The Absolute Recoil
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2013-05-12 · 2:16:46 · 19,449 words
with Paul Holdengräber
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisideologyhistoryphilosophy-generalcommunism-socialismecology-climatecinema-art-culturesubjectivitylanguagegeopolitics-warrace-antisemitism
Žižek delivers a lecture arguing that Hegel's dialectic should be understood not as a teleological movement toward higher synthesis but as a 'downward synthesis', a redoubled negation where what is lost is retroactively constituted through its very loss. He contrasts this with Marx's Hölderlin-paradigm eschatology, defends Hegel's irreducible alienation (alienation as constitutive of subjectivity, with no pre-existent subject who alienates itself), and extends the argument through Lacan, Heidegger, late Schelling, and the 'sorrow of nature' motif. A sustained political example about colonial languages (India/English, Malcolm X, Jesuit Paraguay) illustrates how the wound of colonialism is also the condition of possibility for a more radical universalism.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 25
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Used to name the illusory substantial historical agent or world spirit that Žižek argues does not exist, there is no agency of total accountancy guaranteeing the outcome of historical acts.
Excessive enjoyment that is both impossible to reach fully (we always miss it) and impossible to escape, the obsessional who punishes himself ends up enjoying the punishment itself.
For Lacan, desire is indestructible precisely insofar as it is utterly fleeting and evanescent, it is nothing, always eludes you, but as such always returns.
Kierkegaard's point is not that mortality causes anxiety but the opposite: the truly traumatic fact is accepting that we are immortal and thus permanently responsible, mortality is the escapist release.
as “alienation and separation (Lacanian couple)”
Lacan's two fundamental operations of the subject, contrasted with Hegel's negation of negation, for Lacan, disalienation/separation does not restore a prior unity but merely redoubles the gap.
as “disalienation as redoubling”
Against the standard Hegelian reading of disalienation as triumphant re-appropriation, Žižek argues disalienation merely redoubles the gap, the secret of the other was already a secret for the other.
as “redoubled negation”
A form of negation of negation in which the outcome is not sublated synthesis but a repetition of the gap at a deeper level, the secret of the Egyptians was already a secret for the Egyptians themselves.
as “cunning of unreason”
Žižek's gloss on Hegel's cunning of reason: the one thing you can be sure of is that whatever you do it will always go wrong, and Hegel's problem is how to make use of things going wrong.
as “self-negated pessimism / optimism without positive substance”
A form of optimism that is not the opposite of pessimism but a further elaboration of it, life goes on not out of vitality but because the subject is too weak even to follow through on principled pessimism.
A dialectical third term that is not a higher unity but the lowest of the low, the residual persistence of life when even principled pessimism collapses, or the undead remainder when mortality is negated.
The paradigm, shared by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, and the entire Judeo-Christian tradition, in which the present moment is the lowest point of decadence which also opens the possibility of reversal, 'where the danger is, grows also what can save us.'
as “retroactive teleology”
Hegel's teleology is always backward-looking: once Caesar crossed the Rubicon, crossing it retroactively became his fate, there is no forward-pointing historical necessity, only retrospective constitution.
as “substanceless subjectivity”
Marx's characterization of the proletariat, workers totally separated from their objective conditions, which for Marx is the standpoint from which collective reappropriation becomes possible.
Late Heidegger's notion of a radically historicized transcendentalism, the play of transcendental horizons with no hidden substantial agent regulating it, analogous to Lacan's symbolic order as ultimate horizon.
By analogy with Freud's 'discontent in civilization,' a constitutive deadlock, dislocation or sorrow already immanent in nature itself, human language is a reaction to this prior gap, not a fall from natural homeostasis.
Lacan's term (from Seminar XI) for what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of its subjection to the cycle of sexed reproduction, cited as evidence that the deadlock is already in nature, not added by human speech.
as “spirit as the wound of nature”
Spirit (human subjectivity) is itself the wound it tries to heal, it is the power of abstraction and tearing apart that creates the very dimension of organic unity it then laments having lost.
Wagner's Parsifal motto, 'the wound can be healed only by the spear that made it', used by Žižek to argue that colonial and other wounds are overcome only by radicalizing (not retreating from) the force that caused them.
as “absolute Gegenstoß”
Hegel's term from the Logic of Essence for an absolute recoil or counter-thrust in which a withdrawal from something creates the very thing it withdraws from, presupposition is constituted only in the return.
as “torture house of being”
Žižek's supplement to Heidegger's 'language is the house of being', the fundamental relationship between language and human being is one of traumatic cut and torture, not dwelling.
For Žižek's Hegel, not omniscience but the most radical self-relativization, the moment when the subject falls fully into relativism without a meta-position from which to observe relativity.
Invoked to describe minorities or subalterns who, precisely because they occupy no fixed particular place, can claim the position of the universal.
A minority or marginal element within a particular culture that, by virtue of being excluded from the dominant particularity, can serve as the site of genuine universalism.
Used here in the Lacanian sense of what is simultaneously impossible (can never be fully attained) and unavoidable (can never be fully gotten rid of), exemplified by jouissance, freedom, and universality.
as “alienation (constitutive)”
For Žižek's Hegel, alienation is constitutive of the subject in the radical sense that the subject does not pre-exist its alienation but emerges through it, it is nature that alienates itself, not a pre-given subject.
Stories he reaches for 2
When in analysis, Žižek planned his associations up to five sessions in advance, including deliberate slips of tongue, yet they still had the status of free association; he could not escape it.
“when I was in analysis I planned up to five sessions in advance, every slip of tongue was well planned and so on, it has the status of free association, you cannot escape it”
Žižek holds up the Jesuit Republic of Paraguay, which was already printing books in the native Guaraní language, as a historical site of authentic universalism, destroyed by Spain, Portugal, and Argentina acting together.
“they were already printing books in them. That's my reproach to Chavez... the true heroes were the true universalists were Jesuits”
Works invoked 21
Žižek notes that contemporary criticisms of his own lecture style (jumping from jokes to French Revolution to perception) are exactly how the Phenomenology was critically described when it appeared.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's own 'tiny big book of two pounds'; cited for his treatment of Hegel's theory of madness and abstract negativity that is never finally aufgehoben.
Parsifal film
Praised as a stroke of genius for the moment where Parsifal (rejecting Kundry) transforms into a young woman, the feminine returns from within at the moment of its rejection.
Lukács: cited for the idea that the problem with relativism is it is not relativist enough; also for the problematic of proletarian revolution as fully transparent historical act.
Science of Logic book
At gunpoint Žižek would choose the Logic over the Phenomenology as the greatest book of all time; he reads it as a series of failures and improvisations, not a cold system.
Don Giovanni opera
Kasper Holten's contemporary London staging of Don Giovanni: Žižek calls it interesting, Don Giovanni seduces Zerlina naked, without fat opera singers.
Žižek's own book cited as where he dealt with Anthropocene, one of those cases where Hegel is literally needed to clarify the situation.
Being and Event book
Badiou: cited in the Q&A on whether events have internal relations, Badiou's claim that every event is the in-between of two events and thus internally multiple.
Hegel's introduction is cited: Hegel says of Russia and the United States 'next century will be theirs', evidence that absolute knowing for Hegel is not end-of-history omniscience but radical openness.
Derrida's book: praised as not simple New Age sentimentalism; cites its paraphrase of Benjamin on the hope of requiting the sorrow of nature.
François Balmès: cited for drawing attention to early Lacan's subjectivation vs. late Lacan's violent return to Cartesian cogito against Heidegger.
Freedom Evolves book
Daniel Dennett: Žižek thinks Dennett is not a complete idiot but often simplifies; cites a possible example from this book about apes fighting and apparent animal pain.
Hegel and Haiti book
Susan Buck-Morss: Žižek agrees with her point that minorities within a nation are the site of universalism, though she simplifies.
The Mission (film) film
Robert De Niro film about the Jesuits: Žižek dismisses it as 'bullshit' when raising the Jesuit Republic of Paraguay as a genuine site of universalism.
The Tree of Life film
Žižek says it should be burned publicly and he hates it, but finds one wonderful line (son to father: 'I'm as bad as you, even worse') that perfectly illustrates authentic Oedipal resolution and his model of solidarity.
Referenced in Q&A by audience member: Deleuze praises only the animal-to-animal relationship and is revolted by the human relationship with animals.
Manfred Frank's first book on Schelling; the only good book Frank wrote; anticipates the Marxist critique of Hegel on displacing actual antagonisms into conceptual contradictions.
Heidegger: the lectures where the question of animal weltarm / stone weltlos is formulated alongside the Schellingian hypothesis of infinite pain pervading living nature.
Luria: described as 'a nice case' and recommended; the man with perfect memory unable to think is a beautiful Hegelian paradox about the enabling function of forgetting.
Westerns given a Hegelian reading by Robert Pippin in his book on Hegel and Westerns, cited as making Pippin 'not a totally bad guy.'
Wahrheit und Methode book
Gadamer: cited in Q&A as having proposed reversing Hegel to see subject grounded in a substantial hermeneutic horizon, mentioned but not endorsed.
People invoked 44
François Balmès positive
Ce que Lacan dit de l'être: cited for drawing attention to how 'subjectivation' belongs to early Lacan while late Lacan surprisingly returns to the Cartesian cogito.
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg positive
His cinema version of Parsifal is praised as a stroke of genius for having Parsifal turn into a young woman at the moment of rejecting Kundry's advances.
Kasper Holten positive
Director of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden; described as a radical leftist snob like Žižek; discussed a commission for new operas (Žižek dismisses it as exploitation of his name); Holten's Don Giovanni is mentioned approvingly.
Prince Charles negative
Mentioned mockingly as an example of naive New Age anthropomorphism toward nature, reportedly talks to and hugs trees.
Saroj Giri positive
Mentioned as 'my India', leftist Indian friend contrasted with Brahmin cultural studies India.
Mahatma Gandhi negative
Contrasted unfavorably with Ambedkar as representing a particular-roots India rather than a universalist one.
Cited (before 'he got crazy') for calling cricket the most precious legacy of British colonization, used to illustrate the universalism of the colonial wound.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Colleague and close collaborator; Žižek references her unpublished texts on desire as indestructible and on transposing the dislocation of sexuality back into nature itself (apropos lamella in Seminar XI).
Robert Pippin positive
Politically Žižek disagrees (liberal Hegelian) but acknowledges Pippin's books on Hegel and Westerns and Hegel and Film Noir as wonderful; uses Pippin's film noir analysis to open the lecture.
Jacques Derrida positive
Praised for The Animal That Therefore I Am (not simple New Age) and for the example of imitating his American misreaders; also cited on Benjamin's 'sorrow of nature' via Derrida's paraphrase.
Aaron Schuster positive
Close friend, American Lacanian (cured of a Deleuzian deviation); Žižek quotes Schuster's extended description of self-negated pessimism / downward optimism and his account of language redeeming nature's pent-up aggravation.
Richard Wagner positive
Parsifal's 'die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug' is the key political-aesthetic motto of the lecture; Žižek also discusses staging possibilities and Badiou's communist Parsifal dream.
Georg Lukács positive
History and Class Consciousness is cited twice: for the idea of proletarian revolution as transparent self-knowledge (which Žižek criticizes as non-Hegelian) and for the claim that the problem with relativism is it is not relativist enough.
Jacques Lacan positive
Used throughout to illuminate the double impossibility of the Real, alienation and separation, the indestructibility of desire, and the structural parallel between Lacan's transcendentalism and Heidegger's.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
His concept of exaptation is invoked to gloss Hegel's cunning of unreason: you do something, it goes wrong, and then in a contingent improvised way serves an unexpected purpose.
Žižek recounts Singer giving him an evil gaze for eating a chicken sandwich at Princeton; accepts Singer's animal ethics 'up to a point' but warns against arrogant anthropocentric projection.
Cited (possibly from Freedom Evolves) on a documentary of two apes fighting where minutes after apparent severe pain the animal was jumping around happily, used to question anthropomorphic projection of animal suffering.
Terrence Malick positive
The Tree of Life: Žižek hates the film but finds one wonderful line (son telling father 'I'm as bad as you, even worse') that perfectly illustrates authentic Freudian resolution of the Oedipus complex and his model of solidarity.
B. R. Ambedkar positive
Opposed to Gandhi as 'my India', represents the universalist subaltern position against Brahmin cultural nationalism.
Yugoslav communist leader who used obscene sexual proverbs to justify political crimes, cited as illustrating the obscene underside of ideological justification.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as 'part of me in a holistic way'; Žižek endorses Badiou's point about having enemies and on ecology as a crucial ideological battleground; also discusses Badiou's Hollywood Plato film and communist Parsifal dreams.
Charles Taylor negative
Criticized for a 'naive subjectivist reading of Hegel' as if Hegel posits some absolute subject behind the scenes pulling strings of history.
Gérard Lebrun positive
Called 'maybe the last man who wrote a good book on Hegel' (two books); his reading of the Rubicon example illustrating retroactive Hegelian teleology is endorsed.
Homi Jehangir Bhabha negative
Cited as an example of postcolonial theory that wrongly claims imperialism imposes uniformity, Žižek argues the opposite: imperialism is inherently multicultural and needs the other to retain its roots.
Susan Buck-Morss positive
Hegel and Haiti: Žižek agrees with her point that minorities within a nation are the site of universalism, though he thinks she simplifies.
Panait Istrati positive
Romanian-Turkish communist writer; cited for his famous reply to a Stalinist apologist: 'I see broken eggs all around but can you finally show me the omelet?'
Fredric Jameson positive
Noted that Hegel's notion of capitalism was still pre-modern (division of labor only, no modern factory), used to introduce the claim that the greatness of Marx was to discover capitalism is more Hegelian than Hegel thought.
Alexander Luria positive
His case study of the mnemonist who could not forget and therefore could not think (Memoirs of a Mnemonist) is used to illustrate the Hegelian power of abstraction / the enabling function of forgetting.
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero negative
His 'pact among civilizations' formula is called 'the worst thing that can happen', the answer to clash of civilizations should be solidarity across civilizations, not a pact between them.
Mladen Dolar positive
Close Ljubljana colleague; his reading of Kierkegaard's three-part division (officers, housemaids, chimney-sweepers) as the intrusive third element of a fundamental antagonism is cited approvingly.
Malcolm X positive
Described as 'one of my authentic heroes'; his adoption of X is read not as mourning lost African roots but as seeing in the gap of enslaved identity the resource for a genuinely universalist position.
Martin Heidegger positive
Praised as the most radical philosopher of historicity (Ereignis as radically historicized transcendentalism); Žižek reads Heidegger's residual question about nature-without-man as pointing toward the Unbehagen in der Natur.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Late Schelling's motive of the great sorrow of nature and the infinite pain pervading living nature is invoked alongside Heidegger's question about nature-without-man.
Walter Benjamin positive
Benjamin's idea that the past carries a temporal index referring to redemption, and that our coming was expected on earth, is used to extend Heidegger's nature-without-man question to a cosmic-redemptive register.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
His notion of sickness unto death is read as a structure analogous to the double impossibility, the truly unbearable fact is immortality/responsibility, not mortality.
Friedrich Hölderlin positive
The 'Hölderlin paradigm' (Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch) names the paradigm Žižek argues Hegel does NOT belong to, danger opens possibility of redemptive reversal.
Manfred Frank positive
His first book on Schelling (Der unendliche Mangel an Sein) is noted as the only good book he wrote; it anticipates Marx's critique of Hegel by arguing Hegel displaces actual antagonisms into merely conceptual contradictions.
Nelson Mandela positive
Cited as embodying the wisdom that authentic universalism (against Buthelezi's roots-card) is the true anti-apartheid position.
Hugo Chávez negative
Reproached for speaking Spanish despite presenting himself as anti-colonial, contrasted with the Jesuits in Paraguay who printed books in native Guaraní.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek argues Marx is more eschatological than Hegel and follows the Hölderlin paradigm; he praises the mature Marx (post-1848) for grasping Hegel while criticizing the early Feuerbachian Marx as inferior.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The central figure: Žižek defends Hegel's materialism, his retroactive teleology, his notion of alienation as constitutive, and his absolute Gegenstoß, against both idealist and postmodern misreadings.
Immanuel Kant positive
Practical philosophy (freedom as impossible real) and Perpetual Peace / cosmopolitan writings are discussed; Kant's two-sided awareness of the French Revolution (contrasted with Hegel's capacity to think them together) is a key point.
Grouped with Heidegger and Derrida as thinkers who conceived their age as a critical turning point of metaphysics, illustrating the Hölderlin paradigm.
Lacanian cited for his account of the fascination with animal nature documentaries, they depict a universe that 'works,' mirroring our lack of instinctual knowledge.
What it argues
downward synthesis and redoubled negationalienation as constitutive of subjectivityHegel vs Marx on teleology and eschatologythe sorrow of nature and Unbehagen in der Naturcolonial wound as condition of universalismabsolute Gegenstoß — withdrawal that creates what it withdraws fromLacanian real as simultaneously impossible and unavoidable
Dialectical moves 12
“The Lacanian real is simultaneously impossible and unavoidable — you can never reach jouissance, but you also can never get rid of it.”
Standard readings emphasize only inaccessibility; Žižek insists the more fundamental Lacanian lesson is the inescapability of enjoyment.
“The traumatic fact is not that a free act was pathologically motivated, but that it really was free — anxiety comes from realizing the act was genuinely free, and pathological reduction is the escape from that horror.”
Reversal of the psychoanalytic common sense: the analyst's task is not to unmask impurity but to confront the subject with genuine freedom.
“Kierkegaard's sickness unto death is not that we are mortal and will disappear, but the opposite: the truly traumatic fact is to accept that we are immortal.”
Mortality is the escapist comfort; immortality (and responsibility) is the unbearable truth.
“Hegel is not part of the Hölderlin paradigm — it is Marx, not Hegel, who follows the logic of danger-into-redemption and revolutionary eschatology.”
The common sense identification of Hegel with teleological reversal is actually a description of Marx; Hegel's true position is more radically open.
“Disalienation is not now I know the secret — disalienation is to experience how what we saw as the secret of the Egyptians was already a secret for the Egyptians themselves.”
The gap is not closed but redoubled, alienation is not overcome by appropriation but by displacing the gap into the other itself.
“Optimism is not the opposite of pessimism — it is a further elaboration of pessimism's relentless negativity, the thorn that doesn't allow pessimism to comfortably settle into itself.”
The downward synthesis: what results from the negation of principled pessimism is not a higher affirmation but a lower residual clinging to life.
“The spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal — spirit is the wound of nature.”
Spirit (human subjectivity as abstraction and tearing-apart) does not come from outside to heal nature's wound; it is the wound, and its 'return to itself' creates the very dimension it returns to.
“Absolute Gegenstoß: a withdrawal from that creates what it withdraws from — the presupposition is only in the return itself.”
The negative move (loss, withdrawal) generates the very thing it negates: the origin is retroactively constituted by its own loss.
“The colonial imposition of English created the very X which is now oppressed by it — what is oppressed is not the actual pre-colonial India but an authentic dream of a new universalist democratic India that emerges through colonization.”
The wound of colonialism is at the same time the condition of possibility for a more radical universalism than the colonizer itself possesses.
“Far from being a step toward freedom, it is the very extreme form of alienation under capitalism that already contains in itself the disintegration of all limited presuppositions and creates the unconditional presuppositions of liberation.”
Žižek's reading of Marx on proletarian substanceless subjectivity: the deepest alienation is already in an inverted form the condition of liberation.
“The problem with relativism is not that it is relativist but that it is not relativist enough — it always presupposes an outside meta-position from which one sees the relativity.”
Absolute knowing for Hegel is the most radical self-relativization: when the subject itself falls fully into relativism without an exterior standpoint.
“Cunning of reason is better understood as a cunning of unreason — the one thing you can be sure of is that whatever you do it will always go wrong.”
Žižek strips Hegel's cunning of reason of its teleological guarantee, retaining only the lesson that things go wrong and Hegel asks how to make use of that.
Claims 20
asserts
The Lacanian Real is simultaneously impossible (we can never reach jouissance fully) and unavoidable (we can never get rid of it) — this double impossibility defines its status.Lacanian Real / jouissance
reframes
Hegel is not part of the Hölderlin paradigm of danger-into-redemption; it is Marx, not Hegel, who follows that eschatological logic.Hegel vs Marx on historical teleology
asserts
The subject does not pre-exist its alienation but emerges through it — alienation is constitutive of subjectivity, so Hegel's 'self' in self-alienation is nature, not a pre-given subject.Hegelian alienation and subjectivity
reframes
Disalienation is not Hegelian re-appropriation but a redoubling of the gap — the secret of the Egyptians was already a secret for the Egyptians themselves.Hegelian disalienation
asserts
The Hegelian moment is not the pre-revolutionary point of highest tension (as Marx has it) but the moment after the resolution that misses its goal and turns into a nightmare.Hegelian historical experience
asserts
The Left should return from Marx's revolutionary eschatology to Hegel's tragic vision of a history that remains radically open, accepting that there is no big Other guaranteeing the outcome of our acts.Left political strategy
asserts
Nature is not a homeostatic background against which human dislocation appears; the dislocation, gap, and sorrow must be transposed back into nature itself.nature and the Unbehagen in der Natur
asserts
Human speech is not a fall from natural balance but a reaction to a fall that was already there in nature — the deadlock is immanent to the living being via the lamella.language and nature
asserts
Colonial imposition of English created the very X (the authentic dream of a new universalist India) that is now oppressed by it — the wound is the condition of possibility for a more radical universalism.colonialism, language, and universalism
asserts
True liberation from colonialism is not return to pre-colonial roots or synthesis with modernity but the fully accomplished loss of pre-modern origins — beating the colonizer at their own game.postcolonial politics
asserts
Imperialism is inherently multicultural — it wants the other to retain its original roots — so sticking to particular roots as resistance to imperialism is a trap.imperialism and multiculturalism
rejects
Our answer to the clash of civilizations should not be a pact among civilizations but universal solidarity between multiple clashes within each civilization.Zapatero's 'pact among civilizations'
rejects
The early Marx critique of Hegel (the Manuscripts, German Ideology) is Feuerbachian and represents a step back from subjectivity to positive substantial forces — it is the worst Marx.early Marx's critique of Hegel
reframes
Hegel's cunning of reason is better understood as a cunning of unreason — the guarantee is not that things go right but that they always go wrong, and Hegel's question is how to make use of that.Hegelian cunning of reason
asserts
A Hegelian approach is the most effective tool against New Age temptations in ecology and the Anthropocene because it insists on radical human universality (we have become a geological factor) without anthropocentric self-denigration.ecology / Anthropocene and Hegelianism
rejects
Deep ecology is self-contradictory: even as it empirically humiliates humanity (trees have rights, valleys have rights), it still presupposes humans as the only site and agent of those universal rights.deep ecology
asserts
Hegel's teleology is always retroactive: it is only after Caesar crossed the Rubicon that crossing the Rubicon became his fate — not a forward-pointing metaphysical necessity.Hegelian teleology
reframes
Language is not Heidegger's 'house of being' but a torture house of being — the fundamental relationship between language and the human being is one of traumatic cut.Heidegger's 'language as house of being'
asserts
The Stalinism and neoliberal market universalism share the same structure: both claim to be working for our own good while breaking eggs and never producing the omelet.Stalinism and neoliberalism
asserts
A free act is doubly impossible: we can never be certain it was truly free (it might have a hidden pathological motive), yet the more traumatic fact is accepting that it really was free — anxiety comes from the latter, not the former.Kantian freedom
Quotes 16
“Although you are not free, you are nonetheless fully responsible.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian responsibility despite unfreedom
“The real, as already said, is simultaneously impossible and unavoidable.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian Real — double impossibility
“What causes true anxiety is the prospect that our act really was free. And this trauma is domesticated by reducing it to some pathological motivation.”Slavoj Žižek · Kantian freedom as trauma
“The spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal.”Slavoj Žižek · spirit as wound of nature
“die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug — the wound can be healed only by the spear that made it.”Slavoj Žižek · colonial wound as condition of universalism / Wagner's Parsifal motto
“There is no higher historical necessity whose instruments we are and which guarantees the final outcome. All we have is our activity open to all the risks of an open contingent history.”Slavoj Žižek · against historical teleology / no big Other in history
“Disalienation is just to experience how what we saw as the secret of the Egyptians for us were the secrets already for the Egyptians themselves.”Slavoj Žižek · disalienation as redoubling of the gap
“I see broken eggs all around but can you finally show me the omelet?”Slavoj Žižek · critique of Stalinist / neoliberal justifications of harm
“Language is not simply a house of being, it's a torture house of being.”Slavoj Žižek · against Heidegger's 'language as house of being'
“What is lost is retroactively constituted through its loss. Reconciliation means the colonized accepts English not only as an obstacle but as an enabling medium, as the positive condition of liberation.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive constitution / colonial wound as liberation
“Our answer to clash of civilizations is universal solidarity between multiple clashes within each civilization.”Slavoj Žižek · universalism vs. clash of civilizations
“The problem with relativism is not that it's relativist but it's not relativist enough. It always presupposes a kind of outside meta-position from which you see the relativity.”Slavoj Žižek · absolute knowing as most radical self-relativization
“Once he crossed Rubicon, crossing Rubicon retroactively became his fate.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian retroactive teleology
“Absolute Gegenstoß: a withdrawal from that creates what it withdraws from.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian absolute recoil / presupposition constituted in the return
“True ecology would be to attack especially this false self-denigration which still fully asserts human arrogance.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of deep ecology's anthropocentric self-humiliation
“The concept of pessimism is correct and life itself is wrong. The fact that life doesn't disappear does not refute pessimism but requires us to admit a certain ironic twist.”Slavoj Žižek · downward synthesis / self-negated pessimism
Transcript 81 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. I wanted to begin with but I don’t have time, you know, I always there is a nice French joke against a stupid Englishman, directed a stupid Englishman who goes to a French restaurant and wants to impress them with his knowledge of French, but gets all the expressions wrong and it’s a wonderful whole line like, the waiter asks him hors d’oeuvre, like hors d’oeuvre like you know, appetizer, and he reads it literally, out of work, and answered, no, no, I am not hors d’oeuvre, I have my job, I can pay for it and so on and so on, and at the end to impress them saying good night he wants to appear educated Latin he says nota bene, you know like, good night. So now. Let
Thank you very much. I wanted to begin with but I don’t have time, you know, I always there is a nice French joke against a stupid Englishman, directed a stupid Englishman who goes to a French restaurant and wants to impress them with his knowledge of French, but gets all the expressions wrong and it’s a wonderful whole line like, the waiter asks him hors d’oeuvre, like hors d’oeuvre like you know, appetizer, and he reads it literally, out of work, and answered, no, no, I am not hors d’oeuvre, I have my job, I can pay for it and so on and so on, and at the end to impress them saying good night he wants to appear educated Latin he says nota bene, you know like, good night. So now. Let
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me tell you a better one then in that mode. This man arrives at the university at the, sorry, at the airport of Athens, I’m not fully awake yet. Arrives at the airport of Athens, goes to the immigration officer, immigration officer says nationality? German. Occupation? No, no, I’m here for holidays.
me tell you a better one then in that mode. This man arrives at the university at the, sorry, at the airport of Athens, I’m not fully awake yet. Arrives at the airport of Athens, goes to the immigration officer, immigration officer says nationality? German. Occupation? No, no, I’m here for holidays.
