non-man. Which means a third domain beyond sexual difference is—is opened up. And incidentally I think exactly the same goes for proletariat which is un-bourgeoisie, like non-bourgeoisie, outside it. So, and incidentally if you know Alain Badiou’s work, I think that in the same—in exactly the same way one has to read his rejection of aesthetics. You know that he calls his writings about art "inaesthetics." He uses the term *Handbook of Inaesthetics*. I think it’s precisely "in" in this Kantian sense of the third domain in between. Now I come to my next point which for me at least is crucial: how is then this structure of pure antagonism—like that before difference there is one which doesn’t coincide with itself? Like, coffee is never purely coffee, it’s always coffee and X, an empty spot and so on. And I think everything originates from this. Like, I think that a name proper always aims at this place. You know, like a name is never—here I am for Kripke against Bertrand Russell and so on—a name is never just a name of a thing, is never just a combinatoire of the properties of the thing, like a shortened version of their properties. If you enumerate all the properties, you miss something. And name is the name for that something. Name is fundamentally tautological. At the same time, the name for the—the name for the—for the unnamable. But now comes—I want to interpret it more in detail, maybe you already know it—the absolute quote from Lacan. My favorite. I mean, literally at this moment if you ask me, give me a couple of lines from Lacan that you think they are absolute, this is it, I think. It is, if you want the references, again, unpublished text, from Seminar from *D’un Discours qui ne Serait pas du Semblant* (Of a Discourse That Would Not Be of Semblance). This one appeared incidentally in French at least, Éditions du Seuil page where Lacan tries to differentiate his position from that of nominalism. And I think this is a crucial philosophical debate because—because here Lacan is clearly against Althusser, against Michel Foucault and so on, who are basically nominalists for Lacan. Listen to it, I quote: "If there is something I am," says Lacan, "it is clear that I am not a nominalist. What I want to say is that my starting point is not that the name is something like a nameplate which attaches itself just like that onto the real. One has to choose: if one is a nominalist, one has to renounce completely dialectical materialism. So that all in all, I evidently reject the nominalist tradition which is effectively the only danger of idealism which can arise in a discourse like mine." What I like here—did you notice, and this is from when hardline Marxism was already out of fashion—how I love this, how for Lacan the main argument against nominalism is that it’s incompatible with dialectical materialism. Not so bad for Lacan, no? Okay, so it goes on: "The point is not to be a realist in the sense in which one was a realist in medieval times, in the sense of the realism of the universals. The point is to emphasize that our discourse, our scientific discourse, can only find the real insofar as it depends on the function of the semblant. The articulation, and I mean the algebraic articulation of the semblant and its effects—this is the only apparatus which enables us to designate what is real. What is real is what opens up a hole in this semblant, in this articulated semblant which is the scientific discourse," and so on and so on. Okay, what’s—what’s Lacan’s point here? I think it’s absolutely crucial. A) Lacan is not a nominalist. His point is not what actually exists are just particular or even individual cases and so on and so on. So he is not a nominalist. But of course he is not a naive realist in the sense of realism of the universals and so on and so on. There is something beyond singular semblances. But that something is the gap of the real impossibility and so on and so on. Again, please don’t kill me if I give you an example which I think I’ve written about it at least twenty times in my books. But nonetheless, you know that famous Lévi-Strauss example of—you take some stupid Native American village and you ask different members of the tribe to draw the disposition of the houses in the—in the village. And Lévi-Strauss noticed how if you ask two different groups, you get totally different description of the village. For one part of the tribe, the houses in the village are divided
accessible to mathematized science and the subjective universe of meaning which we project onto reality, but underlying this gap is a desexualization of reality. And I think it is against this background that one should measure Lacan’s achievement. He reasserts the ontological status of sexual difference. The problem is how can he, in a way, resexualize the universe without regressing into a pre-scientific mythology? Because for all modern transcendental philosophy, sexual difference is deontologized; it’s reduced to an ontic feature of some entities—human race, some animals, and so on. Of course, if one ontologizes sexual difference, one is immediately accused of anthropomorphism. So again, how does Lacan do it? Okay, the first answer is clear—that’s the first formula, then we will go much deeper—the first, for Lacan, sexual difference is purely formal, in the sense that sexual difference, the way it structures our symbolic universe, for Lacan, the way sexual difference functions in the human universe is not immediately linked to biological functions of sexuality. So that even—I use here the expression of my Slovene colleague Alenka Zupančič—even natural sexuality can be sexualized. There you can see the formal status of properly human sexuality. Like, you can imagine a biological—what do I mean by this gap between formal structure and immediate reality? You can well imagine a couple making love or, to put it more brutally, copulating, but without any excitement, doing it as a pure instrumental activity. Just, it’s literally—I can imagine, maybe it even happened to me, I’m not sure, but—you know, doing love in a totally non-sexual way. On the other hand, I can imagine—we all know this—doing things which have nothing to do with sexuality, I mean in the biological sense, but they can be somehow sexualized. Okay, maybe you heard it, the example I like to use is that of—imagine I meet one of you and imagine a very simple act: I squeeze your hand. We shake hands. That’s normal. But imagine that after the first squeeze, I don’t let your hand go, but I—I still hold it and go on squeezing it rhythmically. Admit it, your first association would be: there is something perverted in it, what does he want, and so on. No, you see the point: a purely nothing directly erotic about it, but this pure act of protraction, repetition, somehow sexualizes it. But this brings us already to the first key point of Lacan: that this ability of sexuality to spill over different spheres is for Lacan not the sign of the strength of sexuality but the sign of its weakness, precisely because it never works, as it were, in its own domain, it has to—it has to expand. So, the first indication should be the following one, I think: for Lacan, to sexualize the universe—insofar as for Lacan sexuality is inherently linked to failure, incompleteness, and so on—to sexualize the universe means that we should opt for a different ontology, an ontology of incompleteness, of a deadlock and so on, which is why I think Joan Copjec was right when, in her classical text *The Euthanasia of Reason*, she read as the first philosopher who came close, without knowing it, to Lacan’s notion of sexual difference, Immanuel Kant with his two sets of antinomies: mathematical antinomies, dynamical antinomies. The idea being there that it’s exactly, in a way, the Lacanian non-all. You know, Lacan’s point is that if you extrapolate concepts we use or we are forced to use—they are our transcendental a priori—to describe reality, we get into a deadlock. This impossibility of getting it all, of to totalize our notion of reality. And I claim that the truly subversive thing that Lacan compels us to do is—sorry if I sound pretentious, I don’t have time to dwell on all this now, but I will try—is that one has to make here a step from Kant to Hegel. Which means Kant remains too epistemological; he still presupposes some objective reality out there, just because of the limitation of our categories, we cannot get at it. Hegel’s step is: what if we transpose this structure of failure, hindrance, you cannot get it, you get involved in antagonism into the thing itself? It’s a little bit like, you know—and I will conclude with, sorry for this megalomania, quantum physics. I was here imprecise till now. You know that there is—I was convinced now reading closer, more closely stuff—there is a gap between Heisenberg and Bohr. Bohr is the good guy, I am more and more convinced. And don’t be afraid, I will not quote you now the eleventh time that boring story about why do you have a horseshoe above your door. No, no. What I want to say is that precisely Heisenberg, in his uncertainty principle, still basically reads this impossibility to get—to get position and velocity, whatever, movement at the same time, two complementary properties—still reads it in an epistemological way. While Bohr emphasizes this in a very refined critique of Heisenberg: that Heisenberg didn’t get the point, that this impossibility is in the thing itself. Okay. First, how does all this appear within psychoanalysis, this incompleteness of society? In a Kantian way, we can say that the incompleteness of ontology, of the structure of reality, means that in order to make our experience of reality consistent, we have to supplement our experience by some kind of a virtual fiction. This, as Lacan was aware, this was already a lesson done by Bentham, whose—again—Theory of Fictions, I think it is even now recently reprinted in the *Radical Classics* or whatever by Verso. Don’t underestimate it. He is precisely not doing what you would have expected a simple British empiricist to do. His point is not that we should aim at getting rid of fictions to see reality in a nominalist way, the way it really is. His point is a nicely paradoxical one: yes, we can distinguish what is fiction and what is reality, but if we take away the fiction, we lose reality itself. It’s impossible to describe, to grasp reality without fictions. I think that this same point was made in a beautiful way by, again, haha, my old guy G.K. Chesterton, where when he says—a wonderful quote—literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. So, what do I mean by this necessity of fictional supplement? Years ago, I remember seeing a caricature in a German weekly publication—I’m not sure, I think it was *Stern*, *Der Stern*, but this was like thirty, forty years ago—it, of course, it mocked the male hypocrisy. It showed five men, each of them asked in a caricature: "What would you like to do during your summer holiday?" And each of them gives an answer, but then in this kind of a cloud, you know, it shows what he really thinks. Each—for example, one says, "I would like finally to have time to read a good philosophical book." The cloud shows a naked woman. The other one said, "I would like to go to a serious music concert." The cloud shows a naked woman, and so on and so on. So it's this tasteless point that, you know, don't bluff, we all want to do just like that. I claim this is strictly wrong. I claim that we all know that we want to do that, but the question is in what precise way do we want to do that? So, much closer to the truth would have been the opposite caricature: you ask five men what would you like to do and probably you will get a sincere answer, "screw many ladies" whatever, but then the cloud should show, you know, one of them wants to seduce a lady while reading a book, the other one while walking on a beach, and so on and so on. No, it's precisely that you cannot do it directly. You need a fiction. You need a fiction to do it. And I think that even when we are in reality, this fiction has somehow to supplement reality. In what way? Here we come to the beauty of things. I'm not claiming that, oh, part of our reality doesn't really exist, it's fictional. I claim almost something of the opposite: that even if all we perceive is reality, part of it—the way we perceive it in our psychic economy—is structured like or functions as a fiction. And I think this is cinema at its best—as I already mentioned once maybe here—this is cinema at its best. Not to reproduce so well a fiction, stage it so well that we mistake fiction for reality, but to show only reality but to make us experience it as a magical fiction. I will give you immediately an example about the film to which, haha, my small moment of glory, you buy the DVD, you will get comments by me—Alfonso Cuarón’s *Children of Men*. But now I’m a bad guy, I always talk bad against the—behind their back on people—so I would say that, first, of course, I’m a Hegelian. This means when I made those comments, I didn’t see the film. No, I don’t need the reality. But more important, when I saw the film, I discovered something which demonstrates that Cuarón is a good cinema director but not such a good thinker. He did something very nice, but I checked it up with him, he wasn’t aware of it. Namely, if you saw the movie—you know, Clive Owen, infertility, blah, blah, blah—at the very end of the film, Clive Owen, the hero, Theo or whatever, and the Black girl, who is the first after I don’t know how many years in the entire humanity of getting pregnant, go out on a small boat to a sea where some kind of—some kind of ship with laboratories in it, called "Tomorrow," where allegedly they will solve the problem of fertility, is awaiting them. And Clive Owen, wounded, dies. And the idea is, nonetheless, she, the Black girl who is pregnant, will get to the ship where they will analyze her, she will save humanity, restore fertility. Now, to me it seemed so obvious that although it is shot like reality, that the proper way to read it—no ship, of course, that this was—this is the dying dream of the hero. No? That the ship is pure appearance. Cuarón wasn’t aware of this ambiguity, but strangely enough, most of my friends were. Almost most of the people that I talked to claimed that they liked precisely this radical ambiguity. Although it’s shot like reality, it functions like a magic *deus ex machina* apparition. Or to give you another example that I already used in my books—I watched them three, four times, they are boring because of my son—those *Home Alone* series. Did you notice something? Like, two-thirds of the film is more or less, not quite, realistic. But then the reason we watch—at least I do—this kind of films is that, you know, for usually it’s the last twenty minutes when the small kid sets the trap and then all horrible things, you know, happen to the two bad guys. Now, that is pure cartoon logic. Physically impossible. Like, you know, the bad guy—his head starts burning. So he runs to the toilet, puts his head into the toilet bowl. But the—the small evil child predicted this, so of course instead of water there is oil, there is gasoline there, so alcohol, so the head explodes like anything but—again, what I like is how it’s still shot realistically. In the sense of supposed to be part of reality, but somehow we know we passed from reality to fiction in a way. This I think again is, for me at least, the cinematic art at its best. And this is again how our reality is structured. So, okay, let’s now go on patiently about how Lacan tries to formalize sexual difference. Of course, we—you probably know the ABC, which is: Lacan proposed the so-called formulas of sexuation, where the masculine side is defined by the universal function and its exception. Like all X, all entities are submitted to a certain function, but then there is one which is, at least one which is the exception—masculine side. The feminine side, you have the paradox of non-all, *le pas-tout*. There is no exception, but for that very reason the set is non-all, non-totalized. To give you a simple philosophical example of this, I think that for Lacan the passage from early to late Wittgenstein would have been a clear example. The early Wittgenstein is masculine, you know, it proposes his *Tractatus*, a certain universal structure with the exception of the mystical and so on and so on. What the late Wittgenstein does is—he no longer talks about this mystical exception. There is no exception, but for this reason you cannot totalize language. Instead of simple universal structure, you get only these partial family resemblances and so on and so on. So again, you get first universality with an exception, then you get this irreducible plurality of language games. There is nothing outside them, but they are not all, you cannot totalize them. It’s a little bit like another reference to my terrifying experiences with children. For five years I’m totally terrorized, I spent hundreds of dollars for—if some of you have also the misfortune of having children or knowing them—do you know what is *Yu-Gi-Oh!*? Those magic cards, blah, blah, no? My son doesn’t have too many of them, just around ten thousand, I would say, no? And but what fascinates me—and I think we adults are already too senile, too stupid even to understand—is that I think they are a nice example of the feminine non-all. Because in contrast to a standard either card game or chess game, where you have certain universal rules and then you have elements and you have to use them obeying those rules, the madness—you really must be a child with your far superior to us memory—is that here each card in a way brings its own rule. You know, it’s—the point is not that you have a card which is simply worth more than another card within a certain set of rules. No, you must look closely at those small letters which say: "If you have this card and if you have an attack card, you see it on the opponent’s side, then you can revive another card and kill all the opponents on condition that the opponent doesn’t have that"—it’s absolute nightmare, I think. But I like this idea. It’s incredibly complex. And I just admire small children. They can—they can remember thousands of cards, literally all these double, triple tricks. Okay, let’s go on. Lacan’s logic of universality and its constitutive exception is not as simple as it may appear. It’s not simply, you know, this old wisdom, haha, an exception to every universality. No, no, it’s not wisdom. Lacan is very precise here. First, it goes still—we will go much more in detail later, no—first at an abstract level. First, I think we have three steps here. First, there is Lacan’s thesis: an exception to every universality. Every universality contains a particular element which, while formally belonging to this universality, sticks out, doesn’t fit its frame. I will not bore you with the examples that I am already bored by them, that I always use, like in Marx, for example, I claim that in the Marxian classification of the modes of production, obviously the—and here I am an honest anti-Eurocentrist—that the so-called Asiatic mode of production is this kind of exception. I mean, if you read Marx closely, you will see what is going on, no? Marx originally did propose just the Eurocentric series, that is to say, primitive, whatever you call them, tribal societies, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and whatever the hell is maybe coming after. Now, then Marx—honestly, he was honest enough to notice that there are some societies, social formations, modes of production which fit neither of this. And I claim a close analysis demonstrates that the so-called Asiatic mode of production is not really a positive—it appears to be a positive concept, but in reality it's just a kind of a negative container. Marx simply threw into that one what didn't fit the others. You know, it's like that joke from Borges quoted at the beginning of Foucault's *Les Mots et les Choses*, where you have that famous list of categorization of dogs, at the end you have all the dogs which doesn't belong to this list or whatever. I mean, of course, it's not as simple as that. But you can see how Marx was struggling and wasn't himself wasn't sure if you can really put Ancient Egypt, Ancient Incas, Ancient China at all, if you can really put them within the same umbrella. So again, we have the exception. Then you have to do the next step. And I hope you will notice if you know Marx here, the parallel between this gradual expansion of the exception and the so-called three moment stages of the expression of the value-form at the beginning of Marx's *Capital*. Then you of course discover that everything is an exception. That every—and this is the basic rule of Hegel. I already made this point, I would like to repeat it, this is what I like about Hegel. You know, here you can see that Hegel was a materialist in a radical sense. For Plato, Platonists—and here I have a problem with my good friend Alain Badiou—I totally sympathize with his rehabilitation of Plato against Aristotle. But I think there are some problems, like, you know, if Plato's state is something, it's a—based on a corporate image of society. The notion of justice that you find there is precisely this corporate notion of justice means each at his or her own place. And I claim that you—there is nonetheless no way to—although Badiou is now, as you probably know, retranslating Plato's *Republic*—it's almost finished incidentally—into French with the subtitle "Republic or about Communism," no? Trying to reread it as a com—it's a wonderful thing what he is doing. He is, for example, replacing when Plato says a sophist is trying to seduce the crowd, Alain put into—translated as a corrupted bourgeois journalist who is publishing an article and so on in the popular press. But I think that here you get a problem. So, for Plato, example is always deficient with regard to an idea, no? Like, examples are imperfect... but for Hegel, there also is always a gap between an idea and the way you try to exemplify it. But for Hegel, it's the opposite that it's true. You exemplify an idea and there is more in the example than in the idea itself. So that the example which is supposed to illustrate an idea effectively always undermines it. And one can even say that this is one of the basic matrices of the Hegelian process. How do things go on in Hegel's dialectic? You have a certain notion, form of life, and Hegel doesn't criticize it so that he measures it by an ideal standard. He just says: let's exemplify it, let's look how it works. And then the example itself gives more. You probably know, again, one of the great moments of Hegelian what Lacan calls *la langue*, reference to wordplay, contingency of language. Hegel does here a consciously wrong etymology. You know that the German term for example is *Beispiel*, something which, as it were, plays itself along. And for Hegel, this is precisely example. Like, I want only this, but that shitty example comes along and ruins it, no? I mean, I get more than I asked for in an example. Okay, so then we have this paradox that every example is an exception. But then we have the third stage, which would have fitted somehow this notion of universal equivalent in Marx, in Hegel: that nonetheless all examples, like exceptions, are not equal. That if all examples are exceptions, there is always an exception to exceptions, which is an example which precisely as a double exception immediately gives body to universality as such. And in this precise sense, Hegel, for example—you should be careful to know these details—he calls Jesus Christ an example of examples or an absolute example. Precisely in this sense that, you know, everything is an example, but then you get an absolute example, an absolute exception, which is precisely the place where, in the guise of its opposite, universality itself comes to exist. Okay, the classical example, again, known to all of you, what Jacques Rancière, even more than Badiou, conceptualizes as "that part of the social body, the part of no-part," which is those who are without proper place within the social body and as such stand for its universality. Okay, but let’s go on. So, the starting point of Lacan’s formulas of sexuation is Aristotle. Why? Aristotle, as you know—this is the ABC of history of philosophy—you all know that for Aristotle an entity, ontological unit, as it were, something existing is composed of form and matter. *Morphe*, *hyle*, whatever, I’m not good at that. Now there is a problem here, as all perspicuous readers of Aristotle noticed. On—you find, to put it very simply, an inconsistency or contradiction here which undermines as such the very foundation of Aristotelian ontology. On the one hand, in a more traditional Platonic mode, Aristotle claims that form is universal while matter, *hyle*, is the individualizing element, no? Like, to put it very simply, these are chairs, their idea is the same. They all—this chair and that chair or if there were to be others—the same, they all imitate, copy, realize the same universal idea. What makes them different is the stuff, the matter. The, no? Otherwise, if you take away the matter, this and this would be absolutely the same, namely, the same idea. Matter multiplies them. At the same time, Aristotle—nonetheless a serious philosopher—is intelligent and honest enough to also pursue the opposite path. Namely that precisely if you take the form away from this and that chair, all you get is the—is the formless universal matter. So you see the point: that it’s precisely—you can also claim that it’s precisely the opposite. If I take the form away, we just get the neutral base stuff, matter. So that it is form, not matter, which is the individualizing principle. Of course, Hegel is absolutely for this second solution because it’s much closer to his idealism: that the plurality, the concrete content, comes out of the self-movement of the form, of the notional content. But now—I don't have time, this would have meant another hour at least, to develop it—but some very good interpreters, French ones now, for example, the good friend of Badiou—she is worth reading—Barbara Cassin, demonstrate that how it is in order to resolve or not so much resolve but rather obfuscate this deadlock that Aristotle mobilizes sexual difference. To blur it out, he says, "Oh, but basically is like man, masculine-feminine, masculine is form, feminine is matter." But what is crucial here again is that it’s too easy to say that Aristotle simply regresses to the ancient, pre-philosophical sexualized cosmology. No, no, cosmology enters—sorry, sexual difference enters in order to resolve a certain ontological deadlock, a certain oscillation. And then, okay, I don't have time to go into it now to show how—what kind of a paradox always sexual difference is for philosophers starting with Aristotle. Because, you know, the frame of traditional philosophy is always this hierarchic subdivision: genus, species, subspecies, and so on. The problem is always how to read against this background, how to locate sexual difference. Because, you know, like the only consistent way would have been to say, "Humanity, we humans are a genus with two species: male, female." But it doesn't work, of course. Because the definition of a species is that it reproduces itself and so on and so on. So this is why this simple definition always has to be supplemented by some paradoxes. For example, yeah yeah, the traditional male chauvinist way, yeah yeah, male and female, men and women are two species, but it's only man who is really truly human, the species, and so on. Or whatever, you can even do it the opposite. But you know what I mean, what I mean simply is that you always have a problem here. So again, how do Lacan’s formulas of sexuation relate to Aristotle? Lacan’s starting point is—and this is what I was not attentive enough when I previously referred to Aristotle—sorry, to when I previously tried to elaborate Lacan’s formulas of sexuation—Lacan’s starting point is the Aristotelian so-called logical square. I mean, you all know it or heard of it. It’s that this matrix of four propositions: universal affirmative judgment, universal negative judgment, particular—like, all swans are white, some swans are white, all swans are non-white, some swans are non-white. Okay, so you will say what’s the problem here? There is already in Aristotle—as good, very good new readings have demonstrated—Aristotle and for a brief moment, not so much Aristotle as some of his commentators have noticed it, Aristotle here—it’s not Lacan who introduces some eccentricity—it’s Aristotle, in order for Aristotle for this to function in the way he wants it to function, he has to violate the spontaneous use of language. Namely, the problem is here, everything begins here. Some of the swans are white. And I hate the movie *Black Swan*, I’m not making propaganda for that one. It’s all bullshit, all that psychology. I mean, don’t you think that—here I try to be a good feminist—that this is the worst male chauvinist dream. You know, I let me improvise this, I didn’t think I did two days ago. Namely, isn’t this—it’s one of the most violently—so I hope I will convince you I am not totally bad, just making bad jokes about women—it’s secretly, I’d claim, one of the most violently anti-feminist films I’ve seen. Because the thesis ultimately it’s very simple. As a man—implicitly it’s clear, like take as a man the master of Natalie Portman, that whatever ballet director or whatever, played by I think that French guy Vincent Cassel or whatever—for a man, it’s not a problem. You can be fully dedicated to your job and still screw women or whatever, have sex. A woman, if she fully dedicates to her job task, it’s death. She cannot do it. It’s way—isn’t this the basic thesis, very simply? It’s an—again, you see how—and people say no, no ideology today. I even wanted to do—but I don’t have time—a text on comparing the two films—I mean this was one of the worst Hollywood years in the history of humanity, from prehistoric, from ancient prehistoric times, you know, Hollywood didn’t produce such bad movies—because I think that, you know what’s, I wonder what is your attitude towards *King’s Speech*? Mine is: maybe watchable, but what—what’s the joke? Is this the best movie? Like, you know, like—sorry, I cannot resist being vulgar—like, if you seduce a girl and you somehow perform, no, sex? And the girl says—justified, I’m on a girl’s side here—"Okay, okay, you did satisfy me, but is this it?" Like, "Is this it?" Like, you know what I mean, like what’s the point? It’s... but there is nonetheless something interesting: how sexual difference and in the very male chauvinist patriarchal sense was inscribed into this duality. The two big winners: *Black Swan* is a male chauvinist dream about a woman who, you know, if she dedicates herself to her task, it means no sexuality, death, suicide. And on the other hand, a typical *King’s Speech* male problem, the problem—very Lacanian problem even—of assuming a symbolic mandate. It’s clear that the stuttering problem is—it’s almost I would have said a sign of intelligence of this king. He knows secretly that it’s all bullshit. He knows that to act as a king, you must be stupid. To really believe that you are a king. And you know, he has this—he knows what Hegel knew, what Kierkegaard knew. And I will give you another surprising example: I came to this example via Lenin. You know that in Soviet Union Jack London, *White Fang* and so on, was extremely popular, millions of copies were printed. You know why? Only because Nadezhda Krupskaya, London—Lenin’s widow, wrote in her diary and was published that one evening she was reading to Lenin, who was very ill, some of Jack London’s short stories, and London liked some of them, sorry, Lenin liked some of them. Oh, you got it. Okay, but maybe Lenin was right. Because read—it’s much better than the usual opinion—read *Martin Eden*. It’s worth reading. I reread it recently. It’s absolutely more complex than it may appears. You know, a guy who wants to be a writer, becomes a successful writer, then drowns—not, sorry, not like this—drowns at the end. Why? It's a purely Lacanian problem, precisely this problem. When he succeeds, he notices that people who before—you know, I see you there, I quickly cross to the other side of the street not to—that people, even the woman who allegedly loves him, all of a sudden treated him differently. And he cannot accept this. Like, "But I’m exactly the same person as before. All the works for which I am now famous, I wrote them before." He cannot accept precisely what Lacan would have called a radical decentrement. Like, "I am the same shit as before, people before treated me as a shit, now they don’t." And I think to be a good king, you must accept this radical decentrement. You are piece of shit, your title is your title, you have nothing to do with your title and so on and so on. Again, the film here, I think, is again mystifying. Even again, like *Black Swan*, it is mystifying false in its own terms. I don’t think you become a good king the way this guy becomes, where he finally starts to believe in himself. No, a good king must be deeply aware of the utter stupidity of his title. That it has nothing to do with him and so on and so on. Sorry, so okay, now you will see what this has to do with Aristotle and so on. So at the level of everyday language, so as I said, the problem is this particular affirmative judgment which is, let us say, stupid example, I’m embarrassed, some swans are white. And maybe you know, if you know a little bit of history of logic, there was a great debate after Aristotle about how to read the particular affirmative judgment. There is a minimal and the maximal way called. The minimal way—namely, the problem is this one: precisely how particular judgment relates to universal one. "Some swans are white." Does this mean "But some are not," or does this mean "At least some, but maybe all are white"? And as already early Aristotelians noticed, because for the need of logical consistency, Aristotle opts for the minimal reading, that is to say, non-exclusive reading, like "Some swans are white" doesn't exclude that all are white. It only means "Some are." But as a minimum of sense, common sense sensitivity for language tells you, in our ordinary language, it's rather the opposite. When you say "Some men are beautiful," it usually means "But some are stinking pigs" how shall I put it, you know what I mean. Precisely the implication is stronger, is that not all are. So this is—this is the first thing Lacan is, does, and maybe this is the beginning of it all—is to just return to ordinary language here. To read the particular, instead of, you know, with Aristotle contradiction or contrariness is here, they are not tautological but here the relationship is one of implication. If all swans are white then of course some of them are white. If all of them are not white then of course also some of them are not white. For Lacan, no, the contradiction goes here. That is to say, "Some swans are white" means that not all are white. So this is Lacan's first—Lacan's first option. Lacan's first change—that he reads this particular affirmation in a maximal way. And then, okay, we will come gradually at the other—at the other changes. Okay, but let’s go quickly through them. So, Lacan: this is the same as Aristotle. All X are subsumed to the function X. Then for Lacan, you have here the exception. There is one X which is the exception. Again, here the other change by Lacan: in the universal negative judgment, he puts the negation here. Not all X are, whatever, white swans and so on. And here you have the double negation. There is no X which is not X. What does this mean? Now let me go immediately to the point. First, you saw how with Lacan contradiction is displaced. Again, as I already said, in the Aristotelian logical square, contradiction is vertical. Between the left side, "All X are, all swans are white, some swans are white," and the right side, "All swans are not white, some of them are not white." While the diagonals are contradictory, the two diagonals. "Some particular negation, some swans are not white," is in contradiction with "They all are white," and so on. Furthermore, yes, I already said, the relation between each universal and particular is one of implication. If all swans are white then also some swans are white. Okay. In the square rewritten by Lacan, the contradiction, the only contradiction, the contradiction is here, not here. This is the—the beauty of Lacan. That—the contradiction is not here between left and right side, but it’s between the upper and the lower level. That is to say, if all X are FX... no, sorry, here I of course confused things, doesn't matter. If all X are FX then of course there is no X which is, you know, if all swans are white then there is no swan which is not white. Or if there is one swan at least which is not white, then not all are white and so on. Why is this important? You will see it immediately. But you can already guess what’s going on here. The first hint: insofar as this is for Lacan how he conceives sexual difference—masculine-feminine—you see the beauty, which is that Lacan totally leaves behind all this shitty Yin-Yang topic, you know, men active, women passive, complementing with each other, but at the same time the eternal struggle of sexual differences, there will never be, you know, all this. But some people, they really disappointed me here, like Bruce Fink even quoted that shitty book which makes me almost a Goebbelsian, like burning it in public—"Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus," you know, this idea of the eternal struggle. No, for Lacan, there is no struggle here. I mean, this is the same as this, this is the same as this. The only struggle is within. You see, it’s not that men are intelligent, women are emotional. This is—this is bullshit for Lacan. It’s just that what defines each sex is not a set of features opposed to the other sex’s features. Like, I don’t know all this male chauvinist bullshit: intelligent men versus and so on. No, in each sex there is as constitutive of sexual difference, coming earlier than it, there is a—a certain radical contradiction. For Lacan, it's ultimately the tension between big Other and *jouissance*. And what accounts for sexual difference again is the different ways just to assume this contradiction. Now, let’s go on. Now comes the true beauty. So the first thing—and this is very important because here I agree with a guy called—if you read French you should read him, he is not an idiot—Guy Le Gaufey. He wrote a very good—very good short book on *Le Pas-Tout de Lacan*, the Lacanian non-all, where he shows—and I must say even against some Millerians successfully, especially Jean-Claude Milner is too weak here—how what they do is they still read Lacan’s formulas of sexuation as a new, more formalized modern way of the same—of the same old this cosmic duality, you know, we have masculine-feminine principle. They miss this crucial point. But then we go on. Now comes the true beauty. It’s not only that particular existence, like some—some swans are white—for Lacan contradicts universality. Lacan insists on another point which again is implicit in Aristotle but wasn’t taken into account by him. And Lacan connects it to the first mistake by Aristotle, which is—you must know it if you know minimally about logic, and as you can see, I do know minimally about logic—it's that the problem of existence, no? That from universal statement, even if it is true, no existence follows. But here—so in other words, if you say "Unicorns have one horn," this statement is true even if there are no unicorns. But if you say "Some unicorns have one horn," this means they must exist. And Lacan takes this absolutely literally: that universality does not imply existence. Now you will say, "Okay, so what’s the big deal?" Ah, Lacan gives here a very—this is the *King’s Speech* problem, no—that imagine instead of universality a universal title that you have, like "I am a father" or whatever. And Lacan’s point is that we have the symbolic function of the father, but it doesn’t exist. Nobody can be a father. You cannot—let me give you, okay, an a nice short quote from Lacan’s seminar *Identification* from January I quote: "The order of the function which we introduce here as that of the name of the father is something which has universal value, but simultaneously puts on you the charge to control if there is or not a father who fits this function. If there is no such father, it still remains true that the father is God; it is simply that this formula is confirmed only by the empty sector of the—of the square." So here Lacan reads this tension between particular existence and inexistent universality as of deep relevance to psychoanalysis. As Lacan puts it, you cannot be a good father. You know, father is always too much or too little. You try to assert... father is, again, an impossible. "Do you have a page reference for your quote?" "I do have but, haha, now I will make it easy for myself, haha, it’s not published. No, no, no, but I can give it to you. Do not some guys in Ireland publish the complete translation? All I can give you is the date. It’s *Identification*, The session is 17th of January "Identification is isn’t it?" "No, no, no, it must be something different because *Ethics* is *Transference* Yeah, yeah, sorry, it is. Because then comes *Anxiety*, no? Yeah, yeah. 17th of January Yes." Okay. So now you will say again, but what’s the point of all of this? Ah, now comes—I wouldn’t say an amusing part, but for me at least, philosophically, the most interesting part. I here rely, I must openly admit when I steal stuff from others, to my Slovene colleague party member Alenka Zupančič, who—who brought into circulation, as it were, an—a magnificent—I’m so mad at myself that I didn’t noticed it because of course I saw the movie five times—purely dialectical magnificent joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s *Ninotchka*. No, nothing to do with communism, Greta Garbo, sex, but there is a scene in that film where the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. And you know what the waiter answers? It’s wonderful. The waiter replies, "Sorry, but we have run out of cream. So can I bring you coffee without milk? Because we have milk, you know." So again, in both cases, either coffee without cream or coffee without milk, you get coffee alone. But this coffee, one, is each time accompanied by a different negation: coffee with no cream, coffee with no milk. And this has even, I claim, political meaning. For example, when East Europeans in they did not simply want democracy, they were cheated in the same way that this waiter tries to cheat. They were—they wanted democracy without communism, but they also wanted democracy without capitalism, and they got the wrong one. Okay, let’s go on. So what we encounter here is—it appears to be—the logic of differentiality, where the lack itself functions as a positive feature. Again, the paradox rendered nicely by an old Yugoslav joke about a Montenegrin—don’t be afraid, I will not repeat the twentieth time a joke how the Montenegro people masturbate, it’s a different one here—who are supposed to be lazy. The question is the joke: Why does a Montenegrin guy when he goes to sleep, why does he put at the side of his bed two glasses, one full and one empty, of water? Because he is too lazy to think in advance if he will be thirsty or not during the night. You see the paradox? Common sense tells you just put the glass there if you use it or not. But the differential logic tells you, no, also the non-being thirsty should be marked, should be there registered as an—as an empty—as an empty glass. That is to say, the second, the negative fact itself has to be taken note of. But now I come to the crucial point which will bring us to the key of sexual difference and so on for Lacan. Can this logic really be reduced to symbolic differentiality, you know, where differences matter, so the absence of something is also a positive feature? Is coffee without coffee? What basically the waiter is offering to the customer is coffee with without milk instead of coffee with without cream. They both want a kind of a coffee with a negative predicate, no? Justified by him: "I cannot give you coffee without cream because we have no cream, so I can only give you coffee with coffee with without milk because we have milk." Is this differentiality? It may appear so. In both cases, what we really get is exactly the same plain coffee. The difference resides only in the purely differential fact that the absence which defines coffee is first the absence of cream, then the absence of milk. Now what complicates the issue nonetheless is, I claim, the double negation at work in coffee with no milk. This coffee is not just with no milk, but also with—but also not with no cream. And this second negation, I claim, is not purely symbolic. It is coffee with milk which would have functioned differentially the same as coffee with no cream. And within this space, coffee with not with no cream is simply coffee with cream. Again, you get my point: if the relationships were to be purely differential then a double negation would bring us back to positivity: coffee not without—not without cream—doubly negated would have been simply coffee with cream. But no, coffee not without cream, in this case, is—coffee not without cream is coffee with—with no milk. So, this—I claim that this last opposition is not differential. Why? Because you must include the function of the object small a. That is to say, for this field to function, obviously the premise is that coffee cannot stand alone. Coffee is, even if you want coffee without milk, the empty place of a supplement of something to add is already there. You, in order for coffee to be attractive, you need something to fill in its lack, you know, like coffee with something, which makes it desirable. That would have been the object small a. And then the whole game is then a differential one: what will fill in this—what will fill in this excess. Which is why coffee without cream is not the same as straight coffee. Why not? Because you know, this—it's already mediated through negation. Or even now you will tell me, "But what if I really like just plain coffee?" I claim that if you analyze the semantic structure closely, you will see that coffee is already redoubled, that coffee functions as its own supplement. And this—there is nothing paradoxical about it. Let me evoke you a similar example to get the point. I used it in my first book, so I hope you are stupid old enough to forget it, or in *Looking Awry*, I don’t know where. You know that when Western got into crisis—Western the movies—from late 40s, what emerged were so-called meta-Westerns. They tried to supplement the Western dimension with another genre. For example, I don’t know, you know *Seven Brides for Seven Brothers*, whatever. It’s Western supplemented by musical. You have, for example, *Pursued* with Robert Mitchum and so on. It’s Western supplemented by film noir, and so on and so on. So again, they—they did so-called meta-Westerns: Westerns which inherently relied to another genre to fill in the non-satisfactory part, whatever. But then—I refer here to André Bazin—who had this idea at this very time where Western was already in crisis, there emerged two model Westerns: *Shane* and *High Noon*. And he claims no, these are not simply Westerns. These are Westerns where the meta-Western is Western itself. Westerns which relate to an otherness but this otherness is, again, the otherness of—the otherness of Western itself. So let me go on a little bit here. What I’m aiming at is the example that I used already, you know it all, years ago I was using it a lot, that of those stupid eggs, Kinder Surprise, no? And to say "I want coffee without milk" is just to say "I want that chocolate without the stupid plastic thing." But again, the structure is already that one. And what I’m saying is that this structure of a thing and its excess is not differential. It is differential to say "no milk," "yes," and so on and so on. What is not differential is this tension between a thing and a void in its core. A void which has to be supplemented by a figure of what Lacan calls object small a and so on and so on. Because again, what I'm claiming is that meta-Western is the same as when somebody offers you like "You don't need to add milk, sugar; this is already just plain best coffee." There again, self-reflexivity is already at—at—at work. So let me go on. So what has this to do with sexual difference, you will ask. Sexual difference precisely for Lacan is not differential. When Lacan privileges Phallus, this does not mean that sexual difference is structured along the axis of presence or absence of Phallus, like man has it, woman doesn’t have it. So of course you can read it in this way. And even now I will be really evil, paraphrase the famous Sherlock Holmes passage, you know, from *Silver Blaze*, I think. Do you remember "the curious accident of the dog," "but the dog did nothing," "that was the curious accident." The most famous lines of Sherlock Holmes. You can apply the same to the differential notion of sexual difference. "Is there any other point about seeing your sister naked to which you wish to draw my attention?" asks—if Sherlock Holmes is asked, Sherlock Holmes says "To the curious thing I noticed between her legs." "But there was nothing hanging out between her legs." "That was the curious thing," and so on, whatever. I mean, but—but I think this precisely is what Lacan doesn't want to say. The early Lacan till the 60s, yes, there one has to admit it, it’s simply a male-centered universe where the presence of or absence of Phallus in a differential way stands for sexual difference. But now, again, what Lacan does is something—is something different. His point is not to structure it in this way, but what? What is more in it? Ah, okay. Not to get too lost, let me go a step further. The crucial conclusion of Lacan from this asymmetry of excess and so on is again that the structure that I tried to isolate, that of an object one and its supplement—to put it in very speculative term, shortly, one is never one, one is always one and X, more than one but less than two, one and—and the object small a—that masculine and feminine position refer in a different way to this excess. How? Ah, now comes what I consider a little bit more interesting. The asymmetry between masculine and feminine for Lacan is that the masculine position is differential. That is to say, a differential relationship would have been where each sexual position is defined by its difference to the other: woman is not man, man is not woman. If somebody is not woman, he is man; if somebody is not man, she is a woman. But the way Lacan reads this non-all—not all of X is FX—is he introduces—and that's the beauty—the asymmetry among the sexes. That is to say, "no man" means woman; we men are stupid differential. If you are not a man, you are a woman. But if you are not a woman, you are not a man. That's the point of Lacan. If you are—that is to say, there is something of—and here is a beautiful quote which I think it’s really crucial from Lacan. This time is the—the seminar *Ou Pire* (Or Worse) from session May the 10th. "Since woman is non-all, why should all that is not woman be men?" You see that non-all of a woman means that if in a double negation you negate woman, you still get a woman. And that this—what again I will try to go—so for Lacan... and this, of course, this doesn’t mean there is some deep transsexual substance in woman and so on. That’s the beauty of it. It is still that there is—there is—there is nothing which is outside, which is not, but this spectral nothingness can be called the nothingness of the subject or whatever you want and so on and so on. So let me give you another line of thought here, a philosophical one, which will make this clear. We are dealing here with a negation of negation which again doesn’t bring you back to the first position. It’s not "You negate man, you get woman; you negate woman, you get man." No. Woman is much closer to negativity. Woman is its own negation. In the same way, ah, now you will say I’m crazy, I don’t care about it, what has this to do with progressive politics? I think—to give you a first hint—it is crucial to read class struggle like this. That is to say, a non-bourgeois is proletarian but a non-proletarian is not bourgeois. Marx says this. How? When he says—you must remember the details—that—that—that bourgeoisie is the only pure class in the history of humanity. Before bourgeoisie, capitalists, we have classes which are not yet fully classes. But working class is already a class which has to abolish itself as a class to assert itself. You see, you already have this double "no" in it. Okay, but—now let me go a little bit further to account for this stuff. You know Freud’s legendary example—everybody knows it—of a patient who told Freud when asked about "Who is this woman in your dream?" "I do not know who this woman in my dream is, but I am sure of one thing: this is not my mother." Of course, we all know, haha, like this simple logic, haha, why did you mention it, this precisely means that it is your mother. But I think that if we—if we read closely this example, things are much more paradoxical. "This is not my mother" means at two different level its exact opposite. First, again, it’s the obvious level of denial. In the patient’s unconscious, the figure is of course his mother. And denial is the price the patient has to pay to bring this maternal figure to consciousness. But this is not all. There is another level at which "This is not my mother" asserts the existence of mother. Because we know that in the Freudian space, mother stands for the impossible incestuous object and so on and so on. So, we can also say that "This is not my mother," it's not just a lie, you know, a lie in the sense of "It really is my mother but I don’t want to admit it that I was dreaming screwing my mother" whatever. It also can mean "Mother is impossible, inaccessible." Like the idea being: this miserable figure cannot be my mother. And now, here we come to this more complex paradoxes. I claim that the problem with denying "this is not my mother" asserts mother even too much, because it still implies that there is a mother but even if this woman in the dream is my mother, it cannot be that mother, the incestuous mother, whatever. So, the paradox here is that if we were to get, instead of this Freudian conservative patient, a more open permissive patient who would have said, "So what’s the problem? Okay, this is my mother, I wanted to screw my mother," for a strict Freudian the repression would have been even stronger here. Because saying "This is my mother" is a lie. It cannot be. This is the pervert illusion: that you can get—that you can get the object. So, again, negation operates here at two levels. First, there is the simple *verneinung*, denial. "This is not my mother." Then there is the other as the impossible real object of—of desire. Like, then you can say "Even if it is mother, it’s not yet mother." And again, the result should be here the double negation: not not mother, and so on. So, again, what does this mean for sexual difference? That it paradoxically precedes the two terms whose difference it is. Sexual difference is not—this would have been Lacan’s speculative formula—sexual difference is not a difference between two given positions. But sexual difference is the name of a deadlock, and two given positions are two attempts to deal with this—with to deal with this deadlock. Let me first give you here another example of this which maybe you know from my work but I think it fits perfectly here. You know, I spoke years ago a lot about this, about this Kantian distinction—no wonder Kant was the first, I think, to conceptualize sexual difference in his antinomies—Kantian distinction between infinite and—or indefinite and negative judgment. You know the story: negative judgment negates a predicate; infinite judgment asserts a non-predicate. Negative judgment, for example, if I am alive, negative—sorry, if I am—alive, negative judgment is "I am not dead." I negate a predicate, "dead." Infinite judgment is not "I am not dead," but "I am undead." And here you see what's the difference if you know Stephen King and so on, of course. "I am not dead," it's not—it's simply "I am alive." The space is here that of binary differential opposition. If I am not dead, I am alive; if I am alive, I am not dead. But if you say "I am undead," you open up a third infinite field of the living dead, undead, neither dead nor alive. And for Lacan, again, this is the structure—you know, woman is not "not man." Woman—you cannot say woman isn't man. Man isn't woman, that's okay. But with woman it's different. It's not "Woman isn't man." Woman is un-man or non-man. Which means a third domain beyond sexual difference is—is opened up. And incidentally I think exactly the same goes for proletariat which is un-bourgeoisie, like non-bourgeoisie, outside it. So, and incidentally if you know Alain Badiou’s work, I think that in the same—in exactly the same way one has to read his rejection of aesthetics. You know that he calls his writings about art "inaesthetics." He uses the term *Handbook of Inaesthetics*. I think it’s precisely "in" in this Kantian sense of the third domain in between. Now I come to my next point which for me at least is crucial: how is then this structure of pure antagonism—like that before difference there is one which doesn’t coincide with itself? Like, coffee is never purely coffee, it’s always coffee and X, an empty spot and so on. And I think everything originates from this. Like, I think that a name proper always aims at this place. You know, like a name is never—here I am for Kripke against Bertrand Russell and so on—a name is never just a name of a thing, is never just a combinatoire of the properties of the thing, like a shortened version of their properties. If you enumerate all the properties, you miss something. And name is the name for that something. Name is fundamentally tautological. At the same time, the name for the—the name for the—for the unnamable. But now comes—I want to interpret it more in detail, maybe you already know it—the absolute quote from Lacan. My favorite. I mean, literally at this moment if you ask me, give me a couple of lines from Lacan that you think they are absolute, this is it, I think. It is, if you want the references, again, unpublished text, from Seminar from *D’un Discours qui ne Serait pas du Semblant* (Of a Discourse That Would Not Be of Semblance). This one appeared incidentally in French at least, Éditions du Seuil page where Lacan tries to differentiate his position from that of nominalism. And I think this is a crucial philosophical debate because—because here Lacan is clearly against Althusser, against Michel Foucault and so on, who are basically nominalists for Lacan. Listen to it, I quote: "If there is something I am," says Lacan, "it is clear that I am not a nominalist. What I want to say is that my starting point is not that the name is something like a nameplate which attaches itself just like that onto the real. One has to choose: if one is a nominalist, one has to renounce completely dialectical materialism. So that all in all, I evidently reject the nominalist tradition which is effectively the only danger of idealism which can arise in a discourse like mine." What I like here—did you notice, and this is from when hardline Marxism was already out of fashion—how I love this, how for Lacan the main argument against nominalism is that it’s incompatible with dialectical materialism. Not so bad for Lacan, no? Okay, so it goes on: "The point is not to be a realist in the sense in which one was a realist in medieval times, in the sense of the realism of the universals. The point is to emphasize that our discourse, our scientific discourse, can only find the real insofar as it depends on the function of the semblant. The articulation, and I mean the algebraic articulation of the semblant and its effects—this is the only apparatus which enables us to designate what is real. What is real is what opens up a hole in this semblant, in this articulated semblant which is the scientific discourse," and so on and so on. Okay, what’s—what’s Lacan’s point here? I think it’s absolutely crucial. A) Lacan is not a nominalist. His point is not what actually exists are just particular or even individual cases and so on and so on. So he is not a nominalist. But of course he is not a naive realist in the sense of realism of the universals and so on and so on. There is something beyond singular semblances. But that something is the gap of the real impossibility and so on and so on. Again, please don’t kill me if I give you an example which I think I’ve written about it at least twenty times in my books. But nonetheless, you know that famous Lévi-Strauss example of—you take some stupid Native American village and you ask different members of the tribe to draw the disposition of the houses in the—in the village. And Lévi-Strauss noticed how if you ask two different groups, you get totally different description of the village. For one part of the tribe, the houses in the village are divided
