The Animal Doesn’t Exist
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2011-12-16 · 1:57:52 · 15,503 words
psychoanalysishegel-dialecticsphilosophy-generalideologyscience-physicssubjectivityconsciousness-mindlanguagereligion-theologyhistoryliberalism-political-correctnessecology-climate
Žižek delivers a lecture titled 'The Animal Does Not Exist' at a Human-Animal Workshop, arguing that the standard philosophical opposition between human and animal is ideologically constructed: our image of animals as naive, world-poor, speech-less creatures is a retroactive projection symmetrical to the Western projection of primitive naivety onto non-European peoples. Taking Derrida's 'The Animal That Therefore I Am' as a starting point, he argues that 'the animal' as universal category has no referent, the one being that actually embodies 'the animal as such' is the human, as a Gattungswesen (species-being) that relates to itself as universal. The lecture develops a Lacanian-Freudian counter-thesis: what distinguishes humans is not rational speech but the Freudian drive, a pathological fixation on impossibility that precedes and disturbs both animal instinct and cultural symbolization. In the Q&A, Žižek extends these points into a sustained debate with Badiou's duality of human-animal versus subject of the event, arguing that the Freudian drive names a necessary third term, neither animal life nor fully constituted subjectivity, and criticizing Badiou's ontology as too flat to account for genuine antagonism.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 18
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Lacan's formula that 'there is no sexual relationship', cited here as one of the standard human/animal distinctions (only humans lack a harmonious instinctual mating) that Derrida's questioning puts under pressure.
Žižek's backhanded praise for what Derrida does at his best: asking naive questions that undermine centuries-old philosophical propositions taken for granted (such as the claim that animals cannot feign to feign).
Heidegger's term for the animal's mode of being: 'world-poor', captivated in a narrow life-world, a characterization Žižek critiques as a retroactive projection from the human standpoint.
Every theory that presents itself as a radical break retroactively reduces all that came before to a single defining feature it then overcomes, a necessary but violent ideological operation.
Marx's 'species-being', reread by Žižek not as humans being one species among others but as the species that relates to itself as universal, making humans 'the animal' par excellence.
The universal category 'the animal' has no real correspondent in particular animals; its only actual incarnation is the human being, who as non-animal among animals IS 'the animal' for others.
as “pas-tout (non-all)”
Lacanian feminine logic of sexuation: a universality that cannot be totalized through exception, here applied by Alenka Zupančič to read Meillassoux's radical contingency more provocatively than his own masculine-logic reading.
as “fossils as ideology”
Philip Gosse's creationist claim that God created fossils ready-made to give the impression of deep history is read by Žižek as a perfect model of how ideology operates: inserting 'pre-existing' traces to constitute a retroactive past.
Ernst Renan's definition of nation, lies about the past, shared enemies in the present, illusions about the future, cited approvingly as a model of retroactive ideological construction of collective identity.
Lacan's 'object small a', the impossible objectal equivalent of the subject, invoked as the Lacanian answer to Meillassoux: the true fossil is not life before humans but the subject's own being-in-itself.
as “wild freedom / Unruliness”
Kant's notion (in the text on education) of a noumenal wildness in humans, not animal nature and not yet culture, that has to be cultivated by a master: Žižek equates this with the Freudian drive.
as “Freudian drive (Trieb)”
The drive is what is no longer animal instinct but not yet culture/symbolic order; it is a pathological fixation on an impossibility, you fail to reach the object but compulsively repeat the attempt.
as “integration of impossibility”
What distinguishes a new historical formation is not what it can do but the changed status of what it cannot do: democracy integrates the empty throne, capitalism integrates permanent self-revolutionizing, humans integrate the fixation on an unresolvable deadlock.
The evolutionary biologists' metaphor for human intelligence: where the animal's secondary reactive loop folds back on itself as self-stimulation, generating the compulsive circular structure Žižek equates with the drive.
as “ontological non-all”
Reality itself is not fully ontologically constituted, drawing on quantum physics, Žižek argues virtuality and void are features of being itself, not only of human symbolic projection.
Žižek's charge that Badiou covertly reproduces the Kantian duality of finitude and freedom: if the event is 'nothing but a fragment of being' yet cannot be reduced to being, the only consistent explanation is the subject's finitude, which Badiou officially rejects.
In Badiou's usage, ordinary humans caught in utilitarian satisfaction of needs; Žižek argues this is a secondary ideological formation, there is no 'human animal' at the foundational level, since humans structurally sabotage their own well-being.
as “decaffeinated other”
The left-liberal idealization of indigenous or ethnic others as organic and holistic, which strips them of their real antagonism and brutality, the most violently reductive form of anthropomorphism disguised as respect.
Stories he reaches for 7
A Native American man in Missoula, Montana told Žižek he prefers 'Indian' over 'Native American' because 'at least that is a monument to white man's stupidity', and proceeded to demolish the left-liberal image of indigenous people as ecologically holistic, saying they burned more forests and killed more buffalo than any white person.
“I much prefer to be called Indians because in this way my name is at least a monument to white man's stupidity”
In Tom and Jerry cartoons, when Tom's skin is torn away a human body in shorts is revealed beneath. Žižek reads this as deep ideological truth: cartoon animals are basically humans dressed as animals, the human is the universal template.
“in cartoons animals are basically humans dressed up as animals.”
At his coronation Napoleon took the crown from the Pope and placed it on his own head. The Pope, understanding the act, told Napoleon he knew he wanted to destroy Christianity, suggesting that Christianity as an institution is a struggle against its own excess.
“the whole of Christianity as institution is a struggle not against the pagan tradition, but against its own excess.”
Victorian naturalist Philip Gosse proposed that God created the world a few thousand years ago but pre-inserted fossils to give the impression of an ancient history, wrong as science but a perfect model of ideological retroactive construction.
“God created the world years whatever BC, but he created directly fossils as such to give us humans the wrong impression of openness.”
Žižek quotes G.K. Chesterton's 'The Everlasting Man' at length: man is a stranger on the earth, shaken with laughter, unable to trust his instincts, wrapped in artificial bandages (clothes), propped on artificial crutches (furniture), illustrating the drive as constitutive dysfunction.
“Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter, as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.”
Anthropologists trek to a feared New Guinea tribe to see their death-mask dance. The tribe, wanting to be polite, spends the night making masks to perform the dance the visitors expected, they were not performing their own ritual but staging a spectacle for the anthropologist's gaze.
“the whole night they were preparing these masks to satisfy them in the morning. So again it was already staged for their own eyes.”
Eric Hobsbawm's 'Invention of Tradition' shows that most national traditions celebrated as ancient were invented in the late 19th century, kilts being a prime example, confirming that national identity is built on ideological fossils.
“most of the traditions that we celebrate as blah blah were invented, invented usually late 19th century”
Works invoked 17
Capital book
The first-edition passage on money as 'the animal', dropped from subsequent editions, is central to Žižek's argument that 'the animal' as universal category is structurally analogous to money as general equivalent.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's forthcoming (at time of talk) 1,200-page book on Hegel, mentioned in passing by the chair during introduction.
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book, mentioned as containing a long chapter debating evolutionary biology and developing the argument he is presenting here.
Logic of Sense book
Deleuze's text is cited for its formulation that the human universe is characterized by a structural lack (empty space) and an excess (object with no place), which are strictly correlative, the parallax of lack and surplus.
Being and Event book
Badiou's major ontological work; Žižek criticizes its mathematicized ontology as 'too flat', lacking inherent antagonism, and secretly reproducing Kantian finitude/freedom duality.
Logics of Worlds book
Badiou promises to work out the passage from pure multiplicity to the structure of worlds, but Žižek claims 'there is absolutely no passage whatsoever' between the mathematicized infinity and different worlds.