Slavoj Žižek
But you Greeks have a limit of humor. I was once sitting beneath Acropolis in a restaurant and they tried to convince me that there is a crisis in Greece. And I looked up and said, my God, you know Acropolis, my God if you don’t even have the money to renovate that building, it must really be a big crisis in Greece, you know. And they didn’t find it funny, I don’t know what problems you have. Sorry, now, I have a lot to say so let’s go to work, seriously. I promise you, this may be bad news for you, not even one joke. It is and some stuff that maybe a little bit you already know, at least some of you, but I really want to go through this line of why Hegel today and then to end up in an undecidable mood, what Hegel maybe or maybe not cannot think, what is the limit. Okay, I would like to begin with a guy with whom of course politically I don’t agree, Robert Pippin, the American liberal Hegelian, but nonetheless he did something wonderful in the last two three years. He wrote two books on Hegel and which are quite surprising. First, a book on Hegel and Western, wonderful reading of Stagecoach, Red River and so on, a Hegelian reading, and then a book on Hegel and Film Noir. Now a guy who does this cannot be a totally bad guy. So in his book on Film Noir, Pippin describes the hero’s predicament in a Film Noir. Yes, we are doomed, fate pulls the strings, every manipulator is in his or her turn manipulated, every position of a free agent who decides his fate is illusory. But to simply endorse or assume this predicament is also an illusion, an escapist avoiding of the burden of responsibility. So we have a double impossibility. We cannot escape from the clutches of fate, we are not free, but we also cannot escape from the burden of responsibility into fate. You know, this paradox of yes, I am not free, but the moment I subjectively say, haha, I’m not free so what, it’s also false. This I think is why psychoanalysis is exemplary of our predicament. Freud’s lesson is that yes, we are decentered, caught in a foreign cobweb, overdetermined by unconscious mechanisms, you know all that rather stupid sounding today Lacanian jargon, I don’t speak, I am spoken and all that stuff, the other speaks through me. But nonetheless, as Lacan always emphasizes, to simply assume this as a subjective position, for example, I don’t know, I say something stupid, Costas in a totally justified way criticizes me and then to say, ah sorry, the big Other is speaking through me, it’s not me, so you know, although you are not free, you are nonetheless fully responsible. This redoubled impossibility is what defines the status of the Lacanian real. As it was already mentioned a couple of times yesterday, real is inaccessible, impossible, but at the same time unavoidable, necessary. For example, jouissance, excessive enjoyment. Usually we only hear the poetry of oh, incestuous enjoyment is impossible, you can never reach it, it always, like Alenka’s mother, it always eludes you and so on. But you know, it’s absolutely crucial to bear in mind that for Lacan, yes, we always miss the full jouissance, but at the same time we cannot get rid of it. Maybe a more fundamental lesson by Lacan is how no matter how you try to get rid of enjoyment, like all the obsessional rituals are destined to do this, it haunts you. You know this standard obsessional idea how you have certain illicit desires, you punish yourself, whipping yourselves, you whip yourself whatever, and then all of a sudden you start to enjoy the punishment itself, like whatever you do you cannot escape it. Did you notice how the same goes for free associations in psychoanalysis? On the one hand, and Freud was well aware, free associations are in a way impossible. It’s not that you really can suspend all rational reasoning and really just have the free flow whatever. But at the same time, that’s the point, and that’s the fundamental dialectic of psychoanalytic session, treatment. No matter how well you plan it in advance, and you are talking to a master here, when I was in analysis I planned up to five sessions in advance, every slip of tongue was well planned and so on, it has the status of free association, you cannot escape it. We should note here how the relationship between these two impossibilities is asymmetrical. First, we are forced to accept the impossibility to reach a certain goal, radical incestuous jouissance, the spontaneity of free associations or whatever. Then we are unable to get rid of what we were in vain trying to reach. Everything we do is stained by jouissance and so on. In other words, the real, as already said, is simultaneously impossible and unavoidable. And what is not so often noticed, especially by postcolonial critics, is that the same holds for the properly dialectical status of universality. What people prefer to emphasize is, we cannot ever reach universality, everyone who pretends to speak on behalf of a certain universality is a hidden Western imperialist, imposing a particular view, blah blah. You know all that story, human rights are really the rights of Western upper middle class women or whatever, intentional slip but, but at the same time, Marx has a much more fundamental lesson that insofar as we are subjects of market, we are universal. We cannot escape universality. No matter how particular you are, it’s already a secondary filling in of a universal place. So again, universality is impossible, and we can play this stupid games. When I speak with a Chinese friend and tell him, your state is non-democratic, he will tell me, how do you know that we use the term state in the same way, you are imposing on me like, this happened to me in India when I told to my cultural studies friends there, what about struggle against caste and for equality, they told me don’t impose on us Western imperialist notions like equality and so on. So, another of this double deadlock, negation of negation. It is in this sense that, and Alenka developed this in an as yet unpublished text I think, that for Lacan desire is indestructible precisely insofar as it is utterly fleeting, evanescent, impossible. Desire is not in a Jungian way like a big solid substantial rock. Desire is nothing, it all the way avoids you, but as such it always returns. This brings us to freedom, which I claim in Kant’s practical philosophy has the same status of an impossible real. A truly free act is first impossible in the simple common sense that we cannot ever be sure that what we did was really a free act. It can always be, and Kant admits that, that in a hidden way, what you think, you think you are doing something for the sake of duty, but in a hidden way there is always a suspicion that there was some pathological motivation. Even if your act is pure, it can be that you did it precisely to boast in front of others, to cause esteem, like oh you see I did it for, so it’s impossible. But this is only the one side of the story. What causes true anxiety is the prospect that our act really was free. And this trauma is domesticated by reducing it to some pathological motivation. So what I’m saying here is, you see, it’s not that we pretend to do a pure free act of duty but the analyst comes haha you were thinking of impressing your peers or whatever. No, a much more traumatic fact for Kant is that it’s very difficult to accept the horror of a free act and so release comes precisely from reducing it to something pathological. Don’t worry, it’s part of natural chain of causes, effects and so on and so on. Kierkegaard’s notion of sickness unto death relies on the same tension. One should be very careful here. Kierkegaard is not saying being mortal makes us, causes anxiety, it’s horrible. No, Kierkegaard’s point is the opposite one. The truly traumatic unbearable fact is to accept that we are immortal. That we are in this sense responsible in the afterlife and precisely the escapist is to say haha I can kill you, sorry neutral example, doesn’t matter I’m a piece of, after I die I disappear, I turn into dust and so on and so on. But it is after all a religious talk you’re giving me. Sorry? It is Sunday you are talking about immortality. Absolutely, but there is a different, there are different, I will return to it later, immortalities, yes. Let me go on. Now, a very simplified but I think pertinent dilemma. The topic of Hegel’s materialism is maybe condensed in one simple question. Can the Hegelian movement of negation of negation account for such weird redoubled impossibility, which is also a form of negation of negation? Like, first I claim I am not free, I negate freedom, but then this very escape from freedom proves impossible. This same question can also be put in the terms of the relationship between the Hegelian negation of negation and Lacan’s couple of alienation and separation. For Lacan, alienation of the subject in the symbolic
But you Greeks have a limit of humor. I was once sitting beneath Acropolis in a restaurant and they tried to convince me that there is a crisis in Greece. And I looked up and said, my God, you know Acropolis, my God if you don’t even have the money to renovate that building, it must really be a big crisis in Greece, you know. And they didn’t find it funny, I don’t know what problems you have. Sorry, now, I have a lot to say so let’s go to work, seriously. I promise you, this may be bad news for you, not even one joke. It is and some stuff that maybe a little bit you already know, at least some of you, but I really want to go through this line of why Hegel today and then to end up in an undecidable mood, what Hegel maybe or maybe not cannot think, what is the limit. Okay, I would like to begin with a guy with whom of course politically I don’t agree, Robert Pippin, the American liberal Hegelian, but nonetheless he did something wonderful in the last two three years. He wrote two books on Hegel and which are quite surprising. First, a book on Hegel and Western, wonderful reading of Stagecoach, Red River and so on, a Hegelian reading, and then a book on Hegel and Film Noir. Now a guy who does this cannot be a totally bad guy. So in his book on Film Noir, Pippin describes the hero’s predicament in a Film Noir. Yes, we are doomed, fate pulls the strings, every manipulator is in his or her turn manipulated, every position of a free agent who decides his fate is illusory. But to simply endorse or assume this predicament is also an illusion, an escapist avoiding of the burden of responsibility. So we have a double impossibility. We cannot escape from the clutches of fate, we are not free, but we also cannot escape from the burden of responsibility into fate. You know, this paradox of yes, I am not free, but the moment I subjectively say, haha, I’m not free so what, it’s also false. This I think is why psychoanalysis is exemplary of our predicament. Freud’s lesson is that yes, we are decentered, caught in a foreign cobweb, overdetermined by unconscious mechanisms, you know all that rather stupid sounding today Lacanian jargon, I don’t speak, I am spoken and all that stuff, the other speaks through me. But nonetheless, as Lacan always emphasizes, to simply assume this as a subjective position, for example, I don’t know, I say something stupid, Costas in a totally justified way criticizes me and then to say, ah sorry, the big Other is speaking through me, it’s not me, so you know, although you are not free, you are nonetheless fully responsible. This redoubled impossibility is what defines the status of the Lacanian real. As it was already mentioned a couple of times yesterday, real is inaccessible, impossible, but at the same time unavoidable, necessary. For example, jouissance, excessive enjoyment. Usually we only hear the poetry of oh, incestuous enjoyment is impossible, you can never reach it, it always, like Alenka’s mother, it always eludes you and so on. But you know, it’s absolutely crucial to bear in mind that for Lacan, yes, we always miss the full jouissance, but at the same time we cannot get rid of it. Maybe a more fundamental lesson by Lacan is how no matter how you try to get rid of enjoyment, like all the obsessional rituals are destined to do this, it haunts you. You know this standard obsessional idea how you have certain illicit desires, you punish yourself, whipping yourselves, you whip yourself whatever, and then all of a sudden you start to enjoy the punishment itself, like whatever you do you cannot escape it. Did you notice how the same goes for free associations in psychoanalysis? On the one hand, and Freud was well aware, free associations are in a way impossible. It’s not that you really can suspend all rational reasoning and really just have the free flow whatever. But at the same time, that’s the point, and that’s the fundamental dialectic of psychoanalytic session, treatment. No matter how well you plan it in advance, and you are talking to a master here, when I was in analysis I planned up to five sessions in advance, every slip of tongue was well planned and so on, it has the status of free association, you cannot escape it. We should note here how the relationship between these two impossibilities is asymmetrical. First, we are forced to accept the impossibility to reach a certain goal, radical incestuous jouissance, the spontaneity of free associations or whatever. Then we are unable to get rid of what we were in vain trying to reach. Everything we do is stained by jouissance and so on. In other words, the real, as already said, is simultaneously impossible and unavoidable. And what is not so often noticed, especially by postcolonial critics, is that the same holds for the properly dialectical status of universality. What people prefer to emphasize is, we cannot ever reach universality, everyone who pretends to speak on behalf of a certain universality is a hidden Western imperialist, imposing a particular view, blah blah. You know all that story, human rights are really the rights of Western upper middle class women or whatever, intentional slip but, but at the same time, Marx has a much more fundamental lesson that insofar as we are subjects of market, we are universal. We cannot escape universality. No matter how particular you are, it’s already a secondary filling in of a universal place. So again, universality is impossible, and we can play this stupid games. When I speak with a Chinese friend and tell him, your state is non-democratic, he will tell me, how do you know that we use the term state in the same way, you are imposing on me like, this happened to me in India when I told to my cultural studies friends there, what about struggle against caste and for equality, they told me don’t impose on us Western imperialist notions like equality and so on. So, another of this double deadlock, negation of negation. It is in this sense that, and Alenka developed this in an as yet unpublished text I think, that for Lacan desire is indestructible precisely insofar as it is utterly fleeting, evanescent, impossible. Desire is not in a Jungian way like a big solid substantial rock. Desire is nothing, it all the way avoids you, but as such it always returns. This brings us to freedom, which I claim in Kant’s practical philosophy has the same status of an impossible real. A truly free act is first impossible in the simple common sense that we cannot ever be sure that what we did was really a free act. It can always be, and Kant admits that, that in a hidden way, what you think, you think you are doing something for the sake of duty, but in a hidden way there is always a suspicion that there was some pathological motivation. Even if your act is pure, it can be that you did it precisely to boast in front of others, to cause esteem, like oh you see I did it for, so it’s impossible. But this is only the one side of the story. What causes true anxiety is the prospect that our act really was free. And this trauma is domesticated by reducing it to some pathological motivation. So what I’m saying here is, you see, it’s not that we pretend to do a pure free act of duty but the analyst comes haha you were thinking of impressing your peers or whatever. No, a much more traumatic fact for Kant is that it’s very difficult to accept the horror of a free act and so release comes precisely from reducing it to something pathological. Don’t worry, it’s part of natural chain of causes, effects and so on and so on. Kierkegaard’s notion of sickness unto death relies on the same tension. One should be very careful here. Kierkegaard is not saying being mortal makes us, causes anxiety, it’s horrible. No, Kierkegaard’s point is the opposite one. The truly traumatic unbearable fact is to accept that we are immortal. That we are in this sense responsible in the afterlife and precisely the escapist is to say haha I can kill you, sorry neutral example, doesn’t matter I’m a piece of, after I die I disappear, I turn into dust and so on and so on. But it is after all a religious talk you’re giving me. Sorry? It is Sunday you are talking about immortality. Absolutely, but there is a different, there are different, I will return to it later, immortalities, yes. Let me go on. Now, a very simplified but I think pertinent dilemma. The topic of Hegel’s materialism is maybe condensed in one simple question. Can the Hegelian movement of negation of negation account for such weird redoubled impossibility, which is also a form of negation of negation? Like, first I claim I am not free, I negate freedom, but then this very escape from freedom proves impossible. This same question can also be put in the terms of the relationship between the Hegelian negation of negation and Lacan’s couple of alienation and separation. For Lacan, alienation of the subject in the symbolic
unknown
order is constitutive of the subject. There is stricto sensu no subject who alienates himself or herself or rather itself into its otherness. You know, I claim when you put it like this, subject alienates itself into fetishized substance, you are
order is constitutive of the subject. There is stricto sensu no subject who alienates himself or herself or rather itself into its otherness. You know, I claim when you put it like this, subject alienates itself into fetishized substance, you are
Slavoj Žižek
already saying too much, because the subject is the result of the process of alienation. It emerges through the loss of its substantial content. And this is why Lacan does have a counter-move, disalienation. But it’s not the standard Hegelian one, or at least what people think the Hegelian one of, you know, I alienate myself in substantial content and then triumphantly I recognize myself in the otherness, I reappropriate. No, for Lacan alienation is just redoubled, to use the old Hegelian phrase that I repeat endlessly. This let’s say we have great, let’s say ancient Egyptians have in their stupid pyramids some secrets for us. Disalienation is not now I know what is this secret. Disalienation is just to, to experience how what we saw as the secret of the Egyptians for us were the secrets already for the Egyptians themselves. So the secret remains, it’s just redoubled. Another exemplary case of such a weird redoubled negation is provided by the existential position of the self-negated pessimism. I’m talking here about a form of optimism which is in a way even worse than pessimism. This was developed by our Alenka’s and mine good friend Aaron Schuster, American Lacanian, he had some Deleuzian deviation, he is cured now of them I think, who developed this idea that there is a breakdown of the principled form of pessimism when in a weird eppur si muove, it still goes on, when life goes on, too weak even to follow consequently itself renunciation. So again, this optimism is not the usual Hegelian negation of negation like, first we are optimists, then we have to accept the gap, the failure, and that would be the usual wrong idea of Hegel, somehow we see how our very defeat contributes through the cunning of reason to some greater cause so we get a mediated optimism. No, what we get is a different movement. First optimism is negated, the subject assumes the insight into how, to cut it short, life is shit. But then the very form of principled pessimist position is negated. You know, even to claim life is shit is too much of a principled position to assume, when you really existentially think that life is shit. When you think that life is shit, if you really think it, it’s too much to kill yourself or to negate it. Life goes on in a weird optimistic way where well, it’s such a shit that I don’t even have the strength to terminate it. Here is Schuster’s wonderful half a page quote, I’m sorry, description of this existential position: "Optimism, this radical crazy optimism, is not the opposite of pessimism. It has no positive substance or consistency, no resilient spirit that could stand on its own. But it is a further elaboration of pessimism’s relentless negativity. It is what is subtracted from the nothingness of pessimism, the thorn that doesn’t allow pessimism to comfortably settle into itself, to vanish into its own nihilism. Yet without converting it into its opposite. Against this common sense, the common sense, one should defend the mad idealist claim that the concept of pessimism is correct and life itself is wrong. If there were any ontological justice, the human species would disappear in a puff of logical smoke, like the computer in Star Trek that explodes when ordered to solve a logical paradox. The fact that life doesn’t do so does not refute pessimism but requires us to admit a certain ironic twist. Rather than the proof of an indomitable vitality and richness, this clinging to life is the supreme ontological injustice, a violent perturbation of the self-canceling nothing." End of quote. And again, I will just briefly mention it how the same goes on for immortality, not only in the already described Kierkegaardian sense but also in the sense of the undead and so on and so on. Immortality, mortality, but then there is some immortality which is even lower than mortality itself, vampires, undead and so on and so on. Okay, so again my question is, where does Hegel stand with regard to all of this? Can a Hegelian mechanism, the basic formal matrix of dialectical process, can it account for this strange what I called in one of my earlier books downward synthesis, where the third term is not some kind of a higher synthesis but the lowest of the low as it were. Let me approach this topic through another point, through a detour. Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Heidegger or Derrida all conceive their own age as that of the critical turning point of metaphysics. In their or our time, that’s the idea, metaphysics has exhausted its potentials. And the thinker’s duty is to prepare the ground for a new post-metaphysical thinking. I think that Derrida is more ambiguous here, but at least in some of his earlier texts even he says like, the closure of metaphysics, we are approaching a certain zero point, with Heidegger it’s evident technology as the exhaustion of possibilities and metaphysics. More generally, the entire Judeo-Christian tradition up to our postmodernity is determined by what I am tempted to call the Hölderlin paradigm. You know Hölderlin’s famous "Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch." Where the danger is, grows also what can save us. So again, within this paradigm, the present moment appears as the lowest point in the long process of historical decadence, the flight of gods, economic alienation, social alienation in Marxism whatever. But the danger of the catastrophic loss of the essential dimension of being human also opens up the possibility of a reversal, Kehre in Heidegger. The arrival of new gods for Heidegger, proletarian revolution for Marx, you know so where the danger is, the extreme exhaustion, there is also hope for a reversal. So how does Hegel stand towards this? My claim is that, although Hegel is usually taken as the clearest case of this paradigm, you know utter alienation then oo-ooh, the thing turns into it opposite, that Hegel is not part of this paradigm. A certain historical teleology is wrongly associated with Hegel. The common sense or textbook idea of Hegel is that there is a naive beginning, an immediacy which lacks inner wealth and articulation. Then development means dispersion, fall, up to the utter alienation which opens up the possibility of reversal. Paradoxically I claim it is Marx, not Hegel, who follows this logic. In especially in his famous manuscript on pre-capitalist modes of economic production. For Marx there, the uniqueness of the capitalist mode of production resides in the fact that in it, I quote here Marx, "Labor is torn out from its primordial immersion into its objective conditions, and because of this labor appears on the one side itself as labor and on the other side the labor's own product as objectified labor obtains against labor a completely autonomous existence as value." End of quote. The worker thus appears, quote, "as objectless, purely subjective capacity of labor, confronted with the objective conditions of production as its non-property, as a foreign property, a value which exists for itself as capital." However, the quote goes on, "This extreme form of alienation in which, in the guise of the relationship of the capital towards wage-labor, labor, productive activity, appears as opposed to its own conditions and to its own product, this extreme alienation is a necessary point of transition and for that reason in itself in an inverted form it already contains the disintegration of all limited presuppositions of production and even creates and produces the unconditional presuppositions of production and thereby all material conditions for the total universal development of the productive forces of the individuals." End of quote. History is thus the gradual process of the separation of subjective activity from its objective conditions, that is, from its immersion into the substantial totality. This process reaches its culmination in modern capitalism with the emergence of the proletariat, this substanceless subjectivity of workers totally separated from their objective conditions of work. This separation again is already in itself their liberation because it creates this free point of pure subjectivity as a point of reference, standpoint from which collective subjectivity can reappropriate the alienated objective conditions. And of course that’s the Hölderlin paradigm of Marx. Today we are approaching that point of possible reversal. But again, is this process of subjective division, alienation and then the final reversal really a Hegelian one? The first thing to note is that this Kairos position of finding oneself just before the reversal of danger into redemption is never that of Hegel. The Hegelian historical moment is not the moment of the highest tension, when the teleological resolution seems near but, Hegelian position specific historical experience I claim is the moment after when the resolution is accomplished but misses its goal and turns into a nightmare. At this moment the Hegelian problem is, how to remain faithful to the original goal of liberation, how not to turn towards a conservative position to say, you know, oh it was a mistake, nihilistic mistake. Hegel, Hegel’s innermost desire, however weirdly it may appear articulated, is for example precisely apropos French Revolution. It’s absolutely not and never to dismiss the French Revolution as a great mistake and claim we Germans will do it without cutting heads. Haha, you don’t do anything without cutting heads, no. Hegel’s position is precisely how at the very moment when liberation obviously in some sense for him through Jacobin terror goes wrong, how to nonetheless save the day through repetition and redeem its, to use the Marxist term, rational core. And I claim this is why our moment is still Hegelian. What Hegel called absolute freedom and terror was a pretty mild thing compared to what the greatest genius of humanity comrade Stalin and others did in the 20th century. Like, you know, never forget before lambasting on Jacobins that they were simply overthrown by a vote in Assemblée nationale. I would like to see someone doing this in Supreme Soviet, you know like voting against Stalin, no. So what I’m saying is that this maybe is the lesson of the terrifying experiences of the 20th century. We should return from Marx back to Hegel, from Marx’s revolutionary eschatology back to Hegel’s tragic vision of a history which forever remains radically open, since the historical process always redirects our activity into an unexpected direction. Perhaps the Left should learn to assume fully the basic alienation of the historical process. We cannot control the consequences of our acts, not because we are just puppets in the hands of some secret master or fate which hidden behind the curtain pulls the strings, but for precisely the opposite reason. There is no big Other, no agent of total accountancy who or which can take into account the consequences of our acts. This acceptance of alienation therefore in no way entails a cynical distance. It implies a fully engaged position, but a position aware of the risks involved. There is no higher historical necessity whose instruments we are and which guarantees the final outcome. All we have is our activity open to all the risks of an open contingent history. Or, to put it at a more conceptual level, this means that the conclusive moment of the dialectical process is not a synthetic unity, a return at a higher level to some form of the one. For Hegel, alienation is also I claim constitutive of the subject, in the radical sense that subject does not pre-exist its alienation but emerges through it. This is an important point. For Hegel it’s to fetishize, sorry, the subject already too much to claim subject alienates itself. No, it’s only nature that alienates itself from itself. And so, you know, the self in self-alienation is nature, not subject. Subject is the outcome of the self-alienation of nature. So again, as already said, here things get interesting because of course Hegel we should assert some kind of irreducible alienation. But don’t be afraid, it’s not the Marxist alienation where some big Other substance controls us. No, that’s precisely, that’s precisely the illusion. Alienation can be overcome but precisely in the sense of the Marxist alienation, you know where fate, market, whatever controls us. What we can do is to see how, as Lacan would have put it, the big Other doesn’t exist. For example in history, there is no higher historical necessity, substantial historical agent, world spirit and so on. I’m here totally against Charles Taylor and that naive subjectivist reading of Hegel as if Hegel thinks that above us individuals there is where there is some kind of absolute subject who pulls the strings behind. But, but nonetheless, because alienation because self-alienation of nature is constitutive of subject, when you break out of alienation again you don’t get this overblown narcissistic subject