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into two, one group the
into two, one group the
Slavoj Žižek
other group. For the other part of the tribe, you have—the two kinds of houses are not, like, delimited by a borderline, but are like center and around the center and the environs. And Lévi-Strauss’s point is what? It’s that—okay, you will say "What's the problem? Let's hire a helicopter and took a photoshoot of the village and we will see what is reality." Here comes the greatness of Lévi-Strauss, no, who says "No, the point is not this, the real is not this. It's not that we
other group. For the other part of the tribe, you have—the two kinds of houses are not, like, delimited by a borderline, but are like center and around the center and the environs. And Lévi-Strauss’s point is what? It’s that—okay, you will say "What's the problem? Let's hire a helicopter and took a photoshoot of the village and we will see what is reality." Here comes the greatness of Lévi-Strauss, no, who says "No, the point is not this, the real is not this. It's not that we
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have
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Slavoj Žižek
there reality, the way houses really are, and two misperceptions of the houses." Lévi-Strauss reads it in this way: that this, the antagonism here, is what? This village was on the edge of entering class distinction. It was struggling with a problem of social hierarchy. And these two dispositions, architectural dispositions, are two ways of how to materialize, of how to resolve this deadlock. In other words, the real to which obviously we have here semblances—each, we have semblance one, the way one half of the tribe draw the map of their village, we have semblance two—but the real is not simply the reality. The real is that X on account of which each member of the tribe falsified the disposition of villages. Because the disposition of villages was a pretext—why was—why is the disposition of the houses in the village falsified? Again, not because they were too stupid to draw the images, but because they through falsifying the disposition of houses in reality, they tried to resolve a deadlock. That deadlock is the real. You see, in this sense now I hope you get it: Lacan is not a nominalist. We don’t have only particulars. We don’t have only the reality of the—of how houses are in the village, then one drawing, the other drawing. No, we have something more: social antagonism, which nowhere exists—in this sense it's not nominalist—but you have to refer to it. And to give you even the last example—I know I repeated it five times but it's crucial that we get the logic right here—you remember that—I always mention it—Fredric Jameson’s critique of this, this concept I met with recently in—in Peru, sorry, in Bolivia, where I was a week ago, no, they didn’t like this, my ferocious attack on—on Alternate Modernity. Because unfortunately many of the people in Bolivia believe this
there reality, the way houses really are, and two misperceptions of the houses." Lévi-Strauss reads it in this way: that this, the antagonism here, is what? This village was on the edge of entering class distinction. It was struggling with a problem of social hierarchy. And these two dispositions, architectural dispositions, are two ways of how to materialize, of how to resolve this deadlock. In other words, the real to which obviously we have here semblances—each, we have semblance one, the way one half of the tribe draw the map of their village, we have semblance two—but the real is not simply the reality. The real is that X on account of which each member of the tribe falsified the disposition of villages. Because the disposition of villages was a pretext—why was—why is the disposition of the houses in the village falsified? Again, not because they were too stupid to draw the images, but because they through falsifying the disposition of houses in reality, they tried to resolve a deadlock. That deadlock is the real. You see, in this sense now I hope you get it: Lacan is not a nominalist. We don’t have only particulars. We don’t have only the reality of the—of how houses are in the village, then one drawing, the other drawing. No, we have something more: social antagonism, which nowhere exists—in this sense it's not nominalist—but you have to refer to it. And to give you even the last example—I know I repeated it five times but it's crucial that we get the logic right here—you remember that—I always mention it—Fredric Jameson’s critique of this, this concept I met with recently in—in Peru, sorry, in Bolivia, where I was a week ago, no, they didn’t like this, my ferocious attack on—on Alternate Modernity. Because unfortunately many of the people in Bolivia believe this
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bullshit, no, that like
bullshit, no, that like
Slavoj Žižek
we maybe have a unique possibility reviving some stupid ancient Inca traditions to build an alternate modernity, and so on and so on, no? So again, for Lacan, the real is the universal. In this sense, Lacan is a realist. That is to say, we cannot say simply there are multiple modernities. There are multiple modernities, yes, but they are all—exactly like, you know, when people say—adepts of multiple modernity—no, you cannot talk only about *a* modernity. This is your Western modernity, individualized exploitative capitalism. We can have Indian modernity, Latino-American modernity, Chinese modernity. Nonetheless I’m here on Fred Jameson’s side, who says: yes, we have multiple modernities, but they all relate to the same real, which is the antagonisms of global capitalism. Again, as you probably know and heard this ten times, the reason I’m opposed to Alternate Modernity is that we in Europe, we know very well what is alternate modernity. We had one big alternate modernity in the 20th century; it’s called Fascism, no? Fascism was precisely a dream of "We can have modernity but without Jewish corruption, class struggle, without all that." And that’s for me also the lie of historicism. When you say there is no general modernity, we should historicize and so on—yes, but the danger of historicizing is, as it is clear from concepts of alternate modernities, it is that you try to dismiss as a product of particular historical circumstances what is inscribed into a very universal notion of a phenomenon. For example, de facto, the problem with alternate modernities is that they think, to cut a long story short, that they can get capitalist modernism without paying the price for it, without antagonisms, and so on. No? So you see the point: why Lacan is not nominalist. We don't have only particulars. We don't have only the reality of the—of how houses are in the village, then one drawing, the other drawing. No, we have something more: social antagonism. Which nowhere exists—in this sense it's not nominalist—but you have to refer to it. Again, you got also my point, which is central here, that for a true Hegelian—and Lacan, he doesn't know it, is Hegelian here—the contradiction is not between particulars within a universal space. The contradiction is between particular and its universality. That is to say, to understand corporate-fascist capitalism, it’s not enough to say they fight liberals. No, they are an attempt to control the contradiction, antagonism inscribed into the very notion of capitalism. This is a wonderful Hegelian idea of how every particularity is in conflict with its own universality. Which is why Hegel—and again, which is why there is nothing of wisdom in Hegel. You know, wisdom is this position of particular elements fighting each other, with each other, but—but a wise man pulls back and sees it all. No, precisely this is what you—cannot do. Okay, still we have to go on. Yes, now we—covered this Lacan's nominalism and so on. Another way to—to get at this strange double negation where the result is not return to its origin is a certain type of jokes or rather paradoxes where you have a certain position, you negate it, it doesn’t work, you negate it again, and it gets even worse. Like, sorry if this will sound to you counter-revolutionary, but I love it. I read a book on the fall of Saigon, you know, the victory of—the victory of the—the defeat of Americans in Vietnam And I remember reading as an anecdote that after they took over, communist cadre propagandists were touring the city and asking, and forcing young people to see—gently but nonetheless obligatory—to see North pro-communist propaganda film, no? And the story went like this: they make you see the movie for two hours, then they ask you, "Did you like the film or not?" If you say "yes," they told you, "Oh, fine, so you can see it again if you like it." If you said "no," they said, "Ah, so you didn’t understand it, you have to see it again." But okay, you have a nicer structure of this same joke that I really like in an anecdote, I think I quoted it in my first book, from an—an editor in one of the William Randolph Hearst newspapers. Who was—for twenty years he didn’t take—holiday. And Hearst asked him, "Why don’t you take a rest, go to a holiday?" He said, "Well, I am afraid if—that if I take a holiday, you know, everything depends on me, everything will fall apart, and so on." No? And then Hearst answered, "Don’t worry, everything will be okay, everything will go on as if you are here." And the guy said, "That’s what I’m even more afraid of." You see here, I hope, a little bit, the—the logic. Now, we don't have time to go through all of it, because I wanted to do two more things here. First, Le Gaufey does something wonderful here. He applies this logic of exception to psychoanalytic clinic and claims that psychoanalytic clinic functions precisely in this way: that, you know, cases in psychoanalysis are never simply illustrations of a general proposition, that you have always this more dialectical movement of subversion and so on and so on. The second thing I want to conclude with is what I had mentioned already yesterday: that when Lacan came to this point—radical antagonism, sexual difference, and so on—I think this was his limit. And I think he failed here. In what precise sense? Okay, this antagonism, or rather the fact that the contradiction is here and here, not here, means we are beyond this Yin-Yang cosmology, sexual difference, and so on. So there is no sexual relationship. Now Lacan got entangled in a wonderful Hegelian problem. It may appear purely conceptual, but I think the consequences are crucial. Is it enough to say there is no sexual relationship, or generally there is no relationship, or should we make the move which I already made apropos of the undead and the move from the negation of the predicate to the assertion of the non-predicate? Is it enough to say there is a non-relationship, or sorry, that there isn't—there is no sexual relationship, or are we allowed to say *there is* a non-relationship? That is to say, there is an object which positively embodies non-relationship. Lacan knew that he has to make this step somehow, but he was aware of the dangers and it didn’t work. First, he—I think that of course the—the answer is obvious: that that Lacanian "there is no sexual relationship" is strictly correlative to object small a, to this excess which is, in a way, cause of desire which is the non-relationship embodied. The problem with Lacan was that he tried then to solve in his last years the problem with—the so-called Borromean knot. You know it’s the idea of Borromean knot: you have a knot of three circles, but in such a way that the two circles are never connected. Like, if you cut off one, the two others fall apart. And Lacan thought that here he has the ultimate metaphor. But look here from January ’79—I think this is pretty much towards the end, the very last of Lacan’s seminars—after over ten years of struggle, look how he concludes, quote: "The metaphor of the Borromean knot is, in its most simple state, inadequate. It abuses metaphor because there really is no thing which supports the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. What is essential in what I am saying is that there is no sexual relationship. That there is no sexual relationship because there is an imaginary, a symbolic, and the real—this is what I did not dare to say. But I nonetheless say it. It is evident that I was wrong. But I simply let myself slide—slide into it. This is disturbing, it is even more than annoying. It is even more annoying that it is not justified. This is how things look to me today, and this is what I confess to you. All right." That's Lacan's last words. And I think that we can clearly see in—in what sense it didn’t go. Again, Lacan was well aware that if you remain at this level of "there is no sexual relationship," you are in danger of falling again into yet another version of this, you know, oooh, this wisdom of, "oh reality is ultimately a primordial conflict, war, and so on." You need something more. But he—he went too far with this idea, I think, of Borromean knot. He went too far. This was not the formula. The—the idea was the right one. Namely, that "there is no sexual relationship" means precisely that in a way sexes are never two, that they are three. There is no relationship between the two means that two is always three. Or to put it in—I'm jumping very quickly now, I know—but to put it in Marxist terms simplified: class struggle, contrary to those who accuse me of—of binarism and so on, class struggle means precisely that the classes are never two. If the classes were to be two, there would have been a class struggle but in a purely formal way: I am here, you are there. Class struggle is precisely because two never appears as two. It is always more, and the struggle is for that more. So it's not that we have a pure class struggle which then gets blurred, you know, because there are also small bourgeois farmers, whatever. No, we only get class struggle because there are more than two. And again, the logic of this, Lacan didn't—I think Lacan broke down, he didn't get. Now if you allow me another ten minutes, hahaha, I will try to provide some kind of formula for this. I will do a very modest thing along the lines of my good friend Alain Badiou, who—did you read his text, Badiou's text in *I love Badiou*, in his—in the *New Left Review* on some features of contemporary French philosophy, which I love it? You know, it's a very modest text with the following thesis: Western philosophy has three consecutive stages, each higher than the other, no? Ancient Greek thought, German idealism, and French philosophy of the 20th century. And he is at the top of this last stage in this way, and Badiou is my best friend because, you know, my God, when I told him, "Are you aware what you are saying? Like that you are the top of the top?" he said, "What’s the problem? This is true." He simply didn’t get it, no? Ah no, we need this. No, I’m not making fun here. What I think is basically much more arrogant is to claim exactly the same which we are all in a way claiming. Let’s be serious: if you write a book criticizing other philosophers, are you de facto claiming that you know more than all of them? But today in our hypocritical time, we like to say, "Of course, I may be wrong." I totally agree with Chesterton who says, "How dare you say 'I may be wrong'? This is the greatest arrogance. Be at least honest and you write because you think you are right." It's a much more honest position. So again, in the same modest way—it’s nothing special, I just wanted to give you—which brings together Hegel and Lacan and solve, solve, very modest. Okay. Maybe I already mentioned it, but I would like to go quickly through it in another way. It’s, of course, quantum physics, Higgs field. But now I want to be honest here: I am crazy but not totally crazy. That is to say, I am not now engaged in some New Age stuff where Higgs field provides the formula for good sexual life or whatever, you know. And also, obvious thing: I am too stupid to judge the inherent scientific status of Higgs field. I am well aware that many scientists today think—because you know, you probably know that now Higgs field is reactualized again because all that CERN in Swiss lab stuff that they are doing is precisely—now we are slightly approaching the possibility of maybe detecting the Higgs particle, no? So I, first I must say, what I am doing here is depending on—simply, what can I do but an amateur s2—to accept what they, the scientists, present to me. And I’m just asking a very simple question: let’s accept that this holds. What are the ontological consequences? I think philosophers should be modest here. We cannot play that transcendental role of judging science. We philosophers have to risk—you know, like you commit yourself although you cannot guarantee for its truth to a certain scientific achievement. And incidentally here I cannot but agree with Badiou, I convinced him the last time I tried to convert him, we play these eternal battles that I met him, to my pro-Hegelianism, and I told him, and he accepted this. You know, Badiou’s idea of four—how do you call it—four truth events, truth domains, no? I told him, "But don’t you get it? This is German idealism." You know what are his truth domains? Science, politics, art, love. I told him: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. Kant: science. Kant’s problem is precisely as he says how to reconstruct philosophy based on modern science. Fichte is politics, the whole Fichtean problem is, you know, politics. Schelling is art. Schelling is I think maybe even the only philosopher in the history of philosophy who consciously poses art as a higher level of, okay, let’s call it knowledge, and Hegel, it can be clearly shown that Hegel’s model of all different matrices is love. Okay. So Higgs field. Why was I so fascinated when I was reading about Higgs field? Because precisely as a materialist I was fascinated, because I think it undermines the New Age appropriation of quantum void as the nothing-all. You know, often quantum physics is read in this way: "Oh, but ancient Hindu idiots, jerks, they are masturbating, whatever, they already knew this all," you know, like the—the—that there is a primordial void out of which everything comes and into which everything disappears and so on and so on. No, it’s not that. What quantum physics calls void, zero, is precisely not this Plotinian formless one or beyond one from which all comes, where all disappears and so on and so on. So what am I talking about? Again, some simple definitions, don’t be afraid, it’s Wikipedia style. The Higgs field controls whether forces and particles behave differently or not. When the Higgs field is switched on, operative, symmetries are broken between the elementary particles and their complex pattern of differences emerges. While when Higgs field is switched off, inoperative, forces and particles are indistinguishable from one another. That is to say, the system is in a state of vacuum. And this is why, now you can understand, particle scientists search so desperately for the hypothetical Higgs particle, sometimes referred to as the "God particle." Because this particle would have been, literally, the particle equivalent of what Lacan calls object small a: the cause of disturbing the symmetry of a vacuum, the X which breaks the symmetry and introduces differences. In short, nothing less than the cause of the passage from nothing, vacuum, the void of pure potentialities to something, actual different particles and forces. So, how is this miraculous particle thinkable in a materialist way? How can we avoid here the obscurantist idea of a mystical cause of all objects? Because you can see now why reactionaries get here a multiple orgasm: "Oh, you must admit that there is a particle which is like the divine intervention which basically makes something out of nothing, it’s the cause of the so-called break of the symmetry and so on and so on." All this—this would be my answer—all theological speculations, philosophical rather, focus on this point: at the very beginning or more precisely before the beginning, there is nothing, the void of pure potentiality, the will which wants nothing, the divine abyss prior to God, and this primordial peace balance is then inexplicably disturbed, lost. The material solution is here very precise. It concerns the key paradox of the Higgs field. As every field, Higgs field is characterized by its energy density and by its strength. However, it is energetically favorable for the Higgs field to be switched on and for the symmetries between particles and forces to be broken. What does this mean? We have, let’s say, the pure vacuum. The Higgs field is switched off, inoperative, we have the void, no differences, no symmetries broken. And then, of course, you would have said the Higgs field, in order to break the symmetry, has to spend some energy. Like, nothing comes for free. But here we come to the paradox. The paradox, to cut it very short, the paradox of the Higgs field is the following one: again, imagine the zero level, cosmic void, no symmetry broken, no particular entities emerging out of pure uniformality, and imagine spending zero energy on Higgs field. And this is now the absolute paradox. This is for me the best definition of materialism: there is a gap between the two. Literally, the presupposition of Higgs field is that something costs less than nothing. That is to say, if you want to be at the state of absolute peace, you, spending no energy—no, absolute peace, sorry, in the sense of no broken symmetry—you have already to spend some energy. The lowest point of energy is not when nothing happens. It's when in a minimal way something already—you know what I mean? If this is, for example, how much energy you spend and this is how much symmetry is broken. It's not like this: the more energy you spend, the more symmetry is broken. It's like this. So, physicists, based on this, distinguish between two vacuums: the false vacuum and the true vacuum. The false vacuum is ontologically even more a vacuum. The false vacuum is the state in which Higgs field is switched off. There is pure symmetry with no differentiated particles and so on and so on. But it's false because you need energy to sustain the zero. The true vacuum is already a little bit further, where you spend zero energy but there is already some disturbance, some what I yesterday—two days ago called *e pur si muove* and so on and so on. So why do I find this so attractive? Because the paradox, ontological paradox again is that I think that if you take this seriously, it undermines this very idea of some primordial abyss and so on where things are at the zero level and then you get into all theological problematic by what divine contingency something emerged out of nothing. No, if you read it in this way, something can be cheaper than nothing. The zero level of universe is not peace, primordial abyss and so on. That peace already costs something energetically, an effort and so on. And I claim that this gap, this minimal gap where a certain movement, circulation is cheaper than nothing—this would be the minimum ontological difference, I claim, of the Freudian drive. And I think the minimum idea of idealism is precisely that you can put two vacuums together, you know, in any form like primordial wisdom and so on. No, I think you always have a gap between the two vacuums. Or to put it in libidinal terms, Lacan’s point would have been here that drive is less than zero. It’s not that you have zero in the sense of total Nirvana. No, total Nirvana—to attain this, this would be the ultimate Lacanian anti-Buddhist argument—total Nirvana is not really total Nirvana, it already costs something energetically, an effort and so on. The breathtaking consequences of this: for example, the result you get here is that why is there, you know, this big shitty philosophical problem "Why is there something instead of nothing?" That it's a false problem. I mean, the true mystery is why is there nothing instead of something? You know, because like the problem is how to arrive at nothing. What exists is not more than nothing. What exists is less than nothing. Not even, you know, to get at... this is where, again, I cannot but conclude with a Jewish joke. Which I think is a totally correct one. But it's a well-known one, maybe I even repeated it here already. You know, synagogue, Jews gathering there to pray, blah, blah, whatever they are doing, horrible things there, and first a rich Rabbi says, "Oh dear God, I am nobody, I am not worthy of you, I am a nothing and so on." You know the story, no? Then a rich merchant comes, Jewish, and says, "Oh God, I am also nobody, I am nothing, unworthy of you, blah, blah." Then a poor Jew raises his head and says, "A poor Jew says, 'Oh dear God, I am also nothing and so on.'" And then, you know, one rich guy kicks the other: "But who is he? How does he dare to say that he is nothing?" This is the Hegelian/Lacanian, this is the correct lesson deeply. No, but I’m not kidding here. In Kabbalah, you also find this idea, deeply along these levels, that, you know, the beginning of creation is not something, that God first had to create nothing to withdraw and so again, I’m not playing that cheap game of, you know, "ooh the ancient, those Hindus who, so I was told, can do horrible things like can ejaculate inside, can move their penis so that they suck things and so on in, they already knew everything and so on." No, I’m talking just about this very elementary, deeply materialist moment: that there is a gap, a tension between two vacuums. There is a minimum of ontological movement which is even previous to void. Void is not first. I think, although this may appear materialist, but this idea of a primordial void out of which things emerge and not and so on—and you know who knew this in its own way? He really should be reread: Democritus. We don't have time to go into it, but check it up even if you do it like me on Wikipedia or whatever. You know—you know that wonderful notion of that Democritus' term for atoms is *den*, which is a total neologism, no? Because it doesn't exist, it's *med-en*, that's the original term. *Hen* is *en* is *hen*—all, no? But Democritus consciously puts the wrong cut. Okay. The only correct translation of this is basically less than zero. It’s not one. I mean, good history of philosophy will teach you how Aristotle and all the Diogenes Laërtius who write about Democritus already ontologized him. There, atoms become small ones which circulate in nothingness. Again, with Democritus, it's much more paradoxical. What do I mean by this? Nonetheless, I would like to give you a simple example, my God, what shitty movies I see because of my son. Did you see the new version of *Karate Kid* with... "Don’t blame your son!" "No, I blame you! You’re probably the type who goes to these shitty artie movies and you know—I hate artie movies. You know how you make artie movies? You have a good hardcore movie, people screw each other. Then you are an artist and just add between each sex scene ten minutes people just staring at each other, ooh how deep it becomes, you know." Okay, sorry. There is nonetheless a nice cheap Hollywood wisdom, but nonetheless. In the film, when the young American boy trained by this Chinese Kung Fu teacher who told him that he must learn to—to be inactive, to win the battle, that he asks the American boy, the teacher: "How can I win my fight if I only stand still?" And the teacher replies: "Being still is not the same as doing nothing." I mean, here again we have this idea. And I think we should not read this idea in the usual obscurantist way of the cliché about a wise ruler who knows how to play one against the other his subordinates so that they destroy each other, he does nothing but everything is at peace. No, I think that—that doing—there is a point when you do nothing precisely by doing something. Doing nothing already—doing nothing already—already costs... you know, it’s a little bit like if you permit me this, I know purely brutal illegal step towards individual even psychology. You believe—you should believe me, I know about this because if there ever was a person with all the nervous tics, it’s me, no? Like, if you really want to destroy me, it’s to tell me "Relax, just sit peacefully" and so on and so on. I would have to put an incredible effort into it. The only way for nervous jerks like me to get peace is to focus on some small gesture repetitively. And through, you know like doing something, no, the only way to approach nothing is to do something. If you want direct nothing, it’s an incredible effort, it’s doing much more. So again, this would be somehow my result that again, to resume: quantum physics, as you know, still is an enigma. And I tend to agree with those who—ontologically, I mean—to those who claim that all the versions that we get to resolve the enigma are precisely so many semblances trying to resolve the deadlock. You know, we have, for example, the—we have, for example, this David Bohm solution which is—he tries to state the classical image of presupposing some kind of retroactive causality and so on and so on. We have many-world interpretations, we have the spiritualist interpretations, and so on and so on. I think these are precisely, as with modernity or whatever, we still are not at the level to confront Bohr’s paradox. And I think that this is maybe the task today. The consequences are tremendous ontologically. I really think that we arrive that—if read properly—quantum physics is maybe the most materialist science there was. I think we should totally reject all that stuff—ooh, you know, mind creates reality, time runs backward, and all that stuff. No, no, no, things are much more precise in quantum physics. But again, what has to fall is A) the notion of consistent, fully existing reality. Reality must be rendered not-all, incomplete. And again, following the logic of Higgs field, this our most elementary ontological presupposition: that something is more than nothing, that as it were, things emerge out of some primordial void balance and so on, should be abandoned. That is to say that the zero level of reality is not void, but it’s neither nothing nor something, but some weird less-than-something, some... you know, the paradox would be maybe the following one: when Lacan talks about object small a—I use this two-three times in my books—I was always struck by the parallel between object small a and the status of, I think it’s photon, I’m so bluffing in physics, I don’t know. But I think photon has—is a particle which has this paradoxical property that, you know, with other particles you have a certain mass, gravity and then of course, if the particle is moving, this mass raises. The idea of a photon is that when it’s not moving, it has zero mass. You know—how to put it—it exists only as its own excess. It doesn't exist at zero, as zero level. Something which has no—it's not that you can... it's almost like comrade Stalin in his infinite genius came close to this when, you know, that old joke, when he was asked in I think, by a journalist, "Which deviation is worse: left-wing or right-wing deviation?" Stalin's answer: "They are both worse," you know, like with revisionists, they are not only bad, they are worse, no? Worse like with no standard, there is nobody who is bad, you begin with worse. And it's again the same with photons. You see this idea which maybe also comes close to the way Epicurus supplemented Democritus because *clinamen*, you know, where Epicurus, my God, Marx—I'm almost tempted to say the true young Marx that should be rehabilitated is not that stupid boring proto-Stalinist meditations about alienation from it's his thesis from too, about—he already focused on the difference, you know what's the title of Marx's doctoral thesis: *The Difference Between Democritean and Epicurean Atomism*. And there, the difference is precisely *clinamen*. The idea that atoms not only fall, but in a contingent way they deviate. And the step to be made here—Deleuze wrote some nice lines about it—is precisely that *clinamen* is original. Like photon, you don't have something which then is distorted, sidetracked. It's—this distortion, *clinamen*, taking—making a detour is primordial. Excess, things are always in excess with regard to themselves. Along these lines, I would like maybe to develop some things and so on and so on. Do I get a certain body language from you that maybe it's the time that I shut up or what? "No, there is another talk here at but... I don't know if you want to have time for questions. I mean, it's... I think he did make us work today, as you promised yesterday. No, you did, although, please, let me be serious here. All I can tell you is that I did speak, when I was in the United States, in the UK and so on, with some particle physicists just to be sure that it’s not total bullshit what I’m saying, you know what I mean? Just to be sure that what I’m—I told them, "I don’t want to teach you, I’m not that kind of philosopher who tells you 'No, no, you are making a mistake, I know better than you.'" And they at least... Beckett did say the whole thing much more laconically, the idea that "nothing is more real than nothing," but we could never accuse you of being laconic. Oh, but today my point is there is something more real than nothing. It's less than nothing, less than zero. Okay. All right. But still, I thought this was the most important exploration, rectification, since your own Plato fantasy, really, on sexual difference. Even a modest rectification of Lacan. And I have some questions, but I don’t know if I should let the audience go first. I have some Woody—oh you were there, that’s why all the Jewish jokes were about... I was wondering why they were about... okay, but no, I have—I don’t know if I should start with a question, are there questions? Do you have time to take a few questions? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder, you know, that going back to the formulas of sexuation and your rectification of Lacan but also the admission that you can easily say "man is not woman" it’s logical, but you cannot say "woman is not man" because there is always a domain beyond sexual difference. No, what you cannot say is that not-woman is man. That if you deny woman, you are back at man. I think there is an excess in woman. Okay, there is—the sexual difference is deeply asymmetrical. Which is, again, just to make it clear, which is why I think it’s not some kind of a primordial dualism. The original structure is precisely like that of coffee without milk. There are—there are no two sexes. There is one sex plus something, which is neither. Okay, would that lead you though to agree with something that I’ve heard you disagree with before, the idea that woman has access to some surplus *jouissance* that Lacan goes on about in Seminar Because simply because, you know, there is a domain beyond sexual difference, does that mean that the people on the feminine side of the formulas of sexuation, whether they are biologically men or women, have access to this surplus *jouissance* that in the past you said is Lacan’s sort of fantasy, it’s not really... ah, here things are much more tricky. First, I claim that it all depends how we read this. Even some Lacanians read it in, I think, a very dangerous obscurantist way. It goes like this: man is fully integrated into the symbolic order, while woman is not-all within the symbolic order. There is some terrifying, I don’t know, too strong *jouissance* and only women can get into it. No, I think as I repeated in my book all the time, that it’s absolutely crucial to take this into account: women have access not insofar as they are less within the symbolic order, but insofar as they are totally within it. In other words, I claim that this idea of a woman who, you know, has access to some secret excessive *jouissance* outside language, with the divine—this is the ultimate male fantasy. Yeah. This is the ultimate male fantasy. No, no, no, a woman... so again, but this then has many philosophical consequences. Because, for example, the reason I am for Descartes, philosophically, basically for *Cogito*, is I claim that if you, against this background, read Descartes closely, you can see that Cogito is feminine. Cogito? Yeah, I totally reject this idea that Cogito is coded as... no, first incidentally, first even at the most anecdotal level. Did you know that my God, Descartes is the first breakthrough of philosophy... because of Hypatia... yeah, I mean he was immensely popular, whatever this means, among women. Not only Queen Christina of Sweden, but all others and so on. There was a—they felt in it an immense emancipatory potential. Okay, you... yeah, okay... no, because you did mention this yesterday actually, you said because Descartes took into account that women are more suggestible or more hysterical... no, no, no, no, this is—this is the bad Descartes then, when he sexualizes it into "Cogito is pure thinking, but women are more..." and so on and so on. No, but you know what's my tendency here? One you should always remember that Descartes’ *Cogito* is at its core purely non-substantial point of excess of madness and so on and so on, no? That Descartes’ passage is—I agree with readers who claim that the passage in Descartes from *Cogito* to *res cogitans*, a thinking thing, is illegitimate. Descartes makes it automatically. No, but I think that there sexual difference is already described. That pure subjectivity is feminine. A male position is always already a substantialized, substantialized... you know what I did in some of my books? This you may consider crazy. I even claimed that what is usually taken as the ultimate anti-feminist argument, namely this Freudian link of femininity and masquerade... this is, I think, a correct insight. We should just really read it the way it is. What does it mean "femininity as masquerade"? It means all features you have are already secondary as a mask and so on. And the pure—yeah, this is precisely where women are much more—we men are stupid, we think we are substantially this and—only women can be pure subjects. Which is why, I don’t know if I repeated this here, in a weird French debate, I in a very strange way defended—but this is already now I think in this shitty book of mine, whatever—defended this problem in France of, how do you call it, burqa, burka, whatever, no? I claim that what shocked me, again, is not... this is another problem: are Islam women forced to do it or not? What shocked me is how French women—I even participated there in the debate, I saw French republican, Christian, whatever—they felt threatened by it. Like, a woman told me, a woman to be precise, Françoise Lévy, a journalist for *Le Point*, you know, the right-wing journal where Jacques-Alain Miller regularly publishes, no? She told me, "I feel threatened when I see a face covered with burqa. As if, as if I’m cut off, you know, like somebody doesn’t want to open herself to me or whatever. I feel like our public space is threatened and so on and so on." And I think in the first pages of my *Living in the End Times* book, I proposed the opposite reasoning: that the horror of burqa is the opposite one. Maybe you remember I mention, I think I even did it here, that well-known Alphonse Allais, I think, the French satirist’s version of Salome’s dance, you know? Salome dances, dances, seven veils, then she is naked, then the king shouts, "Go on, go on!" and she puts on her nose, her skin, and so on, like getting really naked. And I claim that phenomenologically, what makes woman with a burqa so horrible is not that it’s covered, but the our true phenomenological relationship to it. It is as if, you know—now I’m going to my softly anti-feminist waters—I remember reading a nice—seeing a nice male chauvinist caricature of a woman who comes home after a party and, you know, does this evening unmasking, you know, takes on the lipstick and so on—takes off, I mean, wipes it, but then it goes on: she takes off her ears, her eyes, and so on! And she goes to sleep just as an empty ball or whatever, no? But I claim that something like this almost happens in burqa when you have it. We are confronted there precisely the pure subject. It’s just an empty gaze, you know, because you don’t just get—if it were to be just a covered black ball, it’s nothing. The true horror is that it has a cut for the eye. That’s pure subject. I claim absolutely it’s the opposite. The reason we—because you know, this is the lesson of psychoanalysis, the anti-Levinasian lesson. You know who is Levinas, no? The... no, here I agree with my friend Woody—no, I’m joking, but Levinas is, you know, the Christian philosopher who masks himself as a Jew, no? I sincerely think Levinas is so popular because he is selling as Jewish wisdom this Christian moral bullshit about, you know, "love neighbor" and so on. What is so great in Judaism is that it's much more communist, my God. It's absolute—the way I understand Judaism, okay, I don't understand it, but the way I do is that it's exactly the primacy of the collective. When Levinas says first is the face of the other and then there are other others, only then... no, no, this is not Judaism, no. Again, so I think that precisely we should here stick to the radical lesson of psychoanalysis against Levinas. Face is not the authentic other. Face is originally primordial lying. Which is why, again, as I always repeat, in psychoanalysis, it's crucial that it's not face-to-face. You know, psychoanalytic treatment is not intersubjectivity. It's not "I am here with an analyst and we both sincerely talk" whatever. No, you are alone, the analyst is behind, doing, you know, masturbating, playing cards, whatever, no? It's crucial, this radical asymmetry. You are not two in psychoanalytic session. You are one plus more than one, less than zero, the object. And so on. And this—we don’t have time to go into it, but this is the greatness of Hegel. He knew it. This would have been my ultimate argument against the—this bourgeois-liberal, let’s call them anarco-recognition Hegelians. No. If you really read Hegel’s that famous passage—struggle to death between the future master and servant, blah, blah—you will see what’s Hegel’s problem there. That the other that you encounter, the self-consciousness encounters, it's not this kind of a "Oh, I recognize myself in you, we are equal." It's a kind of a monstrous, traumatic otherness. I mean, you are—I am here, and I see objects. I am of course the center of my world, point of absolute subjectivity. And then there is another stupid object who claims "But I am also like you, universal," and so on. It's absolutely incompatible, this. The other is primordially not the other in whom I can recognize myself, but is this ontological paradox of another absolute, as it were, no? So again, here I think that we should—Lacan was totally right, even in a Hegelian way, that intersubjectivity is not the ultimate—is not the ultimate horizon, no? Okay, okay, I talk too much. Okay. Woody? Yeah. Here and then... here and then... I have two—two short points... not even questions, I don’t deserve a question. It’s kind of a question... don’t start. One I think about the—the way of reading of Lacan confessing "I was wrong." Yeah. It’s a little bit naive to really read it as "he was wrong." Really what he’s doing is to commit suicide of the master. It’s exactly like when Zarathustra said, "Leave me, betray me, because maybe always I lie to you." So it’s kind of the lesson of the Master from *Totem and Taboo*: instead of let the other people to kill him, he commit a suicide and then he become unalive and he become alive forever. I would always say it’s like Gaddafi that said "You cannot fire me because always I was no one." Yeah. So this is really his trick. Exactly. Nice. Gaddafi’s like the Jewish Rabbi or what? No, he’s like, you know, Lacan, he’s not like the Jew. And the other one is about the—the origin of modernity that you said that "Oh, the alternative..." If the modernity—if we spoke that the semblants are the one who create the real, yeah, so we have to say that all this multiplicity is the one who create this modernity that is the global—is the global capitalism. And then it’s created back to all those multiplicity around. It’s not that they are all wrong and there is one true modernity. No, if the modernity is kind of the real, all those semblants around like Al-Qaeda, whatever, they create the modernity—like communism, Al-Qaeda, fascism, all of them together. Zionism? Zionism definitely. And then this one create them back reflexively. Yeah, but it’s not that this is the true... that Strauss was wrong that things—the deadlock is the one that create all the semblants. Really all those perceptions are the one who create the deadlock. And then it created back in the... this is... can I nonetheless very briefly answer now because I will forget. But nonetheless, I think that—I think that nonetheless in this circular relation, antagonism has a priority. I claim. But for philosophical reasons I cannot go into them now. Of course, the—the real-time causality is circular. But what I like is precisely this idea, which is for me the very core of dialectical idea: that you don’t have entities which then enter into contradictory, conflicting relations. It’s that contradiction comes first. Entities obfuscate contradiction. You know why is there asymmetry? I will give you maybe another example: take political left or right. It’s not enough to say we have a political space which is then divided into left and right. But if you ask a leftist and how the whole political space is structured, you will get a different image than from the rightist. So, you see in this sense for me antagonism comes first. Because the only way you can account for these particular modernities is that they already react to some trauma of let's call it antagonism. As to what you said there about Lacan, yeah, in a way I agree. But here I must confess