The Trial book
Kafka's parable 'Before the Law' and its final line ('this door was here only for you') is used to illustrate how every ideological construct implies the gaze that will perceive it.
After Finitude book
Meillassoux's work on radical contingency and ancestrality is taken seriously but answered: the 'true fossil' problem concerns the human subject itself, not pre-human life.
Paul Veyne's book is cited repeatedly ('I quote all the time') to establish that ancient peoples had a reflexive, mediated relationship to their myths, neither literal belief nor modern ironic distance.
The cartoon is cited as revealing a 'deep truth': when Tom's skin is torn away a human body in shorts is revealed beneath, confirming that cartoon animals are humans dressed as animals.
Hobsbawm's edited volume showing that most national traditions were invented in the 19th century; used to illustrate ideological retroactive construction of the past.
The Everlasting Man book
Chesterton's 'wonderful dialectical text'; quoted at length on the strangeness of man as stranger on the earth, wrapped in artificial bandages, shaken with laughter, to illustrate the drive as constitutive dysfunction.
Julian Jaynes's cult classic; Žižek says it 'didn't give him a multiple orgasm' and was immediately co-opted by New Agers, though the hypothesis about ancient Greeks literally hallucinating divine voices is noted as proposing a third option beyond belief/irony.
Derrida's work is the direct starting point; Žižek endorses its questioning tendency ('the best of the common sense of deconstruction') while going beyond it.
Freedom Evolves book
Dennett's book is criticized for ultimately reducing freedom to following predispositions without obstacles, which is not genuine freedom.
Heidegger's 1929-30 seminar on the triad of world-less stone, world-poor animal, world-forming human; Žižek is critical of its uncritical projection of human standards onto animal life.
Theoretical Writings book
Badiou's collection; Žižek quotes the passage where Badiou says 'an event is nothing but a fragment of being' in order to charge him with secret Kantianism.
People invoked 27
Philip Gosse positive
Victorian naturalist and friend of Darwin who proposed that God created fossils to give the impression of deep time; Žižek calls this wrong as science but 'absolutely true as a theory of ideology'.
Thomas Jefferson positive
Quoted for 'the tree of freedom has to be watered with blood from time to time' as a model for internalizing Hegel's argument about the necessity of negativity, preferring inner destabilization to external war.
Alenka Zupančič positive
A close colleague whose work on the Lacanian drive and on Meillassoux (applying feminine logic of sexuation to radical contingency) Žižek endorses and presents in her absence, adding a personal joke about her spine operation.
Umberto Eco positive
Cited for the observation that postmodern reflexivity makes it impossible to say 'I love you' directly, one must qualify it ('as a poet would have put it').
Jacques Derrida positive
Žižek credits Derrida's 'The Animal That Therefore I Am' with showing 'the common sense of deconstruction' at its best, asking naive questions that undermine centuries of philosophical assumption about the human/animal divide. He is critical of deconstructionism's excessive quotation marks and qualifications but acknowledges Derrida got the questioning right.
Ernest Renan positive
Called 'a dirty racist' but credited with providing the best definition of what a nation is: shared lies about the past, common enemies in the present, illusions about the future.
Jacques Lacan positive
Repeatedly cited as providing the key framework, object a, sexual non-relation, feigning to feign, pas-tout, while Žižek notes Lacan himself oscillated between a simplistic and a more interesting theory of the animal, eventually problematizing his own standard distinctions via dolphins.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Cited as a 'really good Darwinian' who undermines the vulgar naturalist idea of nature as homeostasis; Gould also wrote about Philip Gosse's fossil theory.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Called 'my favorite Catholic philosopher'; Žižek extensively quotes 'The Everlasting Man' on the strangeness of man among animals, using it to illustrate the drive as constitutive dysfunction.
Louis Althusser positive
An early Althusser text is cited in which he distinguished ideological subject, scientific subject, etc. before collapsing all subjectivity into the ideological; Žižek uses this to illustrate the problem of where to locate the void in relation to the subject.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited alongside Lacan as someone who, unlike Derrida or Marx or Heidegger, resists retroactive totalization of the history of philosophy. Also his 'Logic of Sense' formulation of lack and excess as strictly correlative is endorsed.
Steven Pinker negative
Called 'an idiot' with no concession: his evolutionary explanation of why we cannot understand our own minds (brains weren't designed for metaphysics) fails because it cannot explain why humans are obsessively preoccupied with problems that have no adaptive value.
Daniel Dennett negative
Not dismissed as an idiot (unlike Pinker) and credited with some good examples, but criticized for ultimately denying freedom, in 'Freedom Evolves', freedom is reduced to following one's predispositions without obstacles.
Judith Butler negative
Called a 'theoretical enemy' (while a personal friend); mocked for her excessive use of qualifications and quotation marks as exemplifying the naivety of radical deconstructionism, unable to simply say 'this is a glass of water'.
Bruno Bosteels negative
Mentioned briefly in the Q&A as having a 'more radical solution' that Žižek rejects: Bosteels' claim that even anxiety/terror requires a prior 'perspective of the event' (its shadow).
Alain Badiou negative
Žižek has an extended polemic against Badiou's duality of human-animal versus subject-of-event: the duality is insufficient, the ontology too flat, it harbors a secret Kantianism, and it lacks a place for the Freudian drive as a third term between animal and subject.
Eric Hobsbawm positive
Editor of 'The Invention of Tradition', cited to show that most national traditions are 19th-century inventions, confirming the ideological construction of national identity.
Mentioned briefly as a representative of 'aggressive bourgeois liberal materialism' whose association with anti-religious critique has made it politically incorrect in UK left circles to identify as a materialist.
Martin Heidegger negative
Cited extensively for the weltarm/weltlos/Welt triad and the lizard example; Žižek is critical of Heidegger's uncritical embrace of the German philosophical-anthropological tradition in characterizing animals as 'world-poor', but notes a brief interesting regression toward Schellingian romantic philosophy of nature.
Grouped with Dawkins as representatives of bourgeois liberal materialism whose public atheism has complicated left-wing materialism.
Cited via Heidegger quoting Schelling on 'the melancholy of all living beings', the Gnostic/romantic notion that pre-human nature strives for liberation through human speech.
Quentin Meillassoux negative
His 'After Finitude' argument about fossils and the limits of transcendentalism is taken seriously but answered: the true 'fossil' is not pre-human life but the human subject itself, which cannot see itself in becoming.
Julian Jaynes negative
His 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' is mentioned as having interesting hypotheses but was immediately co-opted by New Agers and 'didn't give me a multiple orgasm'.
Paul Veyne positive
His 'Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths?' is cited frequently as demonstrating that ancient peoples had neither naive literal belief nor simple metaphoric rationalism, a third, reflexively mediated stance.
Karl Marx positive
The passage from the first edition of Capital on money as 'the animal' is central to Žižek's argument; Marx's Gattungswesen is reread; also cited for his Theses on Feuerbach as an instance of retroactive totalization.
Immanuel Kant negative
Cited for the thesis in 'On Education' that man is an animal who needs a master because of his noumenal 'unruliness'; Žižek endorses the thesis but then criticizes the Kantian duality of finitude/freedom as secretly reproduced in Badiou.
Güven Güzeldere positive
Described as a good friend and Turkish anthropologist formerly at Duke University; cited for experiments showing apes are more 'plastic' than humans in their libidinal attachments, quickly moving to alternatives, while humans fixate on impossible objects.
What it argues
the animal as retroactive ideological construction of human rationalitythe Freudian drive as a third term between animal instinct and human cultureGattungswesen: humans as the universal species-being who is 'the animal'retroactive totalization and violent simplification as condition of every new beginningthe impossibility of seeing oneself in becoming — humans as the true fossilcritique of Badiou's human-animal / subject-of-event dualitylack and excess as parallax: the same thing from two perspectives
Dialectical moves 9
“'The animal does not exist' — the only actually existing incarnation of 'the animal as such' is we humans.”