who appropriates the other, you just get the, the gap is displaced, the gap. This is how I think we should reread this alienation. Not in the sense that we abolish the gap, but in the sense that when we experience ourselves as alienated from the other, that we see how this alienation should be displaced into the other itself. There is no other, substantial other with regard to whom we are alienated, the gap is redoubled. And now a little bit more of philosophy. This brings me again to Heidegger. What we confront with late Heidegger is I think the problem of historicity at its most radical. I think if you ask me that Heidegger is the most radical imaginable philosopher of historicity. In what sense? Heidegger’s, late Heidegger’s Ereignis, event historicity, is historicity which goes as it were all the way down, which cannot be reduced to the deployment or revelation in history of a non-historical absolute. To put it in not quite appropriate terms of German idealism, Heidegger’s achievement is to elaborate a radically historicized transcendentalism. The Heideggerian historicity is the historicity of transcendental horizons themselves, of the different modes of the disclosure of being, with no agent regulating the process. Here one should defend Heidegger. Ereignis is not some hidden God who said to humanity here now you have the message, Aristotelian for antiquity, ah it’s the modern era now I am sending you the message of subjectivity, technical exploitation of nature. No, Ereignis is il y a, es gibt, it’s totally non-substantial play. There is nothing behind it. For Heidegger, the ultimate horizon is the horizon of this Weltspiel as he puts it, of play of different transcendental horizons. Like for example, which is why for Heidegger, he at a much higher level, Heidegger does the same thing I claim as a somehow ridiculous figure of West Coast American pseudo-follower of Foucault who I tried it once, tried to ask a Foucauldian discourse analyst the, what is this table? And he will tell you ah the only question we can ask is in what discursive regime can we even speak about a table and so on, you know. Or, do I have an immortal soul? Oh, in what discursive, you know, like as if the ontic question, to put it naively, is totally subordinated to that of the ontological horizon. And Heidegger is here consequent. That is why for Heidegger the ultimate catastrophe is always the ontological one. And he likes to repeat this courageously even apropos of the threat of atomic catastrophe, no. He says that he for example or ecological catastrophe, he says openly that the true catastrophe is not if humanity will destroy itself ontically on our earth. The true catastrophe already happened the moment we dwell in the technological universe and so on. But now comes my problem. Nonetheless, this will sound a naive reproach, but it’s incredible and I not only checked it up myself looking for these places but asked some people who know better Heidegger than me and they confirmed to me how from the very beginning, okay not quite the beginning, Sein und Zeit till the end, Heidegger was bothered by this residual question. Because he knew very well he was a serious philosopher that transcendental constitution is not creation. It’s just the opening up of a horizon of disclosure of being. So Heidegger was again and again raising and I love him most at those points, this totally naive question. Okay but the objects the way they appear to us, they appear to us always within a certain world horizon of meaning and so on but what or how are they, or in what sense they dwell, we cannot talk of existence because existence is for Heidegger always within an ontological horizon, outside this horizon? Although this question persists throughout, for example from in a letter to Elizabeth Blochmann, Heidegger writes, I often ask myself, this has for a long time been a fundamental question for me. What nature would be without man? Must it not resonate through him in order to attain its own most potency? I claim that here Heidegger almost rejoins late Schelling or Benjamin, you know Benjamin’s idea of how for example the well-known passage from Benjamin: "The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth." So what Heidegger is hinting at is that we should bring this logic to the end. It doesn’t hold only for human history that like later generations the last big revolution will retroactively redeem earlier revolution, but that it holds even at a more radical level for the very relationship between what in inappropriate terms we call human being and nature. That is to say, back to the quoted passage from Heidegger. One should note that this passage about what is nature outside humanity with no relation to humanity is from the period immediately after Heidegger’s lectures on the fundamental concepts of metaphysics from where the same question is also formulated as a Schellingian hypothesis that perhaps animals are in a hitherto unknown way aware of their lack, of their poorness, so that there is an infinite pain pervading the entire living nature. Quote from Heidegger: "If deprivation in certain forms is a kind of suffering and poverty and deprivation of world belongs to the animal being, then a kind of pain and suffering would have to permit the whole animal realm and the realm of life in general." What I want to do is to save this Heidegger from the obvious temptation of some New Age mystic reading or whatsoever. The choice Heidegger is confronted here is the following one. According to his basic position, the reproach that the definition of animal as you know poor in the world, weltarm, and of stone as weltlos, without world, they imply reference to the human opened up to a world and so this would be the transcendental solution. That when Heidegger talks about animals as weltarm, poor in the world, he simply means that we as humans are always within the horizon of opening up, dwelling within a world, and from this point we cannot but experience animals as weltarm, but the question what are animals in themselves is simply meaningless, because it would presume that we can somehow step out of our inner-worldly existence, not ontic, but in the sense of dwelling within a horizon of meaning, and simply from nowhere look at reality. However, as if himself doubting the sufficiency of this transcendental reply, Heidegger hints at another position. Not that things are simply there in the worldless reality, but that their deprived-of-the-world situation, status, is not just the way we perceive them from our human position. It is something that characterizes them there immanently. Heidegger refers here to an old motive of German Romanticism, I already mentioned it from Schelling to Benjamin, the motive of the great sorrow of nature. Or as Derrida paraphrases Benjamin, Derrida in his wonderful short book *The Animal That Therefore I Am*, quote: "It is in the hope of requiting that sorrow, of redemption from that suffering, that humans live and speak in nature." It’s a beautiful mystical thought that our human speech exploded to redeem nature from its suffering. Again, is this to be dismissed as a stupid mystical obscurantist New Age topic? No, I think it asks the right, it raises rather the right question, which is not, what is nature for language? Can we grasp nature adequately through our language? But the true Hegelian question, which is the opposite one. What is language for nature? How does the emergence of language affect nature? Aaron Schuster again drew attention to how Lacan himself oscillates here between the predominant transcendental approach and some timid hints to its beyond. It’s interesting how again Lacan here if you read him closely is caught in exactly the same predicament as Heidegger. On the one hand Lacan’s official position is the symbolic order is the ultimate horizon. You know all that bullshit, we are always already in language blah blah and all that we can do is like in a Platonic mode to concoct, invent beautiful stories to develop myths about what went before. But it’s not as simple as that. Often Heidegger hints, sorry Lacan, that that the symbolic order is a reaction to some radical deadlock, of course he doesn’t use these mystical terms sorrow in nature, but deadlock, being at a loss, dislocation which is already there in nature. Again I quote so that the Freudian *Unbehagen in der Kultur* should be supplemented by an uncanny *Unbehagen in der Natur*. It’s not simply that nature is this homeostatic healthy universe where you know animals know when to copulate how whatever things are at their own place and then you know all this Romantic topic of human being as nature’s sick unto death displaced nature. No, a displacement must already be there back in nature. Or again, a quote from Schuster, and I’m more than three quarters into it so don’t be afraid. "Imagine all of nature waiting for the gift of speech so it can express how bad it is to be a vegetable or a fish. Is it not the special torment of nature to be deprived of the means of conveying its pent-up aggravation, unable to articulate even the simplest lament, oh me I am the sea. And does not the emergence on earth of the speaking being effectively release this terrible organic tension and bring it to a higher level of non-resolution?" You see the nice, not the higher level of resolution but of non-resolution. "While there are some intriguing passages in Lacan’s seminars where he speculates on the infinite pain of being a plant, raising the possibility of an *Unbehagen in der Natur*, for the most part he conceives the relationship between nature and culture to be the one of radical discontinuity." End of quote. So again, you see how Lacan works. On the one hand you have this eternal, eternal poetry of dislocation of sexuality in human species in contrast to poor animals who nonetheless have instincts which are embodied knowledge which tell them when how to copulate and so on and so on. Which is why along these lines Gerard Wajcman, a Lacanian, tried to account along these lines for our fascination with all these infinitely boring, I think I am here in a Goebbels mood, they should be burned publicly, you know these animal life documentaries on nature, National Geographic. The fascination of them truly is that you know, animals somehow it’s a universe which works, you know, you don’t have to write love letters, instincts tell you now I screw you then whatever, no. And I think we should go here even a step further. When you watch in this ambiguous channels like National Geographic, sometimes they also have reports on human communities. But usually it’s some isolated Alaskan or Midwest small town which is treated precisely as a small animal kingdom, you know where local Americans know now I get drunk now I go to the store, or to go to the end, now I buy a gun and go to a school and kill half of them. It’s all part of natural, natural balance. But I think, and here I refer to, did you already publish it or am I still free to appropriate it myself Alenka, how Alenka developed this point how one should risk a step further. Not a New Age mysticism that there is some secret awareness already in nature. But to put it very simply that, you know how Eric Hobsbawm speaks about invented traditions, how we retroactively, that maybe nature in this homeostatic sense is the ultimate invented tradition. And maybe true materialism begins when you transpose the dislocation, gap, whatever, that is perceived as specifically human, like you know nature in itself, Mother Earth loving us all whatever, and then we, that when we transpose this gap back into the origin, back into nature itself. And I refer here to Alenka in a text not yet published, she again developed all this in detail precisely apropos sexuality. How in a crucial passage when he introduces the term of lamella in Seminar XI, Four Fundamental Concepts, he says something which passes unnoticed. He says, I quote it, Lacan: "What is lamella is what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sex reproduction and so on and so on." So be careful here. The deadlock is already there in nature. Again, this doesn’t mean any kind of teleology. But it means that human speech is not a fall from some natural balance, but a reaction working through a fall which is there from the very beginning. Now, the last couple of pages with the political point. I think that all that I’m trying to say was said beautifully by Wagner in his *Parsifal* whose final message is, in German, *die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug*. The wound can be healed only by the spear that made it, smote it, cut it. Hegel says the same thing, although with the accent shifted into the opposite direction. The spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal. That is to say, what is spirit at its most elementary for Hegel? It’s the wound of nature. The spirit of human subjectivity is the power of differentiating, of abstracting, of tearing apart, of treating as self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity. Spirit is nothing but the process of overcoming natural immediacy and organic unity, the process of mediation of this immediacy. So spirit’s return to itself creates the very dimension to which it returns. At a more formal level, in his logic of reflection at the beginning of Book II of Logic, logic of essence, Hegel uses the unique term that I mentioned yesterday in debate, absolute Gegenstoß, recoil, counter-push, counter-thrust, or I prefer the movie *Counterpunch*. A withdrawal from that creates what it withdraws from. A quote: "Reflection therefore finds before it an immediate which it transcends and from which it is the return. But this return is only the presupposing of what reflection finds before it. What is thus found only comes to be through being left behind. The reflective movement is to be taken as an absolute recoil (absolute Gegenstoß) upon itself from the presupposition of the return into itself, that from which essence comes and is only as this return, for this presupposition is only in the return itself." End of quote. Absolute Gegenstoß thus stands for the radical coincidence of the opposite in which the action appears as its own counter-action, or more precisely, in which the very negative move, lose, loss, withdrawal, generates what it, what it negates. Now I come to my final political example which some of you maybe know, I mentioned it yesterday, I want to elaborate it a little bit more in detail. It’s the example that I repeat all the time about from a visit of mine in India two years ago when in a debate some Indian cultural theorists complained that the fact that they are compelled to use English language in debating with me or even among themselves is already a form of cultural colonialism, censoring their own true identity. Their line of argumentation was something like, we have to speak in an imposed foreign language to express our innermost identity. And does this not put us in a position of radical alienation? Even our resistance to colonization has to be formulated in the language of the colonizer. My answer was: yes, but this imposition of English, a foreign language, created the very X which is oppressed by it. Because when you feel oppressed, you should note that what is oppressed is not the actual pre-colonial India, but an authentic dream of a new universalist democratic India. And this dream emerges through very colonization. Malcolm X, one of my authentic heroes, the one, you know, Denzel Washington to put it in human terms in the film, was following the same insight when he adopted X as his family name. It’s not as some commentators wrongly think that he was fighting on behalf of the return to some primordial African roots and X stands for you see evil white men deprived us of the very roots. No, he was well aware that this X, X meaning through enslavement white people deprived the blacks of their particular roots, that this very gap, hole in their particular identity is what also offers a unique chance of universalist position and thus freedom. He saw in this X the resource, although literally he was a Wagnerian, die Wunde schließt, the wound of colonization schließt only even more radical colonization, like don’t bemoan lost roots, screw the roots, your roots are white man’s imagination, which is literally true in South Africa. Remember that’s the wisdom of Mandela when South Africa was approaching apartheid, who was playing the black roots card? Buthelezi, the king who was on the payroll of of the white majority. You should never forget this that against people like Homi Bhabha who claim that imperialism is imposing on us, no, imperialism is inherently multicultural, imperialism wants the other to retain its original roots and so on. So let me go on. What does this mean? and please I’m not lying you see. We thus get the structure of a dialectical process which is radically different from the triad of some substantial immediacy, alienation and then reconciliation in a higher unity. The beginning is not an immediate unity which is then lost. There is no unity preceding the loss. What is lost is retroactively constituted through its loss. Reconciliation means in this case of Indians, the reconciliation with English language which is to be accepted not only as the obstacle to a new India but as an enabling medium, as the positive condition of liberation. The true victory over colonialism is not the return to some kind of pre-colonial authentic substance. Even less any synthesis between modern civilization and pre-modern origin. You know this is the eternal fascist dream, we can have modernity but as a part of our old organic culture, whatever. Paradoxically, liberation is the fully accomplished loss of pre-modern origins. In other words, colonialism is not overcome when the intrusion of English language as a medium is abolished, but when the colonizers are as it were beaten at their own game. When the new Indian identity will be effortlessly formulated in English, when English language will be denaturalized, will lose its Anglo-Saxon privilege. And this is why I like globalization. People just see this aspect of oh imperialism we all speak English. Yes, but as intelligent conservatives in United States know, the English that we are speaking now all is Slovenian? Yeah, it’s Greek, Slovenian, Chinese. Let’s be racist, some Chinese merchants in Singapore, they are much closer to this universal English than, than Americans. Or to put it in another way. What the experience of English language as an oppressive imposition obfuscates is that the same holds for every language. You see, we should do here the same move. You should not forget that focusing on English as an oppressive medium obfuscates the fact that your original language had the same oppressive quality and through this displacement you can sustain the myth that we had an authentic language while the ABC thesis that unites Freud, Hegel, Lacan is precisely that Heidegger is too simplistic when he speaks about language as Haus des Seins, as the house of being. It’s as I supplemented it in two of my books I think, house is a, language is not simply a house of being, it’s a torture house of being. Like the fundamental relationship between language and human being is one of traumatic cut, torture and so on and so on and we have, we have to accept the radical dimension of it. So today more than ever one should insist on this properly Hegelian ambiguity of colonialism. Colonial powers did brutally intrude into traditional societies all around the world, derailing their customs, disintegrating their social fabric, not to mention economic exploitation. So it is, I agree, unbearably hypocritical of the Western states to worry about illegal immigration. When immigrants from poor states try to penetrate the developed Western states, these states are getting back their own message, reaping the harvest of their own past acts. And again, Marx when he describes the consequences of the British colonization of India is here very brutal and open. Interestingly as if suspecting what will happen one century and a half later, he even mentions outsourcing of torture as a British strategy, like we don’t torture prisoners we give them to Indians and so on. But one should never forget how it is precisely apropos the wound of colonialism that Wagner’s *die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug* holds. The very disintegration of traditional forms opens up the space of liberation. You see my point. My point is what appears to be the deepest wound of colonialism gives you, the colonized, the chance to become more universal than we stupid Westerners everywhere. You can beat us on our own terrain. You have the unique chance as Malcolm X saw it to create an authentic universality against our effectively limited universality. To get this point we should bear in mind that the universality that I’m talking about here is not a common feature uniting different cultures or societies. I’m not talking about that, my God I hate those books, you know those UNESCO presentations of world culture where oh this culture, that culture. No, I’m not for a, you know, a leftist pseudo-multicultural answer to clash of civilizations was I think unfortunately the Spanish one, Zapatero Prime Minister proposed the formula of pact amongst civilizations. No, that’s the worst thing that can happen. We should on the contrary, the formula our answer to clash of civilizations is universal solidarity between multiple clashes within each civilization. The same struggle runs across different civilizations. So the topic of West versus the subaltern should be subordinated to the topic of which is the same struggle that we share. What I see in the West is for example the ongoing struggle between the twin powers of neoliberal global capitalism and its dark shadow, new forms of racist fundamentalism, on the one hand and forces of radical emancipation, Costas mentioned them the first day, on the other side. And whatever whenever there is political struggle outside the West, my question is, can my struggle and their struggle become moments of the same struggle? And this is why I think there is nothing imaginary but an authentic universality in how when we had demonstration on Tahrir Square in Cairo, protests in Greece, anti-racist struggle in Africa, up to Naxalite guerrillas and Dalit awakening in India, that we immediately feel solidarity. I don’t think this should be dismissed as some oh imaginary solidarity obfuscating deep differences. No, there is a real in this universality. So I do not see India versus Europe, I see the same struggle here and there. My India is not the India of Brahmin cultural studies. But the India of Saroj Giri and other of my leftist friends. My India is not the India of Gandhi, but the India of Ambedkar. My India is maybe up to a point, I don’t know enough of it, but even maybe the India of Naxalite rebellion. Yes, this gesture is offensive, what I said now, but offensive against whom? Against the enemy. Because we do have enemies. I would like to conclude with this apparently non-Hegelian thought that is emphasized by Badiou. You know in today’s politically correct times it’s even dangerous sometimes to say this, you know, as if no when you speak about enemy you castigate fetishize the other. No, we do have enemies and enemies are especially dangerous when they think they are working for our own good. This is what unites Stalinism and neoliberal market universalism. They are telling us okay half of the people will lose jobs but in the long term it’s for their own good. So for the same reason that we should reject the justification of Stalinist crimes, I think I used this in a comment for Guardian, maybe you remember it that wonderful phrase by by Turkish communist writer Panait Istrati. You know he visited Moscow in mid-30s and and got of course into a debate about the Stalinist purges and and some Stalinist told him: but you know that’s the price of our progress, like and he evoked as Stalinists like to do some obscene proverb like you know you cannot make an omelet without breaking some eggs, no. Incidentally a friend of mine, a Slovene Lacanian, now looked into it and found that among Yugoslav communists the obscene proverb used to justify crimes was usually a sexual one. Like Yugoslav big leaders like Edvard Kardelj the leading, liked to use the word like a wimpy boy never got to sleep with a girl or whatever some this pro— okay. What I want to say is that what happened is that after hearing this, maybe you know but it’s a wonderful reply: oh you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. You know what Panait Istrati answered? "Yeah, I got your point. I see broken eggs all around but can you finally show me the omelet?" you know. Where is the big omelet? And that should be our answer to neo— yes we see all around Greece, Slovenia, now Spain, here we see broken eggs everywhere. Show us finally the fucking omelet, no. That would be Hegelian answer. Thank you very much. Thank you thank you Slavoj, appropriately religious talk for a Sunday morning, excellent. Now let me start with a pretty naive question, you know I mean in the midst of all this Hegelians, you know I know my Hegel but I haven't read the literature. I mean, is this Žižek or Hegel? I mean let me take you to... It’s a non-Hegelian question and I mean this literally. Okay. It’s a total... yeah. I mean let me take you to the first part of your talk, the Hegelian thing about the down, how did you put it, downward synthesis? Yeah, where what you get at the end is not the higher synthesis but the lowest of the low, yeah. Okay, excellent. But I mean you are using the French Revolution, of course the French Revolution Hegel you know welcomes it and then has all this stuff as we know about abstract freedom, about the terror and all the rest of it. But then Napoleon comes, I mean the idea of a certain, as you put it, retrospective kind of necessity, a retrospectively constructed, still exists there you know so there is Napoleon, he is the spirit on horseback in Jena, then we have Sittlichkeit, you know it's coming Prussian so there is a sense, okay you don't want to call it eschatology, but you know by making this big distinction between Hegel and Marx and Hegel is more kind of radical and so on than Marx, I'm not sure that you know this is right in terms of what we read about Hegel. Now of course if you're telling me that your enemy is Charles Taylor who has some strange idea of a puppeteer that you know moves history through the puppets, of course I mean if that is the case I don't know, I mean you're absolutely right. But that is not, you know, what most people who naively read Hegel like me, you know and don't read all the kind of literature... They do read cunning of reason in this way. They do, don't they? I'm asking. Well not now, I mean you mentioned Bradley, in the 19th century Hegelians here in Britain, but I mean not today. I mean who reads that kind of and but more importantly why is Marx more eschatological than Hegel? I mean the wonderful political writings of Marx have nothing to do with eschatology, you know the 18th Brumaire, you know sort of all that kind of stuff, which is not about. I mean of course the whole of modernity believes in a certain periodization, you keep using the terms postmodern, pre-modern, modern, but this is a modernist, a totally modernist position, everyone uses those classifications. Similarly Hegel, similarly Marx. So why I mean, what is the stake between this big kind of return to Hegel against a certain, so I mean this is Žižek, this is not Hegel, that’s what I’m saying, you know sort of and now that's great I mean I'm not against it. You will get the full answer, a long letter into your prison cell in gulag. Sorry, seriously. I will give tell you exactly where. Where Hegel is for me more materialist is precisely where Marx, you know when he says the owl of Minerva takes off only in the evening and so on and... It flies at dusk. Yeah, yeah, which means Marx does something which for Hegel is absolutely prohibited. It is to adopt now in present moment a position of knowledge of history where history goes which justifies you in what you are doing now. This position of having a somehow transcendent historical knowledge, we are at this point and then the idea of a revolution, this was wonderfully developed but this, this is why I think he is not a Hegelian, Lukács precisely in this sense in *History and Class Consciousness*, this idea of a proletarian revolution as a totally transparent act, not in any metaphysical sense but like, we know where history is going and we jump on that wagon and we do something and we know what we do. This Hegel prohibits. Okay. And and this is why Hegelian teleology, this is of course it's it's teleology, but it's always retroactive teleology. It’s never forward. If anything, sorry just to finish, Hegel was totally perplexed and I agree with it. You remember, remember Hegel’s last political writing was violent conservative I admit it, reaction to English Reform Bill, where Hegel simply didn’t know what to do with it and so on. I think that we should recapture a little bit of this Hegelian radical uncertainty, which again doesn’t mean we should do nothing, sorry. Okay, I mean in terms of the uncertainty in a sense in that part of your talk today you go towards a kind of relativism which is your greatest enemy, I mean you are the guy who keeps attacking relativism. But let me say something different however. Kant, in one of these revolutionary writings, I think either *Perpetual Peace*, Kant, oh yeah, or *Cosmopolitan*, I don’t remember which, he has this wonderful idea that nature, who is a kind of the spirit for him, will end up in cosmopolitanism eventually, in perpetual peace. And then he has one lovely little paragraph which says: "Of course I do have my doubts. But because I’m Kant, because I’m an important philosopher, I’m going to come out and say these things because by just saying them I help them come about." In other words, that the role of the intellectual, of the philosopher, is while he has his doubts to participate and therefore push the historical trajectory towards that end that in his mind is also necessary will come about. So to that extent, and this is I mean in terms of your work, in terms of your political writings, you go out on political activity. You go out and say this is what has to happen. You ask me all the time and you will ask the the Greek left leader on Wednesday in Zagreb, you know, sort of what is your program, what you’re going to do after the day you get, and of course that means that you want a program, in other words, you want to become a part of this historical becoming, and therefore you create a narrative, perhaps even an eschatological teleological, precisely because you want the end to come faster or to come at all. So to that extent it is not just a question of some kind of stupid mechanical eschatological necessity that you know you are projecting, it is seeing yourself as part of that process and therefore using whatever means are available to you including perhaps a kind of stupid history narrative of necessity in order to push in that direction. I got your point, it’s a very nice point, but first let me go step by step. We don’t have time to go into it but the two of you, Catherine and Rebecca have written a lot about it that, you know, relativism. Why not? I claim, I don’t have time to develop it now, that what Hegel calls absolute knowing is the most radical self-relativization that you can imagine. Absolute knowing is not I know everything, because for Hegel, and Lukács develops this nicely in *History and Class Consciousness*, for Hegel the problem with relativism is not that it’s relativist but it’s not relativist enough. It always presupposes a kind of a outside meta-position from which you see the relativity. Relativism absolute knowing means when you yourself fall fully into relativism without so I don’t see any problem there. Again what you said about politics. Yes, but all I want is this type of that we fundamentally accept that the result is radically unknown. That we don’t dismiss the fact like I’ll put it like this. The way Hegelian cunning of reason is read is usually nonetheless in the bad teleological sense, like for example, I am a bad guy, I kill people to take power. But if my name’s happen to my name happens to be Julius Caesar, nonetheless I am an unconscious tool of higher necessity and precisely in following my basest instincts I play a role blah blah blah. The way I try to read Hegel, and here I draw your attention to a book that I like very much, this is after the ladies we have here, maybe the last man who wrote a good book on Hegel, Gérard Lebrun, his two books, that Hegel is not saying this. Hegel is saying, no, for example Lebrun takes the case of Rubicon. It doesn’t mean it was destined from the very beginning for Julius Caesar to cross Rubicon. No, at that time he had the freedom. But to put it in this wonderful dialectical terms, once he crossed Rubicon, crossing Rubicon retroactively became his fate. And that’s absolutely fundamental for Hegel. Cunning of reason does not mean that you are that there is a big agency which as it were uses you for its hidden purposes. No, it means more something what Stephen Jay Gould would have called exaptation. You do something, it goes wrong and then in a contingent improvised way, so this is why I even think that Hegel what he calls cunning of reason is even more cunning of unreason in the sense that one thing that you can be sure of is that whatever you do it will always go wrong. And Hegel’s problem is how to make use of things going wrong. That’s just a more modest position and yes, I’m modest here, I’m not afraid what you said but I agree with you where I say the art is not to connect this to yesterday’s debate, isn’t our problem how not to draw from this radical openness the cheap liberal modest relativist position in the sense of things may go wrong so let’s not do anything radical, let’s be modest and so on? This position is false. This position is false. One should go to the end, risk everything for it and so on and so on. Just two more things very briefly. Hegel, French Revolution, as you Rebecca demonstrated nicely in the book. There is nonetheless one big difference. Kant for example is fully aware of the ambiguity of French Revolution, but he simply keeps the two sides apart. On the one hand, this fucking who cares inner feeling, enthusiasm, big, then you go to Paris, whoa whoa they are chopping heads and so on. Hegel is the only one I know, and I hope I’m correctly referring to you, who is ready radically to bring the two sides together. Yes, French Revolution is the ultimate sublime event, and yes it did necessarily turn into horror. He is not afraid to think the two together. Hegel knew absolutely and accepted it that there is no without You know that you cannot say oh if the French were to be intelligent would be enough, no Jacobins and so on. That’s for me Hegel. As when you mentioned Kant, no, that’s another sensitive topic namely war, perpetual peace. I’m here a Hegelian in the sense that I think that Hegel’s deduction of the necessity of war should be absolutely reasserted and not dismissed as some kind of you know Prussian militarism and so on. It’s a wonderful case of how for Hegel the end of history doesn’t mean some perpetual inertia of some well-ordered bourgeois state, abstract negativity and you also in the necessity of war you find something very strange in Hegel. You find almost something like a non-dialectical repetition. War has to