to you quite sincerely, I am extremely naive here. I don't care about that stupid annoying old man, egotist, impossible to live with, called Lacan. You know what I mean? I take very naively what he said. And it may function—it may function as you said. But it is—and sorry for this naivete—but in a way it is still true. Fuck Lacan, he was talking about certain topic, about certain problems, he didn't solve them. He didn't solve them. Which is why as I already mentioned it's important not to mystify the last Lacan, not to go into this "was there some final secret" and so on and so on. I mean, you know what I mean? Probably Lacan was a great self-performer. So, of course it was this element, no? And I totally agree with you: this is a nice reading that suicide is—suicide is one way to control your destiny, to prevent your pupils... I mean every honest master own—owes to his pupils the fundamental right that in one way or another they kill him, no? And the truly oppressive masters try to take even this from them. But nonetheless, I was very naive here and I focused on the topic. Lacan was in a deadlock, he didn't solve it, and in a quite naive way I'm claiming we can think further. It's not that Lacan reached some ultimate limit and now, as Miller sometimes claims, and now we cannot go further, no. mm-hm. mm-hm. The guy before? Ah, yes. The guy in front. Okay. I want to recover something you said in the beginning today... about how in some way sex spills and contaminates all spheres of life. But then on the—on the other hand, you also say in some place that this is precisely what Freud criticized, this pansexualism, and what Freud was trying to say was precisely that: what needs to be enacted, what kind of fantasies need to be enacted in order for people to have sex? Or in other words, what—what are you thinking about when you are having sex? And my speculation, I mean, I don't know if I'm right but: can we say that in some way when the sex ends up contaminating all other spheres of life, we are dealing with some kind of *jouissance* that comes from the real, and on the opposite when we are talking about what people are thinking when they are having sex, we are talking about the symbolic and the all the fantasies that need needed to be enacted? Is that a correct way of—of putting it? No, it's a crucial question, I think things are very complex here, there is no simple direct answer. But again, you remember I agree with you that Freud was absolutely against this kind of pansexualism. His idea is not if you look deeply behind everything there is sex—like you know this primitive idea of I don't know whatever I—when I—when I whatever I do, ultimately it’s a way of doing that—seducing women or men or whatever. But for me again, the—the—the point would be the unity of the two. That is to say sex has to spill over into anything precisely because it cannot stand on its own. It's not too strong. It's—it's too weak. Again, I agree with your example because—the one I gave which is basically a version of that wonderful example by Lévi-Strauss where he says that there was one tribe in North America I think who—which had the theory that all dreams have sexual meaning, all dreams except explicitly sexual dreams, no? That they—they don’t have, no? That—and again, I agree with you if this was your point—I've written about it that—the true question of sexuality is not this cheap pansexual idea "Whatever I am doing, I am really in a metaphorical way doing that." No, the problem is not that whatever I am doing I am thinking about that. The problem is: but what am I thinking when I *am* doing that sex? No? And then there I have to go out. Sex cannot sustain itself. And I mean this quite—quite literally. I think—to be sorry, vulgar—when you make love, you cannot simply think about how happy I am now in this moment just making love. When you do this, even if you dream about this, why are you laughing? You—you must be perverted, but with you maybe it's possible, never know. We—maybe this is the last secret of the protocols of Zion, you know? Sorry, sorry. But what I want to say is that even if you just think about this, how happy I am now, okay, to be vulgar screwing that lady blah-blah, you will see that at the minimum point you already imagine somebody watching you. An imagined gaze or whatever, a phantasmatic scene, a phantasmatic scene must be here. So again, as to that what you mentioned that *phallic jouissance* and so on. Also you ask me "why," I didn't want to go into that. I think that my God we are into so many paradoxes here. Lacan makes it absolutely clear that *jouissance féminine* doesn't exist. It is operative, but doesn't exist. Because read really closely—people miss this—his Seminar No, *phallic*, the—this *jouissance féminine*. He almost every time that he mentions it, he says, "if there is another *jouissance*, not *phallic*," and then he adds in the—in brackets: "but of course there isn't another one," and so on. So it's the clear example of this, you know, it doesn't exist but it still can be efficient. "It can be operative." Yeah, yeah. This is again what I meant the first day—so I wasn't totally bluffing—with that *e pur si muove*. That we should not read it as this primitive empiricism, "oh your shitty theories" *e pur si muove*. No, something can be proven non-existent but still *e pur si muove*. "But there’s a sort of whole feminist ideology revolved, like feminist-Lacanian ideology revolved precisely on the fantasy that there is a surplus jouissance, and it sort of propagates itself." "Yeah, yeah, but again, can't—don't they see that in this way—I mean it quite literally—you prepare a new form of feminine enslavement? Because you never get there." I mean I tried to convince them there—I wasn’t quite successful partially in Bolivia where my point was precisely that—just don’t bring me all those Inca where women had a role, of course they had a role. They had a role to lay beneath, no I mean—you know what I mean? Like, I claim the only space of freedom is this Cartesian space of empty subjectivity and so on. All modernity—sorry, all pre-modernity where they apparently celebrate women, look at it closely—you know my standard paradoxes—it's like "Yeah, I know there is some shitty tribe in New Zealand where woman is sacred and the central temple in the village has the shape of a vagina." I agree. There is one problem: women are of course prohibited to enter. This is the most dangerous thing I think today, even as with racism. You know I’m just telling my old story that today’s form of racism is typical, is something like, "Oh those apparent primitives they are really much wiser than us. They—let’s not integrate them into our society, in this way they would lose their authentic wisdom or whatever of the world." No, I like natives who want to be more corrupted than ourselves. I like to tell you an anecdote—I don’t know I mention it—which happened to me with Woody. You in New York, when there were some Palestinians who gave me a wonderful example of racism. They were there invited by some shitty college to perform, and they were offered hummus, hummus there. You know, as a sign of respect "we will give you your food," no? And they told us, "Fuck you, we came here to be corrupted with greasy hamburgers and so on. We get enough of that shitty hummus." I mean, I—I—I think that the—the nastiest arrogance is that when you deplore when—some unicorns have one horn, this means they must exist. And Lacan takes this absolutely literally: that universality does not imply existence. Now you will say, "Okay, so what’s the big deal?" Ah, Lacan gives here a very—this is the *King’s Speech* problem, no—that imagine instead of universality a universal title that you have, like "I am a father" or whatever. And Lacan’s point is that we have the symbolic function of the father, but it doesn’t exist. Nobody can be a father. You cannot—let me give you, okay, an a nice short quote from Lacan’s seminar *Identification* from January I quote: "The order of the function which we introduce here as that of the name of the father is something which has universal value, but simultaneously puts on you the charge to control if there is or not a father who fits this function. If there is no such father, it still remains true that the father is God; it is simply that this formula is confirmed only by the empty sector of the—of the square." So here Lacan reads this tension between particular existence and inexistent universality as of deep relevance to psychoanalysis. As Lacan puts it, you cannot be a good father. You know, father is always too much or too little. You try to assert... father is, again, an impossible. "Do you have a page reference for your quote?" "I do have but, haha, now I will make it easy for myself, haha, it’s not published. No, no, no, but I can give it to you. Do not some guys in Ireland publish the complete translation? All I can give you is the date. It’s *Identification*, The session is 17th of January "Identification is isn’t it?" "No, no, no, it must be something different because *Ethics* is *Transference* Yeah, yeah, sorry, it is. Because then comes *Anxiety*, no? Yeah, yeah. 17th of January Yes." Okay. So now you will say again, but what’s the point of all of this? Ah, now comes—I wouldn’t say an amusing part, but for me at least, philosophically, the most interesting part. I here rely, I must openly admit when I steal stuff from others, to my Slovene colleague party member Alenka Zupančič, who—who brought into circulation, as it were, an—a magnificent—I’m so mad at myself that I didn’t noticed it because of course I saw the movie five times—purely dialectical magnificent joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s *Ninotchka*. No, nothing to do with communism, Greta Garbo, sex, but there is a scene in that film where the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. And you know what the waiter answers? It’s wonderful. The waiter replies, "Sorry, but we have run out of cream. So can I bring you coffee without milk? Because we have milk, you know." So again, in both cases, either coffee without cream or coffee without milk, you get coffee alone. But this coffee, one, is each time accompanied by a different negation: coffee with no cream, coffee with no milk. And this has even, I claim, political meaning. For example, when East Europeans in they did not simply want democracy, they were cheated in the same way that this waiter tries to cheat. They were—they wanted democracy without communism, but they also wanted democracy without capitalism, no? And like they got the wrong one. Okay, let’s go on. So what we encounter here is—it appears to be—the logic of differentiality, where the lack itself functions as a positive feature. Again, the paradox rendered nicely by an old Yugoslav joke about a Montenegrin—don’t be afraid, I will not repeat the twentieth time a joke how the Montenegro people masturbate, it’s a different one here—who are supposed to be lazy. The question is the joke: Why does a Montenegrin guy when he goes to sleep, why does he put at the side of his bed two glasses, one full and one empty, of water? Because he is too lazy to think in advance if he will be thirsty or not during the night. You see the paradox? Common sense tells you just put the glass there if you use it or not. But the differential logic tells you, no, also the non-being thirsty should be marked, should be there registered as an—as an empty—as an empty glass. That is to say, the second, the negative fact itself has to be taken note of. But now I come to the crucial point which will bring us to the key of sexual difference and so on for Lacan. Can this logic really be reduced to symbolic differentiality, you know, where differences matter, so the absence of something is also a positive feature? Is coffee without coffee? What basically the waiter is offering to the customer is coffee with without milk instead of coffee with without cream. They both want a kind of a coffee with a negative predicate, no? Justified by him: "I cannot give you coffee without cream because we have no cream, so I can only give you coffee with coffee with without milk because we have milk." Is this differentiality? It may appear so. In both cases, what we really get is exactly the same plain coffee. The difference resides only in the purely differential fact that the absence which defines coffee is first the absence of cream, then the absence of milk. Now what complicates the issue nonetheless is, I claim, the double negation at work in coffee with no milk. This coffee is not just with no milk, but also with—but also not with no cream. And this second negation, I claim, is not purely symbolic. It is coffee with milk which would have functioned differentially the same as coffee with no cream. And within this space, coffee with not with no cream is simply coffee with cream. Again, you get my point: if the relationships were to be purely differential then a double negation would bring us back to positivity: coffee not without—not without cream—doubly negated would have been simply coffee with cream. But no, coffee not without cream, in this case, is—coffee not without cream is coffee with—with no milk. So, this—I claim that this last opposition is not differential. Why? Because you must include the function of the object small a. That is to say, for this field to function, obviously the premise is that coffee cannot stand alone. Coffee is, even if you want coffee without milk, the empty place of a supplement of something to add is already there. You, in order for coffee to be attractive, you need something to fill in its lack, you know, like coffee with something, which makes it desirable. That would have been the object small a. And then the whole game is then a differential one: what will fill in this—what will fill in this excess. Which is why coffee without cream is not the same as straight coffee. Why not? Because you know, this—it's already mediated through negation. Or even now you will tell me, "But what if I really like just plain coffee?" I claim that if you analyze the semantic structure closely, you will see that coffee is already redoubled, that coffee functions as its own supplement. And this—there is nothing paradoxical about it. Let me evoke you a similar example to get the point. I used it in my first book, so I hope you are stupid old enough to forget it, or in *Looking Awry*, I don’t know where. You know that when Western got into crisis—Western the movies—from late 40s, what emerged were so-called meta-Westerns. They tried to supplement the Western dimension with another genre. For example, I don’t know, you know *Seven Brides for Seven Brothers*, whatever. It’s Western supplemented by musical. You have, for example, *Pursued* with Robert Mitchum and so on. It’s Western supplemented by film noir, and so on and so on. So again, they—they did so-called meta-Westerns: Westerns which inherently relied to another genre to fill in the non-satisfactory part, whatever. But then—I refer here to André Bazin—who had this idea at this very time where Western was already in crisis, there emerged two model Westerns: *Shane* and *High Noon*. And he claims no, these are not simply Westerns. These are Westerns where the meta-Western is Western itself. Westerns which relate to an otherness but this otherness is, again, the otherness of—the otherness of Western itself. So let me go on a little bit here. What I’m aiming at is the example that I used already, you know it all, years ago I was using it a lot, that of those stupid eggs, Kinder Surprise, no? And to say "I want coffee without milk" is just to say "I want that chocolate without the stupid plastic thing." But again, the structure is already that one. And what I’m saying is that this structure of a thing and its excess is not differential. It is differential to say "no milk," "yes," and so on and so on. What is not differential is this tension between a thing and a void in its core. A void which has to be supplemented by a figure of what Lacan calls object small a and so on and so on. Because again, what I'm claiming is that meta-Western is the same as when somebody offers you like "You don't need to add milk, sugar; this is already just plain best coffee." There again, self-reflexivity is already at—at—at work. So let me go on. So what has this to do with sexual difference, you will ask. Sexual difference precisely for Lacan is not differential. When Lacan privileges Phallus, this does not mean that sexual difference is structured along the axis of presence or absence of Phallus, like man has it, woman doesn’t have it. So of course you can read it in this way. And even now I will be really evil, paraphrase the famous Sherlock Holmes passage, you know, from *Silver Blaze*, I think. Do you remember "the curious accident of the dog," "but the dog did nothing," "that was the curious accident." The most famous lines of Sherlock Holmes. You can apply the same to the differential notion of sexual difference. "Is there any other point about seeing your sister naked to which you wish to draw my attention?" asks—if Sherlock Holmes is asked, Sherlock Holmes says "To the curious thing I noticed between her legs." "But there was nothing hanging out between her legs." "That was the curious thing," and so on, whatever. I mean, but—but I think this precisely is what Lacan doesn't want to say. The early Lacan till the 60s, yes, there one has to admit it, it’s simply a male-centered universe where the presence of or absence of Phallus in a differential way stands for sexual difference. But now, again, what Lacan does is something—is something different. His point is not to structure it in this way, but what? What is more in it? Ah, okay. Not to get too lost, let me go a step further. The crucial conclusion of Lacan from this asymmetry of excess and so on is again that the structure that I tried to isolate, that of an object one and its supplement—to put it in very speculative term, shortly, one is never one, one is always one and X, more than one but less than two, one and—and the object small a—that masculine and feminine position refer in a different way to this excess. How? Ah, now comes what I consider a little bit more interesting. The asymmetry between masculine and feminine for Lacan is that the masculine position is differential. That is to say, a differential relationship would have been where each sexual position is defined by its difference to the other: woman is not man, man is not woman. If somebody is not woman, he is man; if somebody is not man, she is a woman. But the way Lacan reads this non-all—not all of X is FX—is he introduces—and that's the beauty—the asymmetry among the sexes. That is to say, "no man" means woman; we men are stupid differential. If you are not a man, you are a woman. But if you are not a woman, you are not a man. That's the point of Lacan. If you are—that is to say, there is something of—and here is a beautiful quote which I think it’s really crucial from Lacan. This time is the—the seminar *Ou Pire* (Or Worse) from session May the 10th. "Since woman is non-all, why should all that is not woman be men?" You see that non-all of a woman means that if in a double negation you negate woman, you still get a woman. And that this—what again I will try to go—so for Lacan... and this, of course, this doesn’t mean there is some deep transsexual substance in woman and so on. That’s the beauty of it. It is still that there is—there is—there is nothing which is outside, which is not, but this spectral nothingness can be called the nothingness of the subject or whatever you want and so on and so on. So let me give you another line of thought here, a philosophical one, which will make this clear. We are dealing here with a negation of negation which again doesn’t bring you back to the first position. It’s not "You negate man, you get woman; you negate woman, you get man." No. Woman is much closer to negativity. Woman is its own negation. In the same way, ah, now you will say I’m crazy, I don’t care about it, what has this to do with progressive politics? I think—to give you a first hint—it is crucial to read class struggle like this. That is to say, a non-bourgeois is proletarian but a non-proletarian is not bourgeois. Marx says this. How? When he says—you must remember the details—that—that—that bourgeoisie is the only pure class in the history of humanity. Before bourgeoisie, capitalists, we have classes which are not yet fully classes. But working class is already a class which has to abolish itself as a class to assert itself. You see, you already have this double "no" in it. Okay, but—now let me go a little bit further to account for
we maybe have a unique possibility reviving some stupid ancient Inca traditions to build an alternate modernity, and so on and so on, no? So again, for Lacan, the real is the universal. In this sense, Lacan is a realist. That is to say, we cannot say simply there are multiple modernities. There are multiple modernities, yes, but they are all—exactly like, you know, when people say—adepts of multiple modernity—no, you cannot talk only about *a* modernity. This is your Western modernity, individualized exploitative capitalism. We can have Indian modernity, Latino-American modernity, Chinese modernity. Nonetheless I’m here on Fred Jameson’s side, who says: yes, we have multiple modernities, but they all relate to the same real, which is the antagonisms of global capitalism. Again, as you probably know and heard this ten times, the reason I’m opposed to Alternate Modernity is that we in Europe, we know very well what is alternate modernity. We had one big alternate modernity in the 20th century; it’s called Fascism, no? Fascism was precisely a dream of "We can have modernity but without Jewish corruption, class struggle, without all that." And that’s for me also the lie of historicism. When you say there is no general modernity, we should historicize and so on—yes, but the danger of historicizing is, as it is clear from concepts of alternate modernities, it is that you try to dismiss as a product of particular historical circumstances what is inscribed into a very universal notion of a phenomenon. For example, de facto, the problem with alternate modernities is that they think, to cut a long story short, that they can get capitalist modernism without paying the price for it, without antagonisms, and so on. No? So you see the point: why Lacan is not nominalist. We don't have only particulars. We don't have only the reality of the—of how houses are in the village, then one drawing, the other drawing. No, we have something more: social antagonism. Which nowhere exists—in this sense it's not nominalist—but you have to refer to it. Again, you got also my point, which is central here, that for a true Hegelian—and Lacan, he doesn't know it, is Hegelian here—the contradiction is not between particulars within a universal space. The contradiction is between particular and its universality. That is to say, to understand corporate-fascist capitalism, it’s not enough to say they fight liberals. No, they are an attempt to control the contradiction, antagonism inscribed into the very notion of capitalism. This is a wonderful Hegelian idea of how every particularity is in conflict with its own universality. Which is why Hegel—and again, which is why there is nothing of wisdom in Hegel. You know, wisdom is this position of particular elements fighting each other, with each other, but—but a wise man pulls back and sees it all. No, precisely this is what you—cannot do. Okay, still we have to go on. Yes, now we—covered this Lacan's nominalism and so on. Another way to—to get at this strange double negation where the result is not return to its origin is a certain type of jokes or rather paradoxes where you have a certain position, you negate it, it doesn’t work, you negate it again, and it gets even worse. Like, sorry if this will sound to you counter-revolutionary, but I love it. I read a book on the fall of Saigon, you know, the victory of—the victory of the—the defeat of Americans in Vietnam And I remember reading as an anecdote that after they took over, communist cadre propagandists were touring the city and asking, and forcing young people to see—gently but nonetheless obligatory—to see North pro-communist propaganda film, no? And the story went like this: they make you see the movie for two hours, then they ask you, "Did you like the film or not?" If you say "yes," they told you, "Oh, fine, so you can see it again if you like it." If you said "no," they said, "Ah, so you didn’t understand it, you have to see it again." But okay, you have a nicer structure of this same joke that I really like in an anecdote, I think I quoted it in my first book, from an—an editor in one of the William Randolph Hearst newspapers. Who was—for twenty years he didn’t take—holiday. And Hearst asked him, "Why don’t you take a rest, go to a holiday?" He said, "Well, I am afraid if—that if I take a holiday, you know, everything depends on me, everything will fall apart, and so on." No? And then Hearst answered, "Don’t worry, everything will be okay, everything will go on as if you are here." And the guy said, "That’s what I’m even more afraid of." You see here, I hope, a little bit, the—the logic. Now, we don't have time to go through all of it, because I wanted to do two more things here. First, Le Gaufey does something wonderful here. He applies this logic of exception to psychoanalytic clinic and claims that psychoanalytic clinic functions precisely in this way: that, you know, cases in psychoanalysis are never simply illustrations of a general proposition, that you have always this more dialectical movement of subversion and so on and so on. The second thing I want to conclude with is what I had mentioned already yesterday: that when Lacan came to this point—radical antagonism, sexual difference, and so on—I think this was his limit. And I think he failed here. In what precise sense? Okay, this antagonism, or rather the fact that the contradiction is here and here, not here, means we are beyond this Yin-Yang cosmology, sexual difference, and so on. So there is no sexual relationship. Now Lacan got entangled in a wonderful Hegelian problem. It may appear purely conceptual, but I think the consequences are crucial. Is it enough to say there is no sexual relationship, or generally there is no relationship, or should we make the move which I already made apropos of the undead and the move from the negation of the predicate to the assertion of the non-predicate? Is it enough to say there is a non-relationship, or sorry, that there isn't—there is no sexual relationship, or are we allowed to say *there is* a non-relationship? That is to say, there is an object which positively embodies non-relationship. Lacan knew that he has to make this step somehow, but he was aware of the dangers and it didn’t work. First, he—I think that of course the—the answer is obvious: that that Lacanian "there is no sexual relationship" is strictly correlative to object small a, to this excess which is, in a way, cause of desire which is the non-relationship embodied. The problem with Lacan was that he tried then to solve in his last years the problem with—the so-called Borromean knot. You know it’s the idea of Borromean knot: you have a knot of three circles, but in such a way that the two circles are never connected. Like, if you cut off one, the two others fall apart. And Lacan thought that here he has the ultimate metaphor. But look here from January ’79—I think this is pretty much towards the end, the very last of Lacan’s seminars—after over ten years of struggle, look how he concludes, quote: "The metaphor of the Borromean knot is, in its most simple state, inadequate. It abuses metaphor because there really is no thing which supports the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. What is essential in what I am saying is that there is no sexual relationship. That there is no sexual relationship because there is an imaginary, a symbolic, and the real—this is what I did not dare to say. But I nonetheless say it. It is evident that I was wrong. But I simply let myself slide—slide into it. This is disturbing, it is even more than annoying. It is even more annoying that it is not justified. This is how things look to me today, and this is what I confess to you. All right." That's Lacan's last words. And I think that we can clearly see in—in what sense it didn’t go. Again, Lacan was well aware that if you remain at this level of "there is no sexual relationship," you are in danger of falling again into yet another version of this, you know, oooh, this wisdom of, "oh reality is ultimately a primordial conflict, war, and so on." You need something more. But he—he went too far with this idea, I think, of Borromean knot. He went too far. This was not the formula. The—the idea was the right one. Namely, that "there is no sexual relationship" means precisely that in a way sexes are never two, that they are three. There is no relationship between the two means that two is always three. Or to put it in—I'm jumping very quickly now, I know—but to put it in Marxist terms simplified: class struggle, contrary to those who accuse me of—of binarism and so on, class struggle means precisely that the classes are never two. If the classes were to be two, there would have been a class struggle but in a purely formal way: I am here, you are there. Class struggle is precisely because two never appears as two. It is always more, and the struggle is for that more. So it's not that we have a pure class struggle which then gets blurred, you know, because there are also small bourgeois farmers, whatever. No, we only get class struggle because there are more than two. And again, the logic of this, Lacan didn't—I think Lacan broke down, he didn't get. Now if you allow me another ten minutes, hahaha, I will try to provide some kind of formula for this. I will do a very modest thing along the lines of my good friend Alain Badiou, who—did you read his text, Badiou's text in *I love Badiou*, in his—in the *New Left Review* on some features of contemporary French philosophy, which I love it? You know, it's a very modest text with the following thesis: Western philosophy has three consecutive stages, each higher than the other, no? Ancient Greek thought, German idealism, and French philosophy of the 20th century. And he is at the top of this last stage in this way, and Badiou is my best friend because, you know, my God, when I told him, "Are you aware what you are saying? Like that you are the top of the top?" he said, "What’s the problem? This is true." He simply didn’t get it, no? Ah no, we need this. No, I’m not making fun here. What I think is basically much more arrogant is to claim exactly the same which we are all in a way claiming. Let’s be serious: if you write a book criticizing other philosophers, are you de facto claiming that you know more than all of them? But today in our hypocritical time, we like to say, "Of course, I may be wrong." I totally agree with Chesterton who says, "How dare you say 'I may be wrong'? This is the greatest arrogance. Be at least honest and you write because you think you are right." It's a much more honest position. So again, in the same modest way—it’s nothing special, I just wanted to give you—which brings together Hegel and Lacan and solve, solve, very modest. Okay. Maybe I already mentioned it, but I would like to go quickly through it in another way. It’s, of course, quantum physics, Higgs field. But now I want to be honest here: I am crazy but not totally crazy. That is to say, I am not now engaged in some New Age stuff where Higgs field provides the formula for good sexual life or whatever, you know. And also, obvious thing: I am too stupid to judge the inherent scientific status of Higgs field. I am well aware that many scientists today think—because you know, you probably know that now Higgs field is reactualized again because all that CERN in Swiss lab stuff that they are doing is precisely—now we are slightly approaching the possibility of maybe detecting the Higgs particle, no? So I, first I must say, what I am doing here is depending on—simply, what can I do but an amateur s2—to accept what they, the scientists, present to me. And I’m just asking a very simple question: let’s accept that this holds. What are the ontological consequences? I think philosophers should be modest here. We cannot play that transcendental role of judging science. We philosophers have to risk—you know, like you commit yourself although you cannot guarantee for its truth to a certain scientific achievement. And incidentally here I cannot but agree with Badiou, I convinced him the last time I tried to convert him, we play these eternal battles that I met him, to my pro-Hegelianism, and I told him, and he accepted this. You know, Badiou’s idea of four—how do you call it—four truth events, truth domains, no? I told him, "But don’t you get it? This is German idealism." You know what are his truth domains? Science, politics, art, love. I told him: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. Kant: science. Kant’s problem is precisely as he says how to reconstruct philosophy based on modern science. Fichte is politics, the whole Fichtean problem is, you know, politics. Schelling is art. Schelling is I think maybe even the only philosopher in the history of philosophy who consciously poses art as a higher level of, okay, let’s call it knowledge, and Hegel, it can be clearly shown that Hegel’s model of all different matrices is love. Okay. So Higgs field. Why was I so fascinated when I was reading about Higgs field? Because precisely as a materialist I was fascinated, because I think it undermines the New Age appropriation of quantum void as the nothing-all. You know, often quantum physics is read in this way: "Oh, but ancient Hindu idiots, jerks, they are masturbating, whatever, they already knew this all," you know, like the—the—that there is a primordial void out of which everything comes and into which everything disappears and so on and so on. No, it’s not that. What quantum physics calls void, zero, is precisely not this Plotinian formless one or beyond one from which all comes, where all disappears and so on and so on. So what am I talking about? Again, some simple definitions, don’t be afraid, it’s Wikipedia style. The Higgs field controls whether forces and particles behave differently or not. When the Higgs field is switched on, operative, symmetries are broken between the elementary particles and their complex pattern of differences emerges. While when Higgs field is switched off, inoperative, forces and particles are indistinguishable from one another. That is to say, the system is in a state of vacuum. And this is why, now you can understand, particle scientists search so desperately for the hypothetical Higgs particle, sometimes referred to as the "God particle." Because this particle would have been, literally, the particle equivalent of what Lacan calls object small a: the cause of disturbing the symmetry of a vacuum, the X which breaks the symmetry and introduces differences. In short, nothing less than the cause of the passage from nothing, vacuum, the void of pure potentialities to something, actual different particles and forces. So, how is this miraculous particle thinkable in a materialist way? How can we avoid here the obscurantist idea of a mystical cause of all objects? Because you can see now why reactionaries get here a multiple orgasm: "Oh, you must admit that there is a particle which is like the divine intervention which basically makes something out of nothing, it’s the cause of the so-called break of the symmetry and so on and so on." All this—this would be my answer—all theological speculations, philosophical rather, focus on this point: at the very beginning or more precisely before the beginning, there is nothing, the void of pure potentiality, the will which wants nothing, the divine abyss prior to God, and this primordial peace balance is then inexplicably disturbed, lost. The material solution is here very precise. It concerns the key paradox of the Higgs field. As every field, Higgs field is characterized by its energy density and by its strength. However, it is energetically favorable for the Higgs field to be switched on and for the symmetries between particles and forces to be broken. What does this mean? We have, let’s say, the pure vacuum. The Higgs field is switched off, inoperative, we have the void, no differences, no symmetries broken. And then, of course, you would have said the Higgs field, in order to break the symmetry, has to spend some energy. Like, nothing comes for free. But here we come to the paradox. The paradox, to cut it very short, the paradox of the Higgs field is the following one: again, imagine the zero level, cosmic void, no symmetry broken, no particular entities emerging out of pure uniformality, and imagine spending zero energy on Higgs field. And this is now the absolute paradox. This is for me the best definition of materialism: there is a gap between the two. Literally, the presupposition of Higgs field is that something costs less than nothing. That is to say, if you want to be at the state of absolute peace, you, spending no energy—no, absolute peace, sorry, in the sense of no broken symmetry—you have already to spend some energy. The lowest point of energy is not when nothing happens. It's when in a minimal way something already—you know what I mean? If this is, for example, how much energy you spend and this is how much symmetry is broken. It's not like this: the more energy you spend, the more symmetry is broken. It's like this. So, physicists, based on this, distinguish between two vacuums: the false vacuum and the true vacuum. The false vacuum is ontologically even more a vacuum. The false vacuum is the state in which Higgs field is switched off. There is pure symmetry with no differentiated particles and so on and so on. But it's false because you need energy to sustain the zero. The true vacuum is already a little bit further, where you spend zero energy but there is already some disturbance, some what I yesterday—two days ago called *e pur si muove* and so on and so on. So why do I find this so attractive? Because the paradox, ontological paradox again is that I think that if you take this seriously, it undermines this very idea of some primordial abyss and so on where things are at the zero level and then you get into all theological problematic by what divine contingency something emerged out of nothing. No, if you read it in this way, something can be cheaper than nothing. The zero level of universe is not peace, primordial abyss and so on. That peace already costs something energetically, an effort and so on. And I claim that this gap, this minimal gap where a certain movement, circulation is cheaper than nothing—this would be the minimum ontological difference, I claim, of the Freudian drive. And I think the minimum idea of idealism is precisely that you can put two vacuums together, you know, in any form like primordial wisdom and so on. No, I think you always have a gap between the two vacuums. Or to put it in libidinal terms, Lacan’s point would have been here that drive is less than zero. It’s not that you have zero in the sense of total Nirvana. No, total Nirvana—to attain this, this would be the ultimate Lacanian anti-Buddhist argument—total Nirvana is not really total Nirvana, it already costs something energetically, an effort and so on. The breathtaking consequences of this: for example, the result you get here is that why is there, you know, this big shitty philosophical problem "Why is there something instead of nothing?" That it's a false problem. I mean, the true mystery is why is there nothing instead of something? You know, because like the problem is how to arrive at nothing. What exists is not more than nothing. What exists is less than nothing. Not even, you know, to get at... this is where, again, I cannot but conclude with a Jewish joke. Which I think is a totally correct one. But it's a well-known one, maybe I even repeated it here already. You know, synagogue, Jews gathering there to pray, blah, blah, whatever they are doing, horrible things there, and first a rich Rabbi says, "Oh dear God, I am nobody, I am not worthy of you, I am a nothing and so on." You know the story, no? Then a rich merchant comes, Jewish, and says, "Oh God, I am also nobody, I am nothing, unworthy of you, blah, blah." Then a poor Jew raises his head and says, "A poor Jew says, 'Oh dear God, I am also nothing and so on.'" And then, you know, one rich guy kicks the other: "But who is he? How does he dare to say that he is nothing?" This is the Hegelian/Lacanian, this is the correct lesson deeply. No, but I’m not kidding here. In Kabbalah, you also find this idea, deeply along these levels, that, you know, the beginning of creation is not something, that God first had to create nothing to withdraw and so again, I’m not playing that cheap game of, you know, "ooh the ancient, those Hindus who, so I was told, can do horrible things like can ejaculate inside, can move their penis so that they suck things and so on in, they already knew everything and so on." No, I’m talking just about this very elementary, deeply materialist moment: that there is a gap, a tension between two vacuums. There is a minimum of ontological movement which is even previous to void. Void is not first. I think, although this may appear materialist, but this idea of a primordial void out of which things emerge and not and so on—and you know who knew this in its own way? He really should be reread: Democritus. We don't have time to go into it, but check it up even if you do it like me on Wikipedia or whatever. You know—you know that wonderful notion of that Democritus' term for atoms is *den*, which is a total neologism, no? Because it doesn't exist, it's *med-en*, that's the original term. *Hen* is *en* is *hen*—all, no? But Democritus consciously puts the wrong cut. Okay. The only correct translation of this is basically less than zero. It’s not one. I mean, good history of philosophy will teach you how Aristotle and all the Diogenes Laërtius who write about Democritus already ontologized him. There, atoms become small ones which circulate in nothingness. Again, with Democritus, it's much more paradoxical. What do I mean by this? Nonetheless, I would like to give you a simple example, my God, what shitty movies I see because of my son. Did you see the new version of *Karate Kid* with... "Don’t blame your son!" "No, I blame you! You’re probably the type who goes to these shitty artie movies and you know—I hate artie movies. You know how you make artie movies? You have a good hardcore movie, people screw each other. Then you are an artist and just add between each sex scene ten minutes people just staring at each other, ooh how deep it becomes, you know." Okay, sorry. There is nonetheless a nice cheap Hollywood wisdom, but nonetheless. In the film, when the young American boy trained by this Chinese Kung Fu teacher who told him that he must learn to—to be inactive, to win the battle, that he asks the American boy, the teacher: "How can I win my fight if I only stand still?" And the teacher replies: "Being still is not the same as doing nothing." I mean, here again we have this idea. And I think we should not read this idea in the usual obscurantist way of the cliché about a wise ruler who knows how to play one against the other his subordinates so that they destroy each other, he does nothing but everything is at peace. No, I think that—that doing—there is a point when you do nothing precisely by doing something. Doing nothing already—doing nothing already—already costs... you know, it’s a little bit like if you permit me this, I know purely brutal illegal step towards individual even psychology. You believe—you should believe me, I know about this because if there ever was a person with all the nervous tics, it’s me, no? Like, if you really want to destroy me, it’s to tell me "Relax, just sit peacefully" and so on and so on. I would have to put an incredible effort into it. The only way for nervous jerks like me to get peace is to focus on some small gesture repetitively. And through, you know like doing something, no, the only way to approach nothing is to do something. If you want direct nothing, it’s an incredible effort, it’s doing much more. So again, this would be somehow my result that again, to resume: quantum physics, as you know, still is an enigma. And I tend to agree with those who—ontologically, I mean—to those who claim that all the versions that we get to resolve the enigma are precisely so many semblances trying to resolve the deadlock. You know, we have, for example, the—we have, for example, this David Bohm solution which is—he tries to state the classical image of presupposing some kind of retroactive causality and so on and so on. We have many-world interpretations, we have the spiritualist interpretations, and so on and so on. I think these are precisely, as with modernity or whatever, we still are not at the level to confront Bohr’s paradox. And I think that this is maybe the task today. The consequences are tremendous ontologically. I really think that we arrive that—if read properly—quantum physics is maybe the most materialist science there was. I think we should totally reject all that stuff—ooh, you know, mind creates reality, time runs backward, and all that stuff. No, no, no, things are much more precise in quantum physics. But again, what has to fall is A) the notion of consistent, fully existing reality. Reality must be rendered not-all, incomplete. And again, following the logic of Higgs field, this our most elementary ontological presupposition: that something is more than nothing, that as it were, things emerge out of some primordial void balance and so on, should be abandoned. That is to say that the zero level of reality is not void, but it’s neither nothing nor something, but some weird less-than-something, some... you know, the paradox would be maybe the following one: when Lacan talks about object small a—I use this two-three times in my books—I was always struck by the parallel between object small a and the status of, I think it’s photon, I’m so bluffing in physics, I don’t know. But I think photon has—is a particle which has this paradoxical property that, you know, with other particles you have a certain mass, gravity and then of course, if the particle is moving, this mass raises. The idea of a photon is that when it’s not moving, it has zero mass. You know—how to put it—it exists only as its own excess. It doesn't exist at zero, as zero level. Something which has no—it's not that you can... it's almost like comrade Stalin in his infinite genius came close to this when, you know, that old joke, when he was asked in I think, by a journalist, "Which deviation is worse: left-wing or right-wing deviation?" Stalin's answer: "They are both worse," you know, like with revisionists, they are not only bad, they are worse, no? Worse like with no standard, there is nobody who is bad, you begin with worse. And it's again the same with photons. You see this idea which maybe also comes close to the way Epicurus supplemented Democritus because *clinamen*, you know, where Epicurus, my God, Marx—I'm almost tempted to say the true young Marx that should be rehabilitated is not that stupid boring proto-Stalinist meditations about alienation from it's his thesis from too, about—he already focused on the difference, you know what's the title of Marx's doctoral thesis: *The Difference Between Democritean and Epicurean Atomism*. And there, the difference is precisely *clinamen*. The idea that atoms not only fall, but in a contingent way they deviate. And the step to be made here—Deleuze wrote some nice lines about it—is precisely that *clinamen* is original. Like photon, you don't have something which then is distorted, sidetracked. It's—this distortion, *clinamen*, taking—making a detour is primordial. Excess, things are always in excess with regard to themselves. Along these lines, I would like maybe to develop some things and so on and so on. Do I get a certain body language from you that maybe it's the time that I shut up or what? "No, there is another talk here at but... I don't know if you want to have time for questions. I mean, it's... I think he did make us work today, as you promised yesterday. No, you did, although, please, let me be serious here. All I can tell you is that I did speak, when I was in the United States, in the UK and so on, with some particle physicists just to be sure that it’s not total bullshit what I’m saying, you know what I mean? Just to be sure that what I’m—I told them, "I don’t want to teach you, I’m not that kind of philosopher who tells you 'No, no, you are making a mistake, I know better than you.'" And they at least... Beckett did say the whole thing much more laconically, the idea that "nothing is more real than nothing," but we could never accuse you of being laconic. Oh, but today my point is there is something more real than nothing. It's less than nothing, less than zero. Okay. All right. But still, I thought this was the most important exploration, rectification, since your own Plato fantasy, really, on sexual difference. Even a modest rectification of Lacan. And I have some questions, but I don’t know if I should let the audience go first. I have some Woody—oh you were there, that’s why all the Jewish jokes were about... I was wondering why they were about... okay, but no, I have—I don’t know if I should start with a question, are there questions? Do you have time to take a few questions? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder, you know, that going back to the formulas of sexuation and your rectification of Lacan but also the admission that you can easily say "man is not woman" it’s logical, but you cannot say "woman is not man" because there is always a domain beyond sexual difference. No, what you cannot say is that not-woman is man. That if you deny woman, you are back at man. I think there is an excess in woman. Okay, there is—the sexual difference is deeply asymmetrical. Which is, again, just to make it clear, which is why I think it’s not some kind of a primordial dualism. The original structure is precisely like that of coffee without milk. There are—there are no two sexes. There is one sex plus something, which is neither. Okay, would that lead you though to agree with something that I’ve heard you disagree with before, the idea that woman has access to some surplus *jouissance* that Lacan goes on about in Seminar Because simply because, you know, there is a domain beyond sexual difference, does that mean that the people on the feminine side of the formulas of sexuation, whether they are biologically men or women, have access to this surplus *jouissance* that in the past you said is Lacan’s sort of fantasy, it’s not really... ah, here things are much more tricky. First, I claim that it all depends how we read this. Even some Lacanians read it in, I think, a very dangerous obscurantist way. It goes like this: man is fully integrated into the symbolic order, while woman is not-all within the symbolic order. There is some terrifying, I don’t know, too strong *jouissance* and only women can get into it. No, I think as I repeated in my book all the time, that it’s absolutely crucial to take this into account: women have access not insofar as they are less within the symbolic order, but insofar as they are totally within it. In other words, I claim that this idea of a woman who, you know, has access to some secret excessive *jouissance* outside language, with the divine—this is the ultimate male fantasy. Yeah. This is the ultimate male fantasy. No, no, no, a woman... so again, but this then has many philosophical consequences. Because, for example, the reason I am for Descartes, philosophically, basically for *Cogito*, is I claim that if you, against this background, read Descartes closely, you can see that Cogito is feminine. Cogito? Yeah, I totally reject this idea that Cogito is coded as... no, first incidentally, first even at the most anecdotal level. Did you know that my God, Descartes is the first breakthrough of philosophy... because of Hypatia... yeah, I mean he was immensely popular, whatever this means, among women. Not only Queen Christina of Sweden, but all others and so on. There was a—they felt in it an immense emancipatory potential. Okay, you... yeah, okay... no, because you did mention this yesterday actually, you said because Descartes took into account that women are more suggestible or more hysterical... no, no, no, no, this is—this is the bad Descartes then, when he sexualizes it into "Cogito is pure thinking, but women are more..." and so on and so on. No, but you know what's my tendency here? One you should always remember that Descartes’ *Cogito* is at its core purely non-substantial point of excess of madness and so on and so on, no? That Descartes’ passage is—I agree with readers who claim that the passage in Descartes from *Cogito* to *res cogitans*, a thinking thing, is illegitimate. Descartes makes it automatically. No, but I think that there sexual difference is already described. That pure subjectivity is feminine. A male position is always already a substantialized, substantialized... you know what I did in some of my books? This you may consider crazy. I even claimed that what is usually taken as the ultimate anti-feminist argument, namely this Freudian link of femininity and masquerade... this is, I think, a correct insight. We should just really read it the way it is. What does it mean "femininity as masquerade"? It means all features you have are already secondary as a mask and so on. And the pure—yeah, this is precisely where women are much more—we men are stupid, we think we are substantially this and—only women can be pure subjects. Which is why, I don’t know if I repeated this here, in a weird French debate, I in a very strange way defended—but this is already now I think in this shitty book of mine, whatever—defended this problem in France of, how do you call it, burqa, burka, whatever, no? I claim that what shocked me, again, is not... this is another problem: are Islam women forced to do it or not? What shocked me is how French women—I even participated there in the debate, I saw French republican, Christian, whatever—they felt threatened by it. Like, a woman told me, a woman to be precise, Françoise Lévy, a journalist for *Le Point*, you know, the right-wing journal where Jacques-Alain Miller regularly publishes, no? She told me, "I feel threatened when I see a face covered with burqa. As if, as if I’m cut off, you know, like somebody doesn’t want to open herself to me or whatever. I feel like our public space is threatened and so on and so on." And I think in the first pages of my *Living in the End Times* book, I proposed the opposite reasoning: that the horror of burqa is the opposite one. Maybe you remember I mention, I think I even did it here, that well-known Alphonse Allais, I think, the French satirist’s version of Salome’s dance, you know? Salome dances, dances, seven veils, then she is naked, then the king shouts, "Go on, go on!" and she puts on her nose, her skin, and so on, like getting really naked. And I claim that phenomenologically, what makes woman with a burqa so horrible is not that it’s covered, but the our true phenomenological relationship to it. It is as if, you know—now I’m going to my softly anti-feminist waters—I remember reading a nice—seeing a nice male chauvinist caricature of a woman who comes home after a party and, you know, does this evening unmasking, you know, takes on the lipstick and so on—takes off, I mean, wipes it, but then it goes on: she takes off her ears, her eyes, and so on! And she goes to sleep just as an empty ball or whatever, no? But I claim that something like this almost happens in burqa when you have it. We are confronted there precisely the pure subject. It’s just an empty gaze, you know, because you don’t just get—if it were to be just a covered black ball, it’s nothing. The true horror is that it has a cut for the eye. That’s pure subject. I claim absolutely it’s the opposite. The reason we—because you know, this is the lesson of psychoanalysis, the anti-Levinasian lesson. You know who is Levinas, no? The... no, here I agree with my friend Woody—no, I’m joking, but Levinas is, you know, the Christian philosopher who masks himself as a Jew, no? I sincerely think Levinas is so popular because he is selling as Jewish wisdom this Christian moral bullshit about, you know, "love neighbor" and so on. What is so great in Judaism is that it's much more communist, my God. It's absolute—the way I understand Judaism, okay, I don't understand it, but the way I do is that it's exactly the primacy of the collective. When Levinas says first is the face of the other and then there are other others, only then... no, no, this is not Judaism, no. Again, so I think that precisely we should here stick to the radical lesson of psychoanalysis against Levinas. Face is not the authentic other. Face is originally primordial lying. Which is why, again, as I always repeat, in psychoanalysis, it's crucial that it's not face-to-face. You know, psychoanalytic treatment is not intersubjectivity. It's not "I am here with an analyst and we both sincerely talk" whatever. No, you are alone, the analyst is behind, doing, you know, masturbating, playing cards, whatever, no? It's crucial, this radical asymmetry. You are not two in psychoanalytic session. You are one plus more than one, less than zero, the object. And so on. And this—we don’t have time to go into it, but this is the greatness of Hegel. He knew it. This would have been my ultimate argument against the—this bourgeois-liberal, let’s call them anarco-recognition Hegelians. No. If you really read Hegel’s that famous passage—struggle to death between the future master and servant, blah, blah—you will see what’s Hegel’s problem there. That the other that you encounter, the self-consciousness encounters, it's not this kind of a "Oh, I recognize myself in you, we are equal." It's a kind of a monstrous, traumatic otherness. I mean, you are—I am here, and I see objects. I am of course the center of my world, point of absolute subjectivity. And then there is another stupid object who claims "But I am also like you, universal," and so on. It's absolutely incompatible, this. The other is primordially not the other in whom I can recognize myself, but is this ontological paradox of another absolute, as it were, no? So again, here I think that we should—Lacan was totally right, even in a Hegelian way, that intersubjectivity is not the ultimate—is not the ultimate horizon, no? Okay, okay, I talk too much. Okay. Woody? Yeah. Here and then... here and then... I have two—two short points... not even questions, I don’t deserve a question. It’s kind of a question... don’t start. One I think about the—the way of reading of Lacan confessing "I was wrong." Yeah. It’s a little bit naive to really read it as "he was wrong." Really what he’s doing is to commit suicide of the master. It’s exactly like when Zarathustra said, "Leave me, betray me, because maybe always I lie to you." So it’s kind of the lesson of the Master from *Totem and Taboo*: instead of let the other people to kill him, he commit a suicide and then he become unalive and he become alive forever. I would always say it’s like Gaddafi that said "You cannot fire me because always I was no one." Yeah. So this is really his trick. Exactly. Nice. Gaddafi’s like the Jewish Rabbi or what? No, he’s like, you know, Lacan, he’s not like the Jew. And the other one is about the—the origin of modernity that you said that "Oh, the alternative..." If the modernity—if we spoke that the semblants are the one who create the real, yeah, so we have to say that all this multiplicity is the one who create this modernity that is the global—is the global capitalism. And then it’s created back to all those multiplicity around. It’s not that they are all wrong and there is one true modernity. No, if the modernity is kind of the real, all those semblants around like Al-Qaeda, whatever, they create the modernity—like communism, Al-Qaeda, fascism, all of them together. Zionism? Zionism definitely. And then this one create them back reflexively. Yeah, but it’s not that this is the true... that Strauss was wrong that things—the deadlock is the one that create all the semblants. Really all those perceptions are the one who create the deadlock. And then it created back in the... this is... can I nonetheless very briefly answer now because I will forget. But nonetheless, I think that—I think that nonetheless in this circular relation, antagonism has a priority. I claim. But for philosophical reasons I cannot go into them now. Of course, the—the real-time causality is circular. But what I like is precisely this idea, which is for me the very core of dialectical idea: that you don’t have entities which then enter into contradictory, conflicting relations. It’s that contradiction comes first. Entities obfuscate contradiction. You know why is there asymmetry? I will give you maybe another example: take political left or right. It’s not enough to say we have a political space which is then divided into left and right. But if you ask a leftist and how the whole political space is structured, you will get a different image than from the rightist. So, you see in this sense for me antagonism comes first. Because the only way you can account for these particular modernities is that they already react to some trauma of let's call it antagonism. As to what you said there about Lacan, yeah, in a way I agree. But here I must confess to you quite sincerely, I am extremely naive here. I don't care about that stupid annoying old man, egotist, impossible to live with, called Lacan. You know what I mean? I take very naively what he said. And it may function—it may function as you said. But it is—and sorry for this naivete—but in a way it is still true. Fuck Lacan, he was talking about certain topic, about certain problems, he didn't solve them. He didn't solve them. Which is why as I already mentioned it's important not to mystify the last Lacan, not to go into this "was there some final secret" and so on and so on. I mean, you know what I mean? Probably Lacan was a great self-performer. So, of course it was this element, no? And I totally agree with you: this is a nice reading that suicide is—suicide is one way to control your destiny, to prevent your pupils... I mean every honest master own—owes to his pupils the fundamental right that in one way or another they kill him, no? And the truly oppressive masters try to take even this from them. But nonetheless, I was very naive here and I focused on the topic. Lacan was in a deadlock, he didn't solve it, and in a quite naive way I'm claiming we can think further. It's not that Lacan reached some ultimate limit and now, as Miller sometimes claims, and now we cannot go further, no. mm-hm. mm-hm. The guy before? Ah, yes. The guy in front. Okay. I want to recover something you said in the beginning today... about how in some way sex spills and contaminates all spheres of life. But then on the—on the other hand, you also say in some place that this is precisely what Freud criticized, this pansexualism, and what Freud was trying to say was precisely that: what needs to be enacted, what kind of fantasies need to be enacted in order for people to have sex? Or in other words, what—what are you thinking about when you are having sex? And my speculation, I mean, I don't know if I'm right but: can we say that in some way when the sex ends up contaminating all other spheres of life, we are dealing with some kind of *jouissance* that comes from the real, and on the opposite when we are talking about what people are thinking when they are having sex, we are talking about the symbolic and the all the fantasies that need needed to be enacted? Is that a correct way of—of putting it? No, it's a crucial question, I think things are very complex here, there is no simple direct answer. But again, you remember I agree with you that Freud was absolutely against this kind of pansexualism. His idea is not if you look deeply behind everything there is sex—like you know this primitive idea of I don't know whatever I—when I—when I whatever I do, ultimately it’s a way of doing that—seducing women or men or whatever. But for me again, the—the—the point would be the unity of the two. That is to say sex has to spill over into anything precisely because it cannot stand on its own. It's not too strong. It's—it's too weak. Again, I agree with your example because—the one I gave which is basically a version of that wonderful example by Lévi-Strauss where he says that there was one tribe in North America I think who—which had the theory that all dreams have sexual meaning, all dreams except explicitly sexual dreams, no? That they—they don’t have, no? That—and again, I agree with you if this was your point—I've written about it that—the true question of sexuality is not this cheap pansexual idea "Whatever I am doing, I am really in a metaphorical way doing that." No, the problem is not that whatever I am doing I am thinking about that. The problem is: but what am I thinking when I *am* doing that sex? No? And then there I have to go out. Sex cannot sustain itself. And I mean this quite—quite literally. I think—to be sorry, vulgar—when you make love, you cannot simply think about how happy I am now in this moment just making love. When you do this, even if you dream about this, why are you laughing? You—you must be perverted, but with you maybe it's possible, never know. We—maybe this is the last secret of the protocols of Zion, you know? Sorry, sorry. But what I want to say is that even if you just think about this, how happy I am now, okay, to be vulgar screwing that lady blah-blah, you will see that at the minimum point you already imagine somebody watching you. An imagined gaze or whatever, a phantasmatic scene, a phantasmatic scene must be here. So again, as to that what you mentioned that *phallic jouissance* and so on. Also you ask me "why," I didn't want to go into that. I think that my God we are into so many paradoxes here. Lacan makes it absolutely clear that *jouissance féminine* doesn't exist. It is operative, but doesn't exist. Because read really closely—people miss this—his Seminar No, *phallic*, the—this *jouissance féminine*. He almost every time that he mentions it, he says, "if there is another *jouissance*, not *phallic*," and then he adds in the—in brackets: "but of course there isn't another one," and so on. So it's the clear example of this, you know, it doesn't exist but it still can be efficient. "It can be operative." Yeah, yeah. This is again what I meant the first day—so I wasn't totally bluffing—with that *e pur si muove*. That we should not read it as this primitive empiricism, "oh your shitty theories" *e pur si muove*. No, something can be proven non-existent but still *e pur si muove*. "But there’s a sort of whole feminist ideology revolved, like feminist-Lacanian ideology revolved precisely on the fantasy that there is a surplus jouissance, and it sort of propagates itself." "Yeah, yeah, but again, can't—don't they see that in this way—I mean it quite literally—you prepare a new form of feminine enslavement? Because you never get there." I mean I tried to convince them there—I wasn’t quite successful partially in Bolivia where my point was precisely that—just don’t bring me all those Inca where women had a role, of course they had a role. They had a role to lay beneath, no I mean—you know what I mean? Like, I claim the only space of freedom is this Cartesian space of empty subjectivity and so on. All modernity—sorry, all pre-modernity where they apparently celebrate women, look at it closely—you know my standard paradoxes—it's like "Yeah, I know there is some shitty tribe in New Zealand where woman is sacred and the central temple in the village has the shape of a vagina." I agree. There is one problem: women are of course prohibited to enter. This is the most dangerous thing I think today, even as with racism. You know I’m just telling my old story that today’s form of racism is typical, is something like, "Oh those apparent primitives they are really much wiser than us. They—let’s not integrate them into our society, in this way they would lose their authentic wisdom or whatever of the world." No, I like natives who want to be more corrupted than ourselves. I like to tell you an anecdote—I don’t know I mention it—which happened to me with Woody. You in New York, when there were some Palestinians who gave me a wonderful example of racism. They were there invited by some shitty college to perform, and they were offered hummus, hummus there. You know, as a sign of respect "we will give you your food," no? And they told us, "Fuck you, we came here to be corrupted with greasy hamburgers and so on. We get enough of that shitty hummus." I mean, I—I—I think that the—the nastiest arrogance is that when you deplore when—some unicorns have one horn, this means they must exist. And Lacan takes this absolutely literally: that universality does not imply existence. Now you will say, "Okay, so what’s the big deal?" Ah, Lacan gives here a very—this is the *King’s Speech* problem, no—that imagine instead of universality a universal title that you have, like "I am a father" or whatever. And Lacan’s point is that we have the symbolic function of the father, but it doesn’t exist. Nobody can be a father. You cannot—let me give you, okay, an a nice short quote from Lacan’s seminar *Identification* from January I quote: "The order of the function which we introduce here as that of the name of the father is something which has universal value, but simultaneously puts on you the charge to control if there is or not a father who fits this function. If there is no such father, it still remains true that the father is God; it is simply that this formula is confirmed only by the empty sector of the—of the square." So here Lacan reads this tension between particular existence and inexistent universality as of deep relevance to psychoanalysis. As Lacan puts it, you cannot be a good father. You know, father is always too much or too little. You try to assert... father is, again, an impossible. "Do you have a page reference for your quote?" "I do have but, haha, now I will make it easy for myself, haha, it’s not published. No, no, no, but I can give it to you. Do not some guys in Ireland publish the complete translation? All I can give you is the date. It’s *Identification*, The session is 17th of January "Identification is isn’t it?" "No, no, no, it must be something different because *Ethics* is *Transference* Yeah, yeah, sorry, it is. Because then comes *Anxiety*, no? Yeah, yeah. 17th of January Yes." Okay. So now you will say again, but what’s the point of all of this? Ah, now comes—I wouldn’t say an amusing part, but for me at least, philosophically, the most interesting part. I here rely, I must openly admit when I steal stuff from others, to my Slovene colleague party member Alenka Zupančič, who—who brought into circulation, as it were, an—a magnificent—I’m so mad at myself that I didn’t noticed it because of course I saw the movie five times—purely dialectical magnificent joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s *Ninotchka*. No, nothing to do with communism, Greta Garbo, sex, but there is a scene in that film where the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. And you know what the waiter answers? It’s wonderful. The waiter replies, "Sorry, but we have run out of cream. So can I bring you coffee without milk? Because we have milk, you know." So again, in both cases, either coffee without cream or coffee without milk, you get coffee alone. But this coffee, one, is each time accompanied by a different negation: coffee with no cream, coffee with no milk. And this has even, I claim, political meaning. For example, when East Europeans in they did not simply want democracy, they were cheated in the same way that this waiter tries to cheat. They were—they wanted democracy without communism, but they also wanted democracy without capitalism, no? And like they got the wrong one. Okay, let’s go on. So what we encounter here is—it appears to be—the logic of differentiality, where the lack itself functions as a positive feature. Again, the paradox rendered nicely by an old Yugoslav joke about a Montenegrin—don’t be afraid, I will not repeat the twentieth time a joke how the Montenegro people masturbate, it’s a different one here—who are supposed to be lazy. The question is the joke: Why does a Montenegrin guy when he goes to sleep, why does he put at the side of his bed two glasses, one full and one empty, of water? Because he is too lazy to think in advance if he will be thirsty or not during the night. You see the paradox? Common sense tells you just put the glass there if you use it or not. But the differential logic tells you, no, also the non-being thirsty should be marked, should be there registered as an—as an empty—as an empty glass. That is to say, the second, the negative fact itself has to be taken note of. But now I come to the crucial point which will bring us to the key of sexual difference and so on for Lacan. Can this logic really be reduced to symbolic differentiality, you know, where differences matter, so the absence of something is also a positive feature? Is coffee without coffee? What basically the waiter is offering to the customer is coffee with without milk instead of coffee with without cream. They both want a kind of a coffee with a negative predicate, no? Justified by him: "I cannot give you coffee without cream because we have no cream, so I can only give you coffee with coffee with without milk because we have milk." Is this differentiality? It may appear so. In both cases, what we really get is exactly the same plain coffee. The difference resides only in the purely differential fact that the absence which defines coffee is first the absence of cream, then the absence of milk. Now what complicates the issue nonetheless is, I claim, the double negation at work in coffee with no milk. This coffee is not just with no milk, but also with—but also not with no cream. And this second negation, I claim, is not purely symbolic. It is coffee with milk which would have functioned differentially the same as coffee with no cream. And within this space, coffee with not with no cream is simply coffee with cream. Again, you get my point: if the relationships were to be purely differential then a double negation would bring us back to positivity: coffee not without—not without cream—doubly negated would have been simply coffee with cream. But no, coffee not without cream, in this case, is—coffee not without cream is coffee with—with no milk. So, this—I claim that this last opposition is not differential. Why? Because you must include the function of the object small a. That is to say, for this field to function, obviously the premise is that coffee cannot stand alone. Coffee is, even if you want coffee without milk, the empty place of a supplement of something to add is already there. You, in order for coffee to be attractive, you need something to fill in its lack, you know, like coffee with something, which makes it desirable. That would have been the object small a. And then the whole game is then a differential one: what will fill in this—what will fill in this excess. Which is why coffee without cream is not the same as straight coffee. Why not? Because you know, this—it's already mediated through negation. Or even now you will tell me, "But what if I really like just plain coffee?" I claim that if you analyze the semantic structure closely, you will see that coffee is already redoubled, that coffee functions as its own supplement. And this—there is nothing paradoxical about it. Let me evoke you a similar example to get the point. I used it in my first book, so I hope you are stupid old enough to forget it, or in *Looking Awry*, I don’t know where. You know that when Western got into crisis—Western the movies—from late 40s, what emerged were so-called meta-Westerns. They tried to supplement the Western dimension with another genre. For example, I don’t know, you know *Seven Brides for Seven Brothers*, whatever. It’s Western supplemented by musical. You have, for example, *Pursued* with Robert Mitchum and so on. It’s Western supplemented by film noir, and so on and so on. So again, they—they did so-called meta-Westerns: Westerns which inherently relied to another genre to fill in the non-satisfactory part, whatever. But then—I refer here to André Bazin—who had this idea at this very time where Western was already in crisis, there emerged two model Westerns: *Shane* and *High Noon*. And he claims no, these are not simply Westerns. These are Westerns where the meta-Western is Western itself. Westerns which relate to an otherness but this otherness is, again, the otherness of—the otherness of Western itself. So let me go on a little bit here. What I’m aiming at is the example that I used already, you know it all, years ago I was using it a lot, that of those stupid eggs, Kinder Surprise, no? And to say "I want coffee without milk" is just to say "I want that chocolate without the stupid plastic thing." But again, the structure is already that one. And what I’m saying is that this structure of a thing and its excess is not differential. It is differential to say "no milk," "yes," and so on and so on. What is not differential is this tension between a thing and a void in its core. A void which has to be supplemented by a figure of what Lacan calls object small a and so on and so on. Because again, what I'm claiming is that meta-Western is the same as when somebody offers you like "You don't need to add milk, sugar; this is already just plain best coffee." There again, self-reflexivity is already at—at—at work. So let me go on. So what has this to do with sexual difference, you will ask. Sexual difference precisely for Lacan is not differential. When Lacan privileges Phallus, this does not mean that sexual difference is structured along the axis of presence or absence of Phallus, like man has it, woman doesn’t have it. So of course you can read it in this way. And even now I will be really evil, paraphrase the famous Sherlock Holmes passage, you know, from *Silver Blaze*, I think. Do you remember "the curious accident of the dog," "but the dog did nothing," "that was the curious accident." The most famous lines of Sherlock Holmes. You can apply the same to the differential notion of sexual difference. "Is there any other point about seeing your sister naked to which you wish to draw my attention?" asks—if Sherlock Holmes is asked, Sherlock Holmes says "To the curious thing I noticed between her legs." "But there was nothing hanging out between her legs." "That was the curious thing," and so on, whatever. I mean, but—but I think this precisely is what Lacan doesn't want to say. The early Lacan till the 60s, yes, there one has to admit it, it’s simply a male-centered universe where the presence of or absence of Phallus in a differential way stands for sexual difference. But now, again, what Lacan does is something—is something different. His point is not to structure it in this way, but what? What is more in it? Ah, okay. Not to get too lost, let me go a step further. The crucial conclusion of Lacan from this asymmetry of excess and so on is again that the structure that I tried to isolate, that of an object one and its supplement—to put it in very speculative term, shortly, one is never one, one is always one and X, more than one but less than two, one and—and the object small a—that masculine and feminine position refer in a different way to this excess. How? Ah, now comes what I consider a little bit more interesting. The asymmetry between masculine and feminine for Lacan is that the masculine position is differential. That is to say, a differential relationship would have been where each sexual position is defined by its difference to the other: woman is not man, man is not woman. If somebody is not woman, he is man; if somebody is not man, she is a woman. But the way Lacan reads this non-all—not all of X is FX—is he introduces—and that's the beauty—the asymmetry among the sexes. That is to say, "no man" means woman; we men are stupid differential. If you are not a man, you are a woman. But if you are not a woman, you are not a man. That's the point of Lacan. If you are—that is to say, there is something of—and here is a beautiful quote which I think it’s really crucial from Lacan. This time is the—the seminar *Ou Pire* (Or Worse) from session May the 10th. "Since woman is non-all, why should all that is not woman be men?" You see that non-all of a woman means that if in a double negation you negate woman, you still get a woman. And that this—what again I will try to go—so for Lacan... and this, of course, this doesn’t mean there is some deep transsexual substance in woman and so on. That’s the beauty of it. It is still that there is—there is—there is nothing which is outside, which is not, but this spectral nothingness can be called the nothingness of the subject or whatever you want and so on and so on. So let me give you another line of thought here, a philosophical one, which will make this clear. We are dealing here with a negation of negation which again doesn’t bring you back to the first position. It’s not "You negate man, you get woman; you negate woman, you get man." No. Woman is much closer to negativity. Woman is its own negation. In the same way, ah, now you will say I’m crazy, I don’t care about it, what has this to do with progressive politics? I think—to give you a first hint—it is crucial to read class struggle like this. That is to say, a non-bourgeois is proletarian but a non-proletarian is not bourgeois. Marx says this. How? When he says—you must remember the details—that—that—that bourgeoisie is the only pure class in the history of humanity. Before bourgeoisie, capitalists, we have classes which are not yet fully classes. But working class is already a class which has to abolish itself as a class to assert itself. You see, you already have this double "no" in it. Okay, but—now let me go a little bit further to account for
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this stuff. You know Freud’s
this stuff. You know Freud’s
Slavoj Žižek
legendary example—everybody knows it—of a patient who told Freud when asked about "Who is this woman in your dream?" "I do not know who this woman in my dream is, but I am sure of one thing: this is not my mother." Of course, we all know, haha, like this simple logic, haha, why did you mention it, this precisely means that it is your mother. But I think that if we—if we read closely this example, things are much more paradoxical. "This is not my mother" means at
legendary example—everybody knows it—of a patient who told Freud when asked about "Who is this woman in your dream?" "I do not know who this woman in my dream is, but I am sure of one thing: this is not my mother." Of course, we all know, haha, like this simple logic, haha, why did you mention it, this precisely means that it is your mother. But I think that if we—if we read closely this example, things are much more paradoxical. "This is not my mother" means at
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two
two
Slavoj Žižek
different level its exact opposite. First, again, it’s the obvious level of denial. In the patient’s unconscious, the figure is of course his mother. And denial is the price the patient has to pay to bring this maternal figure to consciousness. But this is not all. There is another level at which "This is not my mother" asserts the existence of mother. Because we know that in the Freudian space, mother stands for the impossible incestuous object and so on and so on. So, we can also say that "This is not my mother," it's not just a lie, you know, a lie in the sense of "It really is my mother but I don’t want to admit it that I was dreaming screwing my mother" whatever. It also can mean "Mother is impossible, inaccessible." Like the idea being: this miserable figure cannot be my mother. And now, here we come to this more complex paradoxes. I claim that the problem with denying "this is not my mother" asserts mother even too much, because it still implies that there is a mother but even if this woman in the dream is my mother, it cannot be that mother, the incestuous mother, whatever. So, the paradox here is that if we were to get, instead of this Freudian conservative patient, a more open permissive patient who would have said, "So what’s the problem? Okay, this is my mother, I wanted to screw my mother," for a strict Freudian the repression would have been even stronger here. Because saying "This is my mother" is a lie. It cannot be. This is the pervert illusion: that you can get—that you can get the object. So, again, negation operates here at two levels. First, there is the simple *verneinung*, denial. "This is not my mother." Then there is the other as the impossible real object of—of desire. Like, then you can say "Even if it is mother, it’s not yet mother." And again, the result should be here the double negation: not not mother, and so on. So, again, what does this mean for sexual difference? That it paradoxically precedes the two terms whose difference it is. Sexual difference is not—this would have been Lacan’s speculative formula—sexual difference is not a difference between two given positions. But sexual difference is the name of a deadlock, and two given positions are two attempts to deal with this—with to deal with this deadlock. Let me first give you here another example of this which maybe you know from my work but I think it fits perfectly here. You know, I spoke years ago a lot about this, about this Kantian distinction—no wonder Kant was the first, I think, to conceptualize sexual difference in his antinomies—Kantian distinction between infinite and—or indefinite and negative judgment. You know the story: negative judgment negates a predicate; infinite judgment asserts a non-predicate. Negative judgment, for example, if I am alive, negative—sorry, if I am—alive, negative judgment is "I am not dead." I negate a predicate, "dead." Infinite judgment is not "I am not dead," but "I am undead." And here you see what's the difference if you know Stephen King and so on, of course. "I am not dead," it's not—it's simply "I am alive." The space is here that of binary differential opposition. If I am not dead, I am alive; if I am alive, I am not dead. But if you say "I am undead," you open up a third infinite field of the living dead, undead, neither dead nor alive. And for Lacan, again, this is the structure—you know, woman is not "not man." Woman—you cannot say woman isn't man. Man isn't woman, that's okay. But with woman it's different. It's not "Woman isn't man." Woman is un-man or non-man. Which means a third domain beyond sexual difference is—is opened up. And incidentally I think exactly the same goes for proletariat which is un-bourgeoisie, like non-bourgeoisie, outside it. So, and incidentally if you know Alain Badiou’s work, I think that in the same—in exactly the same way one has to read his rejection of aesthetics. You know that he calls his writings about art "inaesthetics." He uses the term *Handbook of Inaesthetics*. I think it’s precisely "in" in this Kantian sense of the third domain in between. Now I come to my next point which for me at least is crucial: how is then this structure of pure antagonism—like that before difference there is one which doesn’t coincide with itself? Like, coffee is never purely coffee, it’s always coffee and X, an empty spot and so on. And I think everything originates from this. Like, I think that a name proper always aims at this place. You know, like a name is never—here I am for Kripke against Bertrand Russell and so on—a name is never just a name of a thing, is never just a combinatoire of the properties of the thing, like a shortened version of their properties. If you enumerate all the properties, you miss something. And name is the name for that something. Name is fundamentally tautological. At the same time, the name for the—the name for the—for the unnamable. But now comes—I want to interpret it more in detail, maybe you already know it—the absolute quote from Lacan. My favorite. I mean, literally at this moment if you ask me, give me a couple of lines from Lacan that you think they are absolute, this is it, I think. It is, if you want the references, again, unpublished text, from Seminar from *D’un Discours qui ne Serait pas du Semblant* (Of a Discourse That Would Not Be of Semblance). This one appeared incidentally in French at least, Éditions du Seuil page where Lacan tries to differentiate his position from that of nominalism. And I think this is a crucial philosophical debate because—because here Lacan is clearly against Althusser, against Michel Foucault and so on, who are basically nominalists for Lacan. Listen to it, I quote: "If there is something I am," says Lacan, "it is clear that I am not a nominalist. What I want to say is that my starting point is not that the name is something like a nameplate which attaches itself just like that onto the real. One has to choose: if one is a nominalist, one has to renounce completely dialectical materialism. So that all in all, I evidently reject the nominalist tradition which is effectively the only danger of idealism which can arise in a discourse like mine." What I like here—did you notice, and this is from when hardline Marxism was already out of fashion—how I love this, how for Lacan the main argument against nominalism is that it’s incompatible with dialectical materialism. Not so bad for Lacan, no? Okay, so it goes on: "The point is not to be a realist in the sense in which one was a realist in medieval times, in the sense of the realism of the universals. The point is to emphasize that our discourse, our scientific discourse, can only find the real insofar as it depends on the function of the semblant. The articulation, and I mean the algebraic articulation of the semblant and its effects—this is the only
different level its exact opposite. First, again, it’s the obvious level of denial. In the patient’s unconscious, the figure is of course his mother. And denial is the price the patient has to pay to bring this maternal figure to consciousness. But this is not all. There is another level at which "This is not my mother" asserts the existence of mother. Because we know that in the Freudian space, mother stands for the impossible incestuous object and so on and so on. So, we can also say that "This is not my mother," it's not just a lie, you know, a lie in the sense of "It really is my mother but I don’t want to admit it that I was dreaming screwing my mother" whatever. It also can mean "Mother is impossible, inaccessible." Like the idea being: this miserable figure cannot be my mother. And now, here we come to this more complex paradoxes. I claim that the problem with denying "this is not my mother" asserts mother even too much, because it still implies that there is a mother but even if this woman in the dream is my mother, it cannot be that mother, the incestuous mother, whatever. So, the paradox here is that if we were to get, instead of this Freudian conservative patient, a more open permissive patient who would have said, "So what’s the problem? Okay, this is my mother, I wanted to screw my mother," for a strict Freudian the repression would have been even stronger here. Because saying "This is my mother" is a lie. It cannot be. This is the pervert illusion: that you can get—that you can get the object. So, again, negation operates here at two levels. First, there is the simple *verneinung*, denial. "This is not my mother." Then there is the other as the impossible real object of—of desire. Like, then you can say "Even if it is mother, it’s not yet mother." And again, the result should be here the double negation: not not mother, and so on. So, again, what does this mean for sexual difference? That it paradoxically precedes the two terms whose difference it is. Sexual difference is not—this would have been Lacan’s speculative formula—sexual difference is not a difference between two given positions. But sexual difference is the name of a deadlock, and two given positions are two attempts to deal with this—with to deal with this deadlock. Let me first give you here another example of this which maybe you know from my work but I think it fits perfectly here. You know, I spoke years ago a lot about this, about this Kantian distinction—no wonder Kant was the first, I think, to conceptualize sexual difference in his antinomies—Kantian distinction between infinite and—or indefinite and negative judgment. You know the story: negative judgment negates a predicate; infinite judgment asserts a non-predicate. Negative judgment, for example, if I am alive, negative—sorry, if I am—alive, negative judgment is "I am not dead." I negate a predicate, "dead." Infinite judgment is not "I am not dead," but "I am undead." And here you see what's the difference if you know Stephen King and so on, of course. "I am not dead," it's not—it's simply "I am alive." The space is here that of binary differential opposition. If I am not dead, I am alive; if I am alive, I am not dead. But if you say "I am undead," you open up a third infinite field of the living dead, undead, neither dead nor alive. And for Lacan, again, this is the structure—you know, woman is not "not man." Woman—you cannot say woman isn't man. Man isn't woman, that's okay. But with woman it's different. It's not "Woman isn't man." Woman is un-man or non-man. Which means a third domain beyond sexual difference is—is opened up. And incidentally I think exactly the same goes for proletariat which is un-bourgeoisie, like non-bourgeoisie, outside it. So, and incidentally if you know Alain Badiou’s work, I think that in the same—in exactly the same way one has to read his rejection of aesthetics. You know that he calls his writings about art "inaesthetics." He uses the term *Handbook of Inaesthetics*. I think it’s precisely "in" in this Kantian sense of the third domain in between. Now I come to my next point which for me at least is crucial: how is then this structure of pure antagonism—like that before difference there is one which doesn’t coincide with itself? Like, coffee is never purely coffee, it’s always coffee and X, an empty spot and so on. And I think everything originates from this. Like, I think that a name proper always aims at this place. You know, like a name is never—here I am for Kripke against Bertrand Russell and so on—a name is never just a name of a thing, is never just a combinatoire of the properties of the thing, like a shortened version of their properties. If you enumerate all the properties, you miss something. And name is the name for that something. Name is fundamentally tautological. At the same time, the name for the—the name for the—for the unnamable. But now comes—I want to interpret it more in detail, maybe you already know it—the absolute quote from Lacan. My favorite. I mean, literally at this moment if you ask me, give me a couple of lines from Lacan that you think they are absolute, this is it, I think. It is, if you want the references, again, unpublished text, from Seminar from *D’un Discours qui ne Serait pas du Semblant* (Of a Discourse That Would Not Be of Semblance). This one appeared incidentally in French at least, Éditions du Seuil page where Lacan tries to differentiate his position from that of nominalism. And I think this is a crucial philosophical debate because—because here Lacan is clearly against Althusser, against Michel Foucault and so on, who are basically nominalists for Lacan. Listen to it, I quote: "If there is something I am," says Lacan, "it is clear that I am not a nominalist. What I want to say is that my starting point is not that the name is something like a nameplate which attaches itself just like that onto the real. One has to choose: if one is a nominalist, one has to renounce completely dialectical materialism. So that all in all, I evidently reject the nominalist tradition which is effectively the only danger of idealism which can arise in a discourse like mine." What I like here—did you notice, and this is from when hardline Marxism was already out of fashion—how I love this, how for Lacan the main argument against nominalism is that it’s incompatible with dialectical materialism. Not so bad for Lacan, no? Okay, so it goes on: "The point is not to be a realist in the sense in which one was a realist in medieval times, in the sense of the realism of the universals. The point is to emphasize that our discourse, our scientific discourse, can only find the real insofar as it depends on the function of the semblant. The articulation, and I mean the algebraic articulation of the semblant and its effects—this is the only
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apparatus which enables us to designate
apparatus which enables us to designate
Slavoj Žižek
what is real. What is real is what opens up a hole in this semblant, in this articulated semblant which is the scientific discourse," and so on and so on. Okay, what’s—what’s Lacan’s point here? I think it’s absolutely crucial. A) Lacan is not a nominalist. His point is not what actually exists are just particular or even individual cases and so on and so on. So he is not a nominalist. But of course he is not a naive realist in the sense of realism of the universals and so on and so on. There is something beyond singular semblances.
what is real. What is real is what opens up a hole in this semblant, in this articulated semblant which is the scientific discourse," and so on and so on. Okay, what’s—what’s Lacan’s point here? I think it’s absolutely crucial. A) Lacan is not a nominalist. His point is not what actually exists are just particular or even individual cases and so on and so on. So he is not a nominalist. But of course he is not a naive realist in the sense of realism of the universals and so on and so on. There is something beyond singular semblances.
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But that something is the gap of the real impossibility and so on and so on. Again, please don’t kill me if I give you an example which I think I’ve written about
But that something is the gap of the real impossibility and so on and so on. Again, please don’t kill me if I give you an example which I think I’ve written about
Slavoj Žižek
it at least twenty times in my books. But nonetheless, you
it at least twenty times in my books. But nonetheless, you
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know that famous Lévi-Strauss example of—you take some stupid Native American village and you ask different members of the tribe to draw the disposition of the houses in the—in the village. And Lévi-Strauss noticed how if you ask two different groups, you get totally different description of the village. For one part of the tribe, the houses in the village are divided into two, one group the other group. For the other part of the tribe, you have—the two kinds of houses are not, like, delimited by a borderline, but are like center and around the center and the environs. And Lévi-Strauss’s point is what? It’s
know that famous Lévi-Strauss example of—you take some stupid Native American village and you ask different members of the tribe to draw the disposition of the houses in the—in the village. And Lévi-Strauss noticed how if you ask two different groups, you get totally different description of the village. For one part of the tribe, the houses in the village are divided into two, one group the other group. For the other part of the tribe, you have—the two kinds of houses are not, like, delimited by a borderline, but are like center and around the center and the environs. And Lévi-Strauss’s point is what? It’s
Slavoj Žižek
that—okay, you will say "What's the problem? Let's hire a helicopter and took a
that—okay, you will say "What's the problem? Let's hire a helicopter and took a
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photoshoot of the village and we will see what is reality." Here comes the greatness of Lévi-Strauss, no, who says "No, the point is not this, the real is not this. It's not that we have there reality, the way houses really are, and two misperceptions of the houses." Lévi-Strauss reads it in this way: that this, the antagonism here, is what? This village
photoshoot of the village and we will see what is reality." Here comes the greatness of Lévi-Strauss, no, who says "No, the point is not this, the real is not this. It's not that we have there reality, the way houses really are, and two misperceptions of the houses." Lévi-Strauss reads it in this way: that this, the antagonism here, is what? This village
Slavoj Žižek
was on the edge of entering class distinction. It was struggling with a problem of social hierarchy. And these two dispositions, architectural dispositions, are two ways of how to materialize, of how to resolve this deadlock. In other words, the real to which obviously we have here semblances—each, we have semblance one, the way one half of the tribe draw the map of their village, we have semblance two—but the real is not simply the reality. The real is that X on account of which each member
was on the edge of entering class distinction. It was struggling with a problem of social hierarchy. And these two dispositions, architectural dispositions, are two ways of how to materialize, of how to resolve this deadlock. In other words, the real to which obviously we have here semblances—each, we have semblance one, the way one half of the tribe draw the map of their village, we have semblance two—but the real is not simply the reality. The real is that X on account of which each member
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of the tribe falsified the disposition of villages. Because the disposition of villages was a pretext—why was—why is the disposition of the houses in the village falsified? Again, not because they were too stupid to draw the images, but because they through falsifying the disposition of houses in reality, they tried to resolve a deadlock. That deadlock is the real. You see, in this sense now I hope you get it: Lacan is not a nominalist. We don’t have only particulars. We don’t have only the reality of the—of how houses are in the village, then one drawing, the other drawing.
of the tribe falsified the disposition of villages. Because the disposition of villages was a pretext—why was—why is the disposition of the houses in the village falsified? Again, not because they were too stupid to draw the images, but because they through falsifying the disposition of houses in reality, they tried to resolve a deadlock. That deadlock is the real. You see, in this sense now I hope you get it: Lacan is not a nominalist. We don’t have only particulars. We don’t have only the reality of the—of how houses are in the village, then one drawing, the other drawing.
Slavoj Žižek
No, we have something more: social antagonism, which nowhere exists—in this sense it's not nominalist—but you have to refer to it. And to give you even the last example—I know I repeated it five times but it's crucial that we get the logic right here—you remember that—I always mention it—Fredric Jameson’s critique of this, this concept I met with recently in—in Peru, sorry, in Bolivia, where I was a week ago, no, they didn’t like this, my ferocious attack on—on Alternate Modernity. Because unfortunately many of the people in Bolivia believe this bullshit, no, that like we maybe have a unique possibility reviving some stupid ancient Inca traditions to build an alternate modernity, and so on and so on, no? So again, for Lacan, the real is the universal. In this sense, Lacan is a realist. That is to say, we cannot say simply there are multiple modernities. There are multiple modernities, yes, but they are all—exactly like, you know, when people say—adepts of multiple modernity—no, you cannot talk only about *a* modernity. This is your Western modernity, individualized exploitative capitalism. We can have Indian modernity, Latino-American modernity, Chinese modernity. Nonetheless I’m here on Fred Jameson’s side, who says: yes, we have multiple modernities, but they all relate to the same real, which is the antagonisms of global capitalism. Again, as you probably know and heard this ten times, the reason I’m opposed to Alternate Modernity is that we in Europe, we know very well what is alternate modernity. We had one big alternate modernity in the 20th century; it’s called Fascism, no? Fascism was precisely a dream of "We can have modernity but without Jewish corruption, class struggle, without all that." And that’s for me also the lie of historicism. When you say there is no general modernity, we should historicize and so on—yes, but the danger of historicizing is, as it is clear from concepts of alternate modernities, it is that you try to dismiss as a product of particular historical circumstances what
No, we have something more: social antagonism, which nowhere exists—in this sense it's not nominalist—but you have to refer to it. And to give you even the last example—I know I repeated it five times but it's crucial that we get the logic right here—you remember that—I always mention it—Fredric Jameson’s critique of this, this concept I met with recently in—in Peru, sorry, in Bolivia, where I was a week ago, no, they didn’t like this, my ferocious attack on—on Alternate Modernity. Because unfortunately many of the people in Bolivia believe this bullshit, no, that like we maybe have a unique possibility reviving some stupid ancient Inca traditions to build an alternate modernity, and so on and so on, no? So again, for Lacan, the real is the universal. In this sense, Lacan is a realist. That is to say, we cannot say simply there are multiple modernities. There are multiple modernities, yes, but they are all—exactly like, you know, when people say—adepts of multiple modernity—no, you cannot talk only about *a* modernity. This is your Western modernity, individualized exploitative capitalism. We can have Indian modernity, Latino-American modernity, Chinese modernity. Nonetheless I’m here on Fred Jameson’s side, who says: yes, we have multiple modernities, but they all relate to the same real, which is the antagonisms of global capitalism. Again, as you probably know and heard this ten times, the reason I’m opposed to Alternate Modernity is that we in Europe, we know very well what is alternate modernity. We had one big alternate modernity in the 20th century; it’s called Fascism, no? Fascism was precisely a dream of "We can have modernity but without Jewish corruption, class struggle, without all that." And that’s for me also the lie of historicism. When you say there is no general modernity, we should historicize and so on—yes, but the danger of historicizing is, as it is clear from concepts of alternate modernities, it is that you try to dismiss as a product of particular historical circumstances what
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is inscribed into a very universal notion of a phenomenon.
is inscribed into a very universal notion of a phenomenon.