The universal category 'the animal' fails to refer to any actual animal; instead it retroactively names the human, who as non-animal among animals is the one being that embodies sheer animality.
“Far from the animal being world-poor and the human being world-rich, the true invisible fossil is the human itself — we cannot see ourselves in our becoming.”
The inversion corrects the standard anthropological gaze: the mystification is not that we misrepresent animals but that we cannot see what we humans are outside our ideological self-perception.
“Far from drive being an excess added to animal instinct, drive is what happens when instinct malfunctions — we got dynamic precisely because originally we got stuck.”
Human cultural productivity is not a positive addition to animal life but the consequence of a pathological failure to complete the instinctual circuit.
“The human animal, far from being a natural baseline, is strictly a secondary ideological formation.”
What Badiou presents as the pre-subjective given (servicing-the-goods animal life) is itself already a product of ideological work, not a natural starting point.
“The American Constitution is wrong: it is not the pursuit of happiness but the pursuit of unhappiness that defines us.”
Humans compulsively sabotage their own satisfaction, the drive, not the pleasure principle, is constitutive.
“Rabble (Pöbel) is not the failure of universal society but its only point of universality — precisely as the non-social element it is where the human as social being exists as such.”
Following Hegel's logic that universality encounters itself as one of its own species, the outcast is the only locus where pure universal humanity appears.
“The naive primitive who really believes in the totem is not a finding about primitive peoples but a retroactive construction of modern rationality — it was always already staged for our gaze.”
The image of a natural, immediacy-immersed other (animal or primitive) is produced by the same rational thought that claims to transcend it.
“God created fossils directly to give us the wrong impression of deep time — this is absurd as science but absolutely true as a theory of ideology.”
Gosse's theological 'omphalos' argument, taken as a model: ideology always inserts pre-fabricated 'natural' traces to secure retroactive legitimacy.
“Badiou's event is 'nothing but a fragment of being', yet cannot be reduced to being — the only consistent answer is: because of our finitude. But that makes Badiou secretly Kantian.”
By denying that being is complete (non-all), Žižek avoids both supernaturalism and crypto-Kantian finitude as the explanation for the event.
Claims 18
asserts
The standard philosophical characterization of animals as speechless, world-poor, and naive is not a description of animals but a retroactive ideological construction that mirrors the Western projection of naivety onto non-European peoples.human-animal distinction in philosophy
asserts
'The animal' as universal category does not exist as a particular being; the one entity that actually incarnates 'the animal' is the human, as the species that relates to itself as universal species-being.Gattungswesen / 'das Tier'
asserts
The horror animals perceive in us is precisely that we are 'the animal' for them — as non-animals, we embody the animal-as-such for all other animals.human exceptionalism / animality
asserts
What distinguishes humans is not positive rational capacities but a changed relationship to impossibility: we get stuck on what we cannot resolve and cannot abandon it — the Freudian drive.origin of human intelligence and subjectivity
rejects
Badiou's duality of human-animal versus subject of the event is insufficient; a third level is needed — the Freudian drive — which already disturbs nature but is not yet culture.Badiou's ontology of subject and human animal
asserts
The so-called 'human animal' (in Badiou's sense) is not a baseline natural given but strictly a secondary ideological formation.Badiou's concept of human animal
rejects
Badiou's ontology is too flat — it lacks inherent antagonism and tension — and therefore cannot account for the emergence of worlds from the multiplicity of multiplicities.Badiou's set-theoretic ontology
asserts
The true 'fossil' is not life before humanity but the human subject itself: we cannot see ourselves as we are in becoming, only as we appear through our ideological self-perception.Meillassoux's ancestrality / fossil problem
rejects
Emphasizing 'multiplicity against binary logic' typically serves to obfuscate a central antagonism rather than genuinely pluralize it.postmodern critique of binary logic
asserts
Every radical theoretical break requires a violent retroactive totalization of all prior thought — this is not simply a mistake but a necessary moment of truth.retroactive totalization in philosophy
asserts
The origin of humanity was probably something that went genetically wrong — a malfunction — and humans were born when they started to enjoy the malfunctioning.evolutionary origin of humanity
rejects
Symbolic distance and reflexivity are present from the very beginning; there never was a moment of naive full meaning that later became ritualized emptiness — this is also true of ancient Greek religion.phenomenological reconstruction of original meaning
asserts
The American Constitution's 'pursuit of happiness' is wrong: what defines humans is the pursuit of unhappiness — we systematically sabotage our own satisfaction.human nature / drive versus pleasure principle
asserts
Only as a materialist can one be truly ethical — the politically correct avoidance of criticizing religion to protect minorities is an ideological regression.materialism and political correctness
asserts
Deep ecology and New Age spiritualism are in fact the most violently anthropomorphic positions — they project human attributes onto nature far more brutally than overt rationalism.deep ecology / New Age anthropomorphism
asserts
Lack and excess are strictly correlative and are the same thing seen from two perspectives (parallax): one cannot eliminate the excess by filling the lack.structure of the subject / lack and excess
asserts
Universality is not a neutral container for particular differences but is itself a name for a fundamental antagonism; particular forms are attempts to mystify and manage that antagonism.universality and particularity
asserts
Skype animalizes communication by making deception harder: it reduces the human capacity to feign, collapsing the symbolic distance that defines speech.technology and the human/animal distinction
Quotes 13
“We got so dynamic precisely because originally we got stuck.”Slavoj Žižek · the drive as productive dysfunction / origin of human creativity
“It is not the pursuit of happiness but the pursuit of unhappiness which defines us.”Slavoj Žižek · drive versus pleasure principle / American Constitution critique
“We humans are 'the animal' for others, for other animals. The horror that animals see in us is that we are 'the animal.'”Slavoj Žižek · humans as das Tier / Gattungswesen
“The true invisible fossil is what we humans are in ourselves, what was lost the moment we got caught into our ideological self-perception.”Slavoj Žižek · humans as the true fossil / impossibility of self-knowledge
“Skype animalizes you — you cannot deceive that you are deceiving.”Slavoj Žižek · technology collapsing the human capacity to feign to feign
“A nation is a large group of people characterized by three features: they are kept together by lies about their past, shared enemies in their present, and stupid illusions about their future.”Slavoj Žižek · Renan's definition of nation / ideology
“Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter, as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.”Slavoj Žižek · Chesterton on human exceptionalism / strangeness of humanity
“The whole of being human, symbolic stories and so on, is one struggle to control not our animal nature, but the excess which marked our break with nature.”Slavoj Žižek · drive as excess over animal instinct / human symbolic order
“The problem of fighting essentialism is not to drop the notion of essence, but to redefine the notion of essence.”Slavoj Žižek · dialectical universality / anti-nominalism
“Rational thought thus engenders the figure of the irrational mythic thought.”Slavoj Žižek · modernity producing its own Other / retroactive construction
“What was Christ before he became a Christian? This is the true perversion.”Slavoj Žižek · seeing Christianity in becoming / institution vs. excess
“There is no human animal. We humans in our nature itself, we don't strive for balance, happiness and so on — we sabotage ourselves all the time.”Slavoj Žižek · no baseline human animal / drive as constitutive
“I don't believe in a great origin of humanity. It was something which malfunctioned and we were born humans when we started to enjoy this malfunctioning.”Slavoj Žižek · evolutionary origin of humanity as malfunction / drive
Transcript 64 turns
Slavoj Žižek
We
We
unknown
can begin. My god, wir sind einfach bereit here. We're late, we're bloody late. No, we're not. Okay, it's a great pleasure to have the New Stalin of Theory with us tonight to conclude this Human-Animal Workshop. Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher and a critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis,
can begin. My god, wir sind einfach bereit here. We're late, we're bloody late. No, we're not. Okay, it's a great pleasure to have the New Stalin of Theory with us tonight to conclude this Human-Animal Workshop. Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher and a critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis,
Slavoj Žižek
this is the least I can say. He is
this is the least I can say. He is
unknown
currently senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. His most recent books include Violence, Living in the End Times, all published by Verso, and a forthcoming 1,200-page volume on Hegel entitled Less Than Nothing, which can be easily purchased, pre-ordered on Amazon with nothing less than a discount currently, so buy. The