already saying too much, because the subject is the result of the process of alienation. It emerges through the loss of its substantial content. And this is why Lacan does have a counter-move, disalienation. But it’s not the standard Hegelian one, or at least what people think the Hegelian one of, you know, I alienate myself in substantial content and then triumphantly I recognize myself in the otherness, I reappropriate. No, for Lacan alienation is just redoubled, to use the old Hegelian phrase that I repeat endlessly. This let’s say we have great, let’s say ancient Egyptians have in their stupid pyramids some secrets for us. Disalienation is not now I know what is this secret. Disalienation is just to, to experience how what we saw as the secret of the Egyptians for us were the secrets already for the Egyptians themselves. So the secret remains, it’s just redoubled. Another exemplary case of such a weird redoubled negation is provided by the existential position of the self-negated pessimism. I’m talking here about a form of optimism which is in a way even worse than pessimism. This was developed by our Alenka’s and mine good friend Aaron Schuster, American Lacanian, he had some Deleuzian deviation, he is cured now of them I think, who developed this idea that there is a breakdown of the principled form of pessimism when in a weird eppur si muove, it still goes on, when life goes on, too weak even to follow consequently itself renunciation. So again, this optimism is not the usual Hegelian negation of negation like, first we are optimists, then we have to accept the gap, the failure, and that would be the usual wrong idea of Hegel, somehow we see how our very defeat contributes through the cunning of reason to some greater cause so we get a mediated optimism. No, what we get is a different movement. First optimism is negated, the subject assumes the insight into how, to cut it short, life is shit. But then the very form of principled pessimist position is negated. You know, even to claim life is shit is too much of a principled position to assume, when you really existentially think that life is shit. When you think that life is shit, if you really think it, it’s too much to kill yourself or to negate it. Life goes on in a weird optimistic way where well, it’s such a shit that I don’t even have the strength to terminate it. Here is Schuster’s wonderful half a page quote, I’m sorry, description of this existential position: "Optimism, this radical crazy optimism, is not the opposite of pessimism. It has no positive substance or consistency, no resilient spirit that could stand on its own. But it is a further elaboration of pessimism’s relentless negativity. It is what is subtracted from the nothingness of pessimism, the thorn that doesn’t allow pessimism to comfortably settle into itself, to vanish into its own nihilism. Yet without converting it into its opposite. Against this common sense, the common sense, one should defend the mad idealist claim that the concept of pessimism is correct and life itself is wrong. If there were any ontological justice, the human species would disappear in a puff of logical smoke, like the computer in Star Trek that explodes when ordered to solve a logical paradox. The fact that life doesn’t do so does not refute pessimism but requires us to admit a certain ironic twist. Rather than the proof of an indomitable vitality and richness, this clinging to life is the supreme ontological injustice, a violent perturbation of the self-canceling nothing." End of quote. And again, I will just briefly mention it how the same goes on for immortality, not only in the already described Kierkegaardian sense but also in the sense of the undead and so on and so on. Immortality, mortality, but then there is some immortality which is even lower than mortality itself, vampires, undead and so on and so on. Okay, so again my question is, where does Hegel stand with regard to all of this? Can a Hegelian mechanism, the basic formal matrix of dialectical process, can it account for this strange what I called in one of my earlier books downward synthesis, where the third term is not some kind of a higher synthesis but the lowest of the low as it were. Let me approach this topic through another point, through a detour. Thinkers as different as Nietzsche, Heidegger or Derrida all conceive their own age as that of the critical turning point of metaphysics. In their or our time, that’s the idea, metaphysics has exhausted its potentials. And the thinker’s duty is to prepare the ground for a new post-metaphysical thinking. I think that Derrida is more ambiguous here, but at least in some of his earlier texts even he says like, the closure of metaphysics, we are approaching a certain zero point, with Heidegger it’s evident technology as the exhaustion of possibilities and metaphysics. More generally, the entire Judeo-Christian tradition up to our postmodernity is determined by what I am tempted to call the Hölderlin paradigm. You know Hölderlin’s famous "Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch." Where the danger is, grows also what can save us. So again, within this paradigm, the present moment appears as the lowest point in the long process of historical decadence, the flight of gods, economic alienation, social alienation in Marxism whatever. But the danger of the catastrophic loss of the essential dimension of being human also opens up the possibility of a reversal, Kehre in Heidegger. The arrival of new gods for Heidegger, proletarian revolution for Marx, you know so where the danger is, the extreme exhaustion, there is also hope for a reversal. So how does Hegel stand towards this? My claim is that, although Hegel is usually taken as the clearest case of this paradigm, you know utter alienation then oo-ooh, the thing turns into it opposite, that Hegel is not part of this paradigm. A certain historical teleology is wrongly associated with Hegel. The common sense or textbook idea of Hegel is that there is a naive beginning, an immediacy which lacks inner wealth and articulation. Then development means dispersion, fall, up to the utter alienation which opens up the possibility of reversal. Paradoxically I claim it is Marx, not Hegel, who follows this logic. In especially in his famous manuscript on pre-capitalist modes of economic production. For Marx there, the uniqueness of the capitalist mode of production resides in the fact that in it, I quote here Marx, "Labor is torn out from its primordial immersion into its objective conditions, and because of this labor appears on the one side itself as labor and on the other side the labor's own product as objectified labor obtains against labor a completely autonomous existence as value." End of quote. The worker thus appears, quote, "as objectless, purely subjective capacity of labor, confronted with the objective conditions of production as its non-property, as a foreign property, a value which exists for itself as capital." However, the quote goes on, "This extreme form of alienation in which, in the guise of the relationship of the capital towards wage-labor, labor, productive activity, appears as opposed to its own conditions and to its own product, this extreme alienation is a necessary point of transition and for that reason in itself in an inverted form it already contains the disintegration of all limited presuppositions of production and even creates and produces the unconditional presuppositions of production and thereby all material conditions for the total universal development of the productive forces of the individuals." End of quote. History is thus the gradual process of the separation of subjective activity from its objective conditions, that is, from its immersion into the substantial totality. This process reaches its culmination in modern capitalism with the emergence of the proletariat, this substanceless subjectivity of workers totally separated from their objective conditions of work. This separation again is already in itself their liberation because it creates this free point of pure subjectivity as a point of reference, standpoint from which collective subjectivity can reappropriate the alienated objective conditions. And of course that’s the Hölderlin paradigm of Marx. Today we are approaching that point of possible reversal. But again, is this process of subjective division, alienation and then the final reversal really a Hegelian one? The first thing to note is that this Kairos position of finding oneself just before the reversal of danger into redemption is never that of Hegel. The Hegelian historical moment is not the moment of the highest tension, when the teleological resolution seems near but, Hegelian position specific historical experience I claim is the moment after when the resolution is accomplished but misses its goal and turns into a nightmare. At this moment the Hegelian problem is, how to remain faithful to the original goal of liberation, how not to turn towards a conservative position to say, you know, oh it was a mistake, nihilistic mistake. Hegel, Hegel’s innermost desire, however weirdly it may appear articulated, is for example precisely apropos French Revolution. It’s absolutely not and never to dismiss the French Revolution as a great mistake and claim we Germans will do it without cutting heads. Haha, you don’t do anything without cutting heads, no. Hegel’s position is precisely how at the very moment when liberation obviously in some sense for him through Jacobin terror goes wrong, how to nonetheless save the day through repetition and redeem its, to use the Marxist term, rational core. And I claim this is why our moment is still Hegelian. What Hegel called absolute freedom and terror was a pretty mild thing compared to what the greatest genius of humanity comrade Stalin and others did in the 20th century. Like, you know, never forget before lambasting on Jacobins that they were simply overthrown by a vote in Assemblée nationale. I would like to see someone doing this in Supreme Soviet, you know like voting against Stalin, no. So what I’m saying is that this maybe is the lesson of the terrifying experiences of the 20th century. We should return from Marx back to Hegel, from Marx’s revolutionary eschatology back to Hegel’s tragic vision of a history which forever remains radically open, since the historical process always redirects our activity into an unexpected direction. Perhaps the Left should learn to assume fully the basic alienation of the historical process. We cannot control the consequences of our acts, not because we are just puppets in the hands of some secret master or fate which hidden behind the curtain pulls the strings, but for precisely the opposite reason. There is no big Other, no agent of total accountancy who or which can take into account the consequences of our acts. This acceptance of alienation therefore in no way entails a cynical distance. It implies a fully engaged position, but a position aware of the risks involved. There is no higher historical necessity whose instruments we are and which guarantees the final outcome. All we have is our activity open to all the risks of an open contingent history. Or, to put it at a more conceptual level, this means that the conclusive moment of the dialectical process is not a synthetic unity, a return at a higher level to some form of the one. For Hegel, alienation is also I claim constitutive of the subject, in the radical sense that subject does not pre-exist its alienation but emerges through it. This is an important point. For Hegel it’s to fetishize, sorry, the subject already too much to claim subject alienates itself. No, it’s only nature that alienates itself from itself. And so, you know, the self in self-alienation is nature, not subject. Subject is the outcome of the self-alienation of nature. So again, as already said, here things get interesting because of course Hegel we should assert some kind of irreducible alienation. But don’t be afraid, it’s not the Marxist alienation where some big Other substance controls us. No, that’s precisely, that’s precisely the illusion. Alienation can be overcome but precisely in the sense of the Marxist alienation, you know where fate, market, whatever controls us. What we can do is to see how, as Lacan would have put it, the big Other doesn’t exist. For example in history, there is no higher historical necessity, substantial historical agent, world spirit and so on. I’m here totally against Charles Taylor and that naive subjectivist reading of Hegel as if Hegel thinks that above us individuals there is where there is some kind of absolute subject who pulls the strings behind. But, but nonetheless, because alienation because self-alienation of nature is constitutive of subject, when you break out of alienation again you don’t get this overblown narcissistic subject who appropriates the other, you just get the, the gap is displaced, the gap. This is how I think we should reread this alienation. Not in the sense that we abolish the gap, but in the sense that when we experience ourselves as alienated from the other, that we see how this alienation should be displaced into the other itself. There is no other, substantial other with regard to whom we are alienated, the gap is redoubled. And now a little bit more of philosophy. This brings me again to Heidegger. What we confront with late Heidegger is I think the problem of historicity at its most radical. I think if you ask me that Heidegger is the most radical imaginable philosopher of historicity. In what sense? Heidegger’s, late Heidegger’s Ereignis, event historicity, is historicity which goes as it were all the way down, which cannot be reduced to the deployment or revelation in history of a non-historical absolute. To put it in not quite appropriate terms of German idealism, Heidegger’s achievement is to elaborate a radically historicized transcendentalism. The Heideggerian historicity is the historicity of transcendental horizons themselves, of the different modes of the disclosure of being, with no agent regulating the process. Here one should defend Heidegger. Ereignis is not some hidden God who said to humanity here now you have the message, Aristotelian for antiquity, ah it’s the modern era now I am sending you the message of subjectivity, technical exploitation of nature. No, Ereignis is il y a, es gibt, it’s totally non-substantial play. There is nothing behind it. For Heidegger, the ultimate horizon is the horizon of this Weltspiel as he puts it, of play of different transcendental horizons. Like for example, which is why for Heidegger, he at a much higher level, Heidegger does the same thing I claim as a somehow ridiculous figure of West Coast American pseudo-follower of Foucault who I tried it once, tried to ask a Foucauldian discourse analyst the, what is this table? And he will tell you ah the only question we can ask is in what discursive regime can we even speak about a table and so on, you know. Or, do I have an immortal soul? Oh, in what discursive, you know, like as if the ontic question, to put it naively, is totally subordinated to that of the ontological horizon. And Heidegger is here consequent. That is why for Heidegger the ultimate catastrophe is always the ontological one. And he likes to repeat this courageously even apropos of the threat of atomic catastrophe, no. He says that he for example or ecological catastrophe, he says openly that the true catastrophe is not if humanity will destroy itself ontically on our earth. The true catastrophe already happened the moment we dwell in the technological universe and so on. But now comes my problem. Nonetheless, this will sound a naive reproach, but it’s incredible and I not only checked it up myself looking for these places but asked some people who know better Heidegger than me and they confirmed to me how from the very beginning, okay not quite the beginning, Sein und Zeit till the end, Heidegger was bothered by this residual question. Because he knew very well he was a serious philosopher that transcendental constitution is not creation. It’s just the opening up of a horizon of disclosure of being. So Heidegger was again and again raising and I love him most at those points, this totally naive question. Okay but the objects the way they appear to us, they appear to us always within a certain world horizon of meaning and so on but what or how are they, or in what sense they dwell, we cannot talk of existence because existence is for Heidegger always within an ontological horizon, outside this horizon? Although this question persists throughout, for example from in a letter to Elizabeth Blochmann, Heidegger writes, I often ask myself, this has for a long time been a fundamental question for me. What nature would be without man? Must it not resonate through him in order to attain its own most potency? I claim that here Heidegger almost rejoins late Schelling or Benjamin, you know Benjamin’s idea of how for example the well-known passage from Benjamin: "The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth." So what Heidegger is hinting at is that we should bring this logic to the end. It doesn’t hold only for human history that like later generations the last big revolution will retroactively redeem earlier revolution, but that it holds even at a more radical level for the very relationship between what in inappropriate terms we call human being and nature. That is to say, back to the quoted passage from Heidegger. One should note that this passage about what is nature outside humanity with no relation to humanity is from the period immediately after Heidegger’s lectures on the fundamental concepts of metaphysics from where the same question is also formulated as a Schellingian hypothesis that perhaps animals are in a hitherto unknown way aware of their lack, of their poorness, so that there is an infinite pain pervading the entire living nature. Quote from Heidegger: "If deprivation in certain forms is a kind of suffering and poverty and deprivation of world belongs to the animal being, then a kind of pain and suffering would have to permit the whole animal realm and the realm of life in general." What I want to do is to save this Heidegger from the obvious temptation of some New Age mystic reading or whatsoever. The choice Heidegger is confronted here is the following one. According to his basic position, the reproach that the definition of animal as you know poor in the world, weltarm, and of stone as weltlos, without world, they imply reference to the human opened up to a world and so this would be the transcendental solution. That when Heidegger talks about animals as weltarm, poor in the world, he simply means that we as humans are always within the horizon of opening up, dwelling within a world, and from this point we cannot but experience animals as weltarm, but the question what are animals in themselves is simply meaningless, because it would presume that we can somehow step out of our inner-worldly existence, not ontic, but in the sense of dwelling within a horizon of meaning, and simply from nowhere look at reality. However, as if himself doubting the sufficiency of this transcendental reply, Heidegger hints at another position. Not that things are simply there in the worldless reality, but that their deprived-of-the-world situation, status, is not just the way we perceive them from our human position. It is something that characterizes them there immanently. Heidegger refers here to an old motive of German Romanticism, I already mentioned it from Schelling to Benjamin, the motive of the great sorrow of nature. Or as Derrida paraphrases Benjamin, Derrida in his wonderful short book *The Animal That Therefore I Am*, quote: "It is in the hope of requiting that sorrow, of redemption from that suffering, that humans live and speak in nature." It’s a beautiful mystical thought that our human speech exploded to redeem nature from its suffering. Again, is this to be dismissed as a stupid mystical obscurantist New Age topic? No, I think it asks the right, it raises rather the right question, which is not, what is nature for language? Can we grasp nature adequately through our language? But the true Hegelian question, which is the opposite one. What is language for nature? How does the emergence of language affect nature? Aaron Schuster again drew attention to how Lacan himself oscillates here between the predominant transcendental approach and some timid hints to its beyond. It’s interesting how again Lacan here if you read him closely is caught in exactly the same predicament as Heidegger. On the one hand Lacan’s official position is the symbolic order is the ultimate horizon. You know all that bullshit, we are always already in language blah blah and all that we can do is like in a Platonic mode to concoct, invent beautiful stories to develop myths about what went before. But it’s not as simple as that. Often Heidegger hints, sorry Lacan, that that the symbolic order is a reaction to some radical deadlock, of course he doesn’t use these mystical terms sorrow in nature, but deadlock, being at a loss, dislocation which is already there in nature. Again I quote so that the Freudian *Unbehagen in der Kultur* should be supplemented by an uncanny *Unbehagen in der Natur*. It’s not simply that nature is this homeostatic healthy universe where you know animals know when to copulate how whatever things are at their own place and then you know all this Romantic topic of human being as nature’s sick unto death displaced nature. No, a displacement must already be there back in nature. Or again, a quote from Schuster, and I’m more than three quarters into it so don’t be afraid. "Imagine all of nature waiting for the gift of speech so it can express how bad it is to be a vegetable or a fish. Is it not the special torment of nature to be deprived of the means of conveying its pent-up aggravation, unable to articulate even the simplest lament, oh me I am the sea. And does not the emergence on earth of the speaking being effectively release this terrible organic tension and bring it to a higher level of non-resolution?" You see the nice, not the higher level of resolution but of non-resolution. "While there are some intriguing passages in Lacan’s seminars where he speculates on the infinite pain of being a plant, raising the possibility of an *Unbehagen in der Natur*, for the most part he conceives the relationship between nature and culture to be the one of radical discontinuity." End of quote. So again, you see how Lacan works. On the one hand you have this eternal, eternal poetry of dislocation of sexuality in human species in contrast to poor animals who nonetheless have instincts which are embodied knowledge which tell them when how to copulate and so on and so on. Which is why along these lines Gerard Wajcman, a Lacanian, tried to account along these lines for our fascination with all these infinitely boring, I think I am here in a Goebbels mood, they should be burned publicly, you know these animal life documentaries on nature, National Geographic. The fascination of them truly is that you know, animals somehow it’s a universe which works, you know, you don’t have to write love letters, instincts tell you now I screw you then whatever, no. And I think we should go here even a step further. When you watch in this ambiguous channels like National Geographic, sometimes they also have reports on human communities. But usually it’s some isolated Alaskan or Midwest small town which is treated precisely as a small animal kingdom, you know where local Americans know now I get drunk now I go to the store, or to go to the end, now I buy a gun and go to a school and kill half of them. It’s all part of natural, natural balance. But I think, and here I refer to, did you already publish it or am I still free to appropriate it myself Alenka, how Alenka developed this point how one should risk a step further. Not a New Age mysticism that there is some secret awareness already in nature. But to put it very simply that, you know how Eric Hobsbawm speaks about invented traditions, how we retroactively, that maybe nature in this homeostatic sense is the ultimate invented tradition. And maybe true materialism begins when you transpose the dislocation, gap, whatever, that is perceived as specifically human, like you know nature in itself, Mother Earth loving us all whatever, and then we, that when we transpose this gap back into the origin, back into nature itself. And I refer here to Alenka in a text not yet published, she again developed all this in detail precisely apropos sexuality. How in a crucial passage when he introduces the term of lamella in Seminar XI, Four Fundamental Concepts, he says something which passes unnoticed. He says, I quote it, Lacan: "What is lamella is what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sex reproduction and so on and so on." So be careful here. The deadlock is already there in nature. Again, this doesn’t mean any kind of teleology. But it means that human speech is not a fall from some natural balance, but a reaction working through a fall which is there from the very beginning. Now, the last couple of pages with the political point. I think that all that I’m trying to say was said beautifully by Wagner in his *Parsifal* whose final message is, in German, *die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug*. The wound can be healed only by the spear that made it, smote it, cut it. Hegel says the same thing, although with the accent shifted into the opposite direction. The spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal. That is to say, what is spirit at its most elementary for Hegel? It’s the wound of nature. The spirit of human subjectivity is the power of differentiating, of abstracting, of tearing apart, of treating as self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity. Spirit is nothing but the process of overcoming natural immediacy and organic unity, the process of mediation of this immediacy. So spirit’s return to itself creates the very dimension to which it returns. At a more formal level, in his logic of reflection at the beginning of Book II of Logic, logic of essence, Hegel uses the unique term that I mentioned yesterday in debate, absolute Gegenstoß, recoil, counter-push, counter-thrust, or I prefer the movie *Counterpunch*. A withdrawal from that creates what it withdraws from. A quote: "Reflection therefore finds