Slavoj Žižek
For example, de facto, the problem with alternate modernities is that they think, to cut a long story short, that they can get capitalist modernism without paying the price for it, without antagonisms, and so on. No? So you see the point: why Lacan is not nominalist. We don't have only particulars. We don't have only the reality of the—of how houses are in the village, then one drawing, the other drawing. No, we have something more: social antagonism. Which nowhere exists—in this sense it's not nominalist—but you have to refer to it. Again, you got also my point, which is central here, that for a true Hegelian—and Lacan, he doesn't know it, is Hegelian here—the contradiction is not between particulars within a universal space. The contradiction is between particular and its universality. That is to say, to understand corporate-fascist capitalism, it’s not enough to say they fight liberals. No, they are an attempt to control the contradiction, antagonism inscribed into the very notion of capitalism. This is a wonderful Hegelian idea of how every particularity is in conflict with its own universality. Which is why Hegel—and again, which is why there is nothing of wisdom in Hegel. You know, wisdom is this position of particular elements fighting each other, with each other, but—but a wise man pulls back and sees it all. No, precisely this is what you—cannot do. Okay, still we have to go on. Yes, now we—covered this Lacan's nominalism and so on. Another way to—to get at this strange double negation where the result is not return to its origin is a certain type of jokes or rather paradoxes where you have a certain position, you negate it, it doesn’t work, you negate it again, and it gets even worse. Like, sorry if this will sound to you counter-revolutionary, but I love it. I read a book on the fall of Saigon, you know, the victory of—the victory of the—the defeat of Americans in Vietnam And I remember reading as an anecdote that after they took over, communist cadre propagandists were touring the city and asking, and forcing young people to see—gently but nonetheless obligatory—to see North pro-communist propaganda film, no? And the story went like this: they make you see the movie for two hours, then they ask you, "Did you like the film or not?" If you say "yes," they told you, "Oh, fine, so you can see it again if you like it." If you said "no," they said, "Ah, so you didn’t understand it, you have to see it again." But okay, you have a nicer structure of this same joke that I really like in an anecdote, I think I quoted it in my first book, from an—an editor in one of the William Randolph Hearst newspapers. Who was—for twenty years he didn’t take—holiday. And Hearst asked him, "Why don’t you take a rest, go to a holiday?" He said, "Well, I am afraid if—that if I take a holiday, you know, everything depends on me, everything will fall apart, and so on." No? And then Hearst answered, "Don’t worry, everything will be okay, everything will go on as if you are here." And the guy said, "That’s what I’m even more afraid of." You see here, I hope, a little bit, the—the logic. Now, we don't have time to go through all of it, because I wanted to do two more things here. First, Le Gaufey does something wonderful here. He applies this logic of exception to psychoanalytic clinic and claims that psychoanalytic clinic functions precisely in this way: that, you know, cases in psychoanalysis are never simply illustrations of a general proposition, that you have always this more dialectical movement of subversion and so on and so on. The second thing I want to conclude with is what I had mentioned already yesterday: that when Lacan came to this point—radical antagonism, sexual difference, and so on—I think this was his limit. And I think he failed here. In what precise sense? Okay, this antagonism, or rather the fact that the contradiction is here and here, not here, means we are beyond this Yin-Yang cosmology, sexual difference, and so on. So there is no sexual relationship. Now Lacan got entangled in a wonderful Hegelian problem. It may appear purely conceptual, but I think the consequences are crucial. Is it enough to say there is no sexual relationship, or generally there is no relationship, or should we make the move which I already made apropos of the undead and the move from the negation of the predicate to the assertion of the non-predicate? Is it enough to say there is a non-relationship, or sorry, that there isn't—there is no sexual relationship, or are we allowed to say *there is* a non-relationship? That is to say, there is an object which positively embodies non-relationship. Lacan knew that he has to make this step somehow, but he was aware of the dangers and it didn’t work. First, he—I think that of course the—the answer is obvious: that that Lacanian "there is no sexual relationship" is strictly correlative to object small a, to this excess which is, in a way, cause of desire which is the non-relationship embodied. The problem with Lacan was that he tried then to solve in his last years the problem with—the so-called Borromean knot. You know it’s the idea of Borromean knot: you have a knot of three circles, but in such a way that the two circles are never connected. Like, if you cut off one, the two others fall apart. And Lacan thought that here he has the ultimate metaphor. But look here from January ’79—I think this is pretty much towards the end, the very last of Lacan’s seminars—after over ten years of struggle, look how he concludes, quote: "The metaphor of the Borromean knot is, in its most simple state, inadequate. It abuses metaphor because there really is no thing which supports the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. What is essential in what I am saying is that there is no sexual relationship. That there is no sexual relationship because there is an imaginary, a symbolic, and the real—this is what I did not dare to say. But I nonetheless say it. It is evident that I was wrong. But I simply let myself slide—slide into it. This is disturbing, it is even more than annoying. It is even more annoying that it is not justified. This is how things look to me today, and this is what I confess to you. All right." That's Lacan's last words. And I think that we can clearly see in—in what sense it didn’t go. Again, Lacan was well aware that if you remain at this level of "there is no sexual relationship," you are in danger of falling again into yet another version of this, you know, oooh, this wisdom of, "oh reality is ultimately a primordial conflict, war, and so on." You need something more. But he—he went too far with this idea, I think, of Borromean knot. He went too far. This was not the formula. The—the idea was the right one. Namely, that "there is no sexual relationship" means precisely that in a way sexes are never two, that they are three. There is no relationship between the two means that two is always three. Or to put it in—I'm jumping very quickly now, I know—but to put it in Marxist terms simplified: class struggle, contrary to those who accuse me of—of binarism and so on, class struggle means precisely that the classes are never two. If the classes were to be two, there would have been a class struggle but in a purely formal way: I am here, you are there. Class struggle is precisely because two never appears as two. It is always more, and the struggle is for that more. So it's not that we have a pure class struggle which then gets blurred, you know, because there are also small bourgeois farmers, whatever. No, we only get class struggle because there are more than two. And again, the logic of this, Lacan didn't—I think Lacan broke down, he didn't get. Now if you allow me another ten minutes, hahaha, I will try to provide some kind of formula
For example, de facto, the problem with alternate modernities is that they think, to cut a long story short, that they can get capitalist modernism without paying the price for it, without antagonisms, and so on. No? So you see the point: why Lacan is not nominalist. We don't have only particulars. We don't have only the reality of the—of how houses are in the village, then one drawing, the other drawing. No, we have something more: social antagonism. Which nowhere exists—in this sense it's not nominalist—but you have to refer to it. Again, you got also my point, which is central here, that for a true Hegelian—and Lacan, he doesn't know it, is Hegelian here—the contradiction is not between particulars within a universal space. The contradiction is between particular and its universality. That is to say, to understand corporate-fascist capitalism, it’s not enough to say they fight liberals. No, they are an attempt to control the contradiction, antagonism inscribed into the very notion of capitalism. This is a wonderful Hegelian idea of how every particularity is in conflict with its own universality. Which is why Hegel—and again, which is why there is nothing of wisdom in Hegel. You know, wisdom is this position of particular elements fighting each other, with each other, but—but a wise man pulls back and sees it all. No, precisely this is what you—cannot do. Okay, still we have to go on. Yes, now we—covered this Lacan's nominalism and so on. Another way to—to get at this strange double negation where the result is not return to its origin is a certain type of jokes or rather paradoxes where you have a certain position, you negate it, it doesn’t work, you negate it again, and it gets even worse. Like, sorry if this will sound to you counter-revolutionary, but I love it. I read a book on the fall of Saigon, you know, the victory of—the victory of the—the defeat of Americans in Vietnam And I remember reading as an anecdote that after they took over, communist cadre propagandists were touring the city and asking, and forcing young people to see—gently but nonetheless obligatory—to see North pro-communist propaganda film, no? And the story went like this: they make you see the movie for two hours, then they ask you, "Did you like the film or not?" If you say "yes," they told you, "Oh, fine, so you can see it again if you like it." If you said "no," they said, "Ah, so you didn’t understand it, you have to see it again." But okay, you have a nicer structure of this same joke that I really like in an anecdote, I think I quoted it in my first book, from an—an editor in one of the William Randolph Hearst newspapers. Who was—for twenty years he didn’t take—holiday. And Hearst asked him, "Why don’t you take a rest, go to a holiday?" He said, "Well, I am afraid if—that if I take a holiday, you know, everything depends on me, everything will fall apart, and so on." No? And then Hearst answered, "Don’t worry, everything will be okay, everything will go on as if you are here." And the guy said, "That’s what I’m even more afraid of." You see here, I hope, a little bit, the—the logic. Now, we don't have time to go through all of it, because I wanted to do two more things here. First, Le Gaufey does something wonderful here. He applies this logic of exception to psychoanalytic clinic and claims that psychoanalytic clinic functions precisely in this way: that, you know, cases in psychoanalysis are never simply illustrations of a general proposition, that you have always this more dialectical movement of subversion and so on and so on. The second thing I want to conclude with is what I had mentioned already yesterday: that when Lacan came to this point—radical antagonism, sexual difference, and so on—I think this was his limit. And I think he failed here. In what precise sense? Okay, this antagonism, or rather the fact that the contradiction is here and here, not here, means we are beyond this Yin-Yang cosmology, sexual difference, and so on. So there is no sexual relationship. Now Lacan got entangled in a wonderful Hegelian problem. It may appear purely conceptual, but I think the consequences are crucial. Is it enough to say there is no sexual relationship, or generally there is no relationship, or should we make the move which I already made apropos of the undead and the move from the negation of the predicate to the assertion of the non-predicate? Is it enough to say there is a non-relationship, or sorry, that there isn't—there is no sexual relationship, or are we allowed to say *there is* a non-relationship? That is to say, there is an object which positively embodies non-relationship. Lacan knew that he has to make this step somehow, but he was aware of the dangers and it didn’t work. First, he—I think that of course the—the answer is obvious: that that Lacanian "there is no sexual relationship" is strictly correlative to object small a, to this excess which is, in a way, cause of desire which is the non-relationship embodied. The problem with Lacan was that he tried then to solve in his last years the problem with—the so-called Borromean knot. You know it’s the idea of Borromean knot: you have a knot of three circles, but in such a way that the two circles are never connected. Like, if you cut off one, the two others fall apart. And Lacan thought that here he has the ultimate metaphor. But look here from January ’79—I think this is pretty much towards the end, the very last of Lacan’s seminars—after over ten years of struggle, look how he concludes, quote: "The metaphor of the Borromean knot is, in its most simple state, inadequate. It abuses metaphor because there really is no thing which supports the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. What is essential in what I am saying is that there is no sexual relationship. That there is no sexual relationship because there is an imaginary, a symbolic, and the real—this is what I did not dare to say. But I nonetheless say it. It is evident that I was wrong. But I simply let myself slide—slide into it. This is disturbing, it is even more than annoying. It is even more annoying that it is not justified. This is how things look to me today, and this is what I confess to you. All right." That's Lacan's last words. And I think that we can clearly see in—in what sense it didn’t go. Again, Lacan was well aware that if you remain at this level of "there is no sexual relationship," you are in danger of falling again into yet another version of this, you know, oooh, this wisdom of, "oh reality is ultimately a primordial conflict, war, and so on." You need something more. But he—he went too far with this idea, I think, of Borromean knot. He went too far. This was not the formula. The—the idea was the right one. Namely, that "there is no sexual relationship" means precisely that in a way sexes are never two, that they are three. There is no relationship between the two means that two is always three. Or to put it in—I'm jumping very quickly now, I know—but to put it in Marxist terms simplified: class struggle, contrary to those who accuse me of—of binarism and so on, class struggle means precisely that the classes are never two. If the classes were to be two, there would have been a class struggle but in a purely formal way: I am here, you are there. Class struggle is precisely because two never appears as two. It is always more, and the struggle is for that more. So it's not that we have a pure class struggle which then gets blurred, you know, because there are also small bourgeois farmers, whatever. No, we only get class struggle because there are more than two. And again, the logic of this, Lacan didn't—I think Lacan broke down, he didn't get. Now if you allow me another ten minutes, hahaha, I will try to provide some kind of formula
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for this. I will do a very modest thing along the lines of my good friend Alain Badiou, who—did you read his text, Badiou's text in *I love Badiou*, in his—in the *New Left Review* on some features of contemporary French philosophy, which I love it? You know, it's a very modest text with the following thesis: Western philosophy has three consecutive stages, each higher than the other, no? Ancient Greek thought, German idealism, and French philosophy of the 20th century. And he is at the top of this last stage in this way, and Badiou is my best friend because, you know, my God, when I told him, "Are you aware what you are saying? Like that you are the top of the top?" he said, "What’s the problem? This is true." He simply didn’t get it, no? Ah no, we need this. No, I’m not making fun here. What I think is basically much more arrogant is to claim exactly the same which we are all in a way claiming. Let’s
for this. I will do a very modest thing along the lines of my good friend Alain Badiou, who—did you read his text, Badiou's text in *I love Badiou*, in his—in the *New Left Review* on some features of contemporary French philosophy, which I love it? You know, it's a very modest text with the following thesis: Western philosophy has three consecutive stages, each higher than the other, no? Ancient Greek thought, German idealism, and French philosophy of the 20th century. And he is at the top of this last stage in this way, and Badiou is my best friend because, you know, my God, when I told him, "Are you aware what you are saying? Like that you are the top of the top?" he said, "What’s the problem? This is true." He simply didn’t get it, no? Ah no, we need this. No, I’m not making fun here. What I think is basically much more arrogant is to claim exactly the same which we are all in a way claiming. Let’s
Slavoj Žižek
be serious: if you write a book criticizing other philosophers, are you
be serious: if you write a book criticizing other philosophers, are you
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de facto claiming that you know more than all of them? But today in our hypocritical time, we like to say, "Of course, I may be wrong." I totally agree with Chesterton who says, "How dare you say 'I may be wrong'? This is the greatest arrogance. Be at least honest and you write because you think you are right." It's a much more honest position. So again, in the same modest way—it’s nothing special, I just wanted to give you—which brings together Hegel and Lacan and solve, solve, very modest. Okay. Maybe I already mentioned it, but I would like to go quickly through it in another way. It’s, of course, quantum physics, Higgs field. But now I want to be honest here: I am crazy but not totally crazy. That is to say, I am not now engaged in some New Age stuff where Higgs field provides the formula for good sexual life or whatever, you know. And also, obvious thing: I am too stupid to judge the inherent
de facto claiming that you know more than all of them? But today in our hypocritical time, we like to say, "Of course, I may be wrong." I totally agree with Chesterton who says, "How dare you say 'I may be wrong'? This is the greatest arrogance. Be at least honest and you write because you think you are right." It's a much more honest position. So again, in the same modest way—it’s nothing special, I just wanted to give you—which brings together Hegel and Lacan and solve, solve, very modest. Okay. Maybe I already mentioned it, but I would like to go quickly through it in another way. It’s, of course, quantum physics, Higgs field. But now I want to be honest here: I am crazy but not totally crazy. That is to say, I am not now engaged in some New Age stuff where Higgs field provides the formula for good sexual life or whatever, you know. And also, obvious thing: I am too stupid to judge the inherent
Slavoj Žižek
scientific status of Higgs field. I am well aware that many scientists today think—because you know, you probably know that now Higgs field is reactualized again because all that CERN in Swiss lab stuff that they are doing is precisely—now we are slightly approaching the possibility of maybe detecting the Higgs particle, no? So I, first I must say, what I am doing here is depending on—simply, what can I do but an amateur s2—to accept what they, the scientists, present to me. And I’m just asking a very simple question: let’s accept that this holds. What are the ontological consequences? I think philosophers should be modest here. We cannot play that transcendental role of judging science. We philosophers have to risk—you know, like you commit yourself although you cannot guarantee for its truth to a certain scientific achievement. And incidentally here I cannot but agree with Badiou, I convinced him the last time I tried to convert him, we play these eternal battles that I met him, to my pro-Hegelianism, and I told him, and he accepted this. You know, Badiou’s idea of four—how do you call it—four truth events, truth domains, no? I told him, "But don’t you get it? This is German idealism." You know what are his truth domains? Science, politics, art, love. I told him: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. Kant: science. Kant’s problem is precisely as he says how to reconstruct philosophy based on modern science. Fichte is politics, the whole Fichtean problem is, you know, politics. Schelling is art. Schelling is I think maybe even the only philosopher in the history of philosophy who consciously poses art as a higher level of, okay, let’s call it knowledge, and Hegel, it can be clearly shown that Hegel’s model of all different matrices is love. Okay. So Higgs field. Why was I so fascinated when I was reading about Higgs field? Because precisely as a materialist I was fascinated, because I think it undermines the New Age appropriation of quantum void as the nothing-all. You know, often quantum physics is read in this way: "Oh, but ancient Hindu idiots, jerks, they are masturbating, whatever, they already knew this all," you know, like the—the—that there is a primordial void out of which everything comes and into which everything disappears and so on and so on. No, it’s not that. What quantum physics calls void, zero, is precisely not this Plotinian formless one or beyond one from which all comes, where all disappears and so on and so on. So what am I talking about? Again, some simple definitions, don’t be afraid, it’s Wikipedia style. The Higgs field controls whether forces and particles behave differently or not. When the Higgs field is switched on, operative, symmetries are broken between the elementary particles and their complex pattern of differences emerges. While when Higgs field is switched off, inoperative, forces and particles are indistinguishable from one another. That is to say, the system is in a state of vacuum. And this is why, now you can understand, particle scientists search so desperately for the hypothetical Higgs particle, sometimes referred to as the "God particle." Because this particle would have been, literally, the particle equivalent of what Lacan calls object small a: the cause of disturbing the symmetry of a vacuum, the X which breaks the symmetry and introduces differences. In short, nothing less than the cause of the passage from nothing, vacuum, the void of pure potentialities
scientific status of Higgs field. I am well aware that many scientists today think—because you know, you probably know that now Higgs field is reactualized again because all that CERN in Swiss lab stuff that they are doing is precisely—now we are slightly approaching the possibility of maybe detecting the Higgs particle, no? So I, first I must say, what I am doing here is depending on—simply, what can I do but an amateur s2—to accept what they, the scientists, present to me. And I’m just asking a very simple question: let’s accept that this holds. What are the ontological consequences? I think philosophers should be modest here. We cannot play that transcendental role of judging science. We philosophers have to risk—you know, like you commit yourself although you cannot guarantee for its truth to a certain scientific achievement. And incidentally here I cannot but agree with Badiou, I convinced him the last time I tried to convert him, we play these eternal battles that I met him, to my pro-Hegelianism, and I told him, and he accepted this. You know, Badiou’s idea of four—how do you call it—four truth events, truth domains, no? I told him, "But don’t you get it? This is German idealism." You know what are his truth domains? Science, politics, art, love. I told him: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. Kant: science. Kant’s problem is precisely as he says how to reconstruct philosophy based on modern science. Fichte is politics, the whole Fichtean problem is, you know, politics. Schelling is art. Schelling is I think maybe even the only philosopher in the history of philosophy who consciously poses art as a higher level of, okay, let’s call it knowledge, and Hegel, it can be clearly shown that Hegel’s model of all different matrices is love. Okay. So Higgs field. Why was I so fascinated when I was reading about Higgs field? Because precisely as a materialist I was fascinated, because I think it undermines the New Age appropriation of quantum void as the nothing-all. You know, often quantum physics is read in this way: "Oh, but ancient Hindu idiots, jerks, they are masturbating, whatever, they already knew this all," you know, like the—the—that there is a primordial void out of which everything comes and into which everything disappears and so on and so on. No, it’s not that. What quantum physics calls void, zero, is precisely not this Plotinian formless one or beyond one from which all comes, where all disappears and so on and so on. So what am I talking about? Again, some simple definitions, don’t be afraid, it’s Wikipedia style. The Higgs field controls whether forces and particles behave differently or not. When the Higgs field is switched on, operative, symmetries are broken between the elementary particles and their complex pattern of differences emerges. While when Higgs field is switched off, inoperative, forces and particles are indistinguishable from one another. That is to say, the system is in a state of vacuum. And this is why, now you can understand, particle scientists search so desperately for the hypothetical Higgs particle, sometimes referred to as the "God particle." Because this particle would have been, literally, the particle equivalent of what Lacan calls object small a: the cause of disturbing the symmetry of a vacuum, the X which breaks the symmetry and introduces differences. In short, nothing less than the cause of the passage from nothing, vacuum, the void of pure potentialities
unknown
to something, actual different particles and forces. So, how is this miraculous particle thinkable in a materialist way? How can we avoid here the obscurantist idea of a mystical cause of all objects? Because you can see now why reactionaries get here a multiple orgasm: "Oh, you must admit that there is a particle which is like the divine intervention which basically makes something out of nothing, it’s the cause of the so-called break of the symmetry and so on and so on." All this—this would be my answer—all theological speculations, philosophical rather, focus on this point: at the very beginning or more precisely before the beginning, there is nothing, the void of pure
to something, actual different particles and forces. So, how is this miraculous particle thinkable in a materialist way? How can we avoid here the obscurantist idea of a mystical cause of all objects? Because you can see now why reactionaries get here a multiple orgasm: "Oh, you must admit that there is a particle which is like the divine intervention which basically makes something out of nothing, it’s the cause of the so-called break of the symmetry and so on and so on." All this—this would be my answer—all theological speculations, philosophical rather, focus on this point: at the very beginning or more precisely before the beginning, there is nothing, the void of pure
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potentiality, the will which wants nothing, the divine abyss prior to God, and this primordial peace balance is then inexplicably disturbed, lost. The material solution is here very precise. It concerns the key paradox of the Higgs field. As every field, Higgs field is characterized by its energy density and by its strength. However, it is energetically favorable for the Higgs field to be switched on and for the symmetries between particles and forces to be broken. What does this mean? We have, let’s say, the pure vacuum. The Higgs field is switched off, inoperative, we have the void, no differences,
potentiality, the will which wants nothing, the divine abyss prior to God, and this primordial peace balance is then inexplicably disturbed, lost. The material solution is here very precise. It concerns the key paradox of the Higgs field. As every field, Higgs field is characterized by its energy density and by its strength. However, it is energetically favorable for the Higgs field to be switched on and for the symmetries between particles and forces to be broken. What does this mean? We have, let’s say, the pure vacuum. The Higgs field is switched off, inoperative, we have the void, no differences,
Slavoj Žižek
no symmetries broken. And then, of course, you would have said the Higgs field, in order to break the symmetry, has to spend some energy. Like, nothing comes for free. But here we come to the paradox. The paradox, to cut it very short, the paradox of the Higgs field is the following one: again, imagine the zero level, cosmic void, no symmetry broken, no particular entities emerging out of pure uniformality, and imagine spending zero energy on Higgs field. And this is now the absolute paradox. This is for me the best definition of materialism: there is a gap between the two. Literally, the presupposition of Higgs field is that something costs less than nothing. That is to say, if you want to be at the state of absolute peace, you, spending no energy—no, absolute peace, sorry, in the sense of no broken symmetry—you have already to spend some energy. The lowest point of energy is not when nothing happens. It's when in a minimal way something already—you know what I mean? If this is, for example, how much energy you spend and this is how much symmetry is broken. It's not like this: the more energy you spend, the more symmetry is broken. It's like this. So, physicists, based on this, distinguish between two vacuums: the false vacuum and the true vacuum. The false vacuum is ontologically even more a vacuum. The false vacuum is the state in which Higgs field is switched off. There is pure symmetry with no differentiated particles and so on and so on. But it's false because you need energy to sustain the zero. The true vacuum is already a little bit further, where you spend zero energy but there is already some disturbance, some what I yesterday—two days ago called *e pur si muove* and so on and so on. So why do I find this so attractive? Because the paradox, ontological paradox again is that I think that if you take this seriously, it undermines this very idea of some primordial abyss and so on where things are at the zero level and then you get into all theological problematic by what divine contingency something emerged out of nothing. No, if you read it in this way, something can be cheaper than nothing. The zero level of universe is not peace,
no symmetries broken. And then, of course, you would have said the Higgs field, in order to break the symmetry, has to spend some energy. Like, nothing comes for free. But here we come to the paradox. The paradox, to cut it very short, the paradox of the Higgs field is the following one: again, imagine the zero level, cosmic void, no symmetry broken, no particular entities emerging out of pure uniformality, and imagine spending zero energy on Higgs field. And this is now the absolute paradox. This is for me the best definition of materialism: there is a gap between the two. Literally, the presupposition of Higgs field is that something costs less than nothing. That is to say, if you want to be at the state of absolute peace, you, spending no energy—no, absolute peace, sorry, in the sense of no broken symmetry—you have already to spend some energy. The lowest point of energy is not when nothing happens. It's when in a minimal way something already—you know what I mean? If this is, for example, how much energy you spend and this is how much symmetry is broken. It's not like this: the more energy you spend, the more symmetry is broken. It's like this. So, physicists, based on this, distinguish between two vacuums: the false vacuum and the true vacuum. The false vacuum is ontologically even more a vacuum. The false vacuum is the state in which Higgs field is switched off. There is pure symmetry with no differentiated particles and so on and so on. But it's false because you need energy to sustain the zero. The true vacuum is already a little bit further, where you spend zero energy but there is already some disturbance, some what I yesterday—two days ago called *e pur si muove* and so on and so on. So why do I find this so attractive? Because the paradox, ontological paradox again is that I think that if you take this seriously, it undermines this very idea of some primordial abyss and so on where things are at the zero level and then you get into all theological problematic by what divine contingency something emerged out of nothing. No, if you read it in this way, something can be cheaper than nothing. The zero level of universe is not peace,
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primordial abyss and so on. That
primordial abyss and so on. That
Slavoj Žižek
peace already costs something energetically, an effort and so on. And I claim that this gap, this minimal gap where a certain movement, circulation is cheaper than nothing—this would be the minimum ontological difference, I claim, of the Freudian drive. And I think the minimum idea of idealism is precisely that you can put two vacuums together, you know, in any form like primordial wisdom and so on. No, I think you always have a gap between the two vacuums. Or to put it in libidinal terms, Lacan’s point would have been here that drive is less than zero. It’s not that you have zero in the sense of total Nirvana. No, total Nirvana—to attain this, this would be the ultimate Lacanian anti-Buddhist argument—total Nirvana is not really total Nirvana, it already costs something energetically, an effort and so on. In but—okay I will develop this in my next book—the breathtaking consequences of this. For example, the result you get here is that why is there, you know, this big shitty philosophical problem "Why is there something instead of
peace already costs something energetically, an effort and so on. And I claim that this gap, this minimal gap where a certain movement, circulation is cheaper than nothing—this would be the minimum ontological difference, I claim, of the Freudian drive. And I think the minimum idea of idealism is precisely that you can put two vacuums together, you know, in any form like primordial wisdom and so on. No, I think you always have a gap between the two vacuums. Or to put it in libidinal terms, Lacan’s point would have been here that drive is less than zero. It’s not that you have zero in the sense of total Nirvana. No, total Nirvana—to attain this, this would be the ultimate Lacanian anti-Buddhist argument—total Nirvana is not really total Nirvana, it already costs something energetically, an effort and so on. In but—okay I will develop this in my next book—the breathtaking consequences of this. For example, the result you get here is that why is there, you know, this big shitty philosophical problem "Why is there something instead of
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nothing?"
nothing?"
Slavoj Žižek
That it's a false problem. I mean, the true mystery is why is there nothing instead of something? You know, because like the problem is how to arrive at nothing. What exists is not more than nothing. What exists is less than nothing. Not
That it's a false problem. I mean, the true mystery is why is there nothing instead of something? You know, because like the problem is how to arrive at nothing. What exists is not more than nothing. What exists is less than nothing. Not
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even, you know, to get at... this is
even, you know, to get at... this is
Slavoj Žižek
where, again, I cannot but conclude with a Jewish joke. Which I think is a totally correct one. But it's a well-known one, maybe I even repeated it here already. You know, synagogue, Jews gathering there to pray, blah, blah, whatever they are doing, horrible things there, and first a rich Rabbi says, "Oh dear God, I am nobody, I am not worthy of you, I am a nothing and so on." You know the story, no? Then a rich merchant comes, Jewish, and says, "Oh God, I am also nobody, I am nothing, unworthy of you, blah, blah." Then a poor Jew raises his head and says, "A poor Jew says, 'Oh dear God, I am also nothing and so on.'" And then, you know, one rich guy kicks the other: "But who is he? How does he dare to say that he is nothing?" This is the Hegelian/Lacanian, this is the correct lesson deeply. No, but I’m not kidding here. In Kabbalah, you also find this idea, deeply along these levels, that, you know, the beginning of creation is not something, that
where, again, I cannot but conclude with a Jewish joke. Which I think is a totally correct one. But it's a well-known one, maybe I even repeated it here already. You know, synagogue, Jews gathering there to pray, blah, blah, whatever they are doing, horrible things there, and first a rich Rabbi says, "Oh dear God, I am nobody, I am not worthy of you, I am a nothing and so on." You know the story, no? Then a rich merchant comes, Jewish, and says, "Oh God, I am also nobody, I am nothing, unworthy of you, blah, blah." Then a poor Jew raises his head and says, "A poor Jew says, 'Oh dear God, I am also nothing and so on.'" And then, you know, one rich guy kicks the other: "But who is he? How does he dare to say that he is nothing?" This is the Hegelian/Lacanian, this is the correct lesson deeply. No, but I’m not kidding here. In Kabbalah, you also find this idea, deeply along these levels, that, you know, the beginning of creation is not something, that
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God
God
Slavoj Žižek
first had to create nothing to withdraw and so again, I’m not playing that cheap game of, you know, "ooh the ancient, those Hindus who, so I was told, can do horrible things like can ejaculate inside, can move their penis so that they suck things and so on in, they already knew everything and so on." No, I’m talking just about this very elementary, deeply materialist moment: that there is a gap, a tension between two vacuums. There is a minimum of ontological movement which is even previous to void. Void is not first. I think, although this may appear materialist, but this idea of a primordial void out of which things emerge and not and so on—and you know who knew this in its own way? He really should be reread: Democritus. We don't have time to go into it, but check it up even if you do it like me on Wikipedia or whatever. You know—you know that wonderful notion of that Democritus' term for atoms is *den*, which is a total neologism, no? Because it doesn't exist, it's *med-en*, that's the original term. *Hen* is *en* is *hen*—all, no? But Democritus consciously puts the wrong cut. Okay. The only correct translation of this is basically less than zero. It’s not one. I mean, good history of philosophy will teach you how Aristotle and all the Diogenes Laërtius who write about Democritus already ontologized him. There, atoms become small ones which circulate in nothingness. Again, with Democritus, it's much more paradoxical. What do I mean by this? Nonetheless, I would like to give you a simple example, my God, what shitty movies I see because of my son. Did you see the new version of *Karate Kid* with... "Don’t blame your son!" "No, I blame you! You’re probably the type who goes to these shitty artie movies and you know—I hate artie movies. You know how you make artie movies? You have a good hardcore movie, people screw each other. Then you are an artist and just add between each sex scene ten minutes people just staring at each other, ooh how deep it becomes, you know." Okay, sorry. There is nonetheless a nice cheap Hollywood wisdom, but nonetheless. In the film, when the young American boy trained by this Chinese Kung Fu teacher who told him that he must learn to—to be inactive, to win the battle, that he asks the American boy, the teacher: "How can I win my fight if I only stand still?" And the teacher replies: "Being still is not the same as doing nothing." I mean, here again we have this idea. And I think we should not read this idea in the usual obscurantist way of the cliché about a wise ruler who knows how to play one against the other his subordinates so that they destroy each other, he does nothing but everything is at peace. No, I think that—that doing—there is a point when you do nothing precisely by doing something. Doing nothing already—doing nothing already—already costs... you know, it’s a little bit like if you permit me this, I know purely brutal illegal step towards individual even
first had to create nothing to withdraw and so again, I’m not playing that cheap game of, you know, "ooh the ancient, those Hindus who, so I was told, can do horrible things like can ejaculate inside, can move their penis so that they suck things and so on in, they already knew everything and so on." No, I’m talking just about this very elementary, deeply materialist moment: that there is a gap, a tension between two vacuums. There is a minimum of ontological movement which is even previous to void. Void is not first. I think, although this may appear materialist, but this idea of a primordial void out of which things emerge and not and so on—and you know who knew this in its own way? He really should be reread: Democritus. We don't have time to go into it, but check it up even if you do it like me on Wikipedia or whatever. You know—you know that wonderful notion of that Democritus' term for atoms is *den*, which is a total neologism, no? Because it doesn't exist, it's *med-en*, that's the original term. *Hen* is *en* is *hen*—all, no? But Democritus consciously puts the wrong cut. Okay. The only correct translation of this is basically less than zero. It’s not one. I mean, good history of philosophy will teach you how Aristotle and all the Diogenes Laërtius who write about Democritus already ontologized him. There, atoms become small ones which circulate in nothingness. Again, with Democritus, it's much more paradoxical. What do I mean by this? Nonetheless, I would like to give you a simple example, my God, what shitty movies I see because of my son. Did you see the new version of *Karate Kid* with... "Don’t blame your son!" "No, I blame you! You’re probably the type who goes to these shitty artie movies and you know—I hate artie movies. You know how you make artie movies? You have a good hardcore movie, people screw each other. Then you are an artist and just add between each sex scene ten minutes people just staring at each other, ooh how deep it becomes, you know." Okay, sorry. There is nonetheless a nice cheap Hollywood wisdom, but nonetheless. In the film, when the young American boy trained by this Chinese Kung Fu teacher who told him that he must learn to—to be inactive, to win the battle, that he asks the American boy, the teacher: "How can I win my fight if I only stand still?" And the teacher replies: "Being still is not the same as doing nothing." I mean, here again we have this idea. And I think we should not read this idea in the usual obscurantist way of the cliché about a wise ruler who knows how to play one against the other his subordinates so that they destroy each other, he does nothing but everything is at peace. No, I think that—that doing—there is a point when you do nothing precisely by doing something. Doing nothing already—doing nothing already—already costs... you know, it’s a little bit like if you permit me this, I know purely brutal illegal step towards individual even
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psychology. You believe—you
psychology. You believe—you
Slavoj Žižek
should believe me, I know about this because if there ever was a person with all the nervous tics, it’s me, no? Like, if you really want to destroy me, it’s to tell me "Relax, just sit peacefully" and so on and so on. I would have to put an incredible effort into it. The only way for nervous jerks like me to get peace is to focus on some small gesture repetitively. And through, you know like doing something, no, the only way to approach nothing is to do something. If you want direct nothing, it’s an incredible effort, it’s doing much more. So again, this would be somehow my result that again, to resume: quantum physics, as you know, still is an enigma. And I tend to agree with those who—ontologically, I mean—to those who claim that all the versions that we get to resolve the enigma are precisely so many semblances trying to resolve the deadlock. You know, we have, for example, the—we have, for example, this David Bohm solution which is—he tries to state the classical image of presupposing some kind of retroactive causality and so on and so on. We have many-world interpretations, we have the spiritualist interpretations, and so on and so on. I think these are precisely, as with modernity or whatever, we still are not at the level to confront Bohr’s paradox. And I think that this is maybe the task today. The consequences are tremendous ontologically. I really think that we arrive that—if read properly—quantum physics is maybe the most materialist science there was. I think we should totally reject all that stuff—ooh, you know, mind creates reality, time runs backward, and all that stuff. No, no, no, things are much more precise in quantum physics. But again, what has to fall is A) the notion of consistent, fully existing reality. Reality must be rendered not-all, incomplete. And again, following the logic of Higgs field, this our most elementary ontological presupposition: that something is more than nothing, that as it were, things emerge out of some primordial void balance and so on, should be abandoned. That is to say that the zero level of reality is not void, but it’s neither nothing nor something, but some weird less-than-something, some... you know, the paradox would be maybe the following one: when Lacan talks about object small a—I use this two-three times in my books—I was always struck by the parallel between object small a and the status of, I think it’s photon, I’m so bluffing in physics, I don’t know. But I think photon has—is a particle which has this paradoxical property that, you know, with other particles you have a certain mass, gravity and then of course, if the particle is moving, this mass raises. The idea of a photon is that when it’s not moving, it has zero mass. You know—how to put it—it exists only as its own excess. It doesn't exist at zero, as zero level. Something which has no—it's not that you can... it's almost like comrade Stalin in his infinite genius came close to this when, you know, that old joke, when he was asked in I think, by a journalist, "Which deviation is worse: left-wing or right-wing deviation?" Stalin's answer: "They are both worse," you know, like with revisionists, they are not only bad, they are worse, no? Worse like with no standard, there is nobody who is bad, you begin with worse. And it's again the same with photons. You see this idea which maybe also comes close to the way Epicurus supplemented Democritus because *clinamen*, you know, where Epicurus, my God, Marx—I'm almost tempted to say the true young Marx that should be rehabilitated is not that stupid boring proto-Stalinist meditations
should believe me, I know about this because if there ever was a person with all the nervous tics, it’s me, no? Like, if you really want to destroy me, it’s to tell me "Relax, just sit peacefully" and so on and so on. I would have to put an incredible effort into it. The only way for nervous jerks like me to get peace is to focus on some small gesture repetitively. And through, you know like doing something, no, the only way to approach nothing is to do something. If you want direct nothing, it’s an incredible effort, it’s doing much more. So again, this would be somehow my result that again, to resume: quantum physics, as you know, still is an enigma. And I tend to agree with those who—ontologically, I mean—to those who claim that all the versions that we get to resolve the enigma are precisely so many semblances trying to resolve the deadlock. You know, we have, for example, the—we have, for example, this David Bohm solution which is—he tries to state the classical image of presupposing some kind of retroactive causality and so on and so on. We have many-world interpretations, we have the spiritualist interpretations, and so on and so on. I think these are precisely, as with modernity or whatever, we still are not at the level to confront Bohr’s paradox. And I think that this is maybe the task today. The consequences are tremendous ontologically. I really think that we arrive that—if read properly—quantum physics is maybe the most materialist science there was. I think we should totally reject all that stuff—ooh, you know, mind creates reality, time runs backward, and all that stuff. No, no, no, things are much more precise in quantum physics. But again, what has to fall is A) the notion of consistent, fully existing reality. Reality must be rendered not-all, incomplete. And again, following the logic of Higgs field, this our most elementary ontological presupposition: that something is more than nothing, that as it were, things emerge out of some primordial void balance and so on, should be abandoned. That is to say that the zero level of reality is not void, but it’s neither nothing nor something, but some weird less-than-something, some... you know, the paradox would be maybe the following one: when Lacan talks about object small a—I use this two-three times in my books—I was always struck by the parallel between object small a and the status of, I think it’s photon, I’m so bluffing in physics, I don’t know. But I think photon has—is a particle which has this paradoxical property that, you know, with other particles you have a certain mass, gravity and then of course, if the particle is moving, this mass raises. The idea of a photon is that when it’s not moving, it has zero mass. You know—how to put it—it exists only as its own excess. It doesn't exist at zero, as zero level. Something which has no—it's not that you can... it's almost like comrade Stalin in his infinite genius came close to this when, you know, that old joke, when he was asked in I think, by a journalist, "Which deviation is worse: left-wing or right-wing deviation?" Stalin's answer: "They are both worse," you know, like with revisionists, they are not only bad, they are worse, no? Worse like with no standard, there is nobody who is bad, you begin with worse. And it's again the same with photons. You see this idea which maybe also comes close to the way Epicurus supplemented Democritus because *clinamen*, you know, where Epicurus, my God, Marx—I'm almost tempted to say the true young Marx that should be rehabilitated is not that stupid boring proto-Stalinist meditations
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about alienation from it's his thesis from too,
about alienation from it's his thesis from too,
Slavoj Žižek
about—he already focused on the difference, you know what's the title of Marx's doctoral thesis: *The Difference Between Democritean and Epicurean Atomism*. And there, the difference is precisely *clinamen*. The idea that atoms not only fall, but in a contingent way they deviate. And the step to be made here—Deleuze wrote some nice lines about it—is precisely that *clinamen* is original. Like photon, you don't have something which then is distorted, sidetracked. It's—this distortion, *clinamen*, taking—making a detour is primordial. Excess, things are always in excess with regard to themselves. Along these lines, I would like maybe to develop some things and so on and so on. "Do I get a certain body language from you that maybe it's the time that I shut up or what?" "No, there is another talk here at but... I don't know if you want to have time for questions. I mean, it's... I think he did make us work today, as you promised yesterday. No, you did, although, please, let me be serious here. All I can tell you is that I did speak, when I was in the United States, in the UK and so on, with some particle physicists just to be sure that it’s not total bullshit what I’m saying, you know what I mean? Just to be sure that what I’m—I told them, "I don’t want to teach you, I’m not that kind of philosopher who tells you 'No, no, you are making a mistake, I know better than you.'" And they at least... Beckett did say the whole thing much more laconically, the idea that "nothing is more real than nothing," but we could never accuse you of being laconic. Oh, but today my point is there is something more real than nothing. It's less than nothing, less than zero. Okay. All right. But still, I thought this was the most important exploration, rectification, since your own Plato fantasy, really, on sexual difference. Even a modest rectification of Lacan. And I have some questions, but I don’t know if I should let the audience go first. I have some Woody—oh you were there, that’s why all the Jewish jokes were about... I was wondering why they were about... okay, but no, I have—I don’t know if I should start with a question, are there questions? Do you have time to take a few questions? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder, you know, that going back to the formulas of sexuation and your rectification of Lacan but also the admission that you can easily say "man is not woman" it’s logical, but you cannot say "woman is not man" because there is always a domain beyond sexual difference. No, what you cannot say is that not-woman is man. That if you deny
about—he already focused on the difference, you know what's the title of Marx's doctoral thesis: *The Difference Between Democritean and Epicurean Atomism*. And there, the difference is precisely *clinamen*. The idea that atoms not only fall, but in a contingent way they deviate. And the step to be made here—Deleuze wrote some nice lines about it—is precisely that *clinamen* is original. Like photon, you don't have something which then is distorted, sidetracked. It's—this distortion, *clinamen*, taking—making a detour is primordial. Excess, things are always in excess with regard to themselves. Along these lines, I would like maybe to develop some things and so on and so on. "Do I get a certain body language from you that maybe it's the time that I shut up or what?" "No, there is another talk here at but... I don't know if you want to have time for questions. I mean, it's... I think he did make us work today, as you promised yesterday. No, you did, although, please, let me be serious here. All I can tell you is that I did speak, when I was in the United States, in the UK and so on, with some particle physicists just to be sure that it’s not total bullshit what I’m saying, you know what I mean? Just to be sure that what I’m—I told them, "I don’t want to teach you, I’m not that kind of philosopher who tells you 'No, no, you are making a mistake, I know better than you.'" And they at least... Beckett did say the whole thing much more laconically, the idea that "nothing is more real than nothing," but we could never accuse you of being laconic. Oh, but today my point is there is something more real than nothing. It's less than nothing, less than zero. Okay. All right. But still, I thought this was the most important exploration, rectification, since your own Plato fantasy, really, on sexual difference. Even a modest rectification of Lacan. And I have some questions, but I don’t know if I should let the audience go first. I have some Woody—oh you were there, that’s why all the Jewish jokes were about... I was wondering why they were about... okay, but no, I have—I don’t know if I should start with a question, are there questions? Do you have time to take a few questions? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder, you know, that going back to the formulas of sexuation and your rectification of Lacan but also the admission that you can easily say "man is not woman" it’s logical, but you cannot say "woman is not man" because there is always a domain beyond sexual difference. No, what you cannot say is that not-woman is man. That if you deny
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woman, you
woman, you
Slavoj Žižek