currently senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. His most recent books include Violence, Living in the End Times, all published by Verso, and a forthcoming 1,200-page volume on Hegel entitled Less Than Nothing, which can be easily purchased, pre-ordered on Amazon with nothing less than a discount currently, so buy. The
Slavoj Žižek
title of his paper
title of his paper
unknown
today is, quite appropriate for our discussions, The Animal Does Not Exist. Slavoj Žižek. Thank
today is, quite appropriate for our discussions, The Animal Does Not Exist. Slavoj Žižek. Thank
Slavoj Žižek
you very much. First, let me tell you how proud I am to be here for very precise reasons. I don't know to what extent you follow the politically correct fashions and pressures, but what disturbs me in the last couple of years, and you can vouch for me here, especially in United Kingdom, is how because on the one hand we have now this aggressive, let's call it naively, bourgeois liberal materialism, Dawkins, Hitchens, and so on, and because of the link with some Palestinians and so on, all of a sudden I noticed it's considered politically incorrect to simply emphasize that you are a materialist. Like I wrote once a comment claiming how not only you can be ethical by being a materialist, but only as a materialist you can be really ethical, blah blah, and then I got bombarded: my message is, I don't even mention Islam in that text, why did you turn into Islamophobia and so on and so on. It's as if not to offend Palestinians or whoever, it's better not to criticize even religion. So no, I remain an old-fashioned materialist. So let me begin with a strange starting point because it's not an author to whom I often refer: Jacques Derrida. In his book The Animal That Therefore I Am, although this title with obvious references to Descartes, although this title was intended as an ironic stab at Descartes, one should, I think, take it with more of a literal naivety. The Cartesian cogito is not a separate substance different from the body, as Descartes himself misunderstood his cogito. At the level of substantial content, I am nothing but the animal that I am. What makes me human is the very formal, formal declaration of being as an animal. Derrida's starting point is that every clear and general differentiation between humans and the animal that we know from the history of philosophy, from Aristotle to Heidegger, from Lacan to Levinas, should be deconstructed. What, what, Derrida's question, and here I think is Derrida at his best, here I agree with the tendency of his questioning: what, for example, really legitimates us to say that only humans speak while animals only emit signs? You know, this is the usual answer to that famous example of how one stupid bee finds honey at certain shrub then goes back to the tribe and performs a certain dance which precisely signals what direction, how far is the honey. The idea is these are only signals, this is not language proper. Or what legitimates us to say that only humans experience things as such, while animals are just captivated by their animal life-world? This is of Heidegger. Or that, another thesis by Lacan, that only humans can feign to feign, like reflexively: I lie that I lie, I tell the truth but I count that what is literally true will be taken as a lie, while animals just directly feign or lie. Furthermore, that only humans are mortal, experience death, while animals simply die. Or that animals enjoy a harmonious sexual relationship or instinctual mating, while only for us humans, as Lacan put it, il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel. Derrida displays here, I think, the best of what I'm tempted to call the common sense of deconstruction: asking naive questions which undermine philosophical propositions taken for granted for centuries. What, for example, legitimates Lacan to claim with such self-evidence, without providing any data or arguments, that animals cannot feign to feign? What legitimates Heidegger to claim as a self-evident fact that animals don't relate to their death? As Derrida emphasizes again and again, the point of this questioning is not to abolish the gap that separates man from other animals. It's not to attribute also to animals what we call spiritual properties. This, as you probably know, is the path of some eco-mystics who claim that not only animals but even trees and other plants communicate in a secret language of their own for which we humans are blind and so on and so on. The point is rather that all these differences should be rethought, conceived in a different way. Now I want to pursue this path. Such a negative characterization of animals: they are speechless, they exchange signals but they don't speak properly, or as Heidegger put it, they are world-less or rather, in a very interesting way, you know these famous passages from Heidegger's seminar from '29-'30 where Heidegger develops this triad of dead objects, animals, and humans and says objects are weltlos, without world, they just are there stupidly; animals are weltarm, they have a world but a narrow world into which they are absolutely captivated; while only humans do have properly a world. And of course, Heidegger himself immediately is aware of the problems here. How can you say that animals are weltarm? I mean, why this limitation? Isn't it that again you already presuppose humans? So the question is: are animals weltarm in themselves or just in comparison with humans? And I like the madness of Heidegger at that point where for a brief moment he regresses into romantic philosophy of nature, where he claims that what if animal life is in itself weltarm in the sense that they, animals themselves, experience their predicament condition as terribly constrained and... he quotes here, Heidegger quotes here Schelling which speaks about melancholy of all living beings, how living nature, pre-human nature itself strives towards its liberation, so that this is an old, as you probably know, Gnostic mythic motif, that human speech is not just an affair of the human, it retroactively liberates nature, living nature in its entirety. So again, such negative characterization of animals, speechless, worldless, engenders the appearance of a positive determination which is false. For example, when we claim that animals are captured by their environments and so on and so on. I think we encounter here the same phenomenon as the one in that is usually at work in traditional Eurocentric anthropology. Viewed through the lenses of the modern Western rational thought, as the standard of maturity, the other, non-European others cannot but appear as primitives caught into magic thinking, or those who really think that their tribe originated from some stupid totemic animal, or that a pregnant woman was really inseminated by a spirit and not by a man and so on and so on. You see, the parallel I try to draw is this one: that when modern anthropology, or rather the one from years ago in its early naivety, visited primitive tribes, they projected into them a certain pre-modern naivety, as if those idiots really believed in ghosts, they thought that they really originate from totem and so on and so on. But it's absolutely clear that this is not the case. This image of a primitive who really believes, is immediately caught into the appearance, is simply a retroactive construction of us humans. If anything, it can be proven that the so-called primitives or generally neuro-premodern people had, on the contrary, a much more refined sense of reflexive mediation or distance and so on. For example, let me mention a well-known book that I quote all the time or at least refer to: Paul Veyne, Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, where he demonstrates that no, definitely no, ancient Greeks were not idiots, they didn't think that if you climb to the Mount Olympus you will there see I don't know Zeus screwing Aphrodite or whatever. They... no. But you know, the question is what then did they think? And Paul Veyne also demonstrates that they also, it's also wrong to read it in our enlightened European way as simple metaphoric thinking. You know, people usually say no, Zeus was for them just a personalized metaphor of some cosmic creative force or whatever. No, this is also wrong. What is difficult for us to accept is that never did we reach that point of immediacy where words really meant or whatever. Here I think, incidentally, we should also reject so-called phenomenological reconstruction of meaning, which is based on the idea that originally we have the full experience which later gets ritualized, emptied, turned into a mere ritual and so on and so on. You know like I don't know, the idea is for example shaking hands: oh originally it meant a gesture of friendship because it's a proof that I don't hold a knife in my hand, but later it became an empty gesture or whatever. No, I think that precisely there never was this moment of full meaning which later became an empty form. From the very beginning, from the very beginning I claim the distance is here. Which is why for me, if there is naivety, the most naive position is precisely that of radical deconstructionism. Where do you encounter this naivety? Do you notice how if you read, okay now this style is already a little bit out of fashion, but if you read classical deconstructive works from years ago by Derrida or my personal friend, theoretical enemy, Judith Butler, the first thing that strikes the eye is the incredible amount of quotes, sorry quotation marks and conditional formulations. Like you will never get them to simply say, for example, my old ironic example, if you ask Judith Butler what is this, she wouldn't like to say this is a glass of water, she would say "if we temporarily for strategic reasons endorse the essentialist denotative functioning of language then..." and she likes to put it in this, "then maybe we can risk the hypothesis that this is the glass of water." It's the same as