before it an immediate which it transcends and from which it is the return. But this return is only the presupposing of what reflection finds before it. What is thus found only comes to be through being left behind. The reflective movement is to be taken as an absolute recoil (absolute Gegenstoß) upon itself from the presupposition of the return into itself, that from which essence comes and is only as this return, for this presupposition is only in the return itself." End of quote. Absolute Gegenstoß thus stands for the radical coincidence of the opposite in which the action appears as its own counter-action, or more precisely, in which the very negative move, lose, loss, withdrawal, generates what it, what it negates. Now I come to my final political example which some of you maybe know, I mentioned it yesterday, I want to elaborate it a little bit more in detail. It’s the example that I repeat all the time about from a visit of mine in India two years ago when in a debate some Indian cultural theorists complained that the fact that they are compelled to use English language in debating with me or even among themselves is already a form of cultural colonialism, censoring their own true identity. Their line of argumentation was something like, we have to speak in an imposed foreign language to express our innermost identity. And does this not put us in a position of radical alienation? Even our resistance to colonization has to be formulated in the language of the colonizer. My answer was: yes, but this imposition of English, a foreign language, created the very X which is oppressed by it. Because when you feel oppressed, you should note that what is oppressed is not the actual pre-colonial India, but an authentic dream of a new universalist democratic India. And this dream emerges through very colonization. Malcolm X, one of my authentic heroes, the one, you know, Denzel Washington to put it in human terms in the film, was following the same insight when he adopted X as his family name. It’s not as some commentators wrongly think that he was fighting on behalf of the return to some primordial African roots and X stands for you see evil white men deprived us of the very roots. No, he was well aware that this X, X meaning through enslavement white people deprived the blacks of their particular roots, that this very gap, hole in their particular identity is what also offers a unique chance of universalist position and thus freedom. He saw in this X the resource, although literally he was a Wagnerian, die Wunde schließt, the wound of colonization schließt only even more radical colonization, like don’t bemoan lost roots, screw the roots, your roots are white man’s imagination, which is literally true in South Africa. Remember that’s the wisdom of Mandela when South Africa was approaching apartheid, who was playing the black roots card? Buthelezi, the king who was on the payroll of of the white majority. You should never forget this that against people like Homi Bhabha who claim that imperialism is imposing on us, no, imperialism is inherently multicultural, imperialism wants the other to retain its original roots and so on. So let me go on. What does this mean? and please I’m not lying you see. We thus get the structure of a dialectical process which is radically different from the triad of some substantial immediacy, alienation and then reconciliation in a higher unity. The beginning is not an immediate unity which is then lost. There is no unity preceding the loss. What is lost is retroactively constituted through its loss. Reconciliation means in this case of Indians, the reconciliation with English language which is to be accepted not only as the obstacle to a new India but as an enabling medium, as the positive condition of liberation. The true victory over colonialism is not the return to some kind of pre-colonial authentic substance. Even less any synthesis between modern civilization and pre-modern origin. You know this is the eternal fascist dream, we can have modernity but as a part of our old organic culture, whatever. Paradoxically, liberation is the fully accomplished loss of pre-modern origins. In other words, colonialism is not overcome when the intrusion of English language as a medium is abolished, but when the colonizers are as it were beaten at their own game. When the new Indian identity will be effortlessly formulated in English, when English language will be denaturalized, will lose its Anglo-Saxon privilege. And this is why I like globalization. People just see this aspect of oh imperialism we all speak English. Yes, but as intelligent conservatives in United States know, the English that we are speaking now all is Slovenian? Yeah, it’s Greek, Slovenian, Chinese. Let’s be racist, some Chinese merchants in Singapore, they are much closer to this universal English than, than Americans. Or to put it in another way. What the experience of English language as an oppressive imposition obfuscates is that the same holds for every language. You see, we should do here the same move. You should not forget that focusing on English as an oppressive medium obfuscates the fact that your original language had the same oppressive quality and through this displacement you can sustain the myth that we had an authentic language while the ABC thesis that unites Freud, Hegel, Lacan is precisely that Heidegger is too simplistic when he speaks about language as Haus des Seins, as the house of being. It’s as I supplemented it in two of my books I think, house is a, language is not simply a house of being, it’s a torture house of being. Like the fundamental relationship between language and human being is one of traumatic cut, torture and so on and so on and we have, we have to accept the radical dimension of it. So today more than ever one should insist on this properly Hegelian ambiguity of colonialism. Colonial powers did brutally intrude into traditional societies all around the world, derailing their customs, disintegrating their social fabric, not to mention economic exploitation. So it is, I agree, unbearably hypocritical of the Western states to worry about illegal immigration. When immigrants from poor states try to penetrate the developed Western states, these states are getting back their own message, reaping the harvest of their own past acts. And again, Marx when he describes the consequences of the British colonization of India is here very brutal and open. Interestingly as if suspecting what will happen one century and a half later, he even mentions outsourcing of torture as a British strategy, like we don’t torture prisoners we give them to Indians and so on. But one should never forget how it is precisely apropos the wound of colonialism that Wagner’s *die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug* holds. The very disintegration of traditional forms opens up the space of liberation. You see my point. My point is what appears to be the deepest wound of colonialism gives you, the colonized, the chance to become more universal than we stupid Westerners everywhere. You can beat us on our own terrain. You have the unique chance as Malcolm X saw it to create an authentic universality against our effectively limited universality. To get this point we should bear in mind that the universality that I’m talking about here is not a common feature uniting different cultures or societies. I’m not talking about that, my God I hate those books, you know those UNESCO presentations of world culture where oh this culture, that culture. No, I’m not for a, you know, a leftist pseudo-multicultural answer to clash of civilizations was I think unfortunately the Spanish one, Zapatero Prime Minister proposed the formula of pact amongst civilizations. No, that’s the worst thing that can happen. We should on the contrary, the formula our answer to clash of civilizations is universal solidarity between multiple clashes within each civilization. The same struggle runs across different civilizations. So the topic of West versus the subaltern should be subordinated to the topic of which is the same struggle that we share. What I see in the West is for example the ongoing struggle between the twin powers of neoliberal global capitalism and its dark shadow, new forms of racist fundamentalism, on the one hand and forces of radical emancipation, Costas mentioned them the first day, on the other side. And whatever whenever there is political struggle outside the West, my question is, can my struggle and their struggle become moments of the same struggle? And this is why I think there is nothing imaginary but an authentic universality in how when we had demonstration on Tahrir Square in Cairo, protests in Greece, anti-racist struggle in Africa, up to Naxalite guerrillas and Dalit awakening in India, that we immediately feel solidarity. I don’t think this should be dismissed as some oh imaginary solidarity obfuscating deep differences. No, there is a real in this universality. So I do not see India versus Europe, I see the same struggle here and there. My India is not the India of Brahmin cultural studies. But the India of Saroj Giri and other of my leftist friends. My India is not the India of Gandhi, but the India of Ambedkar. My India is maybe up to a point, I don’t know enough of it, but even maybe the India of Naxalite rebellion. Yes, this gesture is offensive, what I said now, but offensive against whom? Against the enemy. Because we do have enemies. I would like to conclude with this apparently non-Hegelian thought that is emphasized by Badiou. You know in today’s politically correct times it’s even dangerous sometimes to say this, you know, as if no when you speak about enemy you castigate fetishize the other. No, we do have enemies and enemies are especially dangerous when they think they are working for our own good. This is what unites Stalinism and neoliberal market universalism. They are telling us okay half of the people will lose jobs but in the long term it’s for their own good. So for the same reason that we should reject the justification of Stalinist crimes, I think I used this in a comment for Guardian, maybe you remember it that wonderful phrase by by Turkish communist writer Panait Istrati. You know he visited Moscow in mid-30s and and got of course into a debate about the Stalinist purges and and some Stalinist told him: but you know that’s the price of our progress, like and he evoked as Stalinists like to do some obscene proverb like you know you cannot make an omelet without breaking some eggs, no. Incidentally a friend of mine, a Slovene Lacanian, now looked into it and found that among Yugoslav communists the obscene proverb used to justify crimes was usually a sexual one. Like Yugoslav big leaders like Edvard Kardelj the leading, liked to use the word like a wimpy boy never got to sleep with a girl or whatever some this pro— okay. What I want to say is that what happened is that after hearing this, maybe you know but it’s a wonderful reply: oh you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. You know what Panait Istrati answered? "Yeah, I got your point. I see broken eggs all around but can you finally show me the omelet?" you know. Where is the big omelet? And that should be our answer to neo— yes we see all around Greece, Slovenia, now Spain, here we see broken eggs everywhere. Show us finally the fucking omelet, no. That would be Hegelian answer. Thank you very much. Thank you thank you Slavoj, appropriately religious talk for a Sunday morning, excellent. Now let me start with a pretty naive question, you know I mean in the midst of all this Hegelians, you know I know my Hegel but I haven't read the literature. I mean, is this Žižek or Hegel? I mean let me take you to... It’s a non-Hegelian question and I mean this literally. Okay. It’s a total... yeah. I mean let me take you to the first part of your talk, the Hegelian thing about the down, how did you put it, downward synthesis? Yeah, where what you get at the end is not the higher synthesis but the lowest of the low, yeah. Okay, excellent. But I mean you are using the French Revolution, of course the French Revolution Hegel you know welcomes it and then has all this stuff as we know about abstract freedom, about the terror and all the rest of it. But then Napoleon comes, I mean the idea of a certain, as you put it, retrospective kind of necessity, a retrospectively constructed, still exists there you know so there is Napoleon, he is the spirit on horseback in Jena, then we have Sittlichkeit, you know it's coming Prussian so there is a sense, okay you don't want to call it eschatology, but you know by making this big distinction between Hegel and Marx and Hegel is more kind of radical and so on than Marx, I'm not sure that you know this is right in terms of what we read about Hegel. Now of course if you're telling me that your enemy is Charles Taylor who has some strange idea of a puppeteer that you know moves history through the puppets, of course I mean if that is the case I don't know, I mean you're absolutely right. But that is not, you know, what most people who naively read Hegel like me, you know and don't read all the kind of literature... They do read cunning of reason in this way. They do, don't they? I'm asking. Well not now, I mean you mentioned Bradley, in the 19th century Hegelians here in Britain, but I mean not today. I mean who reads that kind of and but more importantly why is Marx more eschatological than Hegel? I mean the wonderful political writings of Marx have nothing to do with eschatology, you know the 18th Brumaire, you know sort of all that kind of stuff, which is not about. I mean of course the whole of modernity believes in a certain periodization, you keep using the terms postmodern, pre-modern, modern, but this is a modernist, a totally modernist position, everyone uses those classifications. Similarly Hegel, similarly Marx. So why I mean, what is the stake between this big kind of return to Hegel against a certain, so I mean this is Žižek, this is not Hegel, that’s what I’m saying, you know sort of and now that's great I mean I'm not against it. You will get the full answer, a long letter into your prison cell in gulag. Sorry, seriously. I will give tell you exactly where. Where Hegel is for me more materialist is precisely where Marx, you know when he says the owl of Minerva takes off only in the evening and so on and... It flies at dusk. Yeah, yeah, which means Marx does something which for Hegel is absolutely prohibited. It is to adopt now in present moment a position of knowledge of history where history goes which justifies you in what you are doing now. This position of having a somehow transcendent historical knowledge, we are at this point and then the idea of a revolution, this was wonderfully developed but this, this is why I think he is not a Hegelian, Lukács precisely in this sense in *History and Class Consciousness*, this idea of a proletarian revolution as a totally transparent act, not in any metaphysical sense but like, we know where history is going and we jump on that wagon and we do something and we know what we do. This Hegel prohibits. Okay. And and this is why Hegelian teleology, this is of course it's it's teleology, but it's always retroactive teleology. It’s never forward. If anything, sorry just to finish, Hegel was totally perplexed and I agree with it. You remember, remember Hegel’s last political writing was violent conservative I admit it, reaction to English Reform Bill, where Hegel simply didn’t know what to do with it and so on. I think that we should recapture a little bit of this Hegelian radical uncertainty, which again doesn’t mean we should do nothing, sorry. Okay, I mean in terms of the uncertainty in a sense in that part of your talk today you go towards a kind of relativism which is your greatest enemy, I mean you are the guy who keeps attacking relativism. But let me say something different however. Kant, in one of these revolutionary writings, I think either *Perpetual Peace*, Kant, oh yeah, or *Cosmopolitan*, I don’t remember which, he has this wonderful idea that nature, who is a kind of the spirit for him, will end up in cosmopolitanism eventually, in perpetual peace. And then he has one lovely little paragraph which says: "Of course I do have my doubts. But because I’m Kant, because I’m an important philosopher, I’m going to come out and say these things because by just saying them I help them come about." In other words, that the role of the intellectual, of the philosopher, is while he has his doubts to participate and therefore push the historical trajectory towards that end that in his mind is also necessary will come about. So to that extent, and this is I mean in terms of your work, in terms of your political writings, you go out on political activity. You go out and say this is what has to happen. You ask me all the time and you will ask the the Greek left leader on Wednesday in Zagreb, you know, sort of what is your program, what you’re going to do after the day you get, and of course that means that you want a program, in other words, you want to become a part of this historical becoming, and therefore you create a narrative, perhaps even an eschatological teleological, precisely because you want the end to come faster or to come at all. So to that extent it is not just a question of some kind of stupid mechanical eschatological necessity that you know you are projecting, it is seeing yourself as part of that process and therefore using whatever means are available to you including perhaps a kind of stupid history narrative of necessity in order to push in that direction. I got your point, it’s a very nice point, but first let me go step by step. We don’t have time to go into it but the two of you, Catherine and Rebecca have written a lot about it that, you know, relativism. Why not? I claim, I don’t have time to develop it now, that what Hegel calls absolute knowing is the most radical self-relativization that you can imagine. Absolute knowing is not I know everything, because for Hegel, and Lukács develops this nicely in *History and Class Consciousness*, for Hegel the problem with relativism is not that it’s relativist but it’s not relativist enough. It always presupposes a kind of a outside meta-position from which you see the relativity. Relativism absolute knowing means when you yourself fall fully into relativism without so I don’t see any problem there. Again what you said about politics. Yes, but all I want is this type of that we fundamentally accept that the result is radically unknown. That we don’t dismiss the fact like I’ll put it like this. The way Hegelian cunning of reason is read is usually nonetheless in the bad teleological sense, like for example, I am a bad guy, I kill people to take power. But if my name’s happen to my name happens to be Julius Caesar, nonetheless I am an unconscious tool of higher necessity and precisely in following my basest instincts I play a role blah blah blah. The way I try to read Hegel, and here I draw your attention to a book that I like very much, this is after the ladies we have here, maybe the last man who wrote a good book on Hegel, Gérard Lebrun, his two books, that Hegel is not saying this. Hegel is saying, no, for example Lebrun takes the case of Rubicon. It doesn’t mean it was destined from the very beginning for Julius Caesar to cross Rubicon. No, at that time he had the freedom. But to put it in this wonderful dialectical terms, once he crossed Rubicon, crossing Rubicon retroactively became his fate. And that’s absolutely fundamental for Hegel. Cunning of reason does not mean that you are that there is a big agency which as it were uses you for its hidden purposes. No, it means more something what Stephen Jay Gould would have called exaptation. You do something, it goes wrong and then in a contingent improvised way, so this is why I even think that Hegel what he calls cunning of reason is even more cunning of unreason in the sense that one thing that you can be sure of is that whatever you do it will always go wrong. And Hegel’s problem is how to make use of things going wrong. That’s just a more modest position and yes, I’m modest here, I’m not afraid what you said but I agree with you where I say the art is not to connect this to yesterday’s debate, isn’t our problem how not to draw from this radical openness the cheap liberal modest relativist position in the sense of things may go wrong so let’s not do anything radical, let’s be modest and so on? This position is false. This position is false. One should go to the end, risk everything for it and so on and so on. Just two more things very briefly. Hegel, French Revolution, as you Rebecca demonstrated nicely in the book. There is nonetheless one big difference. Kant for example is fully aware of the ambiguity of French Revolution, but he simply keeps the two sides apart. On the one hand, this fucking who cares inner feeling, enthusiasm, big, then you go to Paris, whoa whoa they are chopping heads and so on. Hegel is the only one I know, and I hope I’m correctly referring to you, who is ready radically to bring the two sides together. Yes, French Revolution is the ultimate sublime event, and yes it did necessarily turn into horror. He is not afraid to think the two together. Hegel knew absolutely and accepted it that there is no without You know that you cannot say oh if the French were to be intelligent would be enough, no Jacobins and so on. That’s for me Hegel. As when you mentioned Kant, no, that’s another sensitive topic namely war, perpetual peace. I’m here a Hegelian in the sense that I think that Hegel’s deduction of the necessity of war should be absolutely reasserted and not dismissed as some kind of you know Prussian militarism and so on. It’s a wonderful case of how for Hegel the end of history doesn’t mean some perpetual inertia of some well-ordered bourgeois state, abstract negativity and you also in the necessity of war you find something very strange in Hegel. You find almost something like a non-dialectical repetition. War has to
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erupt, but not in any progressive sense. Wars are always the same. So we have here something that again shouldn’t have happened in Hegel, you know at the ultimate point, the end of history, war returns. War as abstract negativity, but again not in a progressive sense, it’s not that through this war you get a higher war or whatever, and I think that we should focus, that’s what I tried to do with my tiny big book of two pounds, less than nothing. For example I found a similar moment in Hegel’s theory of madness. He says the threat of madness is always here, it’s never aufgehoben in the sense of, you know, there is a moment of madness to become a rational being. Hegel has deeply in himself this idea that the threat of abstract negativity is never in a simple maybe pseudo-Hegelian sense aufgehoben in some final concrete unit. It stays there as an enabling ground. Now I’m not saying here with Alenka and my Slovene gang we are here like, the party hasn’t yet decided what is true, how to put it. Where do we exactly stand with Hegel here? But again, what I like to emphasize is this moment in Hegel which totally undermined the idea that Hegel meant by absolute knowing any type of, you know, end of history and so on. Like, what I like to mention is look at the introduction to his *Philosophy of History* where Hegel says something common-sensical very wise and accurate. When talking about Russia and United States he says we are not yet in a position to develop the notion of these countries, next century will be theirs. It’s not so stupid, no, in or when, to say
erupt, but not in any progressive sense. Wars are always the same. So we have here something that again shouldn’t have happened in Hegel, you know at the ultimate point, the end of history, war returns. War as abstract negativity, but again not in a progressive sense, it’s not that through this war you get a higher war or whatever, and I think that we should focus, that’s what I tried to do with my tiny big book of two pounds, less than nothing. For example I found a similar moment in Hegel’s theory of madness. He says the threat of madness is always here, it’s never aufgehoben in the sense of, you know, there is a moment of madness to become a rational being. Hegel has deeply in himself this idea that the threat of abstract negativity is never in a simple maybe pseudo-Hegelian sense aufgehoben in some final concrete unit. It stays there as an enabling ground. Now I’m not saying here with Alenka and my Slovene gang we are here like, the party hasn’t yet decided what is true, how to put it. Where do we exactly stand with Hegel here? But again, what I like to emphasize is this moment in Hegel which totally undermined the idea that Hegel meant by absolute knowing any type of, you know, end of history and so on. Like, what I like to mention is look at the introduction to his *Philosophy of History* where Hegel says something common-sensical very wise and accurate. When talking about Russia and United States he says we are not yet in a position to develop the notion of these countries, next century will be theirs. It’s not so stupid, no, in or when, to say
Slavoj Žižek
that the 20th century will be Russian and American. And or not to mention how many times if you look what
that the 20th century will be Russian and American. And or not to mention how many times if you look what
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for me is the summit of Hegelian system but you are not yet mature to accept it, you know Hegel is the thinker which has his side which is half dead like all that cultural analysis history, then the most lively Hegel is of course philosophy of nature and so on, no? And there, how often Hegel is relativ— he simply says we don’t yet know enough, we don’t yet know enough to develop this. Now I’m not trying to draw any big conclusion of this, just I see in this proofs that what Hegel meant as absolute knowing is what you Frank mentioned with this Entschluss and so on. It’s an existential position which has absolutely nothing
for me is the summit of Hegelian system but you are not yet mature to accept it, you know Hegel is the thinker which has his side which is half dead like all that cultural analysis history, then the most lively Hegel is of course philosophy of nature and so on, no? And there, how often Hegel is relativ— he simply says we don’t yet know enough, we don’t yet know enough to develop this. Now I’m not trying to draw any big conclusion of this, just I see in this proofs that what Hegel meant as absolute knowing is what you Frank mentioned with this Entschluss and so on. It’s an existential position which has absolutely nothing
Slavoj Žižek
to do with finally we reached absolute or whatever. I stop I talk too much. Okay let’s open it to the audience. I am myopic you will distribute you will give voice, yes. Well I want to ask you a question about the way you relate Badiou and Hegel in your corpus. He is the authority. Seriously, she wrote a wonderful text reading Badiou as Hegelian against his own, sorry go on. But in your interpretation, the Hegelian absolute is this non-evolutionary process of failed attempts at total self-identification. These attempts, whether we call them notions in the Hegelian sense or fantasies in the Lacanian sense, are self-related paradigms or frameworks. Yes what do you mean exactly? Yeah, but now if we agree that Badiou’s name for the absolute is event, then the question is there is no substantial relation or dialectics between events as as you know plural events in Badiou’s thought. And that’s precisely why Badiou can ignore political economy or even class struggle in his philosophy and in his politics. This is an interesting point, can you develop it minimally? I don’t get it, but I would like to believe you. I don’t get it, why because there is no relation between events you cannot get political economy. Yes because then class struggle you have to develop it you know in a sequence where there are no relations with events at all you know with plural events you know then you can’t really you can ignore you know that development some sort of political economy or theory of class struggle
to do with finally we reached absolute or whatever. I stop I talk too much. Okay let’s open it to the audience. I am myopic you will distribute you will give voice, yes. Well I want to ask you a question about the way you relate Badiou and Hegel in your corpus. He is the authority. Seriously, she wrote a wonderful text reading Badiou as Hegelian against his own, sorry go on. But in your interpretation, the Hegelian absolute is this non-evolutionary process of failed attempts at total self-identification. These attempts, whether we call them notions in the Hegelian sense or fantasies in the Lacanian sense, are self-related paradigms or frameworks. Yes what do you mean exactly? Yeah, but now if we agree that Badiou’s name for the absolute is event, then the question is there is no substantial relation or dialectics between events as as you know plural events in Badiou’s thought. And that’s precisely why Badiou can ignore political economy or even class struggle in his philosophy and in his politics. This is an interesting point, can you develop it minimally? I don’t get it, but I would like to believe you. I don’t get it, why because there is no relation between events you cannot get political economy. Yes because then class struggle you have to develop it you know in a sequence where there are no relations with events at all you know with plural events you know then you can’t really you can ignore you know that development some sort of political economy or theory of class struggle
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and still be some sort of communist. But my problem is that can you as a Hegelian Marxist like Badiou talk about absolute as subject but not as substance? Because maybe in your case the Hegelian formula must be reversed you know like in a way maybe we should say that absolute is not only a subject but also a substance. Do you
and still be some sort of communist. But my problem is that can you as a Hegelian Marxist like Badiou talk about absolute as subject but not as substance? Because maybe in your case the Hegelian formula must be reversed you know like in a way maybe we should say that absolute is not only a subject but also a substance. Do you
Slavoj Žižek
know who already proposed
know who already proposed