are back at man. I think there is an excess in woman. Okay, there is—the sexual difference is deeply asymmetrical. Which is, again, just to make it clear, which is why I think it’s not some kind of a primordial dualism. The original structure is precisely like that of coffee without milk. There are—there are no two sexes. There is one sex plus something, which is neither. Okay, would that lead you though to agree with something that I’ve heard you disagree with before, the idea that woman has access to some surplus *jouissance* that Lacan goes on about in Seminar Because simply because, you know, there is a domain beyond sexual difference, does that mean that the people on the feminine side of the formula of sexuation, whether they are biologically men or women, have access to this surplus *jouissance* that in the past you said is Lacan’s sort of fantasy, it’s not really... ah, here things are much more tricky. First, I claim that it all depends how we read this. Even some Lacanians read it in, I think, a very dangerous obscurantist way. It goes like this: man is fully integrated into the symbolic order, while woman is not-all within the symbolic order. There is some terrifying, I don’t know, too strong *jouissance* and only women can get into it. No, I think as I repeated in my book all the time, that it’s absolutely crucial to take this into account: women have access not insofar as they are less within the symbolic order, but insofar as they are totally within it. In other words, I claim that this idea of a woman who, you know, has access to some secret excessive *jouissance* outside language, with the divine—this is the ultimate male fantasy. Yeah. This is the ultimate male fantasy. No, no, no, a woman... so again, but this then has many philosophical consequences. Because, for example, the reason I am for Descartes, philosophically, basically for *Cogito*, is I claim that if you, against this background, read Descartes closely, you can see that Cogito is feminine. Cogito? Yeah, I totally reject this idea that Cogito is coded as... no, first incidentally, first even at the most anecdotal level. Did you know that my God, Descartes is the first breakthrough of philosophy... because of Hypatia... yeah, I mean he was immensely popular, whatever this means, among women. Not only Queen Christina of Sweden, but all others and so on. There was a—they felt in it an immense emancipatory potential. Okay, you... yeah, okay... no, because you did mention this yesterday actually, you said because Descartes took into account that women are more suggestible or more hysterical... no, no, no, no, this is—this is the bad Descartes then, when he sexualizes it into "Cogito is pure thinking, but women are more..." and so on and so on. No, but you know what's my tendency here? One you should always remember that Descartes’ *Cogito* is at its core purely non-substantial point of excess of madness and so on and so on, no? That Descartes’ passage is—I agree with readers who claim that the passage in Descartes from *Cogito* to *res cogitans*, a thinking thing, is illegitimate. Descartes makes it automatically. No, but I think that there sexual difference is already described. That pure subjectivity is feminine. A male position is always already a substantialized, substantialized... you know what I did in some of my books? This you may consider crazy. I even claimed that what is usually taken as the ultimate anti-feminist argument, namely this Freudian link of femininity and masquerade... this is, I think, a correct insight. We should just really read it the way it is. What does it mean "femininity as masquerade"? It means all features you have are already secondary as a mask and so on. And the pure—yeah, this is precisely where women are much more—we men are stupid, we think we are substantially this and—only women can be pure subjects. Which is why, I don’t know if I repeated this here, in a weird French debate, I in a very strange way defended—but this is already now I think in this shitty book of mine, whatever—defended this problem in France of, how do you call it, burqa, burka, whatever, no? I claim that what shocked me, again, is not... this is another problem: are Islam women forced to do it or not? What shocked me is how French women—I even participated there in the debate, I saw French republican, Christian, whatever—they felt threatened by it. Like, a woman told me, a woman to be precise, Françoise Lévy, a journalist for *Le Point*, you know, the right-wing journal where Jacques-Alain Miller regularly publishes, no? She told me, "I feel threatened when I see a face covered with burqa. As if, as if I’m cut off, you know, like somebody doesn’t want to open herself to me or whatever. I feel like our public space is threatened and so on and so on." And I think in the first pages of my *Living in the End Times* book, I proposed the opposite reasoning: that the horror of burqa is the opposite one. Maybe you remember I mention, I think I even did it here, that well-known Alphonse Allais, I think, the French satirist’s version of Salome’s dance, you know? Salome dances, dances, seven veils, then she is naked, then the king shouts, "Go on, go on!" and she puts on her nose, her skin, and so on, like getting really naked. And I claim that phenomenologically, what makes woman with a burqa so horrible is not that it’s covered, but the our true phenomenological relationship to it. It is as if, you know—now I’m going to my softly anti-feminist waters—I remember reading a nice—seeing a nice male chauvinist caricature of a woman who comes home after a party and, you know, does this evening unmasking, you know, takes on the lipstick and so on—takes off, I mean, wipes it, but then it goes on: she takes off her ears, her eyes, and so on! And she goes to sleep just as an empty ball or whatever, no? But I claim that something like this almost happens in burqa when you have it. We are confronted there precisely the pure subject. It’s just an empty gaze, you know, because you don’t just get—if it were to be just a covered black ball, it’s nothing. The true horror is that it has a cut for the eye. That’s pure subject. I claim absolutely it’s the opposite. The reason we—because you know, this is the lesson of psychoanalysis, the anti-Levinasian lesson. You know who is Levinas, no? The... no, here I agree with my friend Woody—no, I’m joking, but Levinas is, you know, the Christian philosopher who masks himself as a Jew, no? I sincerely think Levinas is so popular because he is selling as Jewish wisdom this Christian moral bullshit about, you know, "love neighbor" and so on. What is so great in Judaism is that it's much more communist, my God. It's absolute—the way I understand Judaism, okay, I don't understand it, but the way I do is that it's exactly the primacy of the collective. When Levinas says first is the face of the other and then there are other others, only then... no, no, this is not Judaism, no. Again, so I think that precisely we should here stick to the radical lesson of psychoanalysis against Levinas. Face is not the authentic other. Face is originally primordial lying. Which is why, again, as I always repeat, in psychoanalysis, it's crucial that it's not face-to-face. You know, psychoanalytic treatment is not intersubjectivity. It's not "I am here with an analyst and we both sincerely talk" whatever. No, you are alone, the analyst is behind, doing, you know, masturbating, playing cards, whatever, no? It's crucial, this radical asymmetry. You are not two in psychoanalytic session. You are one plus more than one, less than zero, the object. And so on. And this—we don’t have time to go into it, but this is the greatness of Hegel. He knew it. This would have been my ultimate argument against the—this bourgeois-liberal, let’s call them anarco-recognition Hegelians. No. If you really read Hegel’s that famous passage—struggle to death between the future master and servant, blah, blah—you will see what’s Hegel’s problem there. That the other that you encounter, the self-consciousness encounters, it's not this kind of a "Oh, I recognize myself in you, we are equal." It's a kind of a monstrous, traumatic otherness. I mean, you are—I am here, and I see objects. I am of course the center of my world, point of absolute subjectivity. And then there is another stupid object who claims "But I am also like you, universal," and so on. It's absolutely incompatible, this. The other is primordially not the other in whom I can recognize myself, but is this ontological paradox of another absolute, as it were, no? So again, here I think that we should—Lacan was totally right, even in a Hegelian way, that intersubjectivity is not the ultimate—is not the ultimate horizon, no? Okay, okay, I talk too much. Okay. Woody? Yeah. Here and then... here and then... I have two—two short points... not even questions, I don’t deserve a question. It’s kind of a question... don’t start. One I think about the—the way of reading of Lacan confessing "I was wrong." Yeah. It’s a little bit naive to really read it as "he was wrong." Really what he’s doing is to commit suicide of the master. It’s exactly like when Zarathustra said, "Leave me, betray me, because maybe always I lie to you." So it’s kind of the lesson of the Master from *Totem and Taboo*: instead of let the other people to kill him, he commit a suicide and then he become unalive and he become alive forever. I would always say it’s like Gaddafi that said "You cannot fire me because always I was no one." Yeah. So this is really his trick. Exactly. Nice. Gaddafi’s like the Jewish Rabbi or what? No, he’s like, you know, Lacan, he’s not like the Jew. And the other one is about the—the origin of modernity that you said that "Oh, the alternative..." If the modernity—if we spoke that the semblants are the one who create the real, yeah, so we have to say that all this multiplicity is the one who create this modernity that is the global—is the global capitalism. And then it’s created back to all those multiplicity around. It’s not that they are all wrong and there is one true modernity. No, if the modernity is kind of the real, all those semblants around like Al-Qaeda, whatever, they create the modernity—like communism, Al-Qaeda, fascism, all of them together. Zionism? Zionism definitely. And then this one create them back reflexively. Yeah, but it’s not that this is the true... that Strauss was wrong that things—the deadlock is the one that create all the semblants. Really all those perceptions are the one who create the deadlock. And then it created back in the... this is... can I nonetheless very briefly answer now because I will forget. But nonetheless, I think that—I think that nonetheless in this circular relation, antagonism has a priority. I claim. But for philosophical reasons I cannot go into them now. Of course, the—the real-time causality is circular. But what I like is precisely this idea, which is for me the very core of dialectical idea: that you don’t have entities which then enter into contradictory, conflicting relations. It’s that contradiction comes first. Entities obfuscate contradiction. You know why is there asymmetry? I will give you maybe another example: take political left or right. It’s not enough to say we have a political space which is then divided into left and right. But if you ask a leftist and how the whole political space is structured, you will get a different image than from the rightist. So, you see in this sense for me antagonism comes first. Because the only way you can account for these particular modernities is that they already react to some trauma of let's call it antagonism. As to what you said there about Lacan, yeah, in a way I agree. But here I must confess to you quite sincerely, I am extremely naive here. I don't care about that stupid annoying old man, egotist, impossible to live with, called Lacan. You know what I mean? I take very naively what he said. And it may function—it may function as you said. But it is—and sorry for this naivete—but in a way it is still true. Fuck Lacan, he was talking about certain topic, about certain problems, he didn't solve them. He didn't solve them. Which is why as already mentioned it's important not to mystify the last Lacan, not to go into this "was there some final secret" and so on and so on. I mean, you know what I mean? Probably Lacan was a great self-performer. So, of course it was this element, no? And I totally agree with you: this is a nice reading that suicide is—suicide is one way to control your destiny, to prevent your pupils... I mean every honest master own—owes to his pupils the fundamental right that in one way or another they kill him, no? And the truly oppressive masters try to take even this from them. But nonetheless, I was very naive here and I focused on the topic. Lacan was in a deadlock, he didn't solve it, and in a quite naive way I'm claiming we can think further. It's not that Lacan reached some ultimate limit and now, as Miller sometimes claims, and now we cannot go further, no. mm-hm. mm-hm. The guy before? Ah, yes. The guy in front. Okay. I want to recover something you said in the beginning today... about how in some way sex spills and contaminates all spheres of life. But then on the—on the other hand, you also say in some place that this is precisely what Freud criticized, this pansexualism, and what Freud was trying to say was precisely that: what needs to be enacted, what kind of fantasies need to be enacted in order for people to have sex? Or in other words, what—what are you thinking about when you are what are you thinking about when you are having sex? And my speculation, I mean, I don't know if I'm right but: can we say that in some way when the sex ends up contaminating all other spheres of life, we are dealing with some kind of *jouissance* that comes from the real, and on the opposite when we are talking about what people are thinking when they are having sex, we are talking about the symbolic and the all the fantasies that need needed to be enacted? Is that a correct way of—of putting it? No, it's a crucial question, I think things are very complex here, there is no simple direct answer. But again, you remember I agree with you that Freud was absolutely against this kind of pansexualism. His idea is not if you look deeply behind everything there is sex—like you know this primitive idea of I don't know whatever I—when I—when I whatever I do, ultimately it’s a way of doing that—seducing women or men or whatever. But for me again, the—the—the point would be the unity of the two. That is to say sex has to spill over into anything precisely because it cannot stand on its own. It's not too strong. It's—it's too weak. Again, I agree with your example because—the one I gave which is basically a version of that wonderful example by Lévi-Strauss where he says that there was one tribe in North America I think who—which had the theory that all dreams have sexual meaning, all dreams except explicitly sexual dreams, no? That they—they don’t have, no? And again, I agree with you if this was your point—I've written about it that—the true question of sexuality is not this cheap pansexual idea "Whatever I am doing, I am really in a metaphorical way doing that." No, the problem is not that whatever I am doing I am thinking about that. The problem is: but what am I thinking when I *am* doing that sex? No? And then there I have to go out. Sex cannot sustain itself. And I mean this quite—quite literally. I think—to be sorry, vulgar—when you make love, you cannot simply think about how happy I am now in this moment just making love. When you do this, even if you dream about this, why are you laughing? You—you must be perverted, but with you maybe it's possible, never know. We—maybe this is the last secret of the protocols of Zion, you know? Sorry, sorry. But what I want to say is that even if you just think about this, how happy I am now, okay, to be vulgar screwing that lady blah-blah, you will see that at the minimum point you already imagine somebody watching you. An imagined gaze or whatever, a phantasmatic scene, a phantasmatic scene must be here. So again, as to that what you mentioned that *phallic jouissance* and so on. Also you ask me "why," I didn’t want to go into that. I think that my God we are into so many paradoxes here. Lacan makes it absolutely clear that *jouissance féminine* doesn't exist. It is operative, but doesn't exist. Because read really closely—people miss this—his Seminar No, *phallic*, the—this *jouissance féminine*. He almost every time that he mentions it, he says, "if there is another *jouissance*, not *phallic*," and then he adds in the—in brackets: "but of course there isn't another one," and so on. So it's the clear example of this, you know, it doesn't exist but it still can be efficient. "It can be operative." Yeah, yeah. This is again what I meant the first day—so I wasn't totally bluffing—with that *e pur si muove*. That we should not read it as this primitive empiricism, "oh your shitty theories" *e pur si muove*. No, something can be proven non-existent but still *e pur si muove*. "But there’s a sort of whole feminist ideology revolved, like feminist-Lacanian ideology revolved precisely on the fantasy that there is a surplus jouissance, and it sort of propagates itself." "Yeah, yeah, but again, can't—don’t they see that in this way—I mean it quite literally—you prepare a new form of feminine enslavement? Because you never get there." I mean I tried to convince them there—I wasn’t quite successful partially in Bolivia where my point was precisely that—just don’t bring me all those Inca where women had a role, of course they had a role. They had a role to lay beneath, no I mean—you know what I mean? Like, I claim the only space of freedom is this Cartesian space of empty subjectivity and so on. All modernity—sorry, all pre-modernity where they apparently celebrate women, look at it closely—you know my standard paradoxes—it's like "Yeah, I know there is some shitty tribe in New Zealand where woman is sacred and the central temple in the village has the shape of a vagina." I agree. There is one problem: women are of course prohibited to enter. This is the most dangerous thing I think today, even as with racism. You know I’m just telling my old story that today’s form of racism is typical, is something like, "Oh those apparent primitives they are really much wiser than us. They—let’s not integrate them into our society, in this way they would lose their authentic wisdom or whatever of the world." No, I like natives who want to be more corrupted than ourselves. I like to tell you an anecdote—I don’t know I mention it—which happened to me with Woody. You in New York, when there were some Palestinians who gave me a wonderful example of racism. They were there invited by some shitty college to perform, and they were offered hummus, hummus there. You know, as a sign of respect "we will give you your food," no? And they told us, "Fuck you, we came here to be corrupted with greasy hamburgers and so on. We get enough of that shitty hummus." I mean, I—I—I think that the—the nastiest arrogance is that when you deplore when—some unicorns have one horn, this means they must exist. And Lacan takes this absolutely literally: that universality does not imply existence. Now you will say, "Okay, so what’s the big deal?" Ah, Lacan gives here a very—this is the *King’s Speech* problem, no—that imagine instead of universality a universal title that you have, like "I am a father" or whatever. And Lacan’s point is that we have the symbolic function of the father, but it doesn’t exist. Nobody can be a father. You cannot—let me give you, okay, an a nice short quote from Lacan’s seminar *Identification* from January I quote: "The order of the function which we introduce here as that of the name of the father is something which has universal value, but simultaneously puts on you the charge to control if there is or not a father who fits this function. If there is no such father, it still remains true that the father is God; it is simply that this formula is confirmed only by the empty sector of the—of the square." So here Lacan reads this tension between particular existence and inexistent universality as of deep relevance to psychoanalysis. As Lacan puts it, you cannot be a good father. You know, father is always too much or too little. You try to assert... father is, again, an impossible. "Do you have a page reference for your quote?" "I do have but, haha, now I will make it easy for myself, haha, it’s not published. No, no, no, but I can give it to you. Do not some guys in Ireland publish the complete translation? All I can give you is the date. It’s *Identification*, The session is 17th of January "Identification is isn’t it?" "No, no, no, it must be something different because *Ethics* is *Transference* Yeah, yeah, sorry, it is. Because then comes *Anxiety*, no? Yeah, yeah. 17th of January Yes." Okay. So now you will say again, but what’s the point of all of this? Ah, now comes—I wouldn’t say an amusing part, but for me at least, philosophically, the most interesting part. I here rely, I must openly admit when I steal stuff from others, to my Slovene colleague party member Alenka Zupančič, who—who brought into circulation, as it were, an—a magnificent—I’m so mad at myself that I didn’t noticed it because of course I saw the movie five times—purely dialectical magnificent joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s *Ninotchka*. No, nothing to do with communism, Greta Garbo, sex, but there is a scene in that film where the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. And you know what the waiter answers? It’s wonderful. The waiter replies, "Sorry, but we have run out of cream. So can I bring you coffee without milk? Because we have milk, you know." So again, in both cases, either coffee without cream or coffee without milk, you get coffee alone. But this coffee, one, is each time accompanied by a different negation: coffee with no cream, coffee with no milk. And this has even, I claim, political meaning. For example, when East Europeans in they did not simply want democracy, they were cheated in the same way that this waiter tries to cheat. They were—they wanted democracy without communism, but they also wanted democracy without capitalism, no? And like they got the wrong one. Okay, let’s go on. So what we encounter here is—it appears to be—the logic of differentiality, where the lack itself functions as a positive feature. Again, the paradox rendered nicely by an old Yugoslav joke about a Montenegrin—don’t be afraid, I will not repeat the twentieth time a joke how the Montenegro people masturbate, it’s a different one here—who are supposed to be lazy. The question is the joke: Why does a Montenegrin guy when he goes to sleep, why does he put at the side of his bed two glasses, one full and one empty, of water? Because he is too lazy to think in advance if he will be thirsty or not during the night. You see the paradox? Common sense tells you just put the glass there if you use it or not. But the differential logic tells you, no, also the non-being thirsty should be marked, should be there registered as an—as an empty—as an empty glass. That is to say, the second, the negative fact itself has to be taken note of. But now I come to the crucial point which will bring us to the key of sexual difference and so on for Lacan. Can this logic really be reduced to symbolic differentiality, you know, where differences matter, so the absence of something is also a positive feature? Is coffee without coffee? What basically the waiter is offering to the customer is coffee with without milk instead of coffee with without cream. They both want a kind of a coffee with a negative predicate, no? Justified by him: "I cannot give you coffee without cream because we have no cream, so I can only give you coffee with coffee with without milk because we have milk." Is this differentiality? It may appear so. In both cases, what we really get is exactly the same plain coffee. The difference resides only in the purely differential fact that the absence which defines coffee is first the absence of cream, then the absence of milk. Now what complicates the issue nonetheless is, I claim, the double negation at work in coffee with no milk. This coffee is not just with no milk, but also with—but also not with no cream. And this second negation, I claim, is not purely symbolic. It is coffee with milk which would have functioned differentially the same as coffee with no cream. And within this space, coffee with not with no cream is simply coffee with cream. Again, you get my point: if the relationships were to be purely differential then a double negation would bring us back to positivity: coffee not without—not without cream—doubly negated would have been simply coffee with cream. But no, coffee not without cream, in this case, is—coffee not without cream is coffee with—with no milk. So, this—I claim that this last opposition is not differential. Why? Because you must include the function of the object small a. That is to say, for this field to function, obviously the premise is that coffee cannot stand alone. Coffee is, even if you want coffee without milk, the empty place of a supplement of something to add is already there. You, in order for coffee to be attractive, you need something to fill in its lack, you know, like coffee with something, which makes it desirable. That would have been the object small a. And then the whole game is then a differential one: what will fill in this—what will fill in this excess. Which is why coffee without cream is not the same as straight coffee. Why not? Because you know, this—it's already mediated through negation. Or even now you will tell me, "But what if I really like just plain coffee?" I claim that if you analyze the semantic structure closely, you will see that coffee is already redoubled, that coffee functions as its own supplement. And this—there is nothing paradoxical about it. Let me evoke you a similar example to get the point. I used it in my first book, so I hope you are stupid old enough to forget it, or in *Looking Awry*, I don’t know where. You know that when Western got into crisis—Western the movies—from late 40s, what emerged were so-called meta-Westerns. They tried to supplement the Western dimension with another genre. For example, I don’t know, you know *Seven Brides for Seven Brothers*, whatever. It’s Western supplemented by musical. You have, for example, *Pursued* with Robert Mitchum and so on. It’s Western supplemented by film noir, and so on and so on. So again, they—they did so-called meta-Westerns: Westerns which inherently relied to another genre to fill in the non-satisfactory part, whatever. But then—I refer here to André Bazin—who had this idea at this very time where Western was already in crisis, there emerged two model Westerns: *Shane* and *High Noon*. And he claims no, these are not simply Westerns. These are Westerns where the meta-Western is Western itself. Westerns which relate to an otherness but this otherness is, again, the otherness of—the otherness of Western itself. So let me go on a little bit here. What I’m aiming at is the example that I used already, you know it all, years ago I was using it a lot, that of those stupid eggs, Kinder Surprise, no? And to say "I want coffee without milk" is just to say "I want that chocolate without the stupid plastic thing." But again, the structure is already that one. And what I’m saying is that this structure of a thing and its excess is not differential. It is differential to say "no milk," "yes," and so on and so on. What is not differential is this tension between a thing and a void in its core. A void which has to be supplemented by a figure of what Lacan calls object small a and so on and so on. Because again, what I'm claiming is that meta-Western is the same as when somebody offers you like "You don't need to add milk, sugar; this is already just plain best coffee." There again, self-reflexivity is already at—at—at work. So let me go on. So what has this to do with sexual difference, you will ask. Sexual difference precisely for Lacan is not differential. When Lacan privileges Phallus, this does not mean that sexual difference is structured along the axis of presence or absence of Phallus, like man has it, woman doesn’t have it. So of course you can read it in this way. And even now I will be really evil, paraphrase the famous Sherlock Holmes passage, you know, from *Silver Blaze*, I think. Do you remember "the curious accident of the dog," "but the dog did nothing," "that was the curious accident." The most famous lines of Sherlock Holmes. You can apply the same to the differential notion of sexual difference. "Is there any other point about seeing your sister naked to which you wish to draw my attention?" asks—if Sherlock Holmes is asked, Sherlock Holmes says "To the curious thing I noticed between her legs." "But there was nothing hanging out between her legs." "That was the curious thing," and so on, whatever. I mean, but—but I think this precisely is what Lacan doesn't want to say. The early Lacan till the 60s, yes, there one has to admit it, it’s simply a male-centered universe where the presence of or absence of Phallus in a differential way stands for sexual difference. But now, again, what Lacan does is something—is something different. His point is not to structure it in this way, but what? What is more in it? Ah, okay. Not to get too lost, let me go a step further. The crucial conclusion of Lacan from this asymmetry of excess and so on is again that the structure that I tried to isolate, that of an object one and its supplement—to put it in very speculative term, shortly, one is never one, one is always one and X, more than one but less than two, one and—and the object small a—that masculine and feminine position refer in a different way to this excess. How? Ah, now comes what I consider a little bit more interesting. The asymmetry between masculine and feminine for Lacan is that the masculine position is differential. That is to say, a differential relationship would have been where each sexual position is defined by its difference to the other: woman is not man, man is not woman. If somebody is not woman, he is man; if somebody is not man, she is a woman. But the way Lacan reads this non-all—not all of X is FX—is he introduces—and that's the beauty—the asymmetry among the sexes. That is to say, "no man" means woman; we men are stupid differential. If you are not a man, you are a woman. But if you are not a woman, you are not a man. That's the point of Lacan. If you are—that is to say, there is something of—and here is a beautiful quote which I think it’s really crucial from Lacan. This time is the—the seminar *Ou Pire* (Or Worse) from session May the 10th. "Since woman is non-all, why should all that is not woman be men?" You see that non-all of a woman means that if in a double negation you negate woman, you still get a woman. And that this—what again I will try to go—so for Lacan... and this, of course, this doesn’t mean there is some deep transsexual substance in woman and so on. That’s the beauty of it. It is still that there is—there is—there is nothing which is outside, which is not, but this spectral nothingness can be called the nothingness of the subject or whatever you want and so on and so on. So let me give you another line of thought here, a philosophical one, which will make this clear. We are dealing here with a negation of negation which again doesn’t bring you back to the first position. It’s not "You negate man, you get woman; you negate woman, you get man." No. Woman is much closer to negativity. Woman is its own negation. In the same way, ah, now you will say I’m crazy, I don’t care about it, what has this to do with progressive politics? I think—to give you a first hint—it is crucial to read class struggle like this. That is to say, a non-bourgeois is proletarian but a non-proletarian is not bourgeois. Marx says this. How? When he says—you must remember the details—that—that—that bourgeoisie is the only pure class in the history of humanity. Before bourgeoisie, capitalists, we have classes which are not yet fully classes. But working class is already a class which has to abolish itself as a class to assert itself. You see, you already have this double "no" in it. Okay, but—now let me go a little bit further to account for this stuff. You know Freud’s legendary example—everybody knows it—of a patient who told Freud when asked about "Who is this woman in your dream?" "I do not know who this woman in my dream is, but I am sure of one thing: this is not my mother." Of course, we all know, haha, like this simple logic, haha, why did you mention it, this precisely means that it is your mother. But I think that if we—if we read closely this example, things are much more paradoxical. "This is not my mother" means at two different level its exact opposite. First, again, it’s the obvious level of denial. In the patient’s unconscious, the figure is of course his mother. And denial is the price the patient has to pay to bring this maternal figure to consciousness. But this is not all. There is another level at which "This is not my mother" asserts the existence of mother. Because we know that in the Freudian space, mother stands for the impossible incestuous object and so on and so on. So, we can also say that "This is not my mother," it's not just a lie, you know, a lie in the sense of "It really is my mother but I don’t want to admit it that I was dreaming screwing my mother" whatever. It also can mean "Mother is impossible, inaccessible." Like the idea being: this miserable figure cannot be my mother. And now, here we come to this more complex paradoxes. I claim that the problem with denying "this is not my mother" asserts mother even too much, because it still implies that there is a mother but even if this woman in the dream is my mother, it cannot be that mother, the incestuous mother, whatever. So, the paradox here is that if we were to get, instead of this Freudian conservative patient, a more open permissive patient who would have said, "So what’s the problem? Okay, this is my mother, I wanted to screw my mother," for a strict Freudian the repression would have been even stronger here. Because saying "This is my mother" is a lie. It cannot be. This is the pervert illusion: that you can get—that you can get the object. So, again, negation operates here at two levels. First, there is the simple *verneinung*, denial. "This is not my mother." Then there is the other as the impossible real object of—of desire. Like, then you can say "Even if it is mother, it’s not yet mother." And again, the result should be here the double negation: not not mother, and so on. So, again, what does this mean for sexual difference? That it paradoxically precedes the two terms whose difference it is. Sexual difference is not—this would have been Lacan’s speculative formula—sexual difference is not a difference between two given positions. But sexual difference is the name of a deadlock, and two given positions are two attempts to deal with this—with to deal with this deadlock. Let me first give you here another example of this which maybe you know from my work but I think it fits perfectly here. You know, I spoke years ago a lot about this, about this Kantian distinction—no wonder Kant was the first, I think, to conceptualize sexual difference in his antinomies—Kantian distinction between infinite and—or indefinite and negative judgment. You know the story: negative judgment negates a predicate; infinite judgment asserts a non-predicate. Negative judgment, for example, if I am alive, negative—sorry, if I am—alive, negative judgment is "I am not dead." I negate a predicate, "dead." Infinite judgment is not "I am not dead," but "I am undead." And here you see what's the difference if you know Stephen King and so on, of course. "I am not dead," it's not—it's simply "I am alive." The space is here that of binary differential opposition. If I am not dead, I am alive; if I am alive, I am not dead. But if you say "I am undead," you open up a third infinite field of the living dead, undead, neither dead nor alive. And for Lacan, again, this is the structure—you know, woman is not "not man." Woman—you cannot say woman isn't man. Man isn't woman, that's okay. But with woman it's different. It's not "Woman isn't man." Woman is un-man or non-man. Which means a third domain beyond sexual difference is—is opened up. And incidentally I think exactly the same goes for proletariat which is un-bourgeoisie, like non-bourgeoisie, outside it. So, and incidentally if you know Alain Badiou’s work, I think that in the same—in exactly the same way one has to read his rejection of aesthetics. You know that he calls his writings about art "inaesthetics." He uses the term *Handbook of Inaesthetics*. I think it’s precisely "in" in this Kantian sense of the third domain in between. Now I come to my next point which for me at least is crucial: how is then this structure of pure antagonism—like that before difference there is one which doesn’t coincide with itself? Like, coffee is never purely coffee, it’s always coffee and X, an empty spot and so on. And I think everything originates from this. Like, I think that a name proper always aims at this place. You know, like a name is never—here I am for Kripke against Bertrand Russell and so on—a name is never just a name of a thing, is never just a combinatoire of the properties of the thing, like a shortened version of their properties. If you enumerate all the properties, you miss something. And name is the name for that something. Name is fundamentally tautological. At the same time, the name for the—the name for the—for the unnamable. But now comes—I want to interpret it more in detail, maybe you already know it—the absolute quote from Lacan. My favorite. I mean, literally at this moment if you ask me, give me a couple of lines from Lacan that you think they are absolute, this is it, I think. It is, if you want the references, again, unpublished text, from Seminar from *D’un Discours qui ne Serait pas du Semblant* (Of a Discourse That Would Not Be of Semblance). This one appeared incidentally in French at least, Éditions du Seuil page where Lacan tries to differentiate his position from that of nominalism. And I think this is a crucial philosophical debate because—because here Lacan is clearly against Althusser, against Michel Foucault and so on, who are basically nominalists for Lacan. Listen to it, I quote: "If there is something I am," says Lacan, "it is clear that I am not a nominalist. What I want to say is that my starting point is not that the name is something like a nameplate which attaches itself just like that onto the real. One has to choose: if one is a nominalist, one has to renounce completely dialectical materialism. So that all in all, I evidently reject the nominalist tradition which is effectively the only danger of idealism which can arise in a discourse like mine." What I like here—did you notice, and this is from when hardline Marxism was already out of fashion—how I love this, how for Lacan the main argument against nominalism is that it’s incompatible with dialectical materialism. Not so bad for Lacan, no? Okay, so it goes on: "The point is not to be a realist in the sense in which one was a realist in medieval times, in the sense of the realism of the universals. The point is to emphasize that our discourse, our scientific discourse, can only find the real insofar as it depends on the function of the semblant. The articulation, and I mean the algebraic articulation of the semblant and its effects—this is the only apparatus which enables us to designate what is real. What is real is what opens up a hole in this semblant, in this articulated semblant which is the scientific discourse," and so on and so on. Okay, what’s—what’s Lacan’s point here? I think it’s absolutely crucial. A) Lacan is not a nominalist. His point is not what actually exists are just particular or even individual cases and so on and so on. So he is not a nominalist. But of course he is not a naive realist in the sense of realism of the universals and so on and so on. There is something beyond singular semblances. But that something is the gap of the real impossibility and so on and so on. Again, please don’t kill me if I give you an example which I think I’ve written about it at least twenty times in my books. But nonetheless, you know that famous Lévi-Strauss example of—you take some stupid Native American village and you ask different members of the tribe to draw the disposition of the houses in the—in the village. And Lévi-Strauss noticed how if you ask two different groups, you get totally different description of the village. For one part of the tribe, the houses in the village are divided into two, one group the other group. For the other part of the tribe, you have—the two kinds of houses are not, like, delimited by a borderline, but are like center and around the center and the environs. And Lévi-Strauss’s point is what? It’s that—okay, you will say "What's the problem? Let's hire a helicopter and took a photoshoot of the village and we will see what is reality." Here comes the greatness of Lévi-Strauss, no, who says "No, the point is not this, the real is not this. It's not that we have there reality, the way houses really are, and two misperceptions of the houses." Lévi-Strauss reads it in this way: that this, the antagonism here, is what? This village was on the edge of entering class distinction. It was struggling with a problem of social hierarchy. And these two dispositions, architectural dispositions, are two ways of how to materialize, of how to resolve this deadlock. In other words, the real to which obviously we have here semblances—each, we have semblance one, the way one half of the tribe draw the map of their village, we have semblance two—but the real is not simply the reality. The real is that X on account of which each member of the tribe falsified the disposition of villages. Because the disposition of villages was a pretext—why was—why is the disposition of the houses in the village falsified? Again, not because they were too stupid to draw the images, but because they through falsifying the disposition of houses in reality, they tried to resolve a deadlock. That deadlock is the real. You see, in this sense now I hope you get it: Lacan is not a nominalist. We don’t have only particulars. We don’t have only the reality of the—of how houses are in the village, then one drawing, the other drawing. No, we have something more: social antagonism, which nowhere exists—in this sense it's not nominalist—but you have to refer to it. And to give you even the last example—I know I repeated it five times but it's crucial that we get the logic right here—you remember that—I always mention it—Fredric Jameson’s critique of this, this concept I met with recently in—in Peru, sorry, in Bolivia, where I was a week ago, no, they didn’t like this, my ferocious attack on—on Alternate Modernity. Because unfortunately many of the people in Bolivia believe this bullshit, no, that like we maybe have a unique possibility reviving some stupid ancient Inca traditions to build an alternate modernity, and so on and so on, no? So again, for Lacan, the real is the universal. In this sense, Lacan is a realist. That is to say, we cannot say simply there are multiple modernities. There are multiple modernities, yes, but they are all—exactly like, you know, when people say—adepts of multiple modernity—no, you cannot talk only about *a* modernity. This is your Western modernity, individualized exploitative capitalism. We can have Indian modernity, Latino-American modernity, Chinese modernity. Nonetheless I’m here on Fred Jameson’s side, who says: yes, we have multiple modernities, but they all relate to the same real, which is the antagonisms of global capitalism. Again, as you probably know and heard this ten times, the reason I’m opposed to Alternate Modernity is that we in Europe, we know very well what is alternate modernity. We had one big alternate modernity in the 20th century; it’s called Fascism, no? Fascism was precisely a dream of "We can have modernity but without Jewish corruption, class struggle, without all that." And that’s for me also the lie of historicism. When you say there is no general modernity, we should historicize and so on—yes, but the danger of historicizing is, as it is clear from concepts of alternate modernities, it is that you try to dismiss as a product of particular historical circumstances what is inscribed into a very universal notion of a phenomenon. For example, de facto, the problem with alternate modernities is that they think, to cut a long story short, that they can get capitalist modernism without paying the price for it, without antagonisms, and so on. No? So you see the point: why Lacan is not nominalist. We don't have only particulars. We don't have only the reality of the—of how houses are in the village, then one drawing, the other drawing. No, we have something more: social antagonism. Which nowhere exists—in this sense it's not nominalist—but you have to refer to it. Again, you got also my point, which is central here, that for a true Hegelian—and Lacan, he doesn't know it, is Hegelian here—the contradiction is not between particulars within a universal space. The contradiction is between particular and its universality. That is to say, to understand corporate-fascist capitalism, it’s not enough to say they fight liberals. No, they are an attempt to control the contradiction, antagonism inscribed into the very notion of capitalism. This is a wonderful Hegelian idea of how every particularity is in conflict with its own universality. Which is why Hegel—and again, which is why there is nothing of wisdom in Hegel. You know, wisdom is this position of particular elements fighting each other, with each other, but—but a wise man pulls back and sees it all. No, precisely this is what you—cannot do. Okay, still we have to go on. Yes, now we—covered this Lacan's nominalism and so on. Another way to—to get at this strange double negation where the result is not return to its origin is a certain type of jokes or rather paradoxes where you have a certain position, you negate it, it doesn’t work, you negate it again, and it gets even worse. Like, sorry if this will sound to you counter-revolutionary, but I love it. I read a book on the fall of Saigon, you know, the victory of—the victory of the—the defeat of Americans in Vietnam And I remember reading as an anecdote that after they took over, communist cadre propagandists were touring the city and asking, and forcing young people to see—gently but nonetheless obligatory—to see North pro-communist propaganda film, no? And the story went like this: they make you see the movie for two hours, then they ask you, "Did you like the film or not?" If you say "yes," they told you, "Oh, fine, so you can see it again if you like it." If you said "no," they said, "Ah, so you didn’t understand it, you have to see it again." But okay, you have a nicer structure of this same joke that I really like in an anecdote, I think I quoted it in my first book, from an—an editor in one of the William Randolph Hearst newspapers. Who was—for twenty years he didn’t take—holiday. And Hearst asked him, "Why don’t you take a rest, go to a holiday?" He said, "Well, I am afraid if—that if I take a holiday, you know, everything depends on me, everything will fall apart, and so on." No? And then Hearst answered, "Don’t worry, everything will be okay, everything will go on as if you are here." And the guy said, "That’s what I’m even more afraid of." You see here, I hope, a little bit, the—the logic. Now, we don't have time to go through all of it, because I wanted to do two more things here. First, Le Gaufey does something wonderful here. He applies this logic of exception to psychoanalytic clinic and claims that psychoanalytic clinic functions precisely in this way: that, you know, cases in psychoanalysis are never simply illustrations of a general proposition, that you have always this more dialectical movement of subversion and so on and so on. The second thing I want to conclude with is what I had mentioned already yesterday: that when Lacan came to this point—radical antagonism, sexual difference, and so on—I think this was his limit. And I think he failed here. In what precise sense? Okay, this antagonism, or rather the fact that the contradiction is here and here, not here, means we are beyond this Yin-Yang cosmology, sexual difference, and so on. So there is no sexual relationship. Now Lacan got entangled in a wonderful Hegelian problem. It may appear purely conceptual, but I think the consequences are crucial. Is it enough to say there is no sexual relationship, or generally there is no relationship, or should we make the move which I already made apropos of the undead and the move from the negation of the predicate to the assertion of the non-predicate? Is it enough to say there is a non-relationship, or sorry, that there isn't—there is no sexual relationship, or are we allowed to say *there is* a non-relationship? That is to say, there is an object which positively embodies non-relationship. Lacan knew that he has to make this step somehow, but he was aware of the dangers and it didn’t work. First, he—I think that of course the—the answer is obvious: that that Lacanian "there is no sexual relationship" is strictly correlative to object small a, to this excess which is, in a way, cause of desire which is the non-relationship embodied. The problem with Lacan was that he tried then to solve in his last years the problem with—the so-called Borromean knot. You know it’s the idea of Borromean knot: you have a knot of three circles, but in such a way that the two circles are never connected. Like, if you cut off one, the two others fall apart. And Lacan thought that here he has the ultimate metaphor. But look here from January ’79—I think this is pretty much towards the end, the very last of Lacan’s seminars—after over ten years of struggle, look how he concludes, quote: "The metaphor of the Borromean knot is, in its most simple state, inadequate. It abuses metaphor because there really is no thing which supports the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. What is essential in what I am saying is that there is no sexual relationship. That there is no sexual relationship
are back at man. I think there is an excess in woman. Okay, there is—the sexual difference is deeply asymmetrical. Which is, again, just to make it clear, which is why I think it’s not some kind of a primordial dualism. The original structure is precisely like that of coffee without milk. There are—there are no two sexes. There is one sex plus something, which is neither. Okay, would that lead you though to agree with something that I’ve heard you disagree with before, the idea that woman has access to some surplus *jouissance* that Lacan goes on about in Seminar Because simply because, you know, there is a domain beyond sexual difference, does that mean that the people on the feminine side of the formula of sexuation, whether they are biologically men or women, have access to this surplus *jouissance* that in the past you said is Lacan’s sort of fantasy, it’s not really... ah, here things are much more tricky. First, I claim that it all depends how we read this. Even some Lacanians read it in, I think, a very dangerous obscurantist way. It goes like this: man is fully integrated into the symbolic order, while woman is not-all within the symbolic order. There is some terrifying, I don’t know, too strong *jouissance* and only women can get into it. No, I think as I repeated in my book all the time, that it’s absolutely crucial to take this into account: women have access not insofar as they are less within the symbolic order, but insofar as they are totally within it. In other words, I claim that this idea of a woman who, you know, has access to some secret excessive *jouissance* outside language, with the divine—this is the ultimate male fantasy. Yeah. This is the ultimate male fantasy. No, no, no, a woman... so again, but this then has many philosophical consequences. Because, for example, the reason I am for Descartes, philosophically, basically for *Cogito*, is I claim that if you, against this background, read Descartes closely, you can see that Cogito is feminine. Cogito? Yeah, I totally reject this idea that Cogito is coded as... no, first incidentally, first even at the most anecdotal level. Did you know that my God, Descartes is the first breakthrough of philosophy... because of Hypatia... yeah, I mean he was immensely popular, whatever this means, among women. Not only Queen Christina of Sweden, but all others and so on. There was a—they felt in it an immense emancipatory potential. Okay, you... yeah, okay... no, because you did mention this yesterday actually, you said because Descartes took into account that women are more suggestible or more hysterical... no, no, no, no, this is—this is the bad Descartes then, when he sexualizes it into "Cogito is pure thinking, but women are more..." and so on and so on. No, but you know what's my tendency here? One you should always remember that Descartes’ *Cogito* is at its core purely non-substantial point of excess of madness and so on and so on, no? That Descartes’ passage is—I agree with readers who claim that the passage in Descartes from *Cogito* to *res cogitans*, a thinking thing, is illegitimate. Descartes makes it automatically. No, but I think that there sexual difference is already described. That pure subjectivity is feminine. A male position is always already a substantialized, substantialized... you know what I did in some of my books? This you may consider crazy. I even claimed that what is usually taken as the ultimate anti-feminist argument, namely this Freudian link of femininity and masquerade... this is, I think, a correct insight. We should just really read it the way it is. What does it mean "femininity as masquerade"? It means all features you have are already secondary as a mask and so on. And the pure—yeah, this is precisely where women are much more—we men are stupid, we think we are substantially this and—only women can be pure subjects. Which is why, I don’t know if I repeated this here, in a weird French debate, I in a very strange way defended—but this is already now I think in this shitty book of mine, whatever—defended this problem in France of, how do you call it, burqa, burka, whatever, no? I claim that what shocked me, again, is not... this is another problem: are Islam women forced to do it or not? What shocked me is how French women—I even participated there in the debate, I saw French republican, Christian, whatever—they felt threatened by it. Like, a woman told me, a woman to be precise, Françoise Lévy, a journalist for *Le Point*, you know, the right-wing journal where Jacques-Alain Miller regularly publishes, no? She told me, "I feel threatened when I see a face covered with burqa. As if, as if I’m cut off, you know, like somebody doesn’t want to open herself to me or whatever. I feel like our public space is threatened and so on and so on." And I think in the first pages of my *Living in the End Times* book, I proposed the opposite reasoning: that the horror of burqa is the opposite one. Maybe you remember I mention, I think I even did it here, that well-known Alphonse Allais, I think, the French satirist’s version of Salome’s dance, you know? Salome dances, dances, seven veils, then she is naked, then the king shouts, "Go on, go on!" and she puts on her nose, her skin, and so on, like getting really naked. And I claim that phenomenologically, what makes woman with a burqa so horrible is not that it’s covered, but the our true phenomenological relationship to it. It is as if, you know—now I’m going to my softly anti-feminist waters—I remember reading a nice—seeing a nice male chauvinist caricature of a woman who comes home after a party and, you know, does this evening unmasking, you know, takes on the lipstick and so on—takes off, I mean, wipes it, but then it goes on: she takes off her ears, her eyes, and so on! And she goes to sleep just as an empty ball or whatever, no? But I claim that something like this almost happens in burqa when you have it. We are confronted there precisely the pure subject. It’s just an empty gaze, you know, because you don’t just get—if it were to be just a covered black ball, it’s nothing. The true horror is that it has a cut for the eye. That’s pure subject. I claim absolutely it’s the opposite. The reason we—because you know, this is the lesson of psychoanalysis, the anti-Levinasian lesson. You know who is Levinas, no? The... no, here I agree with my friend Woody—no, I’m joking, but Levinas is, you know, the Christian philosopher who masks himself as a Jew, no? I sincerely think Levinas is so popular because he is selling as Jewish wisdom this Christian moral bullshit about, you know, "love neighbor" and so on. What is so great in Judaism is that it's much more communist, my God. It's absolute—the way I understand Judaism, okay, I don't understand it, but the way I do is that it's exactly the primacy of the collective. When Levinas says first is the face of the other and then there are other others, only then... no, no, this is not Judaism, no. Again, so I think that precisely we should here stick to the radical lesson of psychoanalysis against Levinas. Face is not the authentic other. Face is originally primordial lying. Which is why, again, as I always repeat, in psychoanalysis, it's crucial that it's not face-to-face. You know, psychoanalytic treatment is not intersubjectivity. It's not "I am here with an analyst and we both sincerely talk" whatever. No, you are alone, the analyst is behind, doing, you know, masturbating, playing cards, whatever, no? It's crucial, this radical asymmetry. You are not two in psychoanalytic session. You are one plus more than one, less than zero, the object. And so on. And this—we don’t have time to go into it, but this is the greatness of Hegel. He knew it. This would have been my ultimate argument against the—this bourgeois-liberal, let’s call them anarco-recognition Hegelians. No. If you really read Hegel’s that famous passage—struggle to death between the future master and servant, blah, blah—you will see what’s Hegel’s problem there. That the other that you encounter, the self-consciousness encounters, it's not this kind of a "Oh, I recognize myself in you, we are equal." It's a kind of a monstrous, traumatic otherness. I mean, you are—I am here, and I see objects. I am of course the center of my world, point of absolute subjectivity. And then there is another stupid object who claims "But I am also like you, universal," and so on. It's absolutely incompatible, this. The other is primordially not the other in whom I can recognize myself, but is this ontological paradox of another absolute, as it were, no? So again, here I think that we should—Lacan was totally right, even in a Hegelian way, that intersubjectivity is not the ultimate—is not the ultimate horizon, no? Okay, okay, I talk too much. Okay. Woody? Yeah. Here and then... here and then... I have two—two short points... not even questions, I don’t deserve a question. It’s kind of a question... don’t start. One I think about the—the way of reading of Lacan confessing "I was wrong." Yeah. It’s a little bit naive to really read it as "he was wrong." Really what he’s doing is to commit suicide of the master. It’s exactly like when Zarathustra said, "Leave me, betray me, because maybe always I lie to you." So it’s kind of the lesson of the Master from *Totem and Taboo*: instead of let the other people to kill him, he commit a suicide and then he become unalive and he become alive forever. I would always say it’s like Gaddafi that said "You cannot fire me because always I was no one." Yeah. So this is really his trick. Exactly. Nice. Gaddafi’s like the Jewish Rabbi or what? No, he’s like, you know, Lacan, he’s not like the Jew. And the other one is about the—the origin of modernity that you said that "Oh, the alternative..." If