Umberto Eco pointed out, that today with this postmodern reflexive attitude you cannot even say "I love you," today you should somehow qualify it not to appear ridiculous, like "maybe as a poet would have put it, I love you." Yes but what... where's the mistake here? The mistake is precisely in the fear that if I say it directly, I would somehow have meant it too immediately. What the ancient people knew is that even when I say "I love you," all the distance, as the poets would have put it, is already included. We are the stupid ones today, we don't get it that also without all those quotation marks the distance is here. So what I'm saying again is that in the same way that modernity builds retroactively an image of natural immediacy, fullness, whatever you want, that the same goes also for this basic divide human-animal. So the first ideologico-critical operation here is, but then there's a second step this is even maybe more crucial, the first step I think it to dismantle this myth of pseudo-Hegelian myth—Hegel doesn't do this at all—that we start with some naive beautiful immediacy which then gets reflected, mediated. No, reflection, distance is here from the very beginning. For example, what is the beautiful beginning for Hegel? Ancient Greece, Antigone? Are you crazy? Hegel's whole point of reading Antigone is that the split, the cut is here from the very beginning. There never is a moment of authentic state, state emerges by way of being split. So again, the first point of course is to denaturalize our own opposition by way of introducing the moment of reflexivity, distance into the naive other. Again the very first step is to take into account how this naive other is a presupposition already for others themselves. You know I read some wonderful anthropological books where they inquired into for example one classic book that I read, they went to a tribe in Native American so-called Indians and asked them "do you really think that you originate from that totem or of your tribe, some stupid old bird?" and of course you get always the same answer: "Of course we are not stupid, we don't believe that we originate, but some people, some ancestors told us that way ago there were people who really believed it" and so on and so on. And of course you never encounter people who really believe it, you always encounter just people who heard about the other people that they believed in it and so on and so on, no? So the best example I can imagine here on this reflexivity, it's a beautiful story, I'm sorry if you know it but I like to repeat it, it happened around years ago I read, I think it's in New Guinea, New Guinea yeah, where so I heard that a group of anthropologists heard that there is in the middle of the island some terrible tribe and that they dance some terrible death, death dance with hot terrifying masks and so on. So okay they went into the jungle, finally they did reach this tribe and they arrived in the evening, they asked them "could you please dance for us this dance?" the tribe said "oh sorry we are tired, we are going to sleep." They went to sleep, in the morning when they awakened refreshed, the tribe members did dance this horrible dance for them, it was exactly what they expected no, horrible masks and so on, terrible sounds, then they left the tribe and wrote a report. Unfortunately another expedition joined the same tribe years ago and got the true story, which was that these members of the tribe simply wanted to be polite and they somehow guessed that these stupid anthropologists wanted some terrible dance with death masks and so on. So the whole night they were preparing these masks to satisfy them in the morning. So again it was already staged for their own eyes. So again this is what you know, this is the emancipatory moment of Kafka, you remember at the end of that famous parable in The Trial, when after the man from the country dies, the doorman says "this door was here only for you," like your gaze was implied for it, and in the same way that this dance was constructed for the gaze of the anthropologists, this image of nature or animal life in its naive immediacy, whatever, is constructed for our gaze. Rational thought thus engenders the figure of the irrational mythic thought. What we get here is the process of violent simplification which occurs with every rise of the new. In order to assert something radically new, the entire past has to be reduced to some basic defining feature. And now I want nonetheless to defend a little bit this measure, namely did you notice how every theory which presents itself as a radical break has to enact this violent retroactive totalization? Like Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (Thesis you know like "all philosophers till now have only interpreted, we now..." or Heidegger, "all philosophy till me is just metaphysics of presence," or or or... "all is ideology" and so on, you even even Derrida does this, the idea being till his deconstruction all philosophy is again a version of metaphysics of presence, phallogocentric and so on and so on. I think maybe the first step of a truly dialectical thought is to question this retroactive totalization. And here I think we get two strange bedfellows, Deleuze and Lacan, who in spite of all their differences they don't do this. One should admit for Lacan and for Deleuze they never totalize in this sense the past, they are like you know Deleuze picks out this philosopher, that philosopher particularly, they don't do this retroactive totalization. And but also in a at a different level we find the same operation for example from our Western Judeo-Christian tradition. We try to throw together all other traditions into the same Oriental or Pagan or whatever stance, obliterating the incredible wealth of positions covered up by the term Oriental thought. For example can you imagine something more different from Indian metaphysics, Upanishads, castes and so on, than the Chinese Confucianism, which is precisely agnostic pragmatic stance explicitly rejecting metaphysics and so on and so on. So that's again the first step of dialectical critique of metaphysics which should also be applied to animals. We should not forget that among others as Roxana was saying before but others also I think that animal is a differential category. Animal emerges, there is no unity of the animal. Animal emerges with the rise of man and you can compute the issue, the issue and this would be a nice if some of you are stupid young students, I advise you to do when you study philosophy a kind of a small seminar or what it would be wonderful, namely what kind of a seminar? You know when philosophers say "the animal," you can easily discover how they usually have in mind a very specific animal which mysteriously is selected. For example with Heidegger it's a lizard, I think. What is this fascin... nature or what, but when he always when in his seminar '29-'30, *Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik*, yeah he always mentions a lizard there sitting on a... lying on a rock and basking in hot sun and so on. It's always a stupid lizard like why not an ape, why not this, why not that, no? And so again sometimes it's an ape or whatever but I claim you know it's always totalized under the hegemony of one animal. Now in the next step, I want nonetheless to defend this procedure of retroactive totalization. It's easy to claim here to be against binary logic, but I claim that maybe it's time against all this post... you know one of the easy senses of post... easy cheap rhetorical tricks of postmodernism is to to reject binary logic. When you say "this against that," if you don't have any good arguments the easiest thing to say is "yes but you are caught in binary logic" and so on, no? The proof of this bullshit of attacking binary logic is for me a wonderful paraphrase I bought a book, I hope it's translated into German: Politically Correct Guide to the Bible, where they take the biggest hits from the Bible and they translate them in a politically correct way, you know. For example, you know that famous passage "though I walk through the valley of shadow but I feel no fear no evil, because..." and then you have the politically correct version I love, I think I told her—she was mad at me—to Judith Butler, that probably she was targeted here, it's like "I walk in the valley of shadow but I fear no evil, because I know that good and evil are only binary metaphysical opposites." I mean the way to answer this, there is even a better one in a song by a Black rapper you find it, it's even better: "I walk in the valley of shadow but I fear no evil, because I'm the meanest motherfucker in the whole valley." That's I think the revolutionary answer. Okay but let me go on. So be very careful how when you have this emphasis on multiplicity against binary logic, it usually works to obfuscate a certain central antagonism. You know this is how for example the next step of course is then against class binary logic: not only two classes, there are more classes, there are more sexes and so on and so on. I I think that even if this retroactive totalization when you do a cut and violently totalize all that comes before, even if it's in a way violent imposition, there is a moment of truth in it. That is to say, what if the multiplicity of animal forms is to be conceived as a series of attempts to resolve some basic tension which defines animality, a tension which can only be formulated from a minimal distance? So again you see this would be for me a properly dialectical solution. What emerges through the animal is of course not this romantic bullshit of "oh the whole nature was suffering, now we humans liberate nature by starting to talk," but it's only through this minimal distance of speech that retroactively we can formulate what? Not the eternal essence of animality, but the deadlock of animality. I think the problem of fighting essentialism is not to drop the notion of essence, but to redefine the notion of essence. Here, I'm so sad I don't have the time to go into