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this reversal, but I tend not to agree with him, Gadamer in his *Wahrheit und Methode*. He says that the task of hermeneutics is to turn around Hegel, to see subject as grounded in a substantial hermeneutic horizon and so on and so on. But you know maybe, okay again another nice question to answer it means another three hours talk. Just this, that maybe the key is again in what do we mean by the term absolute. Absolute for me is just absolute means a certain structure of self-referentiality, and it’s not absolute in any stupid sense of you know absolute— absolute is something that changes that can disappear whatever. But I would maybe put it in this way to give you a formula. When you talk about this constant process of subjectivation for instance in Lacan there is it’s true it’s not but there is a relation... This is a very tricky question because I think that you are obviously half at least a Lacanian. Then you must know, do you know a wonderful book by François Balmès, *Ce que Lacan dit de l’être*? Or Heidegger? Ce que Lacan did the latter. On the relationship between Heidegger and Lacan where he draws attention to how the term subjectivation is more of the early Lacan where subjectivation means subject through symbolic appropriation. But the true enigma is late Lacan’s notion of subject where surprisingly in his I think *Logique du fantasme* and so on, Lacan violently in a good sense returns to Cartesian cogito. In an explicit move, again Heidegger. Why why that? So again it all depends what do you mean what do you mean by subject. In this sense I’m tempted to remain Hegelian because substance is for me the full
this reversal, but I tend not to agree with him, Gadamer in his *Wahrheit und Methode*. He says that the task of hermeneutics is to turn around Hegel, to see subject as grounded in a substantial hermeneutic horizon and so on and so on. But you know maybe, okay again another nice question to answer it means another three hours talk. Just this, that maybe the key is again in what do we mean by the term absolute. Absolute for me is just absolute means a certain structure of self-referentiality, and it’s not absolute in any stupid sense of you know absolute— absolute is something that changes that can disappear whatever. But I would maybe put it in this way to give you a formula. When you talk about this constant process of subjectivation for instance in Lacan there is it’s true it’s not but there is a relation... This is a very tricky question because I think that you are obviously half at least a Lacanian. Then you must know, do you know a wonderful book by François Balmès, *Ce que Lacan dit de l’être*? Or Heidegger? Ce que Lacan did the latter. On the relationship between Heidegger and Lacan where he draws attention to how the term subjectivation is more of the early Lacan where subjectivation means subject through symbolic appropriation. But the true enigma is late Lacan’s notion of subject where surprisingly in his I think *Logique du fantasme* and so on, Lacan violently in a good sense returns to Cartesian cogito. In an explicit move, again Heidegger. Why why that? So again it all depends what do you mean what do you mean by subject. In this sense I’m tempted to remain Hegelian because substance is for me the full
Slavoj Žižek
consistent other. And the point is not to subjectivize substance in the sense of some absolute subject reappropriates substance but in the sense that the gap that separates the subject from substance is conceived as internal to substance itself. In this sense formal materialist I consider myself a Christian. In the sense that what happens in Christianity? You feel abandoned by God. The Christian solution is not oh pray a lot, squeeze your balls, torture yourself and God will take you back to him, but think about the moment of crucifixion. Exactly God himself was at the same position of abandonment than you are. So Christian solution is precisely when you feel radically abandoned by God. This separation from God is immanent to God himself. That was Christ on the cross and so on. In this sense I am for subjectivity, it has nothing to do with this and sorry maybe this is what Balmès hints why Lacan keeps the term subject. Maybe and Hegel knew this. We when we talk about subject we are too much part of this maybe even pseudo-Fichtean-Marxist where subjectivity means you know creativity productivity domination. For Lacan subject is at its most fundamental a passive position, a position even of an impotent observer. The fundamental attitude of subject is not an agent. You become a subject through experiencing failure. Yes but what I meant was that there is a relation between these attempts, these notions in Hegel there is some sort of a... This here you touch a big problem yeah events have you don’t have like a sequence of plural events you just have singular events you know I don’t know maybe I am mistaken but I don’t see... No no no this is a key problem maybe we should ask the master here because just to introduce you as an amusing element I once when Badiou talks about love no I once asked him a typical male chauvinist question. Okay but can I have at the same time... How come you did that? That’s amazing. No I mean I mean like like can I have multiple like I have an events with that woman in another city I have an event with and he said yes why not typically. He even said at some point but I am doing that. So let’s not go into that, we need you here to intervene comrade. Maybe just I mean as everything for Badiou an event is as soon as it becomes an event through the consequences a multiplicity. So every event, this is why in *Being and Event* says every event is the in-between of two events, every event is internally multiple. So I mean... Internally multiple? Yes, I mean you don’t have plural you know events... What do you mean by I mean this is why every event is universally and immanently related to other events. How? For example relate in an immanent way French Revolution to October Revolution. Is this part of the same historical what? No I mean she is completely correct in pointing out that he basically thinks they are let's put it like this singular isles of history with I mean worlds fully separated fully ruled by different transcendental but what is common to them is the very rupture that the event introduces like the clash within the each mundane civilization, this is what unites them like the instantiation of an exception that then is introduces consequences. This very moment of rupture is what relates them. Okay. and they are effervescent as he says they are they disappear. So to that extent... Yeah but I still have... Sorry we’re not discussing Badiou today we’re discussing Žižek. Badiou will be here in a few months you can you can come and ask Badiou himself. Badiou is part of me in a holistic unfortunately. Okay you can come and ask Badiou himself. So a few more people were interested. But he’s not he’s not Žižek’s Badiou’s agent you know he’s Žižek, okay so... No no I like to be Badiou’s agent. In this sense I can sell stuff I can hurt him. In the sense of secret agent you mean? Sorry? Secret agent. No I’m not secret agent public agent secret enemy I prefer that. Okay the gentleman please. Yeah, first of all I agree with the critique of postcolonial theory that you offer and regarding the more effective universalism that Indians are creating but the more effective universalism you talk about is is of the so-called subalterns which are Brahmin elites of India but you are assuming India as a singular entity. That’s possible. And history of this singular entity is less than years. Before that it is more than languages and many cultures and many religions much more variety than Europe which is a continent. Yeah. and they don’t consider it to be a subcontinent it’s a nation state which doesn’t make any sense. Now I I understand all that and I understand politics behind it and I understand and I agree with you on Ambedkar and everything. And we are also like I’m a Sikh we’re fighting against India and quite a lot of bloodshed we have been through. But I have a language and that language has potential to offer some kind of cultural and political space which we have successfully constructed in the past like in the first Sikh rule in Punjab. We were the first one in that region at least to snatch the land from the landlords and distribute in the cultivators. And regardless of their religion Muslim cultivators Sikh cultivators everybody. So if if I have to translate my language in Hegelian terms or in any other terms when I do not even relate with the Christian theme of death of God which in my understanding plays quite crucial role in the Hegelian dialectics and and throughout it never goes away right the whole thing. Why do I have to go through that? Like I don’t mind what you do in Slovenia or what the Germans do in Germany. My question is if the other languages have the potential to construct their own spaces and potentially they might be able to offer a different which I don’t call to be a discursive space maybe something non-discursive a different space a different model can the West ever allow that space or the wound has to be cured through this space? That’s my question. It’s a very good question I just put... I just made a very specific point which is that what but it's not a point that can be applied mechanically all around like I'm not saying for example today to the Chinese learn English or whatever and you will of course the only all I'm saying is how for example I don’t know about your specific situation but what interests me is that was the crucial moment of how what you fight when you fight colonization is usually an immanent reaction to colonization not in the sense that you become subservient to it whatever. But for example again I just ask you this again I repeat this naive point that I made. The India I’m not even saying I necessarily like it but the dream of the new India that they’re striving for today can you it’s for me okay I’ll put it I’ll put it like this. What surprises me again and again is
consistent other. And the point is not to subjectivize substance in the sense of some absolute subject reappropriates substance but in the sense that the gap that separates the subject from substance is conceived as internal to substance itself. In this sense formal materialist I consider myself a Christian. In the sense that what happens in Christianity? You feel abandoned by God. The Christian solution is not oh pray a lot, squeeze your balls, torture yourself and God will take you back to him, but think about the moment of crucifixion. Exactly God himself was at the same position of abandonment than you are. So Christian solution is precisely when you feel radically abandoned by God. This separation from God is immanent to God himself. That was Christ on the cross and so on. In this sense I am for subjectivity, it has nothing to do with this and sorry maybe this is what Balmès hints why Lacan keeps the term subject. Maybe and Hegel knew this. We when we talk about subject we are too much part of this maybe even pseudo-Fichtean-Marxist where subjectivity means you know creativity productivity domination. For Lacan subject is at its most fundamental a passive position, a position even of an impotent observer. The fundamental attitude of subject is not an agent. You become a subject through experiencing failure. Yes but what I meant was that there is a relation between these attempts, these notions in Hegel there is some sort of a... This here you touch a big problem yeah events have you don’t have like a sequence of plural events you just have singular events you know I don’t know maybe I am mistaken but I don’t see... No no no this is a key problem maybe we should ask the master here because just to introduce you as an amusing element I once when Badiou talks about love no I once asked him a typical male chauvinist question. Okay but can I have at the same time... How come you did that? That’s amazing. No I mean I mean like like can I have multiple like I have an events with that woman in another city I have an event with and he said yes why not typically. He even said at some point but I am doing that. So let’s not go into that, we need you here to intervene comrade. Maybe just I mean as everything for Badiou an event is as soon as it becomes an event through the consequences a multiplicity. So every event, this is why in *Being and Event* says every event is the in-between of two events, every event is internally multiple. So I mean... Internally multiple? Yes, I mean you don’t have plural you know events... What do you mean by I mean this is why every event is universally and immanently related to other events. How? For example relate in an immanent way French Revolution to October Revolution. Is this part of the same historical what? No I mean she is completely correct in pointing out that he basically thinks they are let's put it like this singular isles of history with I mean worlds fully separated fully ruled by different transcendental but what is common to them is the very rupture that the event introduces like the clash within the each mundane civilization, this is what unites them like the instantiation of an exception that then is introduces consequences. This very moment of rupture is what relates them. Okay. and they are effervescent as he says they are they disappear. So to that extent... Yeah but I still have... Sorry we’re not discussing Badiou today we’re discussing Žižek. Badiou will be here in a few months you can you can come and ask Badiou himself. Badiou is part of me in a holistic unfortunately. Okay you can come and ask Badiou himself. So a few more people were interested. But he’s not he’s not Žižek’s Badiou’s agent you know he’s Žižek, okay so... No no I like to be Badiou’s agent. In this sense I can sell stuff I can hurt him. In the sense of secret agent you mean? Sorry? Secret agent. No I’m not secret agent public agent secret enemy I prefer that. Okay the gentleman please. Yeah, first of all I agree with the critique of postcolonial theory that you offer and regarding the more effective universalism that Indians are creating but the more effective universalism you talk about is is of the so-called subalterns which are Brahmin elites of India but you are assuming India as a singular entity. That’s possible. And history of this singular entity is less than years. Before that it is more than languages and many cultures and many religions much more variety than Europe which is a continent. Yeah. and they don’t consider it to be a subcontinent it’s a nation state which doesn’t make any sense. Now I I understand all that and I understand politics behind it and I understand and I agree with you on Ambedkar and everything. And we are also like I’m a Sikh we’re fighting against India and quite a lot of bloodshed we have been through. But I have a language and that language has potential to offer some kind of cultural and political space which we have successfully constructed in the past like in the first Sikh rule in Punjab. We were the first one in that region at least to snatch the land from the landlords and distribute in the cultivators. And regardless of their religion Muslim cultivators Sikh cultivators everybody. So if if I have to translate my language in Hegelian terms or in any other terms when I do not even relate with the Christian theme of death of God which in my understanding plays quite crucial role in the Hegelian dialectics and and throughout it never goes away right the whole thing. Why do I have to go through that? Like I don’t mind what you do in Slovenia or what the Germans do in Germany. My question is if the other languages have the potential to construct their own spaces and potentially they might be able to offer a different which I don’t call to be a discursive space maybe something non-discursive a different space a different model can the West ever allow that space or the wound has to be cured through this space? That’s my question. It’s a very good question I just put... I just made a very specific point which is that what but it's not a point that can be applied mechanically all around like I'm not saying for example today to the Chinese learn English or whatever and you will of course the only all I'm saying is how for example I don’t know about your specific situation but what interests me is that was the crucial moment of how what you fight when you fight colonization is usually an immanent reaction to colonization not in the sense that you become subservient to it whatever. But for example again I just ask you this again I repeat this naive point that I made. The India I’m not even saying I necessarily like it but the dream of the new India that they’re striving for today can you it’s for me okay I’ll put it I’ll put it like this. What surprises me again and again is
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how true brutal economic imperialism
how true brutal economic imperialism
Slavoj Žižek
always needs authentic local cultures. That’s why I don’t
always needs authentic local cultures. That’s why I don’t
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like
like
Slavoj Žižek
this standard my enemy was this attitude of there is bad pseudo-universal imperialism and we can resist it through sticking to our
this standard my enemy was this attitude of there is bad pseudo-universal imperialism and we can resist it through sticking to our
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particular roots and so on. Maybe I’m especially sensitive to this coming from Europe. Because for example in France you have the so-called GRACE movement Alain de Benoist and so on who are precisely saying this they say we have nothing against multiculturalism we just want for the French the same rights to keep our culture and so on and so on and so on. What I want just to do is something very basic is to see when you experience something as a trauma dislocating you to see a chance of liberation in what appears as a trauma. So in order to answer you and then I
particular roots and so on. Maybe I’m especially sensitive to this coming from Europe. Because for example in France you have the so-called GRACE movement Alain de Benoist and so on who are precisely saying this they say we have nothing against multiculturalism we just want for the French the same rights to keep our culture and so on and so on and so on. What I want just to do is something very basic is to see when you experience something as a trauma dislocating you to see a chance of liberation in what appears as a trauma. So in order to answer you and then I
Slavoj Žižek
will stop fully, I don’t know enough about your Punjab society would have been but when you say you got rid of the law of the masters’ land and so on who were the masters? What was the inner tension of
will stop fully, I don’t know enough about your Punjab society would have been but when you say you got rid of the law of the masters’ land and so on who were the masters? What was the inner tension of
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your society? I don’t know enough about that you see. It was like we were not ruling the land Mughals were ruling Muslims were ruling. It was old feudal culture where one master owned like acres and cultivators work for them. When we started ruling in we snatched the land from all the feudal lords and distributed among the cultivators. And what happened then? Okay let’s not go into the no no but this is Indian history now very briefly. What happened then we were defeated again and things came to to the same place. You mean new masters took over no? No no we the Sikh rule ended in a few years and the Muslims started ruling again. Again we started ruling again we constructed that system. In there is no feudal lord my point was between and India
your society? I don’t know enough about that you see. It was like we were not ruling the land Mughals were ruling Muslims were ruling. It was old feudal culture where one master owned like acres and cultivators work for them. When we started ruling in we snatched the land from all the feudal lords and distributed among the cultivators. And what happened then? Okay let’s not go into the no no but this is Indian history now very briefly. What happened then we were defeated again and things came to to the same place. You mean new masters took over no? No no we the Sikh rule ended in a few years and the Muslims started ruling again. Again we started ruling again we constructed that system. In there is no feudal lord my point was between and India
Slavoj Žižek
killed more than of our people. We’re fighting against India. When you mention India I am I automatically become part of that so-called effective universalism that I have no reason to endorse to. My point is my language for me defines a cultural and political space. How do I realize that? No I will give you a very short answer now I got it. I was this is the point I don’t fully agree with she simplifies it very much with Susan Buck-Morss' *Hegel and Haiti*. But she says very nicely how within a nation those different religious blah minorities they are the site of universalism. I think that even if you experienced yourself fighting the Muslims you were not simply more
killed more than of our people. We’re fighting against India. When you mention India I am I automatically become part of that so-called effective universalism that I have no reason to endorse to. My point is my language for me defines a cultural and political space. How do I realize that? No I will give you a very short answer now I got it. I was this is the point I don’t fully agree with she simplifies it very much with Susan Buck-Morss' *Hegel and Haiti*. But she says very nicely how within a nation those different religious blah minorities they are the site of universalism. I think that even if you experienced yourself fighting the Muslims you were not simply more
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particular. By insisting of
particular. By insisting of
Slavoj Žižek
your on your particular identity getting the land you were the de facto the site of universalism there. Yeah and that is I think your correct position and I was a bit you know sort of surprised that you didn't give it any earlier. First the language and the culture can claim the position of the universal. Second in a particular situation like that but all over the world these are also the part of no part. So in that sense as a part of no part can claim again the position of the universal. So I think that in a sense your last part of your talk which did not link very well with the earlier, you know sort of has that problem that in a sense you kind of claim that English language or that kind of universalism is the only universalism that exists and to that extent can be co-opted to the Hegelian position. But this is absolutely not true I mean... No no no nonetheless wait a minute the problem is that today with global capitalism English language has a certain role which but another thing I want to make to confirm your point. For example for me one of the greatest historical tragedies and I’m not saying this because of that bullshit movie with Robert De Niro *The Mission* or whatever. I’m talking about the Jesuit Republic of Paraguay. Can you imagine what would have happened if Jesuits were to be allowed to rule in Paraguay? A wonderful thing. Do you know that already when they were ruling Paraguay they they were already establishing how is it called Guaraní or what the I don’t want to appear racist, okay the the local language aboriginal all terms that I use are racist but let's call it the native language. They were already printing books in them. That's my reproach to Chavez when he says oh gave the book to to to Obama blah blah blah but fuck it who is Chavez? He is Spanish he is speaking Spanish. The true heroes were the true universalists were Jesuits even if there were elements of religious terror but they were building Indians aboriginals as a nation printing their books and so on. And this is one of the most terrifying crimes where the same as you said you know when united Portugal from the North and Spain, Argentina from the South, Brazil without any reason at all they attacked massacring them all. Paraguay because precisely
your on your particular identity getting the land you were the de facto the site of universalism there. Yeah and that is I think your correct position and I was a bit you know sort of surprised that you didn't give it any earlier. First the language and the culture can claim the position of the universal. Second in a particular situation like that but all over the world these are also the part of no part. So in that sense as a part of no part can claim again the position of the universal. So I think that in a sense your last part of your talk which did not link very well with the earlier, you know sort of has that problem that in a sense you kind of claim that English language or that kind of universalism is the only universalism that exists and to that extent can be co-opted to the Hegelian position. But this is absolutely not true I mean... No no no nonetheless wait a minute the problem is that today with global capitalism English language has a certain role which but another thing I want to make to confirm your point. For example for me one of the greatest historical tragedies and I’m not saying this because of that bullshit movie with Robert De Niro *The Mission* or whatever. I’m talking about the Jesuit Republic of Paraguay. Can you imagine what would have happened if Jesuits were to be allowed to rule in Paraguay? A wonderful thing. Do you know that already when they were ruling Paraguay they they were already establishing how is it called Guaraní or what the I don’t want to appear racist, okay the the local language aboriginal all terms that I use are racist but let's call it the native language. They were already printing books in them. That's my reproach to Chavez when he says oh gave the book to to to Obama blah blah blah but fuck it who is Chavez? He is Spanish he is speaking Spanish. The true heroes were the true universalists were Jesuits even if there were elements of religious terror but they were building Indians aboriginals as a nation printing their books and so on. And this is one of the most terrifying crimes where the same as you said you know when united Portugal from the North and Spain, Argentina from the South, Brazil without any reason at all they attacked massacring them all. Paraguay because precisely
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Paraguay would have been something like your Punjab succeeding,
Paraguay would have been something like your Punjab succeeding,
Slavoj Žižek
you know their own language their own culture and so on so I totally agree here. Yes that was the site of universalism. Another Slovenian come on Alan yes. I just want to go back to question of nature. You were saying that nature gets its meaning only through our being here our presence on earth yeah. So nature or the ontic doesn’t have any meaning without our presence only through language does it gain meaning. So and then I got this association I was watching a documentary on Deleuze, *Abécédaire* where he talks about how
you know their own language their own culture and so on so I totally agree here. Yes that was the site of universalism. Another Slovenian come on Alan yes. I just want to go back to question of nature. You were saying that nature gets its meaning only through our being here our presence on earth yeah. So nature or the ontic doesn’t have any meaning without our presence only through language does it gain meaning. So and then I got this association I was watching a documentary on Deleuze, *Abécédaire* where he talks about how
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he is revolted of the human relationship with animals and that he the only relationship with animals that he praises is the animal relationship with with animals. But so if you can if you can relate to that I mean my question is how can we build like an ecological
he is revolted of the human relationship with animals and that he the only relationship with animals that he praises is the animal relationship with with animals. But so if you can if you can relate to that I mean my question is how can we build like an ecological
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consciousness or sensitivity
consciousness or sensitivity
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towards the ontic towards the animal the non-human being in nature or do we just I don’t know
towards the ontic towards the animal the non-human being in nature or do we just I don’t know
Slavoj Žižek
enjoy our lives and go on with our capitalist ways of relations and lifestyle and exploit I don’t know nature is only here for us to enjoy
enjoy our lives and go on with our capitalist ways of relations and lifestyle and exploit I don’t know nature is only here for us to enjoy
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it because
it because
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without us it doesn’t have any meaning anyway. There are many paradoxes in what you are saying. Okay again it’s my God it’s half an hour answer at least. What I would say is that the main trap to be avoided is to be it’s to be anthropocentric in the very self-debasement. For example what I see as the obvious paradox of so-called deep ecology is, you know how they like to say not only animals even trees even habitats have their rights. Yes but
without us it doesn’t have any meaning anyway. There are many paradoxes in what you are saying. Okay again it’s my God it’s half an hour answer at least. What I would say is that the main trap to be avoided is to be it’s to be anthropocentric in the very self-debasement. For example what I see as the obvious paradox of so-called deep ecology is, you know how they like to say not only animals even trees even habitats have their rights. Yes but
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fuck it they cannot talk about that. We humans are nonetheless presupposed as the only agent of universal rights of all others. This is a nice example of how even if so-called deep ecologists like to empirically ontically humiliate humanity we are just a sub-species here other again not only animals but trees, valleys, rocky mountains have their habitat rights, but nonetheless the only site of these rights are we humans. Or a counter-argument. If we just brutally exploit nature and so on. Well, in some
fuck it they cannot talk about that. We humans are nonetheless presupposed as the only agent of universal rights of all others. This is a nice example of how even if so-called deep ecologists like to empirically ontically humiliate humanity we are just a sub-species here other again not only animals but trees, valleys, rocky mountains have their habitat rights, but nonetheless the only site of these rights are we humans. Or a counter-argument. If we just brutally exploit nature and so on. Well, in some
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sense animals
sense animals
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are doing this let’s not idealize nature. Nature itself is full of catastrophes where one species
are doing this let’s not idealize nature. Nature itself is full of catastrophes where one species