the modernity—if we spoke that the semblants are the one who create the real, yeah, so we have to say that all this multiplicity is the one who create this modernity that is the global—is the global capitalism. And then it’s created back to all those multiplicity around. It’s not that they are all wrong and there is one true modernity. No, if the modernity is kind of the real, all those semblants around like Al-Qaeda, whatever, they create the modernity—like communism, Al-Qaeda, fascism, all of them together. Zionism? Zionism definitely. And then this one create them back reflexively. Yeah, but it’s not that this is the true... that Strauss was wrong that things—the deadlock is the one that create all the semblants. Really all those perceptions are the one who create the deadlock. And then it created back in the... this is... can I nonetheless very briefly answer now because I will forget. But nonetheless, I think that—I think that nonetheless in this circular relation, antagonism has a priority. I claim. But for philosophical reasons I cannot go into them now. Of course, the—the real-time causality is circular. But what I like is precisely this idea, which is for me the very core of dialectical idea: that you don’t have entities which then enter into contradictory, conflicting relations. It’s that contradiction comes first. Entities obfuscate contradiction. You know why is there asymmetry? I will give you maybe another example: take political left or right. It’s not enough to say we have a political space which is then divided into left and right. But if you ask a leftist and how the whole political space is structured, you will get a different image than from the rightist. So, you see in this sense for me antagonism comes first. Because the only way you can account for these particular modernities is that they already react to some trauma of let's call it antagonism. As to what you said there about Lacan, yeah, in a way I agree. But here I must confess to you quite sincerely, I am extremely naive here. I don't care about that stupid annoying old man, egotist, impossible to live with, called Lacan. You know what I mean? I take very naively what he said. And it may function—it may function as you said. But it is—and sorry for this naivete—but in a way it is still true. Fuck Lacan, he was talking about certain topic, about certain problems, he didn't solve them. He didn't solve them. Which is why as already mentioned it's important not to mystify the last Lacan, not to go into this "was there some final secret" and so on and so on. I mean, you know what I mean? Probably Lacan was a great self-performer. So, of course it was this element, no? And I totally agree with you: this is a nice reading that suicide is—suicide is one way to control your destiny, to prevent your pupils... I mean every honest master own—owes to his pupils the fundamental right that in one way or another they kill him, no? And the truly oppressive masters try to take even this from them. But nonetheless, I was very naive here and I focused on the topic. Lacan was in a deadlock, he didn't solve it, and in a quite naive way I'm claiming we can think further. It's not that Lacan reached some ultimate limit and now, as Miller sometimes claims, and now we cannot go further, no. mm-hm. mm-hm. The guy before? Ah, yes. The guy in front. Okay. I want to recover something you said in the beginning today... about how in some way sex spills and contaminates all spheres of life. But then on the—on the other hand, you also say in some place that this is precisely what Freud criticized, this pansexualism, and what Freud was trying to say was precisely that: what needs to be enacted, what kind of fantasies need to be enacted in order for people to have sex? Or in other words, what—what are you thinking about when you are what are you thinking about when you are having sex? And my speculation, I mean, I don't know if I'm right but: can we say that in some way when the sex ends up contaminating all other spheres of life, we are dealing with some kind of *jouissance* that comes from the real, and on the opposite when we are talking about what people are thinking when they are having sex, we are talking about the symbolic and the all the fantasies that need needed to be enacted? Is that a correct way of—of putting it? No, it's a crucial question, I think things are very complex here, there is no simple direct answer. But again, you remember I agree with you that Freud was absolutely against this kind of pansexualism. His idea is not if you look deeply behind everything there is sex—like you know this primitive idea of I don't know whatever I—when I—when I whatever I do, ultimately it’s a way of doing that—seducing women or men or whatever. But for me again, the—the—the point would be the unity of the two. That is to say sex has to spill over into anything precisely because it cannot stand on its own. It's not too strong. It's—it's too weak. Again, I agree with your example because—the one I gave which is basically a version of that wonderful example by Lévi-Strauss where he says that there was one tribe in North America I think who—which had the theory that all dreams have sexual meaning, all dreams except explicitly sexual dreams, no? That they—they don’t have, no? And again, I agree with you if this was your point—I've written about it that—the true question of sexuality is not this cheap pansexual idea "Whatever I am doing, I am really in a metaphorical way doing that." No, the problem is not that whatever I am doing I am thinking about that. The problem is: but what am I thinking when I *am* doing that sex? No? And then there I have to go out. Sex cannot sustain itself. And I mean this quite—quite literally. I think—to be sorry, vulgar—when you make love, you cannot simply think about how happy I am now in this moment just making love. When you do this, even if you dream about this, why are you laughing? You—you must be perverted, but with you maybe it's possible, never know. We—maybe this is the last secret of the protocols of Zion, you know? Sorry, sorry. But what I want to say is that even if you just think about this, how happy I am now, okay, to be vulgar screwing that lady blah-blah, you will see that at the minimum point you already imagine somebody watching you. An imagined gaze or whatever, a phantasmatic scene, a phantasmatic scene must be here. So again, as to that what you mentioned that *phallic jouissance* and so on. Also you ask me "why," I didn’t want to go into that. I think that my God we are into so many paradoxes here. Lacan makes it absolutely clear that *jouissance féminine* doesn't exist. It is operative, but doesn't exist. Because read really closely—people miss this—his Seminar No, *phallic*, the—this *jouissance féminine*. He almost every time that he mentions it, he says, "if there is another *jouissance*, not *phallic*," and then he adds in the—in brackets: "but of course there isn't another one," and so on. So it's the clear example of this, you know, it doesn't exist but it still can be efficient. "It can be operative." Yeah, yeah. This is again what I meant the first day—so I wasn't totally bluffing—with that *e pur si muove*. That we should not read it as this primitive empiricism, "oh your shitty theories" *e pur si muove*. No, something can be proven non-existent but still *e pur si muove*. "But there’s a sort of whole feminist ideology revolved, like feminist-Lacanian ideology revolved precisely on the fantasy that there is a surplus jouissance, and it sort of propagates itself." "Yeah, yeah, but again, can't—don’t they see that in this way—I mean it quite literally—you prepare a new form of feminine enslavement? Because you never get there." I mean I tried to convince them there—I wasn’t quite successful partially in Bolivia where my point was precisely that—just don’t bring me all those Inca where women had a role, of course they had a role. They had a role to lay beneath, no I mean—you know what I mean? Like, I claim the only space of freedom is this Cartesian space of empty subjectivity and so on. All modernity—sorry, all pre-modernity where they apparently celebrate women, look at it closely—you know my standard paradoxes—it's like "Yeah, I know there is some shitty tribe in New Zealand where woman is sacred and the central temple in the village has the shape of a vagina." I agree. There is one problem: women are of course prohibited to enter. This is the most dangerous thing I think today, even as with racism. You know I’m just telling my old story that today’s form of racism is typical, is something like, "Oh those apparent primitives they are really much wiser than us. They—let’s not integrate them into our society, in this way they would lose their authentic wisdom or whatever of the world." No, I like natives who want to be more corrupted than ourselves. I like to tell you an anecdote—I don’t know I mention it—which happened to me with Woody. You in New York, when there were some Palestinians who gave me a wonderful example of racism. They were there invited by some shitty college to perform, and they were offered hummus, hummus there. You know, as a sign of respect "we will give you your food," no? And they told us, "Fuck you, we came here to be corrupted with greasy hamburgers and so on. We get enough of that shitty hummus." I mean, I—I—I think that the—the nastiest arrogance is that when you deplore when—some unicorns have one horn, this means they must exist. And Lacan takes this absolutely literally: that universality does not imply existence. Now you will say, "Okay, so what’s the big deal?" Ah, Lacan gives here a very—this is the *King’s Speech* problem, no—that imagine instead of universality a universal title that you have, like "I am a father" or whatever. And Lacan’s point is that we have the symbolic function of the father, but it doesn’t exist. Nobody can be a father. You cannot—let me give you, okay, an a nice short quote from Lacan’s seminar *Identification* from January I quote: "The order of the function which we introduce here as that of the name of the father is something which has universal value, but simultaneously puts on you the charge to control if there is or not a father who fits this function. If there is no such father, it still remains true that the father is God; it is simply that this formula is confirmed only by the empty sector of the—of the square." So here Lacan reads this tension between particular existence and inexistent universality as of deep relevance to psychoanalysis. As Lacan puts it, you cannot be a good father. You know, father is always too much or too little. You try to assert... father is, again, an impossible. "Do you have a page reference for your quote?" "I do have but, haha, now I will make it easy for myself, haha, it’s not published. No, no, no, but I can give it to you. Do not some guys in Ireland publish the complete translation? All I can give you is the date. It’s *Identification*, The session is 17th of January "Identification is isn’t it?" "No, no, no, it must be something different because *Ethics* is *Transference* Yeah, yeah, sorry, it is. Because then comes *Anxiety*, no? Yeah, yeah. 17th of January Yes." Okay. So now you will say again, but what’s the point of all of this? Ah, now comes—I wouldn’t say an amusing part, but for me at least, philosophically, the most interesting part. I here rely, I must openly admit when I steal stuff from others, to my Slovene colleague party member Alenka Zupančič, who—who brought into circulation, as it were, an—a magnificent—I’m so mad at myself that I didn’t noticed it because of course I saw the movie five times—purely dialectical magnificent joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s *Ninotchka*. No, nothing to do with communism, Greta Garbo, sex, but there is a scene in that film where the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. And you know what the waiter answers? It’s wonderful. The waiter replies, "Sorry, but we have run out of cream. So can I bring you coffee without milk? Because we have milk, you know." So again, in both cases, either coffee without cream or coffee without milk, you get coffee alone. But this coffee, one, is each time accompanied by a different negation: coffee with no cream, coffee with no milk. And this has even, I claim, political meaning. For example, when East Europeans in they did not simply want democracy, they were cheated in the same way that this waiter tries to cheat. They were—they wanted democracy without communism, but they also wanted democracy without capitalism, no? And like they got the wrong one. Okay, let’s go on. So what we encounter here is—it appears to be—the logic of differentiality, where the lack itself functions as a positive feature. Again, the paradox rendered nicely by an old Yugoslav joke about a Montenegrin—don’t be afraid, I will not repeat the twentieth time a joke how the Montenegro people masturbate, it’s a different one here—who are supposed to be lazy. The question is the joke: Why does a Montenegrin guy when he goes to sleep, why does he put at the side of his bed two glasses, one full and one empty, of water? Because he is too lazy to think in advance if he will be thirsty or not during the night. You see the paradox? Common sense tells you just put the glass there if you use it or not. But the differential logic tells you, no, also the non-being thirsty should be marked, should be there registered as an—as an empty—as an empty glass. That is to say, the second, the negative fact itself has to be taken note of. But now I come to the crucial point which will bring us to the key of sexual difference and so on for Lacan. Can this logic really be reduced to symbolic differentiality, you know, where differences matter, so the absence of something is also a positive feature? Is coffee without coffee? What basically the waiter is offering to the customer is coffee with without milk instead of coffee with without cream. They both want a kind of a coffee with a negative predicate, no? Justified by him: "I cannot give you coffee without cream because we have no cream, so I can only give you coffee with coffee with without milk because we have milk." Is this differentiality? It may appear so. In both cases, what we really get is exactly the same plain coffee. The difference resides only in the purely differential fact that the absence which defines coffee is first the absence of cream, then the absence of milk. Now what complicates the issue nonetheless is, I claim, the double negation at work in coffee with no milk. This coffee is not just with no milk, but also with—but also not with no cream. And this second negation, I claim, is not purely symbolic. It is coffee with milk which would have functioned differentially the same as coffee with no cream. And within this space, coffee with not with no cream is simply coffee with cream. Again, you get my point: if the relationships were to be purely differential then a double negation would bring us back to positivity: coffee not without—not without cream—doubly negated would have been simply coffee with cream. But no, coffee not without cream, in this case, is—coffee not without cream is coffee with—with no milk. So, this—I claim that this last opposition is not differential. Why? Because you must include the function of the object small a. That is to say, for this field to function, obviously the premise is that coffee cannot stand alone. Coffee is, even if you want coffee without milk, the empty place of a supplement of something to add is already there. You, in order for coffee to be attractive, you need something to fill in its lack, you know, like coffee with something, which makes it desirable. That would have been the object small a. And then the whole game is then a differential one: what will fill in this—what will fill in this excess. Which is why coffee without cream is not the same as straight coffee. Why not? Because you know, this—it's already mediated through negation. Or even now you will tell me, "But what if I really like just plain coffee?" I claim that if you analyze the semantic structure closely, you will see that coffee is already redoubled, that coffee functions as its own supplement. And this—there is nothing paradoxical about it. Let me evoke you a similar example to get the point. I used it in my first book, so I hope you are stupid old enough to forget it, or in *Looking Awry*, I don’t know where. You know that when Western got into crisis—Western the movies—from late 40s, what emerged were so-called meta-Westerns. They tried to supplement the Western dimension with another genre. For example, I don’t know, you know *Seven Brides for Seven Brothers*, whatever. It’s Western supplemented by musical. You have, for example, *Pursued* with Robert Mitchum and so on. It’s Western supplemented by film noir, and so on and so on. So again, they—they did so-called meta-Westerns: Westerns which inherently relied to another genre to fill in the non-satisfactory part, whatever. But then—I refer here to André Bazin—who had this idea at this very time where Western was already in crisis, there emerged two model Westerns: *Shane* and *High Noon*. And he claims no, these are not simply Westerns. These are Westerns where the meta-Western is Western itself. Westerns which relate to an otherness but this otherness is, again, the otherness of—the otherness of Western itself. So let me go on a little bit here. What I’m aiming at is the example that I used already, you know it all, years ago I was using it a lot, that of those stupid eggs, Kinder Surprise, no? And to say "I want coffee without milk" is just to say "I want that chocolate without the stupid plastic thing." But again, the structure is already that one. And what I’m saying is that this structure of a thing and its excess is not differential. It is differential to say "no milk," "yes," and so on and so on. What is not differential is this tension between a thing and a void in its core. A void which has to be supplemented by a figure of what Lacan calls object small a and so on and so on. Because again, what I'm claiming is that meta-Western is the same as when somebody offers you like "You don't need to add milk, sugar; this is already just plain best coffee." There again, self-reflexivity is already at—at—at work. So let me go on. So what has this to do with sexual difference, you will ask. Sexual difference precisely for Lacan is not differential. When Lacan privileges Phallus, this does not mean that sexual difference is structured along the axis of presence or absence of Phallus, like man has it, woman doesn’t have it. So of course you can read it in this way. And even now I will be really evil, paraphrase the famous Sherlock Holmes passage, you know, from *Silver Blaze*, I think. Do you remember "the curious accident of the dog," "but the dog did nothing," "that was the curious accident." The most famous lines of Sherlock Holmes. You can apply the same to the differential notion of sexual difference. "Is there any other point about seeing your sister naked to which you wish to draw my attention?" asks—if Sherlock Holmes is asked, Sherlock Holmes says "To the curious thing I noticed between her legs." "But there was nothing hanging out between her legs." "That was the curious thing," and so on, whatever. I mean, but—but I think this precisely is what Lacan doesn't want to say. The early Lacan till the 60s, yes, there one has to admit it, it’s simply a male-centered universe where the presence of or absence of Phallus in a differential way stands for sexual difference. But now, again, what Lacan does is something—is something different. His point is not to structure it in this way, but what? What is more in it? Ah, okay. Not to get too lost, let me go a step further. The crucial conclusion of Lacan from this asymmetry of excess and so on is again that the structure that I tried to isolate, that of an object one and its supplement—to put it in very speculative term, shortly, one is never one, one is always one and X, more than one but less than two, one and—and the object small a—that masculine and feminine position refer in a different way to this excess. How? Ah, now comes what I consider a little bit more interesting. The asymmetry between masculine and feminine for Lacan is that the masculine position is differential. That is to say, a differential relationship would have been where each sexual position is defined by its difference to the other: woman is not man, man is not woman. If somebody is not woman, he is man; if somebody is not man, she is a woman. But the way Lacan reads this non-all—not all of X is FX—is he introduces—and that's the beauty—the asymmetry among the sexes. That is to say, "no man" means woman; we men are stupid differential. If you are not a man, you are a woman. But if you are not a woman, you are not a man. That's the point of Lacan. If you are—that is to say, there is something of—and here is a beautiful quote which I think it’s really crucial from Lacan. This time is the—the seminar *Ou Pire* (Or Worse) from session May the 10th. "Since woman is non-all, why should all that is not woman be men?" You see that non-all of a woman means that if in a double negation you negate woman, you still get a woman. And that this—what again I will try to go—so for Lacan... and this, of course, this doesn’t mean there is some deep transsexual substance in woman and so on. That’s the beauty of it. It is still that there is—there is—there is nothing which is outside, which is not, but this spectral nothingness can be called the nothingness of the subject or whatever you want and so on and so on. So let me give you another line of thought here, a philosophical one, which will make this clear. We are dealing here with a negation of negation which again doesn’t bring you back to the first position. It’s not "You negate man, you get woman; you negate woman, you get man." No. Woman is much closer to negativity. Woman is its own negation. In the same way, ah, now you will say I’m crazy, I don’t care about it, what has this to do with progressive politics? I think—to give you a first hint—it is crucial to read class struggle like this. That is to say, a non-bourgeois is proletarian but a non-proletarian is not bourgeois. Marx says this. How? When he says—you must remember the details—that—that—that bourgeoisie is the only pure class in the history of humanity. Before bourgeoisie, capitalists, we have classes which are not yet fully classes. But working class is already a class which has to abolish itself as a class to assert itself. You see, you already have this double "no" in it. Okay, but—now let me go a little bit further to account for this stuff. You know Freud’s legendary example—everybody knows it—of a patient who told Freud when asked about "Who is this woman in your dream?" "I do not know who this woman in my dream is, but I am sure of one thing: this is not my mother." Of course, we all know, haha, like this simple logic, haha, why did you mention it, this precisely means that it is your mother. But I think that if we—if we read closely this example, things are much more paradoxical. "This is not my mother" means at two different level its exact opposite. First, again, it’s the obvious level of denial. In the patient’s unconscious, the figure is of course his mother. And denial is the price the patient has to pay to bring this maternal figure to consciousness. But this is not all. There is another level at which "This is not my mother" asserts the existence of mother. Because we know that in the Freudian space, mother stands for the impossible incestuous object and so on and so on. So, we can also say that "This is not my mother," it's not just a lie, you know, a lie in the sense of "It really is my mother but I don’t want to admit it that I was dreaming screwing my mother" whatever. It also can mean "Mother is impossible, inaccessible." Like the idea being: this miserable figure cannot be my mother. And now, here we come to this more complex paradoxes. I claim that the problem with denying "this is not my mother" asserts mother even too much, because it still implies that there is a mother but even if this woman in the dream is my mother, it cannot be that mother, the incestuous mother, whatever. So, the paradox here is that if we were to get, instead of this Freudian conservative patient, a more open permissive patient who would have said, "So what’s the problem? Okay, this is my mother, I wanted to screw my mother," for a strict Freudian the repression would have been even stronger here. Because saying "This is my mother" is a lie. It cannot be. This is the pervert illusion: that you can get—that you can get the object. So, again, negation operates here at two levels. First, there is the simple *verneinung*, denial. "This is not my mother." Then there is the other as the impossible real object of—of desire. Like, then you can say "Even if it is mother, it’s not yet mother." And again, the result should be here the double negation: not not mother, and so on. So, again, what does this mean for sexual difference? That it paradoxically precedes the two terms whose difference it is. Sexual difference is not—this would have been Lacan’s speculative formula—sexual difference is not a difference between two given positions. But sexual difference is the name of a deadlock, and two given positions are two attempts to deal with this—with to deal with this deadlock. Let me first give you here another example of this which maybe you know from my work but I think it fits perfectly here. You know, I spoke years ago a lot about this, about this Kantian distinction—no wonder Kant was the first, I think, to conceptualize sexual difference in his antinomies—Kantian distinction between infinite and—or indefinite and negative judgment. You know the story: negative judgment negates a predicate; infinite judgment asserts a non-predicate. Negative judgment, for example, if I am alive, negative—sorry, if I am—alive, negative judgment is "I am not dead." I negate a predicate, "dead." Infinite judgment is not "I am not dead," but "I am undead." And here you see what's the difference if you know Stephen King and so on, of course. "I am not dead," it's not—it's simply "I am alive." The space is here that of binary differential opposition. If I am not dead, I am alive; if I am alive, I am not dead. But if you say "I am undead," you open up a third infinite field of the living dead, undead, neither dead nor alive. And for Lacan, again, this is the structure—you know, woman is not "not man." Woman—you cannot say woman isn't man. Man isn't woman, that's okay. But with woman it's different. It's not "Woman isn't man." Woman is un-man or non-man. Which means a third domain beyond sexual difference is—is opened up. And incidentally I think exactly the same goes for proletariat which is un-bourgeoisie, like non-bourgeoisie, outside it. So, and incidentally if you know Alain Badiou’s work, I think that in the same—in exactly the same way one has to read his rejection of aesthetics. You know that he calls his writings about art "inaesthetics." He uses the term *Handbook of Inaesthetics*. I think it’s precisely "in" in this Kantian sense of the third domain in between. Now I come to my next point which for me at least is crucial: how is then this structure of pure antagonism—like that before difference there is one which doesn’t coincide with itself? Like, coffee is never purely coffee, it’s always coffee and X, an empty spot and so on. And I think everything originates from this. Like, I think that a name proper always aims at this place. You know, like a name is never—here I am for Kripke against Bertrand Russell and so on—a name is never just a name of a thing, is never just a combinatoire of the properties of the thing, like a shortened version of their properties. If you enumerate all the properties, you miss something. And name is the name for that something. Name is fundamentally tautological. At the same time, the name for the—the name for the—for the unnamable. But now comes—I want to interpret it more in detail, maybe you already know it—the absolute quote from Lacan. My favorite. I mean, literally at this moment if you ask me, give me a couple of lines from Lacan that you think they are absolute, this is it, I think. It is, if you want the references, again, unpublished text, from Seminar from *D’un Discours qui ne Serait pas du Semblant* (Of a Discourse That Would Not Be of Semblance). This one appeared incidentally in French at least, Éditions du Seuil page where Lacan tries to differentiate his position from that of nominalism. And I think this is a crucial philosophical debate because—because here Lacan is clearly against Althusser, against Michel Foucault and so on, who are basically nominalists for Lacan. Listen to it, I quote: "If there is something I am," says Lacan, "it is clear that I am not a nominalist. What I want to say is that my starting point is not that the name is something like a nameplate which attaches itself just like that onto the real. One has to choose: if one is a nominalist, one has to renounce completely dialectical materialism. So that all in all, I evidently reject the nominalist tradition which is effectively the only danger of idealism which can arise in a discourse like mine." What I like here—did you notice, and this is from when hardline Marxism was already out of fashion—how I love this, how for Lacan the main argument against nominalism is that it’s incompatible with dialectical materialism. Not so bad for Lacan, no? Okay, so it goes on: "The point is not to be a realist in the sense in which one was a realist in medieval times, in the sense of the realism of the universals. The point is to emphasize that our discourse, our scientific discourse, can only find the real insofar as it depends on the function of the semblant. The articulation, and I mean the algebraic articulation of the semblant and its effects—this is the only apparatus which enables us to designate what is real. What is real is what opens up a hole in this semblant, in this articulated semblant which is the scientific discourse," and so on and so on. Okay, what’s—what’s Lacan’s point here? I think it’s absolutely crucial. A) Lacan is not a nominalist. His point is not what actually exists are just particular or even individual cases and so on and so on. So he is not a nominalist. But of course he is not a naive realist in the sense of realism of the universals and so on and so on. There is something beyond singular semblances. But that something is the gap of the real impossibility and so on and so on. Again, please don’t kill me if I give you an example which I think I’ve written about it at least twenty times in my books. But nonetheless, you know that famous Lévi-Strauss example of—you take some stupid Native American village and you ask different members of the tribe to draw the disposition of the houses in the—in the village. And Lévi-Strauss noticed how if you ask two different groups, you get totally different description of the village. For one part of the tribe, the houses in the village are divided into two, one group the other group. For the other part of the tribe, you have—the two kinds of houses are not, like, delimited by a borderline, but are like center and around the center and the environs. And Lévi-Strauss’s point is what? It’s that—okay, you will say "What's the problem? Let's hire a helicopter and took a photoshoot of the village and we will see what is reality." Here comes the greatness of Lévi-Strauss, no, who says "No, the point is not this, the real is not this. It's not that we have there reality, the way houses really are, and two misperceptions of the houses." Lévi-Strauss reads it in this way: that this, the antagonism here, is what? This village was on the edge of entering class distinction. It was struggling with a problem of social hierarchy. And these two dispositions, architectural dispositions, are two ways of how to materialize, of how to resolve this deadlock. In other words, the real to which obviously we have here semblances—each, we have semblance one, the way one half of the tribe draw the map of their village, we have semblance two—but the real is not simply the reality. The real is that X on account of which each member of the tribe falsified the disposition of villages. Because the disposition of villages was a pretext—why was—why is the disposition of the houses in the village falsified? Again, not because they were too stupid to draw the images, but because they through falsifying the disposition of houses in reality, they tried to resolve a deadlock. That deadlock is the real. You see, in this sense now I hope you get it: Lacan is not a nominalist. We don’t have only particulars. We don’t have only the reality of the—of how houses are in the village, then one drawing, the other drawing. No, we have something more: social antagonism, which nowhere exists—in this sense it's not nominalist—but you have to refer to it. And to give you even the last example—I know I repeated it five times but it's crucial that we get the logic right here—you remember that—I always mention it—Fredric Jameson’s critique of this, this concept I met with recently in—in Peru, sorry, in Bolivia, where I was a week ago, no, they didn’t like this, my ferocious attack on—on Alternate Modernity. Because unfortunately many of the people in Bolivia believe this bullshit, no, that like we maybe have a unique possibility reviving some stupid ancient Inca traditions to build an alternate modernity, and so on and so on, no? So again, for Lacan, the real is the universal. In this sense, Lacan is a realist. That is to say, we cannot say simply there are multiple modernities. There are multiple modernities, yes, but they are all—exactly like, you know, when people say—adepts of multiple modernity—no, you cannot talk only about *a* modernity. This is your Western modernity, individualized exploitative capitalism. We can have Indian modernity, Latino-American modernity, Chinese modernity. Nonetheless I’m here on Fred Jameson’s side, who says: yes, we have multiple modernities, but they all relate to the same real, which is the antagonisms of global capitalism. Again, as you probably know and heard this ten times, the reason I’m opposed to Alternate Modernity is that we in Europe, we know very well what is alternate modernity. We had one big alternate modernity in the 20th century; it’s called Fascism, no? Fascism was precisely a dream of "We can have modernity but without Jewish corruption, class struggle, without all that." And that’s for me also the lie of historicism. When you say there is no general modernity, we should historicize and so on—yes, but the danger of historicizing is, as it is clear from concepts of alternate modernities, it is that you try to dismiss as a product of particular historical circumstances what is inscribed into a very universal notion of a phenomenon. For example, de facto, the problem with alternate modernities is that they think, to cut a long story short, that they can get capitalist modernism without paying the price for it, without antagonisms, and so on. No? So you see the point: why Lacan is not nominalist. We don't have only particulars. We don't have only the reality of the—of how houses are in the village, then one drawing, the other drawing. No, we have something more: social antagonism. Which nowhere exists—in this sense it's not nominalist—but you have to refer to it. Again, you got also my point, which is central here, that for a true Hegelian—and Lacan, he doesn't know it, is Hegelian here—the contradiction is not between particulars within a universal space. The contradiction is between particular and its universality. That is to say, to understand corporate-fascist capitalism, it’s not enough to say they fight liberals. No, they are an attempt to control the contradiction, antagonism inscribed into the very notion of capitalism. This is a wonderful Hegelian idea of how every particularity is in conflict with its own universality. Which is why Hegel—and again, which is why there is nothing of wisdom in Hegel. You know, wisdom is this position of particular elements fighting each other, with each other, but—but a wise man pulls back and sees it all. No, precisely this is what you—cannot do. Okay, still we have to go on. Yes, now we—covered this Lacan's nominalism and so on. Another way to—to get at this strange double negation where the result is not return to its origin is a certain type of jokes or rather paradoxes where you have a certain position, you negate it, it doesn’t work, you negate it again, and it gets even worse. Like, sorry if this will sound to you counter-revolutionary, but I love it. I read a book on the fall of Saigon, you know, the victory of—the victory of the—the defeat of Americans in Vietnam And I remember reading as an anecdote that after they took over, communist cadre propagandists were touring the city and asking, and forcing young people to see—gently but nonetheless obligatory—to see North pro-communist propaganda film, no? And the story went like this: they make you see the movie for two hours, then they ask you, "Did you like the film or not?" If you say "yes," they told you, "Oh, fine, so you can see it again if you like it." If you said "no," they said, "Ah, so you didn’t understand it, you have to see it again." But okay, you have a nicer structure of this same joke that I really like in an anecdote, I think I quoted it in my first book, from an—an editor in one of the William Randolph Hearst newspapers. Who was—for twenty years he didn’t take—holiday. And Hearst asked him, "Why don’t you take a rest, go to a holiday?" He said, "Well, I am afraid if—that if I take a holiday, you know, everything depends on me, everything will fall apart, and so on." No? And then Hearst answered, "Don’t worry, everything will be okay, everything will go on as if you are here." And the guy said, "That’s what I’m even more afraid of." You see here, I hope, a little bit, the—the logic. Now, we don't have time to go through all of it, because I wanted to do two more things here. First, Le Gaufey does something wonderful here. He applies this logic of exception to psychoanalytic clinic and claims that psychoanalytic clinic functions precisely in this way: that, you know, cases in psychoanalysis are never simply illustrations of a general proposition, that you have always this more dialectical movement of subversion and so on and so on. The second thing I want to conclude with is what I had mentioned already yesterday: that when Lacan came to this point—radical antagonism, sexual difference, and so on—I think this was his limit. And I think he failed here. In what precise sense? Okay, this antagonism, or rather the fact that the contradiction is here and here, not here, means we are beyond this Yin-Yang cosmology, sexual difference, and so on. So there is no sexual relationship. Now Lacan got entangled in a wonderful Hegelian problem. It may appear purely conceptual, but I think the consequences are crucial. Is it enough to say there is no sexual relationship, or generally there is no relationship, or should we make the move which I already made apropos of the undead and the move from the negation of the predicate to the assertion of the non-predicate? Is it enough to say there is a non-relationship, or sorry, that there isn't—there is no sexual relationship, or are we allowed to say *there is* a non-relationship? That is to say, there is an object which positively embodies non-relationship. Lacan knew that he has to make this step somehow, but he was aware of the dangers and it didn’t work. First, he—I think that of course the—the answer is obvious: that that Lacanian "there is no sexual relationship" is strictly correlative to object small a, to this excess which is, in a way, cause of desire which is the non-relationship embodied. The problem with Lacan was that he tried then to solve in his last years the problem with—the so-called Borromean knot. You know it’s the idea of Borromean knot: you have a knot of three circles, but in such a way that the two circles are never connected. Like, if you cut off one, the two others fall apart. And Lacan thought that here he has the ultimate metaphor. But look here from January ’79—I think this is pretty much towards the end, the very last of Lacan’s seminars—after over ten years of struggle, look how he concludes, quote: "The metaphor of the Borromean knot is, in its most simple state, inadequate. It abuses metaphor because there really is no thing which supports the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. What is essential in what I am saying is that there is no sexual relationship. That there is no sexual relationship
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because
because
Slavoj Žižek
there is an imaginary, a symbolic, and the real—this is what I did not dare to say. But I nonetheless say it. It is evident that I was wrong. But I simply let myself slide—slide into it. This is disturbing, it is even more than annoying. It is even more annoying that it is not justified. This is how things look to me today, and this is what I confess to you. All right." That's Lacan's last words. And I think that we can clearly see in—in what sense it didn’t go. Again, Lacan was well aware that if you remain at this level of "there is no sexual relationship," you are in danger of falling again into yet another version of this, you know, oooh, this wisdom of, "oh reality is ultimately a primordial conflict, war, and so on." You need something more. But he—he went too far with this idea, I think, of Borromean knot. He went too far. This was not the formula. The—the idea was the right one. Namely, that "there is no sexual relationship" means precisely that in a way sexes are never two, that they are three. There is no relationship between the two means that two is always three. Or to put it in—I'm jumping very quickly now, I know—but to put it in Marxist terms simplified: class struggle, contrary to those who accuse me of—of binarism and so on, class struggle means precisely that the classes are never two. If the classes were to be two, there would have been a class struggle but in a purely formal way: I am here, you are there. Class struggle is precisely because two never appears as two. It is always more, and the struggle is for that more. So it's not that we have a pure class struggle which then gets blurred, you know, because there are also small bourgeois farmers, whatever. No, we only get class struggle because there are more than two. And again, the logic of this, Lacan didn't—I think Lacan broke down, he didn't get. Now if you allow me another ten minutes, hahaha, I will try to provide some kind of formula for this. I will do a very modest thing along the lines of my good friend Alain Badiou, who—did you read his text, Badiou's text in *I love Badiou*, in his—in the *New Left Review* on some features of contemporary French philosophy, which I love it? You know, it's a very modest text with the following thesis: Western philosophy has three consecutive stages, each higher than the other, no? Ancient Greek thought, German idealism, and French philosophy of the 20th century. And he is at the top of this last stage in this way, and Badiou is my best friend because, you know, my God, when I told him, "Are you aware what you are saying? Like that you are the top of the top?" he said, "What’s the problem? This is true." He simply didn’t get it, no? Ah no, we need this. No, I’m not making fun here. What I think is basically much more arrogant is to claim exactly the same which we are all in a way claiming. Let’s be serious: if you write a book criticizing other philosophers, are you de facto claiming that you know more than all of them? But today in our hypocritical time, we like to say, "Of course, I may be wrong." I totally agree with Chesterton who says, "How dare you say 'I may be wrong'? This is the greatest arrogance. Be at least honest and you write because you think you are right." It's a much more honest position. So again, in the same modest way—it’s nothing special, I just wanted to give you—which brings together Hegel and Lacan and solve, solve, very modest. Okay. Maybe I already mentioned it, but I would like to go quickly through it in another way. It’s, of course, quantum physics, Higgs field. But now I want to be honest here: I am crazy but not totally crazy. That is to say, I am not now engaged in some New Age stuff where Higgs field provides the formula for good sexual life or whatever, you know. And also, obvious thing: I am too stupid to judge the inherent scientific status of Higgs field. I am well aware that many scientists today think—because you know, you probably know that now Higgs field is reactualized again because all that CERN in Swiss lab stuff that they are doing is precisely—now we are slightly approaching the possibility of maybe detecting the Higgs particle, no? So I, first I must say, what I am doing here is depending on—simply, what can I do but an amateur s2—to accept what they, the scientists, present to me. And I’m just asking a very simple question: let’s accept that this holds. What are the ontological consequences? I think philosophers should be modest here. We cannot play that transcendental role of judging science. We philosophers have to risk—you know, like you commit yourself although you cannot guarantee for its truth to a certain scientific achievement. And incidentally here I cannot but agree with Badiou, I convinced him the last time I tried to convert him, we play these eternal battles that I met him, to my pro-Hegelianism, and I told him, and he accepted this. You know, Badiou’s idea of four—how do you call it—four truth events, truth domains, no? I told him, "But don’t you get it? This is German idealism." You know what are his truth domains? Science, politics, art, love. I told him: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. Kant: science. Kant’s problem is precisely as he says how to reconstruct philosophy based on modern science. Fichte is politics, the whole Fichtean problem is, you know, politics. Schelling is art. Schelling is I think maybe even the only philosopher in the history of philosophy who consciously poses art as a higher level of, okay, let’s call it knowledge, and Hegel, it can be clearly shown that Hegel’s model of all different matrices is love. Okay. So Higgs field. Why was I so fascinated when I was reading about Higgs field? Because precisely as a materialist I was fascinated, because I think it undermines the New Age appropriation of quantum void as the nothing-all. You know, often quantum physics is read in this way: "Oh, but ancient Hindu idiots, jerks, they are masturbating, whatever, they already knew this all," you know, like the—the—that there is a primordial void out of which everything comes and into which everything disappears and so on
there is an imaginary, a symbolic, and the real—this is what I did not dare to say. But I nonetheless say it. It is evident that I was wrong. But I simply let myself slide—slide into it. This is disturbing, it is even more than annoying. It is even more annoying that it is not justified. This is how things look to me today, and this is what I confess to you. All right." That's Lacan's last words. And I think that we can clearly see in—in what sense it didn’t go. Again, Lacan was well aware that if you remain at this level of "there is no sexual relationship," you are in danger of falling again into yet another version of this, you know, oooh, this wisdom of, "oh reality is ultimately a primordial conflict, war, and so on." You need something more. But he—he went too far with this idea, I think, of Borromean knot. He went too far. This was not the formula. The—the idea was the right one. Namely, that "there is no sexual relationship" means precisely that in a way sexes are never two, that they are three. There is no relationship between the two means that two is always three. Or to put it in—I'm jumping very quickly now, I know—but to put it in Marxist terms simplified: class struggle, contrary to those who accuse me of—of binarism and so on, class struggle means precisely that the classes are never two. If the classes were to be two, there would have been a class struggle but in a purely formal way: I am here, you are there. Class struggle is precisely because two never appears as two. It is always more, and the struggle is for that more. So it's not that we have a pure class struggle which then gets blurred, you know, because there are also small bourgeois farmers, whatever. No, we only get class struggle because there are more than two. And again, the logic of this, Lacan didn't—I think Lacan broke down, he didn't get. Now if you allow me another ten minutes, hahaha, I will try to provide some kind of formula for this. I will do a very modest thing along the lines of my good friend Alain Badiou, who—did you read his text, Badiou's text in *I love Badiou*, in his—in the *New Left Review* on some features of contemporary French philosophy, which I love it? You know, it's a very modest text with the following thesis: Western philosophy has three consecutive stages, each higher than the other, no? Ancient Greek thought, German idealism, and French philosophy of the 20th century. And he is at the top of this last stage in this way, and Badiou is my best friend because, you know, my God, when I told him, "Are you aware what you are saying? Like that you are the top of the top?" he said, "What’s the problem? This is true." He simply didn’t get it, no? Ah no, we need this. No, I’m not making fun here. What I think is basically much more arrogant is to claim exactly the same which we are all in a way claiming. Let’s be serious: if you write a book criticizing other philosophers, are you de facto claiming that you know more than all of them? But today in our hypocritical time, we like to say, "Of course, I may be wrong." I totally agree with Chesterton who says, "How dare you say 'I may be wrong'? This is the greatest arrogance. Be at least honest and you write because you think you are right." It's a much more honest position. So again, in the same modest way—it’s nothing special, I just wanted to give you—which brings together Hegel and Lacan and solve, solve, very modest. Okay. Maybe I already mentioned it, but I would like to go quickly through it in another way. It’s, of course, quantum physics, Higgs field. But now I want to be honest here: I am crazy but not totally crazy. That is to say, I am not now engaged in some New Age stuff where Higgs field provides the formula for good sexual life or whatever, you know. And also, obvious thing: I am too stupid to judge the inherent scientific status of Higgs field. I am well aware that many scientists today think—because you know, you probably know that now Higgs field is reactualized again because all that CERN in Swiss lab stuff that they are doing is precisely—now we are slightly approaching the possibility of maybe detecting the Higgs particle, no? So I, first I must say, what I am doing here is depending on—simply, what can I do but an amateur s2—to accept what they, the scientists, present to me. And I’m just asking a very simple question: let’s accept that this holds. What are the ontological consequences? I think philosophers should be modest here. We cannot play that transcendental role of judging science. We philosophers have to risk—you know, like you commit yourself although you cannot guarantee for its truth to a certain scientific achievement. And incidentally here I cannot but agree with Badiou, I convinced him the last time I tried to convert him, we play these eternal battles that I met him, to my pro-Hegelianism, and I told him, and he accepted this. You know, Badiou’s idea of four—how do you call it—four truth events, truth domains, no? I told him, "But don’t you get it? This is German idealism." You know what are his truth domains? Science, politics, art, love. I told him: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. Kant: science. Kant’s problem is precisely as he says how to reconstruct philosophy based on modern science. Fichte is politics, the whole Fichtean problem is, you know, politics. Schelling is art. Schelling is I think maybe even the only philosopher in the history of philosophy who consciously poses art as a higher level of, okay, let’s call it knowledge, and Hegel, it can be clearly shown that Hegel’s model of all different matrices is love. Okay. So Higgs field. Why was I so fascinated when I was reading about Higgs field? Because precisely as a materialist I was fascinated, because I think it undermines the New Age appropriation of quantum void as the nothing-all. You know, often quantum physics is read in this way: "Oh, but ancient Hindu idiots, jerks, they are masturbating, whatever, they already knew this all," you know, like the—the—that there is a primordial void out of which everything comes and into which everything disappears and so on
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and so on. No, it’s not that. What quantum physics calls void, zero, is precisely not this
and so on. No, it’s not that. What quantum physics calls void, zero, is precisely not this
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Plotinian formless one or
Plotinian formless one or
Slavoj Žižek
beyond one from which all comes, where all disappears and so on and so on. So what am I talking about? Again, some simple definitions, don’t be afraid, it’s Wikipedia style. The Higgs field controls whether forces and particles behave differently or not. When the Higgs field is switched on, operative, symmetries are broken between the elementary particles and their complex pattern of differences emerges.
beyond one from which all comes, where all disappears and so on and so on. So what am I talking about? Again, some simple definitions, don’t be afraid, it’s Wikipedia style. The Higgs field controls whether forces and particles behave differently or not. When the Higgs field is switched on, operative, symmetries are broken between the elementary particles and their complex pattern of differences emerges.
unknown
While when Higgs field is switched off, inoperative, forces and particles are indistinguishable from one another. That is to say, the system is in a state of vacuum. And this is why, now you can understand, particle scientists search so desperately for the hypothetical Higgs particle, sometimes referred to as the "God particle." Because
While when Higgs field is switched off, inoperative, forces and particles are indistinguishable from one another. That is to say, the system is in a state of vacuum. And this is why, now you can understand, particle scientists search so desperately for the hypothetical Higgs particle, sometimes referred to as the "God particle." Because
Slavoj Žižek
this particle would have been, literally, the particle
this particle would have been, literally, the particle
unknown
equivalent of what Lacan calls object small a: the cause of disturbing the symmetry of a vacuum, the X which breaks the symmetry and introduces differences. In short, nothing less than the cause of the passage from nothing, vacuum, the void of pure potentialities to something, actual different particles and forces. So, how is this miraculous particle thinkable in a materialist way? How can we avoid here the obscurantist idea of a mystical cause of all objects? Because you can see now why reactionaries get here a multiple orgasm: "Oh, you must admit that there is a particle which is like the divine intervention which basically makes something out of nothing, it’s the cause of the
equivalent of what Lacan calls object small a: the cause of disturbing the symmetry of a vacuum, the X which breaks the symmetry and introduces differences. In short, nothing less than the cause of the passage from nothing, vacuum, the void of pure potentialities to something, actual different particles and forces. So, how is this miraculous particle thinkable in a materialist way? How can we avoid here the obscurantist idea of a mystical cause of all objects? Because you can see now why reactionaries get here a multiple orgasm: "Oh, you must admit that there is a particle which is like the divine intervention which basically makes something out of nothing, it’s the cause of the
Slavoj Žižek
so-called
so-called
unknown
break of the symmetry and so on and so on." All this—this would be my answer—all theological speculations, philosophical rather, focus on this point:
break of the symmetry and so on and so on." All this—this would be my answer—all theological speculations, philosophical rather, focus on this point:
Slavoj Žižek
at the very beginning or more precisely before the beginning, there is nothing, the void of pure potentiality, the will which wants nothing, the divine abyss prior to God, and this primordial peace balance is then inexplicably disturbed, lost. The material solution is here very precise. It concerns the key paradox of the Higgs
at the very beginning or more precisely before the beginning, there is nothing, the void of pure potentiality, the will which wants nothing, the divine abyss prior to God, and this primordial peace balance is then inexplicably disturbed, lost. The material solution is here very precise. It concerns the key paradox of the Higgs
unknown
field. As every field, Higgs field is characterized by its energy density and by its strength. However, it is energetically favorable for the Higgs field to be switched on and for the symmetries between particles and forces to be broken. What does this mean? We have, let’s say, the pure vacuum. The Higgs field is switched off, inoperative, we have the void, no differences, no symmetries broken. And then, of course, you would have said the Higgs field, in order to break the symmetry, has to spend some energy. Like, nothing comes for free.
field. As every field, Higgs field is characterized by its energy density and by its strength. However, it is energetically favorable for the Higgs field to be switched on and for the symmetries between particles and forces to be broken. What does this mean? We have, let’s say, the pure vacuum. The Higgs field is switched off, inoperative, we have the void, no differences, no symmetries broken. And then, of course, you would have said the Higgs field, in order to break the symmetry, has to spend some energy. Like, nothing comes for free.