it because here I have a problem with nominalism. I'm absolute realist of the universal. Not of course in the stupid pseudo-Platonic sense of there are universal essences, but in the sense of that the proper dialectical relationship between universal and particular is not a nominalist one, but it's to introduce a tension between universality and the particular as such. Against the New Age bullshit where you say "particular elements are struggling with each other and universality is the space of this struggle," we should say: no, the first antagonism is not between particular moments of the universality, but between universality and its particular forms. What if universality is a name of a certain antagonism and particular forms are attempts to mystify, to deal with this antagonism? This is why, incidentally, I'm opposed to this politically correct bullshit of "whoo there is no capitalism, there are only concrete forms of capitalism." I agree, what concretely exist are only, you know, corporate capitalism, liberal capitalism, capitalism with Asian values, which of course has nothing to do with Asia but has a lot to do with the fact that—and this is a wonderful dialectical point—that today this is the ultimate revenge of Stalinism, Stalinist communism on capitalism. Okay, maybe Fukuyama was right, communism lost, but look at China. But communists are today the best managers of capitalism. So okay, there are only different capitalisms, but they all try to resolve, obfuscate, control the same antagonism. What unites all capitalisms are not some abstract universal features, but it's a certain deadlock. What if we can apply the same to animals? What do I mean by this? Recall the well-known elaboration of the general equivalent from the first edition of Marxist *Of Capital* by Marx. This is a sentence you find only in the first edition, Marx then as you know for the second edition he rearranged the first chapter and this passage disappears. I quote him, Marx is describing here the logic of money as general equivalent: "It is as if alongside and external to lions, tigers, rabbits and all other actual animals, which form when grouped together the various kinds, species, subspecies of the animal kingdom, there existed in addition the animal, the individual das Tier, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom." End of quote. This image of money as "the animal" romping alongside all the heterogeneous instances of particular sorts of animality that exist around us, does it not lend itself to capture what what Derrida describes as the gap that separates "the animal" from the multiplicity of actual animal life? Now I want to apply here the big rule of Hegelian dialectics which, as Frank developed in detail in his book on Hegel's *Pöbel* (rabble), Hegel didn't follow consequently, namely that in each Hegelian totality or concrete universality, universality itself is one of its own species. It encounters itself among its species as its own *gegensätzliche Bestimmung*, oppositional determination. And this is where Hegel is not radical enough. For example, the rabble, Hegel is good enough to discover the necessity of producing this excess, *Pöbel*. What he is not ready, but he should have done to posit, is that precisely as such, as non-society, as the element which sticks out with no place in society, rabble is the only point of universality. It is as if in rabble, in rabble, human as a social being as such exists. All others are just particular, precisely in the outcast the universality comes to exist as such. So I would claim: which is then this animal which is "the animal"? We humans. This is how I'm tempted to read early Marx's determination of man as *Gattungswesen*, a being of species. It does not mean that humans are one—some ecologists read this as "oh you see Marx was already close to ecology, humans are one among the species"—no no, *Gattungswesen* means precisely something more radical: a species which relates to itself as a universal being, as a species. Incidentally Marx is here of course very much embedded in German idealist heritage. And I claim that now I want to make my next point: I claim that what if this *das Tier*, this animal as such, does exist and these are we humans. And this is the horror that animals see in us. We are "the animal" for precisely as non-animal, we are "the animal" for others, for other animals. So let me go on here, next point. It is not enough to say that that while the determination of animals as speechless and so on is wrong, the determination of humans as rational speaking beings and so on is right. So again, you got my point when I oppose this naive idea of defining animals with some immediate capture, like captivation, like animals are just immediately caught into their environments, speechless, *weltarm* and so on. The point is not we can see what we humans are, but we mystify the other. The entire field is wrong. Which is why the first step is that we should demystify the other, that is to say animals are not in this sense naive, immediately caught into their environments, this is clearly just a retroactive projection, a kind of symmetrical mirror image: if we humans can do it, animals cannot do that and so on and so on. I think that the true mystification is in that what this opposition, standard opposition, obfuscates: we speak, animals don't speak, we relate to death, animals don't relate to death. What effectively disappears here is not so much what animals truly are in themselves in the sense of we already reduce animals to our human perspective, they are just reduced to what we are not, what we really miss is the most radical dimension of what we humans are. Here, in spite of their opposition, Kierkegaard and Hegel are share the same point of opposing becoming (*Werden*) and being (*Sein*). The standard opposition animal/human is formulated from the perspective of human being. We are already constituted and we measure with our standard—reason, speech, whatever—animals. What this perspective cannot think is the human in its becoming. It thinks animals from within the given human standpoint. It cannot think the human from the animal standpoint. What do I mean by this? Here I claim psychoanalysis enters. Now I will provide the formula then I will develop it. I think that the—and here I'm sad that Alenka Zupančič, she had some sad problems, this is why she asked me to and Mladen Dolar who has different medical problems, and I as you can see am ill, I'm getting here KGBed that there was some reactionary plot to prevent us from coming—she got an operation today, Alenka, of her... what is this stupid big bone... spine or what? Yeah, some discs there putting pressure on her nerves and she stopped feeling her legs, her left leg, which I immediately interpreted as the hysterical disavowal of her left-wing orientation, that's one private joke. But I'm sad because she precisely wanted to develop this: the notion of drive, the Freudian *Trieb*, as precisely that which is not yet culture in the sense of symbolic universe but no longer, no longer animal instinct. The idea being that something is in between, no longer animal life but not yet human culture. And here we should, I would like to follow Alenka, she developed this in detail, she wanted to develop it here, of how... I'm so sad we don't have time, how well he translated here Meillassoux, *Après la finitude*, no? So maybe some of you translated it or what? You published it? Okay. So maybe some people read it. Alenka elaborated I think a nice Lacanian answer to Meillassoux's two central points. The first one about this universal contingency: her point is that while agreeing with his point of asserting contingency, the point is that she mobilizes here the Lacanian opposition, dialectic of "non-all" (*pas-tout*). Meillassoux reads universal contingency in what Lacan would have called masculine formulas of sexuation: a universality, everything is radically contingent based on an exception, contingency itself is necessary. And Alenka, I think, in a detailed pages-long analysis shows how you get a much more provocative result if you apply if you read contingency along the what Lacan calls the feminine logic of sexuation. That is to say, contingency is non-all precisely because you cannot totalize it through exception. Not because something is not contingent but precisely because there is nothing which is not contingent and then okay. Her second, even more triumphant argument against Meillassoux I think, and this is the best introduction to the point I want to make, concerns precisely the problem of fossils. You know the, you know what this problem is about. Meillassoux claims that entire transcendental legacy, transcendental Kantian, post-Kantian philosophy cannot provide a clear answer to the status of fossils, like you see a fossil. If you take it ontologically seriously, it refers to something which existed, to cut a long story short, before there was any transcendental horizon which constituted it and so on and so on. And in a very convincing way, I agree, Meillassoux demonstrates how all the usual transcendental tricks don't work here. But I think that Meillassoux even—we were talking so much about Darwinism, no—here I am on if we want to isolate the dimension that maybe Darwin didn't see, I would like to rehabilitate, I forgot his name, a well-known friend of Darwin but at the same time a theologian, who you must know the theory it's wonderful, Stephen Jay Gould wrote about it, who provided I think the best answer, theological answer to Darwinism. He tried to bring together Darwinism and theology. His problem was the following one: Darwinism unambiguously demonstrates that fossils, there was life, blah blah, thousand, tens of thousand of years, millions before there were human beings. How to bring this together with the well-known fact which must be true because my god the Bible is true, it's the word of God, that the world was created I think about and years ago. There is even a wonderful British empiricist claim that God created the