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overexploited the habitats screwed it up ruined everything and so on and so on. So again my first condition of authentic radical ecology would have been to drop to attack not only the the the usual suspects you know technological imperialism we are exploiting nature and so on, but especially this false self-denigration and so on which still fully asserts human arrogance. For example of course I up to a point I agree even with Peter Singer’s position although if I ever saw you know evil gaze like gaze which can kill you is when I gave a talk at Princeton and I just grabbed a chicken sandwich and then Peter Singer observed me like how can you do that eat evil gaze killing. I buy that but what I’m saying is just there is a great danger of extremely arrogant anthropocentric projection there. For example Daniel Dennett who is not a complete idiot he often simplifies things but he gives interesting examples. Daniel Dennett mentioned somewhere that in a documentary or I don’t know where I think it is him in his *Freedom Evolves* book I’m not sure, how he saw two apes fighting and one ape tearing off two males fighting for a woman a testicle from another ape. And he said obviously there was a terrible cry of pain the animal was suffering terribly. But then he says minutes later the same animal was what it looked like gladly joyfully jumping around so fuck it maybe it wasn’t this you know what I mean? It’s very open and uncertain. While of course we shouldn’t be Cartesians and claim that when animals seems to cry is just some mechanical sounds, it’s it’s very it’s a really an open enigma. And this is how I also read Derrida. Derrida is not his *The Animal That Therefore I Am* is not a simple New Age you know ooh and then you end up with you end up like Prince Charles who I heard he is also talking to the trees and so on. I mean hugging the trees. Sorry? Hugging. Yeah hugging even I hope
overexploited the habitats screwed it up ruined everything and so on and so on. So again my first condition of authentic radical ecology would have been to drop to attack not only the the the usual suspects you know technological imperialism we are exploiting nature and so on, but especially this false self-denigration and so on which still fully asserts human arrogance. For example of course I up to a point I agree even with Peter Singer’s position although if I ever saw you know evil gaze like gaze which can kill you is when I gave a talk at Princeton and I just grabbed a chicken sandwich and then Peter Singer observed me like how can you do that eat evil gaze killing. I buy that but what I’m saying is just there is a great danger of extremely arrogant anthropocentric projection there. For example Daniel Dennett who is not a complete idiot he often simplifies things but he gives interesting examples. Daniel Dennett mentioned somewhere that in a documentary or I don’t know where I think it is him in his *Freedom Evolves* book I’m not sure, how he saw two apes fighting and one ape tearing off two males fighting for a woman a testicle from another ape. And he said obviously there was a terrible cry of pain the animal was suffering terribly. But then he says minutes later the same animal was what it looked like gladly joyfully jumping around so fuck it maybe it wasn’t this you know what I mean? It’s very open and uncertain. While of course we shouldn’t be Cartesians and claim that when animals seems to cry is just some mechanical sounds, it’s it’s very it’s a really an open enigma. And this is how I also read Derrida. Derrida is not his *The Animal That Therefore I Am* is not a simple New Age you know ooh and then you end up with you end up like Prince Charles who I heard he is also talking to the trees and so on. I mean hugging the trees. Sorry? Hugging. Yeah hugging even I hope
Paul Holdengräber
not going a step further and like okay whatever no. No but you see what I mean? I mean it’s I think here I agree with Badiou who said that ecology precisely because it is a real problem it’s also a terrifying crucial site of struggle for me. Ideological struggles are almost focused in in ecology today. Okay let
not going a step further and like okay whatever no. No but you see what I mean? I mean it’s I think here I agree with Badiou who said that ecology precisely because it is a real problem it’s also a terrifying crucial site of struggle for me. Ideological struggles are almost focused in in ecology today. Okay let
Slavoj Žižek
me take three questions perhaps together and then have a final... But there are four hands who is liquidated? We’ll take four okay. Okay the gentleman... My first question is uh piggybacks on the previous one and of course I agree with the critique of deep ecology but nonetheless you were going to talk about the limits of Hegel. Uh can Hegel think the the Anthropocene? So the last week as some of you might know the CO2 has reached parts per million so that’s as high you know whatever years so I say that again years so um the the development of spirit um see as you said it it's self-referential. But if we're if we're going to have a commonist eschatology does it make sense to think the Anthropocene as one what precisely triggers universalization? So universalization is that just a vector within the realm of of of ideas or is there not a trigger happening at the moment from you know I don’t like the word but nature. I see. Um yeah that’s just so question. Okay uh so my question is to do with uh language it’s to do with the English language um which um went to India and worked in India and returned from India. And uh on its return it brought features from the Indian uh form of life um such as the tag question at the end which forms um the end of a sentence like 'innit' um which causes horror to people like Peter Hitchens and uh Nigel Farage and so on. And so now they have this experience this is very dialectical where they say 'Oh we are being colonized we are being colonized' um by this returning experience. So my question is how can uh Nigel Farage take that experience and become Nigel X? Like... Excellent idea yes. I actually sort of have the flip side of that question which is I I agree with you that it’s completely philosophically sound about finding the universal between different forms of sort of oppression or however you want to put it the particular of the particular. But what I wonder is um what happens next? I mean I think the crucial question is I I think cricket is a really good example to think about this actually
me take three questions perhaps together and then have a final... But there are four hands who is liquidated? We’ll take four okay. Okay the gentleman... My first question is uh piggybacks on the previous one and of course I agree with the critique of deep ecology but nonetheless you were going to talk about the limits of Hegel. Uh can Hegel think the the Anthropocene? So the last week as some of you might know the CO2 has reached parts per million so that’s as high you know whatever years so I say that again years so um the the development of spirit um see as you said it it's self-referential. But if we're if we're going to have a commonist eschatology does it make sense to think the Anthropocene as one what precisely triggers universalization? So universalization is that just a vector within the realm of of of ideas or is there not a trigger happening at the moment from you know I don’t like the word but nature. I see. Um yeah that’s just so question. Okay uh so my question is to do with uh language it’s to do with the English language um which um went to India and worked in India and returned from India. And uh on its return it brought features from the Indian uh form of life um such as the tag question at the end which forms um the end of a sentence like 'innit' um which causes horror to people like Peter Hitchens and uh Nigel Farage and so on. And so now they have this experience this is very dialectical where they say 'Oh we are being colonized we are being colonized' um by this returning experience. So my question is how can uh Nigel Farage take that experience and become Nigel X? Like... Excellent idea yes. I actually sort of have the flip side of that question which is I I agree with you that it’s completely philosophically sound about finding the universal between different forms of sort of oppression or however you want to put it the particular of the particular. But what I wonder is um what happens next? I mean I think the crucial question is I I think cricket is a really good example to think about this actually
Paul Holdengräber
because you have this game that the British brought to India and to the Commonwealth and now the Commonwealth has totally kicked you know the ass of the English but yet it’s the site of India-Pakistan nationalism it’s how these two different groups are fighting each other. So how do
because you have this game that the British brought to India and to the Commonwealth and now the Commonwealth has totally kicked you know the ass of the English but yet it’s the site of India-Pakistan nationalism it’s how these two different groups are fighting each other. So how do
Slavoj Žižek
we what do we do next when when the two groups the particular
we what do we do next when when the two groups the particular
Paul Holdengräber
of the particular fight with each other? I mean what what’s the next step? Okay let us stop here for the first three and then we’ll take another
of the particular fight with each other? I mean what what’s the next step? Okay let us stop here for the first three and then we’ll take another
Slavoj Žižek
round. I will try to be as short as possible. First
round. I will try to be as short as possible. First
Paul Holdengräber
Anthropocene. Of
Anthropocene. Of
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course Hegel the way he wrote it wasn’t able to deal with it. It’s even clear as Fred Jameson noted that for example how Hegel how although Hegel wrote a lot reading Adam Smith about capitalism and so on but his notion of capitalism is still a pre-modern one, a little bit of division of labor. Hegel didn’t yet have the concept of a modern factory and so on. And the irony here is not that this is something that kind of eludes Hegel but that it’s Hegel didn’t see the
course Hegel the way he wrote it wasn’t able to deal with it. It’s even clear as Fred Jameson noted that for example how Hegel how although Hegel wrote a lot reading Adam Smith about capitalism and so on but his notion of capitalism is still a pre-modern one, a little bit of division of labor. Hegel didn’t yet have the concept of a modern factory and so on. And the irony here is not that this is something that kind of eludes Hegel but that it’s Hegel didn’t see the
Slavoj Žižek
very radically Hegelian dimension of what was emerging. And the greatness of Marx is that he discovered that modern capitalism is much more Hegelian than even Hegel thought. And in the same sense, I don’t think, I don’t see a big problem with Anthropocene. How is the guy called who developed the idea? Crutzen or something? No no but the one who wrote the book on the Ind— yeah. No no, what I mean is that you see it’s too easy I mean how do we read the idea of Anthropocene? It’s not enough
very radically Hegelian dimension of what was emerging. And the greatness of Marx is that he discovered that modern capitalism is much more Hegelian than even Hegel thought. And in the same sense, I don’t think, I don’t see a big problem with Anthropocene. How is the guy called who developed the idea? Crutzen or something? No no but the one who wrote the book on the Ind— yeah. No no, what I mean is that you see it’s too easy I mean how do we read the idea of Anthropocene? It’s not enough
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just to say thereby we are forced to take awareness of ourselves as one of the species on earth. Because precisely with Anthropocene we become the universal species. And not only in the philosophical sense that we have access to conceptual universality but in the quite literal sense that we become directly a geological factor and so on and so on. So again, the only thing I would say is that a Hegelian approach here would be maybe the most effective tool against different New Age temptations and so on that that dwell here. As to because all I can all I can tell you is that
just to say thereby we are forced to take awareness of ourselves as one of the species on earth. Because precisely with Anthropocene we become the universal species. And not only in the philosophical sense that we have access to conceptual universality but in the quite literal sense that we become directly a geological factor and so on and so on. So again, the only thing I would say is that a Hegelian approach here would be maybe the most effective tool against different New Age temptations and so on that that dwell here. As to because all I can all I can tell you is that
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in which city book of mine? I think it’s
in which city book of mine? I think it’s
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*Living in the End Times*. I did
*Living in the End Times*. I did
Slavoj Žižek
try to deal with precisely Anthropocene. I think it’s one of those cases where Hegel is literally needed to to clarify the situation. What you said about languages, it’s a wonderful point. The only thing I can add is that this particular of a particular, you know where I see true universality of languages? Not in some Esperanto stupidities or English as universal language, but when one language uses words which are used as borrowed from a foreign language but really nobody uses them in this sense in that other language, you know. Like so that as if modern French invented its own sub-English. From cinema theory I know what in English you call a tracking shot, in France they call traveling. But no one in English use you know, it’s as if they invented their own in and these are maybe the this particular of particular, you know where the French imagine their own English. The universalization for me would have been for the English to adopt this double falsification as their own as it were. And the philosophical example I usually give is that Derrida was in a way intelligent radical enough to do this. It’s clear that the American reading of Derrida was a misreading up to a point, simplified. But then at a certain point Derrida knowing that this was a misreading started almost, it’s not quite, to imitate his American imitators. That’s all his political ethical religious turn and look
try to deal with precisely Anthropocene. I think it’s one of those cases where Hegel is literally needed to to clarify the situation. What you said about languages, it’s a wonderful point. The only thing I can add is that this particular of a particular, you know where I see true universality of languages? Not in some Esperanto stupidities or English as universal language, but when one language uses words which are used as borrowed from a foreign language but really nobody uses them in this sense in that other language, you know. Like so that as if modern French invented its own sub-English. From cinema theory I know what in English you call a tracking shot, in France they call traveling. But no one in English use you know, it’s as if they invented their own in and these are maybe the this particular of particular, you know where the French imagine their own English. The universalization for me would have been for the English to adopt this double falsification as their own as it were. And the philosophical example I usually give is that Derrida was in a way intelligent radical enough to do this. It’s clear that the American reading of Derrida was a misreading up to a point, simplified. But then at a certain point Derrida knowing that this was a misreading started almost, it’s not quite, to imitate his American imitators. That’s all his political ethical religious turn and look
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what wonderful
what wonderful
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results we got. I mean, or again to go back to cinema theory. You know film noir, it’s clear that it’s a pseudo-notion. Stupid French didn’t know what happens in Hollywood they invented a term, which totally misrepresented Hollywood. But look what then happened. Hollywood itself took over this term and produced some good movies imitating a false image. And this is the big lesson of Hegel that I didn’t have time to develop. Hegel what Hegel praises is not only synthesis in the sense of this is one sided that is one sided. What Hegel knows is that the greatness of spirit is the power of abstraction. Everyone can say oh I’m a multiple person, I have this, I have that. But then the art of language is to say no, this is the main feature. It’s a symbolic, you know, the power of simplification. Which is why I advise you to read a wonderful book, Alexander Luria *Memoirs
results we got. I mean, or again to go back to cinema theory. You know film noir, it’s clear that it’s a pseudo-notion. Stupid French didn’t know what happens in Hollywood they invented a term, which totally misrepresented Hollywood. But look what then happened. Hollywood itself took over this term and produced some good movies imitating a false image. And this is the big lesson of Hegel that I didn’t have time to develop. Hegel what Hegel praises is not only synthesis in the sense of this is one sided that is one sided. What Hegel knows is that the greatness of spirit is the power of abstraction. Everyone can say oh I’m a multiple person, I have this, I have that. But then the art of language is to say no, this is the main feature. It’s a symbolic, you know, the power of simplification. Which is why I advise you to read a wonderful book, Alexander Luria *Memoirs
Slavoj Žižek
of a Mnemonist* or what. It’s a nice case from Stalinism, nothing to do with Stalinism, of a guy who had perfect memory. Like he could remember pages and the problem was because of this he was practically unable to think. Because being unable to forget he was not able to think conceptually, you know he knew too much. So it’s a beautiful Hegelian paradox. He had to develop special techniques not like medieval scholastic to remember but to forget, you know. He had to enumerate complex mechanism not to remember it all, to be able to approach thinking. And it’s typical Luria is an intelligent guy he had sympathy for psychoanalysis he develops the entire subjective attitude from this illness, how because of this remembering too much this guy was not able to do a performative act in the sense of now I decide this. He was in a permanent state of awaiting for some big event. It was never possible for the event to happen. Sorry the last one was cricket. Yes cricket is a cricket is a wonderful example and I like precisely your pessimistic conclusion. Yes I agree. It’s not that then we will have a paradise, then the real fight begins, you know. Although I must say that there is something even more ironic in cricket. It’s so beautiful that cricket emerged as the universal post-British Empire legacy and it’s universal. I remember before he got crazy, years ago, Robert Mugabe was asked: what is for you the most precious legacy of British colonization? He said cricket, of course. But what I like about cricket is that it’s the Britishness at its most ridiculous. First I’m stupid can you I don’t once I was sitting in Oxford and observed the game for five hours I didn’t understand anything. It’s I simply couldn’t connect the points. It’s one guy there with a strange feminized gesture throws a ball, some other guy starts to run there I never got the connection, you know. Somebody explained it to me that the only people who really understand cricket are from late 30s 1930s, you know when KGB ran Oxford. You have to be gay and a KGB agent, you know there is only way but you know what... It was Cambridge, it was Cambridge not Oxford. Yeah yeah, no, what I what I want to say is that I like this. This is for me how a totally ridiculous ambiguous game and connect me if I was wrong. Somebody told me that ridiculous way of throwing the ball came from the fact that originally it was women's game and that men had to imitate a certain... What I would like to hear, do you have it British? I love these stories of origins, you know how the origin of gold. Two Scottish shepherds walking with sticks, one of them by mistake kicks a stone falls into a hole and ah we invented golf or whatever, you know. I would like to hear the the origins of cricket in this. But in terms of cricket, I mean when you say
of a Mnemonist* or what. It’s a nice case from Stalinism, nothing to do with Stalinism, of a guy who had perfect memory. Like he could remember pages and the problem was because of this he was practically unable to think. Because being unable to forget he was not able to think conceptually, you know he knew too much. So it’s a beautiful Hegelian paradox. He had to develop special techniques not like medieval scholastic to remember but to forget, you know. He had to enumerate complex mechanism not to remember it all, to be able to approach thinking. And it’s typical Luria is an intelligent guy he had sympathy for psychoanalysis he develops the entire subjective attitude from this illness, how because of this remembering too much this guy was not able to do a performative act in the sense of now I decide this. He was in a permanent state of awaiting for some big event. It was never possible for the event to happen. Sorry the last one was cricket. Yes cricket is a cricket is a wonderful example and I like precisely your pessimistic conclusion. Yes I agree. It’s not that then we will have a paradise, then the real fight begins, you know. Although I must say that there is something even more ironic in cricket. It’s so beautiful that cricket emerged as the universal post-British Empire legacy and it’s universal. I remember before he got crazy, years ago, Robert Mugabe was asked: what is for you the most precious legacy of British colonization? He said cricket, of course. But what I like about cricket is that it’s the Britishness at its most ridiculous. First I’m stupid can you I don’t once I was sitting in Oxford and observed the game for five hours I didn’t understand anything. It’s I simply couldn’t connect the points. It’s one guy there with a strange feminized gesture throws a ball, some other guy starts to run there I never got the connection, you know. Somebody explained it to me that the only people who really understand cricket are from late 30s 1930s, you know when KGB ran Oxford. You have to be gay and a KGB agent, you know there is only way but you know what... It was Cambridge, it was Cambridge not Oxford. Yeah yeah, no, what I what I want to say is that I like this. This is for me how a totally ridiculous ambiguous game and connect me if I was wrong. Somebody told me that ridiculous way of throwing the ball came from the fact that originally it was women's game and that men had to imitate a certain... What I would like to hear, do you have it British? I love these stories of origins, you know how the origin of gold. Two Scottish shepherds walking with sticks, one of them by mistake kicks a stone falls into a hole and ah we invented golf or whatever, you know. I would like to hear the the origins of cricket in this. But in terms of cricket, I mean when you say
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that it is very characteristic of the British attitude
that it is very characteristic of the British attitude
Slavoj Žižek
or a conception of people about British attitude
or a conception of people about British attitude
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is that it is one of the very few games I suppose
is that it is one of the very few games I suppose
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baseball is a similar to that where you have always one person, yeah, one person confronting a whole team, So there is the batsman, it’s just him in total existential solitude, yeah, and guys around him trying to kill him. So that is you know very much the British individualist strategy. Yeah but is he is the one always alone or does everyone occupy that place in? Eventually everyone but at every one point in time diachronically, not synchronically, synchronically they align, but diachronically it is one against Now that is quite unique. In most games you have you know the same number of players from both on both sides, against or against Here you have But it’s still better than that pseudo-gay
baseball is a similar to that where you have always one person, yeah, one person confronting a whole team, So there is the batsman, it’s just him in total existential solitude, yeah, and guys around him trying to kill him. So that is you know very much the British individualist strategy. Yeah but is he is the one always alone or does everyone occupy that place in? Eventually everyone but at every one point in time diachronically, not synchronically, synchronically they align, but diachronically it is one against Now that is quite unique. In most games you have you know the same number of players from both on both sides, against or against Here you have But it’s still better than that pseudo-gay
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obscenity of baseball when one guy is down and then guys jump on him and I don’t want even to imagine what is happening. That’s not British what they’re doing. Okay let’s get the last round, please. Andrew’s there, I think the gentleman there and the gentleman at the back. Are you implying that Andrew is not a gentleman or what? No no he’s a gangster. Andrew’s gangster, gangster. My question is also about this idea that spirit is the wound of nature. And you know I was really struck by the passage from Aaron Schuster that you read because it sounded so
obscenity of baseball when one guy is down and then guys jump on him and I don’t want even to imagine what is happening. That’s not British what they’re doing. Okay let’s get the last round, please. Andrew’s there, I think the gentleman there and the gentleman at the back. Are you implying that Andrew is not a gentleman or what? No no he’s a gangster. Andrew’s gangster, gangster. My question is also about this idea that spirit is the wound of nature. And you know I was really struck by the passage from Aaron Schuster that you read because it sounded so
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Schopenhauerian, this idea
Schopenhauerian, this idea
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that optimism is the last refuge of pessimism in a certain way. And and then of course that made me think that that *Parsifal* is also very Schopenhauerian at that point for Wagner. So so there is this kind of subtext there and um it’s really the revolutionary Wagner of I think whom you would more you know look to as as
that optimism is the last refuge of pessimism in a certain way. And and then of course that made me think that that *Parsifal* is also very Schopenhauerian at that point for Wagner. So so there is this kind of subtext there and um it’s really the revolutionary Wagner of I think whom you would more you know look to as as
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as as a thinker here. And um and as a you know for for political inspiration. And with Schopenhauer we get an ethics of compassion as sort of the ultimate upshot of this separation from nature. And whereas you know I take it you want to advocate a politics of solidarity as opposed to that ethics of separation. So I’m wondering if there’s some way in which we can
as as a thinker here. And um and as a you know for for political inspiration. And with Schopenhauer we get an ethics of compassion as sort of the ultimate upshot of this separation from nature. And whereas you know I take it you want to advocate a politics of solidarity as opposed to that ethics of separation. So I’m wondering if there’s some way in which we can
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think
think
Slavoj Žižek
about an an ecology that would be based on a concept of solidarity rather than compassion where the the task would be as it were to look for the point of the universal struggle in in nature. Okay. Some of the liberal and postmodern critique of Hegel and Marxism somehow is that it’s a closed system uh and that totality means totalitarian. Yeah. and that therefore Hegel and Marx are Stalin and Stalin is Hegel and so on. Uh and their solution then is that everything is relative, we need individual contextuality and it ends up in a kind of very fragmented way of thinking uh in political reformism on the political level and so on. And uh my question is then for resisting this, wouldn’t it be the best thing to reload Hegel in such a way that the way we are doing philosophy uh is precisely like Hegel’s *Logic*, very systematic, yeah, very systematic totality where you have Sein logic, Wesens logic and Begriffs logic and each of these three logics again decomposes into three logics and so on that you have a constant dialectical movement of the of the Hegelian... Wouldn’t this be the the best way to do it? But now if I look at your talk that you were just giving, you are starting with a joke, then it’s about deadlocks and redoubling of impossibilities negation then you go to history, Heidegger, and nature, Gegenstoß, identity, India, colonialism, universalism. I got the point, yeah. Eggs and omelets. But isn’t this precisely this way of you’re doing philosophy, the way you’re presenting the way you’re writing books, isn’t this precisely a postmodern chaos of categories, references, stories, jokes that are not connected in such a dialectical logical way at the level of the logic of form of philosophy the way we are doing philosophy? So why do you preach a return and a reloading of Hegel but at your own level of the form of philosophy it’s completely postmodern and non-Hegelian so isn’t Žižek then in the end at the level of the of of the form of philosophy a postmodernist and a non-Hegelian? It’s a little bit like cooking the eggs and to find some ingredients somewhere and you make an omelet. Okay but he’s accusing you of performative contradiction over there. Yeah yeah okay, yes I understand the point. Yes. Okay and then the last one, okay you two both very short please so we can finish. Yes quickly. Very quickly. You you’re construal of the Hegelian paradigm seems to be still committed to a kind of triangulation. You’re just shifting the starting point. Instead of the positive and the immediate you start with the negative. Um and then you end up with authentic universality as your third term. Right is that what you really want? Because in in the latest book you’re you’re willing there to suggest even a fourth term and a fifth term. Um as as Hegel himself does stating and then maybe even a fifth term. So are you wanting are you committing yourself to a triangulation? Still point well. Okay. My final one. Uh um I have sort of a question about your materialist reversal of Marx. Um I mean you make two points over there which sort of tend in slightly different directions. One is that Marx in a sense misses the point of Hegel and conceives of alienation as a shell that can just be cast off and the other is that Marx is actually more Hegelian than Hegel at certain moments. Now I I mean I was wondering in this light how would you consider the early Marxist critique of Hegel because isn’t this precisely one of those moments when paradoxically he is being more Hegelian than Hegel. He’s accusing Hegel rightly or wrongly, quite possibly wrongly as you say, of confusing the contradictions of the idea with the contradictions in reality in the thing itself. Which as you I hope you know is a very interesting point deployed by Manfred Frank in his first book which is the only good book he wrote on Schelling, *Der unendliche Mangel an Sein*. Do you know that all but all means all early Marxist critique of Hegel is already found in late Schelling inclusive of of this apparently very materialist Marxist point that Hegel displaces actual antagonisms into merely conceptual contradictions. Please finish. Yeah I actually got that from your work not from Manfred Frank. Okay okay. But um but I mean so but um the terms in which Marx is critical of Hegel are in the sense also very reminiscent of the terms in which you’re critical of Marx, right? I mean that um Marx is um when you say that Marx misses the you know the whole point of alienation that he sees it as something that can just be cast aside you’re exactly saying that he’s missing the contradictions and the tensions within the thing which are constitutive of the thing. So okay. So I’m just yeah. Don’t go on. Maybe okay I will try to be as short as possible. Performative contradiction over there. No no I will leave that to the end maybe because it’s first this early Hegel. You know again these are excellent questions one needs time so very briefly. My general attitude is nonetheless that for me the early Marx critique of Hegel so-called *Philosophical-Economic Manuscripts*, *German Ideology* and so on is the worst you can imagine. This is Feuerbachian, even Robert Pippin is right in suggesting that there is when Marx speaks about positive essential *Wesenskräfte* powers, that this is basically a step back from subjectivity to some kind of substantial positive forces and so on. I think all these reversals that young Marx has you know like instead of subject being master of the object dominate sub— I I think that it’s only after the failure of revolution of when returning to read Hegel, only at that point Marx effectively got some type of understanding of Hegel. As to triangulation. Well I would say even if I speak about four or whatever. No I’m always suspicious of this moment