Slavoj Žižek
But here we come to the paradox. The paradox, to cut it very short, the paradox of the Higgs field is the following one: again, imagine the zero level, cosmic void, no symmetry broken, no particular entities emerging out of pure uniformality, and imagine spending zero energy on Higgs field. And this is now the absolute paradox. This is for me the best definition of materialism: there is a gap between the two. Literally, the presupposition of Higgs field is that something costs less than nothing. That is to say, if you want to be at the state of absolute peace, you, spending no energy—no, absolute peace, sorry, in the sense of no broken symmetry—you have already to spend some energy. The lowest point of energy is not when nothing happens. It's when in a minimal way something already—you know what I mean? If this is, for example, how much energy you spend and this is how much symmetry is broken. It's not like this: the more energy you spend, the more symmetry is broken. It's like this. So, physicists, based on this, distinguish between two vacuums: the false vacuum and the true vacuum. The false vacuum is ontologically even more a vacuum. The false vacuum is the state in which Higgs field is switched off. There is pure symmetry with no differentiated particles and so on and so on. But it's false because you need energy to sustain the zero. The true vacuum is already a little bit further, where you spend zero energy but there is already some disturbance, some what I yesterday—two days ago called *e pur si muove* and so on and so on. So why do I find this so attractive? Because the paradox, ontological paradox again is that I think that if you take this seriously, it undermines this very idea of some primordial abyss and so on where things are at the zero level and then you get into all theological problematic by what divine contingency something emerged out of nothing. No, if you read it in this way, something can be cheaper than nothing. The zero level of universe is not peace, primordial abyss and so on. That peace already costs something energetically, an effort and so on. And I claim that this gap, this minimal gap where a certain movement, circulation is cheaper than nothing—this would be the minimum ontological difference, I claim, of the Freudian drive. And I think the minimum idea of idealism is precisely that you can put two vacuums together, you know, in any form like primordial wisdom and so on. No, I think you always have a gap between the two vacuums. Or to put it in libidinal terms, Lacan’s point would have been here that drive is less than zero. It’s not that you have zero in the sense of total Nirvana. No, total Nirvana—to attain this, this would be the ultimate Lacanian anti-Buddhist argument—total Nirvana is not really total Nirvana, it already costs something energetically, an effort and so on. In but—okay I will develop this in my next book—the breathtaking consequences of this. For example, the result you get here is that why is there, you know, this big shitty philosophical problem "Why is there something instead of nothing?" That it's a false problem. I mean, the true mystery is why is there nothing instead of something? You know, because like the problem is how to arrive at nothing. What exists is not more than nothing. What exists is less than nothing. Not even, you know, to get at... this is where, again, I cannot but conclude with a Jewish joke. Which I think is a totally correct one. But it's a well-known one, maybe I even repeated it here already. You know, synagogue, Jews gathering there to pray, blah, blah, whatever they are doing, horrible things there, and first a rich Rabbi says, "Oh dear God, I am nobody, I am not worthy of you, I am a nothing and so on." You know the story, no? Then a rich merchant comes, Jewish, and says, "Oh God, I am also nobody, I am nothing, unworthy of you, blah, blah." Then a poor Jew raises his head and says, "A poor Jew says, 'Oh dear God, I am also nothing and so on.'" And then, you know, one rich guy kicks the other: "But who is he? How does he dare to say that he is nothing?" This is the Hegelian/Lacanian, this is the correct lesson deeply. No, but I’m not kidding here. In Kabbalah, you also find this idea, deeply along these levels, that, you know, the beginning of creation is not something, that God first had to create nothing to withdraw and so again, I’m not playing that cheap game of, you know, "ooh the ancient, those Hindus who, so I was told, can do horrible things like can ejaculate inside, can move their penis so that they suck things and so on in, they already knew everything and so on." No, I’m talking just about this very elementary, deeply materialist moment: that there is a gap, a tension between two vacuums. There is a minimum of ontological movement which is even previous to void. Void is not first. I think, although this may appear materialist, but this idea of a primordial void out of which things emerge and not and so on—and you know who knew this in its own way? He really should be reread: Democritus. We don't have time to go into it, but check it up even if you do it like me on Wikipedia or whatever. You know—you know that wonderful notion of that Democritus' term for atoms is *den*, which is a total neologism, no? Because it doesn't exist, it's *med-en*, that's the original term. *Hen* is *en* is *hen*—all, no? But Democritus consciously puts the wrong cut. Okay. The only correct translation of this is basically less than zero. It’s not one. I mean, good history of philosophy will teach you how Aristotle and all the Diogenes Laërtius who write about Democritus already ontologized him. There, atoms become small ones which circulate in nothingness. Again, with Democritus, it's much more paradoxical. What do I mean by this? Nonetheless, I would like to give you a simple example, my God, what shitty movies I see because of my son. Did you see the new version of *Karate Kid* with... "Don’t blame your son!" "No, I blame you! You’re probably the type who goes to these shitty artie movies and you know—I hate artie movies. You know how you make artie movies? You have a good hardcore movie, people screw each other. Then you are an artist and just add between each sex scene ten minutes people just staring at each other, ooh how deep it becomes, you know." Okay, sorry. There is nonetheless a nice cheap Hollywood wisdom, but nonetheless. In the film, when the young American boy trained by this Chinese Kung Fu teacher who told him that he must learn to—to be inactive, to win the battle, that he asks the American boy, the teacher: "How can I win my fight if I only stand still?" And the teacher replies: "Being still is not the same as doing nothing." I mean, here again we have this idea. And I think we should not read this idea in the usual obscurantist way of the cliché about a wise ruler who knows how to play one against the other his subordinates so that they destroy each other, he does nothing but everything is at peace. No, I think that—that doing—there is a point when you do nothing precisely by doing something. Doing nothing already—doing nothing already—already costs... you know, it’s a little bit like if you permit me this, I know purely brutal illegal step towards individual even psychology. You believe—you should believe me, I know about this because if there ever was a person with all the nervous tics, it’s me, no? Like, if you really want to destroy me, it’s to tell me "Relax, just sit peacefully" and so on and so on. I would have to put an incredible effort into it. The only way for nervous jerks like me to get peace is to focus on some small gesture repetitively. And through, you know like doing something, no, the only way to approach nothing is to do something. If you want direct nothing, it’s an incredible effort, it’s doing much more. So again, this would be somehow my result that again, to resume: quantum physics, as you know, still is an enigma. And I tend to agree with those who—ontologically, I mean—to those who claim that all the versions that we get to resolve the enigma are precisely so many semblances trying to resolve the deadlock. You know, we have, for example, the—we have, for example, this David Bohm solution which is—he tries to state the classical image of presupposing some kind of retroactive causality and so on and so on. We have many-world interpretations, we have the spiritualist interpretations, and so on and so on. I think these are precisely, as with modernity or whatever, we still are not at the level to confront Bohr’s paradox. And I think that this is maybe the task today. The consequences are tremendous ontologically. I really think that we arrive that—if read properly—quantum physics is maybe the most materialist science there was. I think we should totally reject all that stuff—ooh, you know, mind creates reality, time runs backward, and all that stuff. No, no, no, things are much more precise in quantum physics. But again, what has to fall is A) the notion of consistent, fully existing reality. Reality must be rendered not-all, incomplete. And again, following the logic of Higgs field, this our most elementary ontological presupposition: that something is more than nothing, that as it were, things emerge out of some primordial void balance and so on, should be abandoned. That is to say that the zero level of reality is not void, but it’s neither nothing nor something, but some weird less-than-something, some... you know, the paradox would be maybe the following one: when Lacan talks about object small a—I use this two-three times in my books—I was always struck by the parallel between object small a and the status of, I think it’s photon, I’m so bluffing in physics, I don’t know. But I think photon has—is a particle which has this paradoxical property that, you know, with other particles you have a certain mass, gravity and then of course, if the particle is moving, this mass raises. The idea of a photon is that when it’s not moving, it has zero mass. You know—how to put it—it exists only as its own excess. It doesn't exist at zero, as zero level. Something which has no—it's not that you can... it's almost like comrade Stalin in his infinite genius came close to this when, you know, that old joke, when he was asked in I think, by a journalist, "Which deviation is worse: left-wing or right-wing deviation?" Stalin's answer: "They are both worse," you know, like with revisionists, they are not only bad, they are worse, no? Worse like with no standard, there is nobody who is bad, you begin with worse. And it's again the same with photons. You see this idea which maybe also comes close to the way Epicurus supplemented Democritus because *clinamen*, you know, where Epicurus, my God, Marx—I'm almost tempted to say the true young Marx that should be rehabilitated is not that stupid boring proto-Stalinist meditations about alienation from it's his thesis from too, about—he already focused on the difference, you know what's the title of Marx's doctoral thesis: *The Difference Between Democritean and Epicurean Atomism*. And there, the difference is precisely *clinamen*. The idea that atoms not only fall, but in a contingent way they deviate. And the step to be made here—Deleuze wrote some nice lines about it—is precisely that *clinamen* is original. Like photon, you don't have something which then is distorted, sidetracked. It's—this distortion, *clinamen*, taking—making a detour is primordial. Excess, things are always in excess with regard to themselves. Along these lines, I would like maybe to develop some things and so on and so on. "Do I get a certain body language from you that maybe it's the time that I shut up or what?" "No, there is another talk here at but... I don't know if you want to have time for questions. I mean, it's... I think he did make us work today, as you promised yesterday. No, you did, although, please, let me be serious here. All I can tell you is that I did speak, when I was in the United States, in the UK and so on, with some particle physicists just to be sure that it’s not total bullshit what I’m saying, you know what I mean? Just to be sure that what I’m—I told them, "I don’t want to teach you, I’m not that kind of philosopher who tells you 'No, no, you are making a mistake, I know better than you.'" And they at least... Beckett did say the whole thing much more laconically, the idea that "nothing is more real than nothing," but we could never accuse you of being laconic. Oh, but today my point is there is something more real than nothing. It's less than nothing, less than zero. Okay. All right. But still, I thought this was the most important exploration, rectification, since your own Plato fantasy, really, on sexual difference. Even a modest rectification of Lacan. And I have some questions, but I don’t know if I should let the audience go first. I have some Woody—oh you were there, that’s why all the Jewish jokes were about... I was wondering why they were about... okay, but no, I have—I don’t know if I should start with a question, are there questions? Do you have time to take a few questions? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder, you know, that going back to the formulas of sexuation and your rectification of Lacan but also the admission that you can easily say "man is not woman" it’s logical, but you cannot say "woman is not man" because there is always a domain beyond sexual difference. No, what you cannot say is that not-woman is man. That if you deny woman, you are back at man. I think there is an excess in woman. Okay, there is—the sexual difference is deeply asymmetrical. Which is, again, just to make it clear, which is why I think it’s not some kind of a primordial dualism. The original structure is precisely like that of coffee without milk. There are—there are no two sexes. There is one sex plus something, which is neither. Okay, would that lead you though to agree with something that I’ve heard you disagree with before, the idea that woman has access to some surplus *jouissance* that Lacan goes on about in Seminar Because simply because, you know, there is a domain beyond sexual difference, does that mean that the people on the feminine side of the formula of sexuation, whether they are biologically men or women, have access to this surplus *jouissance* that in the past you said is Lacan’s sort of fantasy, it’s not really... ah, here things are much more tricky. First, I claim that it all depends how we read this. Even some Lacanians read it in, I think, a very dangerous obscurantist way. It goes like this: man is fully integrated into the symbolic order, while woman is not-all within the symbolic order. There is some terrifying, I don’t know, too strong *jouissance* and only women can get into it. No, I think as I repeated in my book all the time, that it’s absolutely crucial to take this into account: women have access not insofar as they are less within the symbolic order, but insofar as they are totally within it. In other words, I claim that this idea of a woman who, you know, has access to some secret excessive *jouissance* outside language, with the divine—this is the ultimate male fantasy. Yeah. This is the ultimate male fantasy. No, no, no, a woman... so again, but this then has many philosophical consequences. Because, for example, the reason I am for Descartes, philosophically, basically for *Cogito*, is I claim that if you, against this background, read Descartes closely, you can see that Cogito is feminine. Cogito? Yeah, I totally reject this idea that Cogito is coded as... no, first incidentally, first even at the most anecdotal level. Did you know that my God, Descartes is the first breakthrough of philosophy... because of Hypatia... yeah, I mean he was immensely popular, whatever this means, among women. Not only Queen Christina of Sweden, but all others and so on. There was a—they felt in it an immense emancipatory potential. Okay, you... yeah, okay... no, because you did mention this yesterday actually, you said because Descartes took into account that women are more suggestible or more hysterical... no, no, no, no, this is—this is the bad Descartes then, when he sexualizes it into "Cogito is pure thinking, but women are more..." and so on and so on. No, but you know what's my tendency here? One you should always remember that Descartes’ *Cogito* is at its core purely non-substantial point of excess of madness and so on and so on, no? That Descartes’ passage is—I agree with readers who claim that the passage in Descartes from *Cogito* to *res cogitans*, a thinking thing, is illegitimate. Descartes makes it automatically. No, but I think that there sexual difference is already described. That pure subjectivity is feminine. A male position is always already a substantialized, substantialized... you know what I did in some of my books? This you may consider crazy. I even claimed that what is usually taken as the ultimate anti-feminist argument, namely this Freudian link of femininity and masquerade... this is, I think, a correct insight. We should just really read it the way it is. What does it mean "femininity as masquerade"? It means all features you have are already secondary as a mask and so on. And the pure—yeah, this is precisely where women are much more—we men are stupid, we think we are substantially this and—only women can be pure subjects. Which is why, I don’t know if I repeated this here, in a weird French debate, I in a very strange way defended—but this is already now I think in this shitty book of mine, whatever—defended this problem in France of, how do you call it, burqa, burka, whatever, no? I claim that what shocked me, again, is not... this is another problem: are Islam women forced to do it or not? What shocked me is how French women—I even participated there in the debate, I saw French republican, Christian, whatever—they felt threatened by it. Like, a woman told me, a woman to be precise, Françoise Lévy, a journalist for *Le Point*, you know, the right-wing journal where Jacques-Alain Miller regularly publishes, no? She told me, "I feel threatened when I see a face covered with burqa. As if, as if I’m cut off, you know, like somebody doesn’t want to open herself to me or whatever. I feel like our public space is threatened and so on and so on." And I think in the first pages of my *Living in the End Times* book, I proposed the opposite reasoning: that the horror of burqa is the opposite one. Maybe you remember I mention, I think I even did it here, that well-known Alphonse Allais, I think, the French satirist’s version of Salome’s dance, you know? Salome dances, dances, seven veils, then she is naked, then the king shouts, "Go on, go on!" and she puts on her nose, her skin, and so on, like getting really naked. And I claim that phenomenologically, what makes woman with a burqa so horrible is not that it’s covered, but the our true phenomenological relationship to it. It is as if, you know—now I’m going to my softly anti-feminist waters—I remember reading a nice—seeing a nice male chauvinist caricature of a woman who comes home after a party and, you know, does this evening unmasking, you know, takes on the lipstick and so on—takes off, I mean, wipes it, but then it goes on: she takes off her ears, her eyes, and so on! And she goes to sleep just as an empty ball or whatever, no? But I claim that something like this almost happens in burqa when you have it. We are confronted there precisely the pure subject. It’s just an empty gaze, you know, because you don’t just get—if it were to be just a covered black ball, it’s nothing. The true horror is that it has a cut for the eye. That’s pure subject. I claim absolutely it’s the opposite. The reason we—because you know, this is the lesson of psychoanalysis, the anti-Levinasian lesson. You know who is Levinas, no? The... no, here I agree with my friend Woody—no, I’m joking, but Levinas is, you know, the Christian philosopher who masks himself as a Jew, no? I sincerely think Levinas is so popular because he is selling as Jewish wisdom this Christian moral bullshit about, you know, "love neighbor" and so on. What is so great in Judaism is that it's much more communist, my God. It's absolute—the way I understand Judaism, okay, I don't understand it, but the way I do is that it's exactly the primacy of the collective. When Levinas says first is the face of the other and then there are other others, only then... no, no, this is not Judaism, no. Again, so I think that precisely we should here stick to the radical lesson of psychoanalysis against Levinas. Face is not the authentic other. Face is originally primordial lying. Which is why, again, as I always repeat, in psychoanalysis, it's crucial that it's not face-to-face. You know, psychoanalytic treatment is not intersubjectivity. It's not "I am here with an analyst and we both sincerely talk" whatever. No, you are alone, the analyst is behind, doing, you know, masturbating, playing cards, whatever, no? It's crucial, this radical asymmetry. You are not two in psychoanalytic session. You are one plus more than one, less than zero, the object. And so on. And this—we don’t have time to go into it, but this is the greatness of Hegel. He knew it. This would have been my ultimate argument against the—this bourgeois-liberal, let’s call them anarco-recognition Hegelians. No. If you really read Hegel’s that famous passage—struggle to death between the future master and servant, blah, blah—you will see what’s Hegel’s problem there. That the other that you encounter, the self-consciousness encounters, it's not this kind of a "Oh, I recognize myself in you, we are equal." It's a kind of a monstrous, traumatic otherness. I mean, you are—I am here, and I see objects. I am of course the center of my world, point of absolute subjectivity. And then there is another stupid object who claims "But I am also like you, universal," and so on. It's absolutely incompatible, this. The other is primordially not the other in whom I can recognize myself, but is this ontological paradox of another absolute, as it were, no? So again, here I think that we should—Lacan was totally right, even in a Hegelian way, that intersubjectivity is not the ultimate—is not the ultimate horizon, no? Okay, okay, I talk too much. Okay. Woody? Yeah. Here and then... here and then... I have two—two short points... not even questions, I don’t deserve a question. It’s kind of a question... don’t start. One I think about the—the way of reading of Lacan confessing "I was wrong." Yeah. It’s a little bit naive to really read it as "he was wrong." Really what he’s doing is to commit suicide of the master. It’s exactly like when Zarathustra said, "Leave me, betray me, because maybe always I lie to you." So it’s kind of the lesson of the Master from *Totem and Taboo*: instead of let the other people to kill him, he commit a suicide and then he become unalive and he become alive forever. I would always say it’s like Gaddafi that said "You cannot fire me because always I was no one." Yeah. So this is really his trick. Exactly. Nice. Gaddafi’s like the Jewish Rabbi or what? No, he’s like, you know, Lacan, he’s not like the Jew. And the other one is about the—the origin of modernity that you said that "Oh, the alternative..." If the modernity—if we spoke that the semblants are the one who create the real, yeah, so we have to say that all this multiplicity is the one who create this modernity that is the global—is the global capitalism. And then it’s created back to all those multiplicity around. It’s not that they are all wrong and there is one true modernity. No, if the modernity is kind of the real, all those semblants around like Al-Qaeda, whatever, they create the modernity—like communism, Al-Qaeda, fascism, all of them together. Zionism? Zionism definitely. And then this one create them back reflexively. Yeah, but it’s not that this is the true... that Strauss was wrong that things—the deadlock is the one that create all the semblants. Really all those perceptions are the one who create the deadlock. And then it created back in the... this is... can I nonetheless very briefly answer now because I will forget. But nonetheless, I think that—I think that nonetheless in this circular relation, antagonism has a priority. I claim. But for philosophical reasons I cannot go into them now. Of course, the—the real-time causality is circular. But what I like is precisely this idea, which is for me the very core of dialectical idea: that you don’t have entities which then enter into contradictory, conflicting relations. It’s that contradiction comes first. Entities obfuscate contradiction. You know why is there asymmetry? I will give you maybe another example: take political left or right. It’s not enough to say we have a political space which is then divided into left and right. But if you ask a leftist and how the whole political space is structured, you will get a different image than from the rightist. So, you see in this sense for me antagonism comes first. Because the only way you can account for these particular modernities is that they already react to some trauma of let's call it antagonism. As to what you said there about Lacan, yeah, in a way I agree. But here I must confess to you quite sincerely, I am extremely naive here. I don't care about that stupid annoying old man, egotist, impossible to live with, called Lacan. You know what I mean? I take very naively what he said. And it may function—it may function as you said. But it is—and sorry for this naivete—but in a way it is still true. Fuck Lacan, he was talking about certain topic, about certain problems, he didn't solve them. He didn't solve them. Which is why as already mentioned it's important not to mystify the last Lacan, not to go into this "was there some final secret" and so on and so on. I mean, you know what I mean? Probably Lacan was a great self-performer. So, of course it was this element, no? And I totally agree with you: this is a nice reading that suicide is—suicide is one way to control your destiny, to prevent your pupils... I mean every honest master own—owes to his pupils the fundamental right that in one way or another they kill him, no? And the truly oppressive masters try to take even this from them. But nonetheless, I was very naive here and I focused on the topic. Lacan was in a deadlock, he didn't solve it, and in a quite naive way I'm claiming we can think further. It's not that Lacan reached some ultimate limit and now, as Miller sometimes claims, and now we cannot go further, no. mm-hm. mm-hm. The guy before? Ah, yes. The guy in front. Okay. I want to recover something you said in the beginning today... about how in some way sex spills and contaminates all spheres of life. But then on the—on the other hand, you also say in some place that this is precisely what Freud criticized, this pansexualism, and what Freud was trying to say was precisely that: what needs to be enacted, what kind of fantasies need to be enacted in order for people to have sex? Or in other words, what—what are you thinking about when you are having sex? And my speculation, I mean, I don't know if I'm right but: can we say that in some way when the sex ends up contaminating all other spheres of life, we are dealing with some kind of *jouissance* that comes from the real, and on the opposite when we are talking about what people are thinking when they are having sex, we are talking about the symbolic and the all the fantasies that need needed to be enacted? Is that a correct way of—of putting it? No, it's a crucial question, I think things are very complex here, there is no simple direct answer. But again, you remember I agree with you that Freud was absolutely against this kind of pansexualism. His idea is not if you look deeply behind everything there is sex—like you know this primitive idea of I don't know whatever I—when I—when I whatever I do, ultimately it’s a way of doing that—seducing women or men or whatever. But for me again, the—the—the point would be the unity of the two. That is to say sex has to spill over into anything precisely because it cannot stand on its own. It's not too strong. It's—it's too weak. Again, I agree with your example because—the one I gave which is basically a version of that wonderful example by Lévi-Strauss where he says that there was one tribe in North America I think who—which had the theory that all dreams have sexual meaning, all dreams except explicitly sexual dreams, no? That they—they don’t have, no? And again, I agree with you if this was your point—I've written about it that—the true question of sexuality is not this cheap pansexual idea "Whatever I am doing, I am really in a metaphorical way doing that." No, the problem is not that whatever I am doing I am thinking about that. The problem is: but what am I thinking when I *am* doing that sex? No? And then there I have to go out. Sex cannot sustain itself. And I mean this quite—quite literally. I think—to be sorry, vulgar—when you make love, you cannot simply think about how happy I am now in this moment just making love. When you do this, even if you dream about this, why are you laughing? You—you must be perverted, but with you maybe it's possible, never know. We—maybe this is the last secret of the protocols of Zion, you know? Sorry, sorry. But what I want to say is that even if you just think about this, how happy I am now, okay, to be vulgar screwing that lady blah-blah, you will see that at the minimum point you already imagine somebody watching you. An imagined gaze or whatever, a phantasmatic scene, a phantasmatic scene must be here. So again, as to that what you mentioned that *phallic jouissance* and so on. Also you ask me "why," I didn’t want to go into that. I think that my God we are into so many paradoxes here. Lacan makes it absolutely clear that *jouissance féminine* doesn't exist. It is operative, but doesn't exist. Because read really closely—people miss this—his Seminar No, *phallic*, the—this *jouissance féminine*. He almost every time that he mentions it, he says, "if there is another *jouissance*, not *phallic*," and then he adds in the—in brackets: "but of course there isn't another one," and so on. So it's the clear example of this, you know, it doesn't exist but it still can be efficient. "It can be operative." Yeah, yeah. This is again what I meant the first day—so I wasn't totally bluffing—with that *e pur si muove*. That we should not read it as this primitive empiricism, "oh your shitty theories" *e pur si muove*. No, something can be proven non-existent but still *e pur si muove*. "But there’s a sort of whole feminist ideology revolved, like feminist-Lacanian ideology revolved precisely on the fantasy that there is a surplus jouissance, and it sort of propagates itself." "Yeah, yeah, but again, can't—don’t they see that in this way—I mean it quite literally—you prepare a new form of feminine enslavement? Because you never get there." I mean I tried to convince them there—I wasn’t quite successful partially in Bolivia where my point was precisely that—just don’t bring me all those Inca where women had a role, of course they had a role. They had a role to lay beneath, no I mean—you know what I mean? Like, I claim the only space of freedom is this Cartesian space of empty subjectivity and so on. All modernity—sorry, all pre-modernity where they apparently celebrate women, look at it closely—you know my standard paradoxes—it's like "Yeah, I know there is some shitty tribe in New Zealand where woman is sacred and the central temple in the village has the shape of a vagina." I agree. There is one problem: women are of course prohibited to enter. This is the most dangerous thing I think today, even as with racism. You know I’m just telling my old story that today’s form of racism is typical, is something like, "Oh those apparent primitives they are really much wiser than us. They—let’s not integrate them into our society, in this way they would lose their authentic wisdom or whatever of the world." No, I like natives who want to be more corrupted than ourselves. I like to tell you an anecdote—I don’t know I mention it—which happened to me with Woody. You in New York, when there were some Palestinians who gave me a wonderful example of racism. They were there invited by some shitty college to perform, and they were offered hummus, hummus there. You know, as a sign of respect "we will give you your food," no? And they told us, "Fuck you, we came here to be corrupted with greasy hamburgers and so on. We get enough of that shitty hummus." I mean, I—I—I think that the—the nastiest arrogance is that when you deplore when—for example—oh, let’s take another one. You say, "no, I—I have some—I respect your... I—no matter what I am, I may be wrong." "The final arrogance..." as Chesterton said. This idea of hypocritical modesty. No, Lacan was right, I was right. Okay. Let’s take the last question. Okay. Oh, this guy there. Yeah? Oh, sorry. I thought... yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanted to ask about the non-relation again. Because if we follow Badiou, no-relation also means that there is—it’s not that there are two, but the one is—the one is not. The—the no-relation between—to be in a relationship means that you—there is a non-relationship. Does this mean that also in politics we are dealing with this? That for example, communism is—is also a non-relationship? "Yeah, no, here—can I answer it briefly?—here I totally agree with Badiou. I think that the point would be that we don’t have... let’s take another example from Badiou. He says, the first is the—the event. And then comes the relationship and so on. No, I would say it’s exactly the same in politics. Communism is not a relationship. Communism is the name of a deadlock. It’s exactly what Lacan would have said. Communism doesn’t exist. But communism is the only thing which matters. Because all other social relationships exist only as semblances to—to resolve the deadlock of communism. This would have been my point. Okay, I think we have to stop here. I hope I wasn't too long. I mean, my God, you came here and you... okay, sorry. Thank you very much."
But here we come to the paradox. The paradox, to cut it very short, the paradox of the Higgs field is the following one: again, imagine the zero level, cosmic void, no symmetry broken, no particular entities emerging out of pure uniformality, and imagine spending zero energy on Higgs field. And this is now the absolute paradox. This is for me the best definition of materialism: there is a gap between the two. Literally, the presupposition of Higgs field is that something costs less than nothing. That is to say, if you want to be at the state of absolute peace, you, spending no energy—no, absolute peace, sorry, in the sense of no broken symmetry—you have already to spend some energy. The lowest point of energy is not when nothing happens. It's when in a minimal way something already—you know what I mean? If this is, for example, how much energy you spend and this is how much symmetry is broken. It's not like this: the more energy you spend, the more symmetry is broken. It's like this. So, physicists, based on this, distinguish between two vacuums: the false vacuum and the true vacuum. The false vacuum is ontologically even more a vacuum. The false vacuum is the state in which Higgs field is switched off. There is pure symmetry with no differentiated particles and so on and so on. But it's false because you need energy to sustain the zero. The true vacuum is already a little bit further, where you spend zero energy but there is already some disturbance, some what I yesterday—two days ago called *e pur si muove* and so on and so on. So why do I find this so attractive? Because the paradox, ontological paradox again is that I think that if you take this seriously, it undermines this very idea of some primordial abyss and so on where things are at the zero level and then you get into all theological problematic by what divine contingency something emerged out of nothing. No, if you read it in this way, something can be cheaper than nothing. The zero level of universe is not peace, primordial abyss and so on. That peace already costs something energetically, an effort and so on. And I claim that this gap, this minimal gap where a certain movement, circulation is cheaper than nothing—this would be the minimum ontological difference, I claim, of the Freudian drive. And I think the minimum idea of idealism is precisely that you can put two vacuums together, you know, in any form like primordial wisdom and so on. No, I think you always have a gap between the two vacuums. Or to put it in libidinal terms, Lacan’s point would have been here that drive is less than zero. It’s not that you have zero in the sense of total Nirvana. No, total Nirvana—to attain this, this would be the ultimate Lacanian anti-Buddhist argument—total Nirvana is not really total Nirvana, it already costs something energetically, an effort and so on. In but—okay I will develop this in my next book—the breathtaking consequences of this. For example, the result you get here is that why is there, you know, this big shitty philosophical problem "Why is there something instead of nothing?" That it's a false problem. I mean, the true mystery is why is there nothing instead of something? You know, because like the problem is how to arrive at nothing. What exists is not more than nothing. What exists is less than nothing. Not even, you know, to get at... this is where, again, I cannot but conclude with a Jewish joke. Which I think is a totally correct one. But it's a well-known one, maybe I even repeated it here already. You know, synagogue, Jews gathering there to pray, blah, blah, whatever they are doing, horrible things there, and first a rich Rabbi says, "Oh dear God, I am nobody, I am not worthy of you, I am a nothing and so on." You know the story, no? Then a rich merchant comes, Jewish, and says, "Oh God, I am also nobody, I am nothing, unworthy of you, blah, blah." Then a poor Jew raises his head and says, "A poor Jew says, 'Oh dear God, I am also nothing and so on.'" And then, you know, one rich guy kicks the other: "But who is he? How does he dare to say that he is nothing?" This is the Hegelian/Lacanian, this is the correct lesson deeply. No, but I’m not kidding here. In Kabbalah, you also find this idea, deeply along these levels, that, you know, the beginning of creation is not something, that God first had to create nothing to withdraw and so again, I’m not playing that cheap game of, you know, "ooh the ancient, those Hindus who, so I was told, can do horrible things like can ejaculate inside, can move their penis so that they suck things and so on in, they already knew everything and so on." No, I’m talking just about this very elementary, deeply materialist moment: that there is a gap, a tension between two vacuums. There is a minimum of ontological movement which is even previous to void. Void is not first. I think, although this may appear materialist, but this idea of a primordial void out of which things emerge and not and so on—and you know who knew this in its own way? He really should be reread: Democritus. We don't have time to go into it, but check it up even if you do it like me on Wikipedia or whatever. You know—you know that wonderful notion of that Democritus' term for atoms is *den*, which is a total neologism, no? Because it doesn't exist, it's *med-en*, that's the original term. *Hen* is *en* is *hen*—all, no? But Democritus consciously puts the wrong cut. Okay. The only correct translation of this is basically less than zero. It’s not one. I mean, good history of philosophy will teach you how Aristotle and all the Diogenes Laërtius who write about Democritus already ontologized him. There, atoms become small ones which circulate in nothingness. Again, with Democritus, it's much more paradoxical. What do I mean by this? Nonetheless, I would like to give you a simple example, my God, what shitty movies I see because of my son. Did you see the new version of *Karate Kid* with... "Don’t blame your son!" "No, I blame you! You’re probably the type who goes to these shitty artie movies and you know—I hate artie movies. You know how you make artie movies? You have a good hardcore movie, people screw each other. Then you are an artist and just add between each sex scene ten minutes people just staring at each other, ooh how deep it becomes, you know." Okay, sorry. There is nonetheless a nice cheap Hollywood wisdom, but nonetheless. In the film, when the young American boy trained by this Chinese Kung Fu teacher who told him that he must learn to—to be inactive, to win the battle, that he asks the American boy, the teacher: "How can I win my fight if I only stand still?" And the teacher replies: "Being still is not the same as doing nothing." I mean, here again we have this idea. And I think we should not read this idea in the usual obscurantist way of the cliché about a wise ruler who knows how to play one against the other his subordinates so that they destroy each other, he does nothing but everything is at peace. No, I think that—that doing—there is a point when you do nothing precisely by doing something. Doing nothing already—doing nothing already—already costs... you know, it’s a little bit like if you permit me this, I know purely brutal illegal step towards individual even psychology. You believe—you should believe me, I know about this because if there ever was a person with all the nervous tics, it’s me, no? Like, if you really want to destroy me, it’s to tell me "Relax, just sit peacefully" and so on and so on. I would have to put an incredible effort into it. The only way for nervous jerks like me to get peace is to focus on some small gesture repetitively. And through, you know like doing something, no, the only way to approach nothing is to do something. If you want direct nothing, it’s an incredible effort, it’s doing much more. So again, this would be somehow my result that again, to resume: quantum physics, as you know, still is an enigma. And I tend to agree with those who—ontologically, I mean—to those who claim that all the versions that we get to resolve the enigma are precisely so many semblances trying to resolve the deadlock. You know, we have, for example, the—we have, for example, this David Bohm solution which is—he tries to state the classical image of presupposing some kind of retroactive causality and so on and so on. We have many-world interpretations, we have the spiritualist interpretations, and so on and so on. I think these are precisely, as with modernity or whatever, we still are not at the level to confront Bohr’s paradox. And I think that this is maybe the task today. The consequences are tremendous ontologically. I really think that we arrive that—if read properly—quantum physics is maybe the most materialist science there was. I think we should totally reject all that stuff—ooh, you know, mind creates reality, time runs backward, and all that stuff. No, no, no, things are much more precise in quantum physics. But again, what has to fall is A) the notion of consistent, fully existing reality. Reality must be rendered not-all, incomplete. And again, following the logic of Higgs field, this our most elementary ontological presupposition: that something is more than nothing, that as it were, things emerge out of some primordial void balance and so on, should be abandoned. That is to say that the zero level of reality is not void, but it’s neither nothing nor something, but some weird less-than-something, some... you know, the paradox would be maybe the following one: when Lacan talks about object small a—I use this two-three times in my books—I was always struck by the parallel between object small a and the status of, I think it’s photon, I’m so bluffing in physics, I don’t know. But I think photon has—is a particle which has this paradoxical property that, you know, with other particles you have a certain mass, gravity and then of course, if the particle is moving, this mass raises. The idea of a photon is that when it’s not moving, it has zero mass. You know—how to put it—it exists only as its own excess. It doesn't exist at zero, as zero level. Something which has no—it's not that you can... it's almost like comrade Stalin in his infinite genius came close to this when, you know, that old joke, when he was asked in I think, by a journalist, "Which deviation is worse: left-wing or right-wing deviation?" Stalin's answer: "They are both worse," you know, like with revisionists, they are not only bad, they are worse, no? Worse like with no standard, there is nobody who is bad, you begin with worse. And it's again the same with photons. You see this idea which maybe also comes close to the way Epicurus supplemented Democritus because *clinamen*, you know, where Epicurus, my God, Marx—I'm almost tempted to say the true young Marx that should be rehabilitated is not that stupid boring proto-Stalinist meditations about alienation from it's his thesis from too, about—he already focused on the difference, you know what's the title of Marx's doctoral thesis: *The Difference Between Democritean and Epicurean Atomism*. And there, the difference is precisely *clinamen*. The idea that atoms not only fall, but in a contingent way they deviate. And the step to be made here—Deleuze wrote some nice lines about it—is precisely that *clinamen* is original. Like photon, you don't have something which then is distorted, sidetracked. It's—this distortion, *clinamen*, taking—making a detour is primordial. Excess, things are always in excess with regard to themselves. Along these lines, I would like maybe to develop some things and so on and so on. "Do I get a certain body language from you that maybe it's the time that I shut up or what?" "No, there is another talk here at but... I don't know if you want to have time for questions. I mean, it's... I think he did make us work today, as you promised yesterday. No, you did, although, please, let me be serious here. All I can tell you is that I did speak, when I was in the United States, in the UK and so on, with some particle physicists just to be sure that it’s not total bullshit what I’m saying, you know what I mean? Just to be sure that what I’m—I told them, "I don’t want to teach you, I’m not that kind of philosopher who tells you 'No, no, you are making a mistake, I know better than you.'" And they at least... Beckett did say the whole thing much more laconically, the idea that "nothing is more real than nothing," but we could never accuse you of being laconic. Oh, but today my point is there is something more real than nothing. It's less than nothing, less than zero. Okay. All right. But still, I thought this was the most important exploration, rectification, since your own Plato fantasy, really, on sexual difference. Even a modest rectification of Lacan. And I have some questions, but I don’t know if I should let the audience go first. I have some Woody—oh you were there, that’s why all the Jewish jokes were about... I was wondering why they were about... okay, but no, I have—I don’t know if I should start with a question, are there questions? Do you have time to take a few questions? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder, you know, that going back to the formulas of sexuation and your rectification of Lacan but also the admission that you can easily say "man is not woman" it’s logical, but you cannot say "woman is not man" because there is always a domain beyond sexual difference. No, what you cannot say is that not-woman is man. That if you deny woman, you are back at man. I think there is an excess in woman. Okay, there is—the sexual difference is deeply asymmetrical. Which is, again, just to make it clear, which is why I think it’s not some kind of a primordial dualism. The original structure is precisely like that of coffee without milk. There are—there are no two sexes. There is one sex plus something, which is neither. Okay, would that lead you though to agree with something that I’ve heard you disagree with before, the idea that woman has access to some surplus *jouissance* that Lacan goes on about in Seminar Because simply because, you know, there is a domain beyond sexual difference, does that mean that the people on the feminine side of the formula of sexuation, whether they are biologically men or women, have access to this surplus *jouissance* that in the past you said is Lacan’s sort of fantasy, it’s not really... ah, here things are much more tricky. First, I claim that it all depends how we read this. Even some Lacanians read it in, I think, a very dangerous obscurantist way. It goes like this: man is fully integrated into the symbolic order, while woman is not-all within the symbolic order. There is some terrifying, I don’t know, too strong *jouissance* and only women can get into it. No, I think as I repeated in my book all the time, that it’s absolutely crucial to take this into account: women have access not insofar as they are less within the symbolic order, but insofar as they are totally within it. In other words, I claim that this idea of a woman who, you know, has access to some secret excessive *jouissance* outside language, with the divine—this is the ultimate male fantasy. Yeah. This is the ultimate male fantasy. No, no, no, a woman... so again, but this then has many philosophical consequences. Because, for example, the reason I am for Descartes, philosophically, basically for *Cogito*, is I claim that if you, against this background, read Descartes closely, you can see that Cogito is feminine. Cogito? Yeah, I totally reject this idea that Cogito is coded as... no, first incidentally, first even at the most anecdotal level. Did you know that my God, Descartes is the first breakthrough of philosophy... because of Hypatia... yeah, I mean he was immensely popular, whatever this means, among women. Not only Queen Christina of Sweden, but all others and so on. There was a—they felt in it an immense emancipatory potential. Okay, you... yeah, okay... no, because you did mention this yesterday actually, you said because Descartes took into account that women are more suggestible or more hysterical... no, no, no, no, this is—this is the bad Descartes then, when he sexualizes it into "Cogito is pure thinking, but women are more..." and so on and so on. No, but you know what's my tendency here? One you should always remember that Descartes’ *Cogito* is at its core purely non-substantial point of excess of madness and so on and so on, no? That Descartes’ passage is—I agree with readers who claim that the passage in Descartes from *Cogito* to *res cogitans*, a thinking thing, is illegitimate. Descartes makes it automatically. No, but I think that there sexual difference is already described. That pure subjectivity is feminine. A male position is always already a substantialized, substantialized... you know what I did in some of my books? This you may consider crazy. I even claimed that what is usually taken as the ultimate anti-feminist argument, namely this Freudian link of femininity and masquerade... this is, I think, a correct insight. We should just really read it the way it is. What does it mean "femininity as masquerade"? It means all features you have are already secondary as a mask and so on. And the pure—yeah, this is precisely where women are much more—we men are stupid, we think we are substantially this and—only women can be pure subjects. Which is why, I don’t know if I repeated this here, in a weird French debate, I in a very strange way defended—but this is already now I think in this shitty book of mine, whatever—defended this problem in France of, how do you call it, burqa, burka, whatever, no? I claim that what shocked me, again, is not... this is another problem: are Islam women forced to do it or not? What shocked me is how French women—I even participated there in the debate, I saw French republican, Christian, whatever—they felt threatened by it. Like, a woman told me, a woman to be precise, Françoise Lévy, a journalist for *Le Point*, you know, the right-wing journal where Jacques-Alain Miller regularly publishes, no? She told me, "I feel threatened when I see a face covered with burqa. As if, as if I’m cut off, you know, like somebody doesn’t want to open herself to me or whatever. I feel like our public space is threatened and so on and so on." And I think in the first pages of my *Living in the End Times* book, I proposed the opposite reasoning: that the horror of burqa is the opposite one. Maybe you remember I mention, I think I even did it here, that well-known Alphonse Allais, I think, the French satirist’s version of Salome’s dance, you know? Salome dances, dances, seven veils, then she is naked, then the king shouts, "Go on, go on!" and she puts on her nose, her skin, and so on, like getting really naked. And I claim that phenomenologically, what makes woman with a burqa so horrible is not that it’s covered, but the our true phenomenological relationship to it. It is as if, you know—now I’m going to my softly anti-feminist waters—I remember reading a nice—seeing a nice male chauvinist caricature of a woman who comes home after a party and, you know, does this evening unmasking, you know, takes on the lipstick and so on—takes off, I mean, wipes it, but then it goes on: she takes off her ears, her eyes, and so on! And she goes to sleep just as an empty ball or whatever, no? But I claim that something like this almost happens in burqa when you have it. We are confronted there precisely the pure subject. It’s just an empty gaze, you know, because you don’t just get—if it were to be just a covered black ball, it’s nothing. The true horror is that it has a cut for the eye. That’s pure subject. I claim absolutely it’s the opposite. The reason we—because you know, this is the lesson of psychoanalysis, the anti-Levinasian lesson. You know who is Levinas, no? The... no, here I agree with my friend Woody—no, I’m joking, but Levinas is, you know, the Christian philosopher who masks himself as a Jew, no? I sincerely think Levinas is so popular because he is selling as Jewish wisdom this Christian moral bullshit about, you know, "love neighbor" and so on. What is so great in Judaism is that it's much more communist, my God. It's absolute—the way I understand Judaism, okay, I don't understand it, but the way I do is that it's exactly the primacy of the collective. When Levinas says first is the face of the other and then there are other others, only then... no, no, this is not Judaism, no. Again, so I think that precisely we should here stick to the radical lesson of psychoanalysis against Levinas. Face is not the authentic other. Face is originally primordial lying. Which is why, again, as I always repeat, in psychoanalysis, it's crucial that it's not face-to-face. You know, psychoanalytic treatment is not intersubjectivity. It's not "I am here with an analyst and we both sincerely talk" whatever. No, you are alone, the analyst is behind, doing, you know, masturbating, playing cards, whatever, no? It's crucial, this radical asymmetry. You are not two in psychoanalytic session. You are one plus more than one, less than zero, the object. And so on. And this—we don’t have time to go into it, but this is the greatness of Hegel. He knew it. This would have been my ultimate argument against the—this bourgeois-liberal, let’s call them anarco-recognition Hegelians. No. If you really read Hegel’s that famous passage—struggle to death between the future master and servant, blah, blah—you will see what’s Hegel’s problem there. That the other that you encounter, the self-consciousness encounters, it's not this kind of a "Oh, I recognize myself in you, we are equal." It's a kind of a monstrous, traumatic otherness. I mean, you are—I am here, and I see objects. I am of course the center of my world, point of absolute subjectivity. And then there is another stupid object who claims "But I am also like you, universal," and so on. It's absolutely incompatible, this. The other is primordially not the other in whom I can recognize myself, but is this ontological paradox of another absolute, as it were, no? So again, here I think that we should—Lacan was totally right, even in a Hegelian way, that intersubjectivity is not the ultimate—is not the ultimate horizon, no? Okay, okay, I talk too much. Okay. Woody? Yeah. Here and then... here and then... I have two—two short points... not even questions, I don’t deserve a question. It’s kind of a question... don’t start. One I think about the—the way of reading of Lacan confessing "I was wrong." Yeah. It’s a little bit naive to really read it as "he was wrong." Really what he’s doing is to commit suicide of the master. It’s exactly like when Zarathustra said, "Leave me, betray me, because maybe always I lie to you." So it’s kind of the lesson of the Master from *Totem and Taboo*: instead of let the other people to kill him, he commit a suicide and then he become unalive and he become alive forever. I would always say it’s like Gaddafi that said "You cannot fire me because always I was no one." Yeah. So this is really his trick. Exactly. Nice. Gaddafi’s like the Jewish Rabbi or what? No, he’s like, you know, Lacan, he’s not like the Jew. And the other one is about the—the origin of modernity that you said that "Oh, the alternative..." If the modernity—if we spoke that the semblants are the one who create the real, yeah, so we have to say that all this multiplicity is the one who create this modernity that is the global—is the global capitalism. And then it’s created back to all those multiplicity around. It’s not that they are all wrong and there is one true modernity. No, if the modernity is kind of the real, all those semblants around like Al-Qaeda, whatever, they create the modernity—like communism, Al-Qaeda, fascism, all of them together. Zionism? Zionism definitely. And then this one create them back reflexively. Yeah, but it’s not that this is the true... that Strauss was wrong that things—the deadlock is the one that create all the semblants. Really all those perceptions are the one who create the deadlock. And then it created back in the... this is... can I nonetheless very briefly answer now because I will forget. But nonetheless, I think that—I think that nonetheless in this circular relation, antagonism has a priority. I claim. But for philosophical reasons I cannot go into them now. Of course, the—the real-time causality is circular. But what I like is precisely this idea, which is for me the very core of dialectical idea: that you don’t have entities which then enter into contradictory, conflicting relations. It’s that contradiction comes first. Entities obfuscate contradiction. You know why is there asymmetry? I will give you maybe another example: take political left or right. It’s not enough to say we have a political space which is then divided into left and right. But if you ask a leftist and how the whole political space is structured, you will get a different image than from the rightist. So, you see in this sense for me antagonism comes first. Because the only way you can account for these particular modernities is that they already react to some trauma of let's call it antagonism. As to what you said there about Lacan, yeah, in a way I agree. But here I must confess to you quite sincerely, I am extremely naive here. I don't care about that stupid annoying old man, egotist, impossible to live with, called Lacan. You know what I mean? I take very naively what he said. And it may function—it may function as you said. But it is—and sorry for this naivete—but in a way it is still true. Fuck Lacan, he was talking about certain topic, about certain problems, he didn't solve them. He didn't solve them. Which is why as already mentioned it's important not to mystify the last Lacan, not to go into this "was there some final secret" and so on and so on. I mean, you know what I mean? Probably Lacan was a great self-performer. So, of course it was this element, no? And I totally agree with you: this is a nice reading that suicide is—suicide is one way to control your destiny, to prevent your pupils... I mean every honest master own—owes to his pupils the fundamental right that in one way or another they kill him, no? And the truly oppressive masters try to take even this from them. But nonetheless, I was very naive here and I focused on the topic. Lacan was in a deadlock, he didn't solve it, and in a quite naive way I'm claiming we can think further. It's not that Lacan reached some ultimate limit and now, as Miller sometimes claims, and now we cannot go further, no. mm-hm. mm-hm. The guy before? Ah, yes. The guy in front. Okay. I want to recover something you said in the beginning today... about how in some way sex spills and contaminates all spheres of life. But then on the—on the other hand, you also say in some place that this is precisely what Freud criticized, this pansexualism, and what Freud was trying to say was precisely that: what needs to be enacted, what kind of fantasies need to be enacted in order for people to have sex? Or in other words, what—what are you thinking about when you are having sex? And my speculation, I mean, I don't know if I'm right but: can we say that in some way when the sex ends up contaminating all other spheres of life, we are dealing with some kind of *jouissance* that comes from the real, and on the opposite when we are talking about what people are thinking when they are having sex, we are talking about the symbolic and the all the fantasies that need needed to be enacted? Is that a correct way of—of putting it? No, it's a crucial question, I think things are very complex here, there is no simple direct answer. But again, you remember I agree with you that Freud was absolutely against this kind of pansexualism. His idea is not if you look deeply behind everything there is sex—like you know this primitive idea of I don't know whatever I—when I—when I whatever I do, ultimately it’s a way of doing that—seducing women or men or whatever. But for me again, the—the—the point would be the unity of the two. That is to say sex has to spill over into anything precisely because it cannot stand on its own. It's not too strong. It's—it's too weak. Again, I agree with your example because—the one I gave which is basically a version of that wonderful example by Lévi-Strauss where he says that there was one tribe in North America I think who—which had the theory that all dreams have sexual meaning, all dreams except explicitly sexual dreams, no? That they—they don’t have, no? And again, I agree with you if this was your point—I've written about it that—the true question of sexuality is not this cheap pansexual idea "Whatever I am doing, I am really in a metaphorical way doing that." No, the problem is not that whatever I am doing I am thinking about that. The problem is: but what am I thinking when I *am* doing that sex? No? And then there I have to go out. Sex cannot sustain itself. And I mean this quite—quite literally. I think—to be sorry, vulgar—when you make love, you cannot simply think about how happy I am now in this moment just making love. When you do this, even if you dream about this, why are you laughing? You—you must be perverted, but with you maybe it's possible, never know. We—maybe this is the last secret of the protocols of Zion, you know? Sorry, sorry. But what I want to say is that even if you just think about this, how happy I am now, okay, to be vulgar screwing that lady blah-blah, you will see that at the minimum point you already imagine somebody watching you. An imagined gaze or whatever, a phantasmatic scene, a phantasmatic scene must be here. So again, as to that what you mentioned that *phallic jouissance* and so on. Also you ask me "why," I didn’t want to go into that. I think that my God we are into so many paradoxes here. Lacan makes it absolutely clear that *jouissance féminine* doesn't exist. It is operative, but doesn't exist. Because read really closely—people miss this—his Seminar No, *phallic*, the—this *jouissance féminine*. He almost every time that he mentions it, he says, "if there is another *jouissance*, not *phallic*," and then he adds in the—in brackets: "but of course there isn't another one," and so on. So it's the clear example of this, you know, it doesn't exist but it still can be efficient. "It can be operative." Yeah, yeah. This is again what I meant the first day—so I wasn't totally bluffing—with that *e pur si muove*. That we should not read it as this primitive empiricism, "oh your shitty theories" *e pur si muove*. No, something can be proven non-existent but still *e pur si muove*. "But there’s a sort of whole feminist ideology revolved, like feminist-Lacanian ideology revolved precisely on the fantasy that there is a surplus jouissance, and it sort of propagates itself." "Yeah, yeah, but again, can't—don’t they see that in this way—I mean it quite literally—you prepare a new form of feminine enslavement? Because you never get there." I mean I tried to convince them there—I wasn’t quite successful partially in Bolivia where my point was precisely that—just don’t bring me all those Inca where women had a role, of course they had a role. They had a role to lay beneath, no I mean—you know what I mean? Like, I claim the only space of freedom is this Cartesian space of empty subjectivity and so on. All modernity—sorry, all pre-modernity where they apparently celebrate women, look at it closely—you know my standard paradoxes—it's like "Yeah, I know there is some shitty tribe in New Zealand where woman is sacred and the central temple in the village has the shape of a vagina." I agree. There is one problem: women are of course prohibited to enter. This is the most dangerous thing I think today, even as with racism. You know I’m just telling my old story that today’s form of racism is typical, is something like, "Oh those apparent primitives they are really much wiser than us. They—let’s not integrate them into our society, in this way they would lose their authentic wisdom or whatever of the world." No, I like natives who want to be more corrupted than ourselves. I like to tell you an anecdote—I don’t know I mention it—which happened to me with Woody. You in New York, when there were some Palestinians who gave me a wonderful example of racism. They were there invited by some shitty college to perform, and they were offered hummus, hummus there. You know, as a sign of respect "we will give you your food," no? And they told us, "Fuck you, we came here to be corrupted with greasy hamburgers and so on. We get enough of that shitty hummus." I mean, I—I—I think that the—the nastiest arrogance is that when you deplore when—for example—oh, let’s take another one. You say, "no, I—I have some—I respect your... I—no matter what I am, I may be wrong." "The final arrogance..." as Chesterton said. This idea of hypocritical modesty. No, Lacan was right, I was right. Okay. Let’s take the last question. Okay. Oh, this guy there. Yeah? Oh, sorry. I thought... yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanted to ask about the non-relation again. Because if we follow Badiou, no-relation also means that there is—it’s not that there are two, but the one is—the one is not. The—the no-relation between—to be in a relationship means that you—there is a non-relationship. Does this mean that also in politics we are dealing with this? That for example, communism is—is also a non-relationship? "Yeah, no, here—can I answer it briefly?—here I totally agree with Badiou. I think that the point would be that we don’t have... let’s take another example from Badiou. He says, the first is the—the event. And then comes the relationship and so on. No, I would say it’s exactly the same in politics. Communism is not a relationship. Communism is the name of a deadlock. It’s exactly what Lacan would have said. Communism doesn’t exist. But communism is the only thing which matters. Because all other social relationships exist only as semblances to—to resolve the deadlock of communism. This would have been my point. Okay, I think we have to stop here. I hope I wasn't too long. I mean, my God, you came here and you... okay, sorry. Thank you very much."