world minus BC at in the morning. It's a wonderful idea like God took breakfast and so on. Okay, and this priest friend of Darwin proposed, you must know it, a wonderful solution, which I think is of course wrong as a scientific theory but it's beautiful as the theory of ideology. It's that of course how can God be wrong? God created the world years whatever BC, but he created directly fossils as such to give us humans the wrong impression of openness. You know like when you create a world for a child and put on windows like a kind of a... like in movies, you know, when they create the false background so that the world appears larger and... So the idea... and although of course this is maybe nonsense biologically, maybe, I say maybe yeah, but it's absolutely true I claim as a theory of ideology. This is how in ideology we are all the time doing it, even literally. Did you translated into German a wonderful book by Eric Hobsbawm—no he is just the editor—The Invention of Tradition? It's a wonderful book which goes in different nations about and for example: what do you know about Scotland? You know kilts and you know that they were invented in the late 19th century? Absolutely nothing to... no, how most of the traditions that we celebrate as blah blah were invented, invented usually late 19th century and so on. So but we are doing this all the time, I claim. And I claim that maybe every national identity is based on fossils in a way. Because you know Ernst Renan, great guy, okay a dirty racist, one of these early scientific French racists, but he provided I think the best definition of what is a nation that we can imagine. He said nation is a large group of people characterized by three features: they are kept together by lies about their past, shared enemies in their present, and stupid illusions about their future. I don't know how it is with you, for us Slovenians I think this holds true. We are kept together by lies about our past: for example, the most popular lie is now that we are really not Slavic, we are barbarian, we are Etruscans, you know even more ancient and so on. Then present enemies, they change that's the problem, no? When I was younger Albanians, then with Milošević Serbs were Albanians were good, now Albanians are also becoming bad and I must tell you Croats are... it looks bad. Then there are also Italians and so on. And illusions about the future: I mean the dream of Slovenian right-wingers is let's get rid of the communist plot, you know every honest Slovenian knows that secretly communists still dominate the nation, no, if we get rid of them in four years we will be wealthier than Switzerland, no? It works. So what I'm saying is that maybe I would like to combine a truly dialectical Darwinism would have been the one which would include this dimension, of course not as a fact but as a necessary fiction constitutive of reality. This retroactivity is not simply subjective. I will not develop it now, it would take too much time which I'm already losing. What I only want to say is that it's too simple to say oh this is just the retroactive illusion and so on and so on. But okay, going back to the point. Fossils. So I claim that the true problem, and this brings us to Lacanian psychoanalysis to what Lacan calls object A, the impossible objectal equivalent of the subject, Lacanian answer to Meillassoux would have been that the true problem is not the fossil out there like was there life on earth before human beings, no problem. The true fossil are we ourselves. That is to say, it's part of our identity as humans that we are unable to see ourselves in becoming. We should not get caught into this problem of "we and the animals, do we see animals the way they are in themselves?" No, the problem is that we cannot see ourselves as well what we are in itself as it were. The problem, what's the problem? Let me give you a religious parallel. It's easy to claim oh we Christians cannot read properly pagan religions, we already reduce them to our perspective. It's also easy to play these games with claiming like all of my Jewish friends are claiming this: "that you stupid Christians, you have a supercessionist view, you reduce us to just a step before like Judaism and then Christianity, you miss what Judaism is" and so on and so on. Maybe, but what I'm saying is that what we miss even more is how to put it, what was Christ before he became a Christian? This is the true perversion. What kind of... are we aware what kind of monstrosity Jesus Christ was for the eyes of the Jews before he as it were created his own horizon of meaning with the story he told about himself. Because the way we perceive Christianity it's already from the perspective of the book. In one of the Bruegel paintings—is it Bruegel? I think so—on crucifixion, you know it's this wonderful detail which is historically true, ideologically not historically sorry. You have crucifixion and then you have the two robbers crucified and to one of them, one of them was good one I think, no? You see the good one already making confession to a priest who holds in his hand the Bible, you know like... But this is how we perceive the past, it's true, as if it's always already here. So the problem is to see it in becoming, when... so you see my point? What the truth of Christianity is, what was Christ before he became a Christian? That's the truly traumatic point. This is how we should read that wonderful anecdote about Napoleon, you know when Napoleon crowned himself as an emperor. You know the story, the Pope approached him and Napoleon took the crown from Pope's hand and put it on. Eh, but you know what Pope told them, Napoleon? Pope was a modern guy, he told Napoleon "I know why you are doing this to me, you want to destroy Christianity." And then the Pope went on like this. So that maybe the whole of Christianity as institution is a struggle not against the pagan tradition, but against its own excess. And in a similar way I claim the whole of being human, symbolic stories and so on, is one struggle to control not our animal nature, but the excess which marked our break with nature. You find even, I'm repeating myself a little bit here I know, you find traces of this even in books like sorry in Kant's philosophy. For example there is a wonderful passage in Kant's lesser-known Immanuel Kant's small text on education where Kant proposes his famous thesis that man is an animal who needs a master. And then he went on, he goes on, Kant, why? And he says because only humans have a certain—while he uses a same German strange word I forgot it, it means a kind of an unruliness, wild freedom unruliness which as Kant emphasizes has to be cultivated, it's not culture but it's not natural. It's also not nature. It's a kind of a wild explosion of a noumenal freedom which is already a break with nature, but has to be cultivated. And which is why again only humans need a master. It's a very nice thesis because again it totally undermines the idea that we need culture to control our the brutality of our animal nature or whatever. No no, the brutality is precisely the Freudian drive, the Freudian Trieb. You know who made this point, my I'm sorry to quote him all the time, my favorite Catholic philosopher, G.K. Chesterton, in his Everlasting Man? It's a wonderful dialectical text, you can find it on the net. He precisely tries to imagine this scene of how the first humans must have appeared to natural animals around them. A quote: "The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being, almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. Man cannot sleep in his own skin, he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called cloth, he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter, as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals, he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being" and so on and so on. So again I this would be my first point: that the excess that needs to be explained it's not can we understand the animals, it's the other side as it were. The true invisible fossil is what we humans are in ourselves, what was lost the moment we got caught into our ideological self-perception. Now what is this point? Here I want to do some wild Darwinian speculation. I am where am I now... okay, no I will now really try to condense it. My first point here would have been that I disagree with those vulgar Darwinians who try to naturalize human mind, who look for the solution in what human mind can do, its complexities and so on, you know like we can talk, we can have infinitesimal mathematics account and so on and so on. I claim that maybe a much more productive way would have been to begin with what Alain Badiou noted when he pointed out that what defines a world are primarily not its positive features, but the way the structure of a world relates to its own inherent point of impossibility. And the true changes in the structure of the world are changes in the status of this impossibility, which doesn't simply mean that the impossible becomes possible. It's just somehow integrated as impossible. For example, the big revolution in mathematics in the 19th century is when the so-called imaginary numbers, the square root of became operative. Before it was simply dismissed as nonsense. There can be no square root of a negative number so it's useless. Even to make an anti-Marxist step, even Marx in his mathematical manuscripts dismisses the square root of as simple nonsense. But you see, the big revolution of mathematics occurred when you proved that even if the square root of is in a way impossible, nonsensical, you can use it, you can integrate it, it functions. My god you can build buildings based on mathematical accounts which use the square root of and so on and so on. So I claim: is not something similar with democracy and with capitalism? What is great about democracy is that it takes something which was for previous forms of government simple traumatic impossibility: my god the throne is empty, let's, you know, you find this even in Stalinism