about an an ecology that would be based on a concept of solidarity rather than compassion where the the task would be as it were to look for the point of the universal struggle in in nature. Okay. Some of the liberal and postmodern critique of Hegel and Marxism somehow is that it’s a closed system uh and that totality means totalitarian. Yeah. and that therefore Hegel and Marx are Stalin and Stalin is Hegel and so on. Uh and their solution then is that everything is relative, we need individual contextuality and it ends up in a kind of very fragmented way of thinking uh in political reformism on the political level and so on. And uh my question is then for resisting this, wouldn’t it be the best thing to reload Hegel in such a way that the way we are doing philosophy uh is precisely like Hegel’s *Logic*, very systematic, yeah, very systematic totality where you have Sein logic, Wesens logic and Begriffs logic and each of these three logics again decomposes into three logics and so on that you have a constant dialectical movement of the of the Hegelian... Wouldn’t this be the the best way to do it? But now if I look at your talk that you were just giving, you are starting with a joke, then it’s about deadlocks and redoubling of impossibilities negation then you go to history, Heidegger, and nature, Gegenstoß, identity, India, colonialism, universalism. I got the point, yeah. Eggs and omelets. But isn’t this precisely this way of you’re doing philosophy, the way you’re presenting the way you’re writing books, isn’t this precisely a postmodern chaos of categories, references, stories, jokes that are not connected in such a dialectical logical way at the level of the logic of form of philosophy the way we are doing philosophy? So why do you preach a return and a reloading of Hegel but at your own level of the form of philosophy it’s completely postmodern and non-Hegelian so isn’t Žižek then in the end at the level of the of of the form of philosophy a postmodernist and a non-Hegelian? It’s a little bit like cooking the eggs and to find some ingredients somewhere and you make an omelet. Okay but he’s accusing you of performative contradiction over there. Yeah yeah okay, yes I understand the point. Yes. Okay and then the last one, okay you two both very short please so we can finish. Yes quickly. Very quickly. You you’re construal of the Hegelian paradigm seems to be still committed to a kind of triangulation. You’re just shifting the starting point. Instead of the positive and the immediate you start with the negative. Um and then you end up with authentic universality as your third term. Right is that what you really want? Because in in the latest book you’re you’re willing there to suggest even a fourth term and a fifth term. Um as as Hegel himself does stating and then maybe even a fifth term. So are you wanting are you committing yourself to a triangulation? Still point well. Okay. My final one. Uh um I have sort of a question about your materialist reversal of Marx. Um I mean you make two points over there which sort of tend in slightly different directions. One is that Marx in a sense misses the point of Hegel and conceives of alienation as a shell that can just be cast off and the other is that Marx is actually more Hegelian than Hegel at certain moments. Now I I mean I was wondering in this light how would you consider the early Marxist critique of Hegel because isn’t this precisely one of those moments when paradoxically he is being more Hegelian than Hegel. He’s accusing Hegel rightly or wrongly, quite possibly wrongly as you say, of confusing the contradictions of the idea with the contradictions in reality in the thing itself. Which as you I hope you know is a very interesting point deployed by Manfred Frank in his first book which is the only good book he wrote on Schelling, *Der unendliche Mangel an Sein*. Do you know that all but all means all early Marxist critique of Hegel is already found in late Schelling inclusive of of this apparently very materialist Marxist point that Hegel displaces actual antagonisms into merely conceptual contradictions. Please finish. Yeah I actually got that from your work not from Manfred Frank. Okay okay. But um but I mean so but um the terms in which Marx is critical of Hegel are in the sense also very reminiscent of the terms in which you’re critical of Marx, right? I mean that um Marx is um when you say that Marx misses the you know the whole point of alienation that he sees it as something that can just be cast aside you’re exactly saying that he’s missing the contradictions and the tensions within the thing which are constitutive of the thing. So okay. So I’m just yeah. Don’t go on. Maybe okay I will try to be as short as possible. Performative contradiction over there. No no I will leave that to the end maybe because it’s first this early Hegel. You know again these are excellent questions one needs time so very briefly. My general attitude is nonetheless that for me the early Marx critique of Hegel so-called *Philosophical-Economic Manuscripts*, *German Ideology* and so on is the worst you can imagine. This is Feuerbachian, even Robert Pippin is right in suggesting that there is when Marx speaks about positive essential *Wesenskräfte* powers, that this is basically a step back from subjectivity to some kind of substantial positive forces and so on. I think all these reversals that young Marx has you know like instead of subject being master of the object dominate sub— I I think that it’s only after the failure of revolution of when returning to read Hegel, only at that point Marx effectively got some type of understanding of Hegel. As to triangulation. Well I would say even if I speak about four or whatever. No I’m always suspicious of this moment
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of opening in the sense of we need more. For example I never got this critique this fear of binary logic. I think that I’m precisely if by binary logic you mean a basic opposition structuring antagonism, I’m totally for it. And as a Hegelian I claim precisely when you have an apparent plurality, oh it’s not just two it’s this this this, you should always look for the oppressed one which you know like if you have a versus A B C D and so on you should say A versus and then one of the others which condenses all the others and so on. It’s interesting
of opening in the sense of we need more. For example I never got this critique this fear of binary logic. I think that I’m precisely if by binary logic you mean a basic opposition structuring antagonism, I’m totally for it. And as a Hegelian I claim precisely when you have an apparent plurality, oh it’s not just two it’s this this this, you should always look for the oppressed one which you know like if you have a versus A B C D and so on you should say A versus and then one of the others which condenses all the others and so on. It’s interesting
Slavoj Žižek
how people usually evoke sexuality here’s like the
how people usually evoke sexuality here’s like the
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binary gender difference versus I don’t know some deconstructionist sexologists claim oh the great mistake of Freud was to claim there are only two sexes there are not only two sexes there are sexes or whatever. I mean
binary gender difference versus I don’t know some deconstructionist sexologists claim oh the great mistake of Freud was to claim there are only two sexes there are not only two sexes there are sexes or whatever. I mean
Slavoj Žižek
but again in a raw analogy with politics it’s the same as saying and this sounds then much more revisionist you know like there are not only two classes
but again in a raw analogy with politics it’s the same as saying and this sounds then much more revisionist you know like there are not only two classes
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class
class
Slavoj Žižek
struggle
struggle
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no there are classes
no there are classes
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and so on. I believe in a fundamental antagonism. The theoretical point not time to develop it now here is why to have an antagonism you need at least three. That is to say you have to have a couple and an excessive element which as it were embodies the deadlock of this couple. This is the authentic complication. Which is why one line I wanted to pursue is developed by our good friend from Ljubljana you couldn’t come here unfortunately Mladen Dolar he takes you remember that one of the most famous quotes from Kierkegaard that Kierkegaard quotes Danish humorist whatever who says that all of humanity can be subdivided in into all people all human persons into officers, housemaids and chimney-sweepers. Now it sounds crazy but you can immediately find a logic in it, it’s officers male principle, housewives feminine and chimney-sweeper the intrusive third element and so
and so on. I believe in a fundamental antagonism. The theoretical point not time to develop it now here is why to have an antagonism you need at least three. That is to say you have to have a couple and an excessive element which as it were embodies the deadlock of this couple. This is the authentic complication. Which is why one line I wanted to pursue is developed by our good friend from Ljubljana you couldn’t come here unfortunately Mladen Dolar he takes you remember that one of the most famous quotes from Kierkegaard that Kierkegaard quotes Danish humorist whatever who says that all of humanity can be subdivided in into all people all human persons into officers, housemaids and chimney-sweepers. Now it sounds crazy but you can immediately find a logic in it, it’s officers male principle, housewives feminine and chimney-sweeper the intrusive third element and so
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on so it’s not quite cont— and in this sense the couple fundamental antagonism has to appear
on so it’s not quite cont— and in this sense the couple fundamental antagonism has to appear
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like three. You never you have two classes and then at least rebel or whatever. But okay so in this sense I am for triangulation and if anything I would be tempted to say that it’s not even three it’s the repetition. That’s why I like Kierkegaard you know when Kierkegaard speaks about aesthetic, ethical, religious, it’s not really three it’s two you have the opposition of ethic and aesthetics and the moment ethical wins aesthetic returns as religious. In other words you never get synchronically the three, you get two and then at another level the two. What you said about Schopenhauer, *Parsifal* and so on I’m sorry again a mega question don’t have time to answer it properly. You I hope you know the story of *Parsifal*. The my dream is to restage *Parsifal* in a disgustingly if you know the story New Age Dan Brown style where in Act II you know where Kundry tries to seduce Parsifal, Parsifal says no and the the castle of Klingsor disappears then Parsifal in Act III that what if at the end of Act II Parsifal is seduced by Kundry, they to put it bluntly fuck like crazy and then in Act III Parsifal returns with Kundry to Montsalvat
like three. You never you have two classes and then at least rebel or whatever. But okay so in this sense I am for triangulation and if anything I would be tempted to say that it’s not even three it’s the repetition. That’s why I like Kierkegaard you know when Kierkegaard speaks about aesthetic, ethical, religious, it’s not really three it’s two you have the opposition of ethic and aesthetics and the moment ethical wins aesthetic returns as religious. In other words you never get synchronically the three, you get two and then at another level the two. What you said about Schopenhauer, *Parsifal* and so on I’m sorry again a mega question don’t have time to answer it properly. You I hope you know the story of *Parsifal*. The my dream is to restage *Parsifal* in a disgustingly if you know the story New Age Dan Brown style where in Act II you know where Kundry tries to seduce Parsifal, Parsifal says no and the the castle of Klingsor disappears then Parsifal in Act III that what if at the end of Act II Parsifal is seduced by Kundry, they to put it bluntly fuck like crazy and then in Act III Parsifal returns with Kundry to Montsalvat
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the castle and gives some kind of a Dan Brown *The
the castle and gives some kind of a Dan Brown *The
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Da Vinci Code*
Da Vinci Code*
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message, we put too much accent on the male principle we need Yin Yang, Kundry will rule with me and so on. The point is
message, we put too much accent on the male principle we need Yin Yang, Kundry will rule with me and so on. The point is
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not to celebrate it but to find it the most the the worst possible. I think that Syberberg was on the right track when he made it was a stroke of genius in his cinema version of *Parsifal* that at the moment of rejecting Kundry’s advances Parsifal young boy turns into a young woman. That we don’t need an external intervention of femininity at the very moment of rejecting woman’s advances Parsifal himself turns and so on. What about that Schopenhauerian what does it mean solidarity
not to celebrate it but to find it the most the the worst possible. I think that Syberberg was on the right track when he made it was a stroke of genius in his cinema version of *Parsifal* that at the moment of rejecting Kundry’s advances Parsifal young boy turns into a young woman. That we don’t need an external intervention of femininity at the very moment of rejecting woman’s advances Parsifal himself turns and so on. What about that Schopenhauerian what does it mean solidarity
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against compassion? I agree let me give you just one example that I like. The movie should be burned publicly I hate it, Terrence Malick’s *The Tree of Life*. But there is one wonderful line of dialogue towards the end when Brad Pitt the father tells the son like apologizing like sorry I was a bad father and so on and I think that the son there it’s not yet played by Sean Penn by the young guy provided a perfect answer to what it means in authentic Freud the resolution of Oedipus complex. He said don’t worry father we are solidarity because I am as bad as you I’m even worse than you you
against compassion? I agree let me give you just one example that I like. The movie should be burned publicly I hate it, Terrence Malick’s *The Tree of Life*. But there is one wonderful line of dialogue towards the end when Brad Pitt the father tells the son like apologizing like sorry I was a bad father and so on and I think that the son there it’s not yet played by Sean Penn by the young guy provided a perfect answer to what it means in authentic Freud the resolution of Oedipus complex. He said don’t worry father we are solidarity because I am as bad as you I’m even worse than you you
Slavoj Žižek
know. That Oedipal resolution is not you drop the father you adopt the idealist father but you of course every puberty adolescent guy knows his father is evil bad but then you know I can beat him I can be even more evil than my father. And that would be my notion of solidarity you know not oh ecological we are good and so on we are like that we humans are the
know. That Oedipal resolution is not you drop the father you adopt the idealist father but you of course every puberty adolescent guy knows his father is evil bad but then you know I can beat him I can be even more evil than my father. And that would be my notion of solidarity you know not oh ecological we are good and so on we are like that we humans are the
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meanest the meanest animal that that can be. We are animals like which is why I like you know there are wonderful books that I cannot advise to
meanest the meanest animal that that can be. We are animals like which is why I like you know there are wonderful books that I cannot advise to
Slavoj Žižek
you but to buy them. There is a short book called *Politically Correct Version of the Bible* where you have maybe you know it paraphrase of you know this best known one of the biggest hits of the Bible you know although I walk in the valley of tears no or shadow whatever tears yes tears I I I fear no evil and so on. Now what is this and so on? First you have the Judith Butler version I like it against this making fun of this binary logic no although I walk in the valley of tears I feel no fear no evil because I know that good and evil are just metaphysical binary opposites no this is Judith Butler. But then Tom Mitchell told me a wonderful black version from from from Chicago ghetto: "Although I walk in the valley of tears I fear no evil because I’m the meanest motherfucker in the entire valley," you know like this would be my solidarity with them I’m the meanest one here. And yes the Stalinism totality. You know not to lose time but I’m quite serious in what will say are you aware that the way you described me jumping here and there not mentioning obscene jokes is the way *Phenomenology of Spirit* was critically described when it appeared. That this is the standard complaint: whatever stupid book is this French Revolution, this that, perception and so on? So I wouldn’t buy so much the idea isn’t all this systematic aspect of Hegel more secondary *Bearbeitung* as they would say, secondary *Bearbeitung* of a much in other words I claim that Hegel is not simply this system— sorry? It means then that the logic is not important and only the phenomenology is? No no no it means that *Logic* is a much more crazy book than it may appear that it’s really a series of failures you know like we try this it fails let’s try something else it’s a which is why also as you probably know and I did study it, if you go no here I must disappoint you if I were to choose at a gun point you know like this is the only serious problem for rational Christian people which is the greatest book of all times, *Phenomenology* or *Logic*, no? At a gun point I would have chosen *Logic* nonetheless. And it’s so clear how often Hegel cheats and improvises there we can get a hint of this of the changes that he envisaged I think if you compare the different versions, no? Ency— Great Logic, Encyclopedia, then a very interesting version of Logic, my God Hegel this is for me the craziest moment of Hegel. You remember that when he was a professor at a high school he gave a high school course for pure what did they get from it you know like and treating Logic exactly the way you describe it you know as some kind of a cold system to be explained to young men of being nothing becoming or whatever no. I again I think that it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s never you know this idea of especially late Hegel as this that’s the usual idea this young Hegel and still *Phenomenology* is still a living thought while the late Hegel is some kind of a dead systematizer. If anything and some French guys I forgot their name emphasize this I think the time is to stop the same as with Marx this celebration of lively existential young Hegel and to start to say Berlin Hegel is our Hegel. Okay that’s wonderful. Now lots of people have asked me about this business that was published recently in the *Observer* newspaper that the Royal Opera House Covent Garden has commissioned four operas on your work. Can you explain to us what is happening is it *Parsifal* going to be one of those? No it’s nothing it’s nothing. It is just that I like Kasper Holten because he did... The director of the of Covent Garden. Yeah and he is a snob like me you know a radical leftist and then I ask him what was the most pleasant moment when you staged *The Ring*? He told me when the Queen of Denmark visited me and haha like all true leftists are like this you know but seriously no. So what what is the story? The story is just this he got some money and wants to spend it on new operas and it’s pure exploitation he just wants my name to add some intellectual charisma to him. It means ab— he made it pretty clear and that’s what I like that nothing serious he wants from me nothing. What about the *Antigone*? I thought we were going to do the *Antigone* together. That's what I tried to bribe him with but he basically said fuck off no. No he said a very interesting idea but you know like okay not now you know forget about it. So I’m still looking for someone to do my triple my triple *Antigone* or to do this new versions of *Parsifal* because you know Alain Badiou he his dream is to stage Alain Badiou has two dreams now. One is as we all know to do a film on Plato. But you know what kind of film? First I thought some shitty Godard style you know just no no big Hollywood production. Brad Pitt should be young Plato. Young Aristotle who is bad guy should be played by Tom Cruise but the one from *Magnolia*, you know that disgusting character. Penélope Cruz should be Plato’s wife and Badiou himself should be the old Parmenides the teacher the great one. And first I thought he is joking and then it took me half a year to get it that he means absolutely seriously. I learned he already contacted friends in Hollywood if they can... so this is why his second dream most serious is to stage a communist version of *Parsifal*. The idea is when Parsifal said *enthüllt den Gral*, disclose the grail, it’s red flag which is this no. That would be maybe my true dream no? Okay thank you we’re going to see it come but if you want to get a good Kasper Holten you can get it now
you but to buy them. There is a short book called *Politically Correct Version of the Bible* where you have maybe you know it paraphrase of you know this best known one of the biggest hits of the Bible you know although I walk in the valley of tears no or shadow whatever tears yes tears I I I fear no evil and so on. Now what is this and so on? First you have the Judith Butler version I like it against this making fun of this binary logic no although I walk in the valley of tears I feel no fear no evil because I know that good and evil are just metaphysical binary opposites no this is Judith Butler. But then Tom Mitchell told me a wonderful black version from from from Chicago ghetto: "Although I walk in the valley of tears I fear no evil because I’m the meanest motherfucker in the entire valley," you know like this would be my solidarity with them I’m the meanest one here. And yes the Stalinism totality. You know not to lose time but I’m quite serious in what will say are you aware that the way you described me jumping here and there not mentioning obscene jokes is the way *Phenomenology of Spirit* was critically described when it appeared. That this is the standard complaint: whatever stupid book is this French Revolution, this that, perception and so on? So I wouldn’t buy so much the idea isn’t all this systematic aspect of Hegel more secondary *Bearbeitung* as they would say, secondary *Bearbeitung* of a much in other words I claim that Hegel is not simply this system— sorry? It means then that the logic is not important and only the phenomenology is? No no no it means that *Logic* is a much more crazy book than it may appear that it’s really a series of failures you know like we try this it fails let’s try something else it’s a which is why also as you probably know and I did study it, if you go no here I must disappoint you if I were to choose at a gun point you know like this is the only serious problem for rational Christian people which is the greatest book of all times, *Phenomenology* or *Logic*, no? At a gun point I would have chosen *Logic* nonetheless. And it’s so clear how often Hegel cheats and improvises there we can get a hint of this of the changes that he envisaged I think if you compare the different versions, no? Ency— Great Logic, Encyclopedia, then a very interesting version of Logic, my God Hegel this is for me the craziest moment of Hegel. You remember that when he was a professor at a high school he gave a high school course for pure what did they get from it you know like and treating Logic exactly the way you describe it you know as some kind of a cold system to be explained to young men of being nothing becoming or whatever no. I again I think that it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s never you know this idea of especially late Hegel as this that’s the usual idea this young Hegel and still *Phenomenology* is still a living thought while the late Hegel is some kind of a dead systematizer. If anything and some French guys I forgot their name emphasize this I think the time is to stop the same as with Marx this celebration of lively existential young Hegel and to start to say Berlin Hegel is our Hegel. Okay that’s wonderful. Now lots of people have asked me about this business that was published recently in the *Observer* newspaper that the Royal Opera House Covent Garden has commissioned four operas on your work. Can you explain to us what is happening is it *Parsifal* going to be one of those? No it’s nothing it’s nothing. It is just that I like Kasper Holten because he did... The director of the of Covent Garden. Yeah and he is a snob like me you know a radical leftist and then I ask him what was the most pleasant moment when you staged *The Ring*? He told me when the Queen of Denmark visited me and haha like all true leftists are like this you know but seriously no. So what what is the story? The story is just this he got some money and wants to spend it on new operas and it’s pure exploitation he just wants my name to add some intellectual charisma to him. It means ab— he made it pretty clear and that’s what I like that nothing serious he wants from me nothing. What about the *Antigone*? I thought we were going to do the *Antigone* together. That's what I tried to bribe him with but he basically said fuck off no. No he said a very interesting idea but you know like okay not now you know forget about it. So I’m still looking for someone to do my triple my triple *Antigone* or to do this new versions of *Parsifal* because you know Alain Badiou he his dream is to stage Alain Badiou has two dreams now. One is as we all know to do a film on Plato. But you know what kind of film? First I thought some shitty Godard style you know just no no big Hollywood production. Brad Pitt should be young Plato. Young Aristotle who is bad guy should be played by Tom Cruise but the one from *Magnolia*, you know that disgusting character. Penélope Cruz should be Plato’s wife and Badiou himself should be the old Parmenides the teacher the great one. And first I thought he is joking and then it took me half a year to get it that he means absolutely seriously. I learned he already contacted friends in Hollywood if they can... so this is why his second dream most serious is to stage a communist version of *Parsifal*. The idea is when Parsifal said *enthüllt den Gral*, disclose the grail, it’s red flag which is this no. That would be maybe my true dream no? Okay thank you we’re going to see it come but if you want to get a good Kasper Holten you can get it now
unknown
on DVD I think it’s not a entirely a success but it works a
on DVD I think it’s not a entirely a success but it works a
Slavoj Žižek
shortened version of *Don Giovanni* set in today’s London. It works. It’s interesting I’m not saying it’s a great thing but it’s like what I like is this contemporary *Don Giovanni* when when Don Giovanni seduces Zerlina, my God you see him and her naked you know like is the thing itself not fat opera singers singing and so on no. Okay thank you very much great thank you. Okay Mr. Žižek thank you very much.
shortened version of *Don Giovanni* set in today’s London. It works. It’s interesting I’m not saying it’s a great thing but it’s like what I like is this contemporary *Don Giovanni* when when Don Giovanni seduces Zerlina, my God you see him and her naked you know like is the thing itself not fat opera singers singing and so on no. Okay thank you very much great thank you. Okay Mr. Žižek thank you very much.