it returns. Like you know in Stalinism always when the leader dies, usually people learn about it a couple of days later because the void has to be filled in immediately. You cannot afford a couple of days where you don't know who is in power, no? But democracy integrates this and makes it the very the very instrument of its, okay, relative stability. Or capitalism does the same: the impossibility of stability, the system always revolutionizes itself, it makes it the very mode of its, okay, yeah mobility. What I claim is that what if we should look for what makes us humans humans rather at this level? Not at what we do but the changed status of what we cannot do, the same integration of impossibility. What do I mean by this? I totally agree when you mention people like Dennett that they should be mentioned, they are not idiots. We cannot... it's possible not to agree with them but here and there they have good examples, they make a nice dialectical point. The one who is an idiot, I don't concede here compromise, is Steven Pinker. The proof: in his, I forgot which book, he confronts this problem of how is it that we cannot naturalize our own consciousness, our own mind. And he tries to provide a simple evolutionary answer. His, Pinker's answer is that simply, of course we cannot understand ourselves because our mind was not created in the course of evolutionary adaptive process for this aim. And he uses this metaphor: he says in the same way that rabbits cannot understand infinitesimal calculus or whatever because simply it's not part of their life, life-world, they need this what, to evade, to evade foxes, to get to get to get some stupid vegetables to eat whatever, in the same way we humans developed our intelligence for certain adaptive survival purposes—sexual seduction, collective work collaboration and so on, not to solve metaphysical problems: how does our mind work and so on and so on. I agree, but there is one problem here, which is that although there are problems which we cannot solve maybe, metaphysical problems, there is one problem, one crucial difference: rabbits are not obsessed by infinitesimal calculus, it's simply external, they don't care about it. But we, how is it that we humans obsessively care again and again all the time for a problem for which which has no adaptive value and so on and so on? And even further, what can be shown if you look really close at the history of science is how is how, for example if you look at the development of modern machinery and so on, it's not in a vulgar Marxist way that you know first they were using machinery for concrete economic purposes and then also... no, it started as a superfluous aesthetic endeavor. You know in the court of Louis XIV they had many machine... only later they said oh my god we have this pure useless excess why don't we apply it to some... So I claim that I claim that what if human intelligence is basically defined at the zero level? It's not a positive achievement, it's more a kind of a getting stuck with a certain impossibility, like I want to resolve it but I cannot and I don't drop it, I go on and on and on. I'm tempted to say that since plasticity was so much celebrated today, but are you aware... okay I will tell you the source, it's my good friend from Duke now he's somewhere else, a Turkish anthropologist but he enjoyed years ago a top position at Duke University, Güven Güzeldere, who told me he made himself experiments with apes and told me how if anything when confronted to a libidinal object, apes are much more plastic, you know? Like you propose to an ape two sexual partners, one obviously more attractive than the other, then okay first the ape selects the more attractive one, tries to if it doesn't go he said "okay fuck off" and go to the second one. With humans, no, you know, the more impossible it is, if anything, humans are much more fixed, an impossibility you you remain, you get you get stuck onto it. And I claim that this maybe is precisely what Freud calls the drive, this fixation on the impossibility, this you know you fail but you repeat you kind of get caught into a you get caught into a circle. So now, in order to avoid me getting caught into a circle, I will just conclude with Alain Badiou. It is here I think that my usual polemical point against Badiou that I think we should reject, I'm tempted to reject his duality of human animal and subject as the being of an event, in the sense of we are human animals caught into our ordinary pleasures and so on, utilitarian, servicing the goods, but then from time to time the miracle happens, we are interpolated by the event and so on and so on. Usually Alain Badiou is attacked here for his idealism like "oh my god where does this come this event, is it this a remainder of some metaphysics or whatever?" I tend to formulate exactly the opposite criticism. If there is something to be learned from not only psychoanalysis but even from good really good Darwinians you mentioned him like Stephen Jay Gould and so on, is that the problem is not there is no subject of the event, that is to say the event should be reduced to or deduced from antagonisms whatever of human animal. There is a lesson from psychoanalysis: it's that there is no human animal. That is to say this image of a human animal, if there is any meaning in in psychoanalysis, is that we humans in our as it were not only as beings of event but in our as it were nature itself, we don't strive for balance, happiness and so on, we sabotage American ourselves all the time. Here American Constitution is wrong, you know "the pursuit of happiness," no it's the pursuit of unhappiness which defines us. So what I want to say is that I see the problem there in this idea of human, I think that what Badiou calls human animal, of course there exists something like human animal, but it's strictly a secondary ideological formation. And I think this would be my point: that the duality of human animal and subject of the event is not enough, there must be a third level which I precisely call the Freudian drive, which is something which already disturbs nature but it's not yet culture. Okay, I don't want now to go on for too long because one can develop things here very much in detail. I tried to develop this a little bit in my *Parallax View* where I have a long chapter around debating evolutionary biology and so on. I'm in great sympathy with them, but what I claim is that reading, okay not many but yeah about some books of, I always noticed how whenever evolutionary biologists try to portray that magic moment when out of animal instincts human thought, whatever you call it, emerges, they systematically refer to the same metaphor, which is the metaphor of a self-relating circle. Like one of them uses the wonderful metaphor of how, you know, in ice dancing, how a dancer you make this movement that you... pirouette? Yeah, pirouette. And then said "human thought is as if this pirouette starts to turn in itself and magically you persist in the air." Another biologist uses this wonderful metaphor, he says that usually we are caught in this distance of stimulus-reaction, but that what characterizes human being is that what is for animals a secondary reaction that we generate our own stimulus, this self-stimul... it's a certain self-referential closure which they described, which I think again is precisely the Freudian drive. And let me be here very clear: I'm not saying—this is absolutely not meant in a non-naturalist way—I'm not saying somebody from above had to screw things up for us. No, I claim that here I agree with what you were saying and I would have said this happened probably, if we were to get an answer—this is my dream—it would have been if we would get probably a totally stupid not interesting answer: maybe something went genetically wrong, something something went simply wrong, we got stuck. There is no, I don't believe in great origin of humanity, it was something which malfunctioned and we were born humans when we started to enjoy this malfunctioning. Let me put it in this way. And all the big things then, you see this is my properly Hegelian dialectics: that we we got so dynamic precisely because originally we got stuck. "We human" means you find that, a libidinal object, and you got stuck to it, you fail to reach it but you... so again there is something here which I think nonetheless raises a couple of questions. One question is, which is totally legitimate, which was raised many times today: how can something like this happen in the order of nature? I think one way, the wrong one, would have been of course to say nonetheless another dimension intervenes, blah blah. No, I think a much more, and here I refer to what you said Roxana, another much more radical dimension should be mentioned here. What if the only way to account for things like this—human symbolic order and so on—is to claim that you know the moment you ask the problem you formulate the problem in these terms "we have a complete natural causal order and then oh how can human freedom consciousness emerge," here you get caught, either it's supernatural or you must do what even Dennett in *Freedom Evolves* does: he nonetheless claims that ultimately there is no freedom, that what you experience as freedom is simply when we can freely like without obstacles follow our predispositions and so on and so on. But there is I claim another solution, which does not mean that freedom is just, as they like to call it, users' illusion, but it also doesn't mean a higher tendency intervenes. It's simply: what if reality, objective reality, is ontologically non-all? I think we must include—and this is for me answering, I'm who formulated this question? You, yeah—this is for me the lesson to be drawn from quantum physics and so on. I'm totally materialist, I hate this idea of you know quantum physics oh my god our mind is creating reality or whatever. No, but there is one lesson of quantum physics, which is again reality in itself is not fully ontologically constituted. There are gaps in reality. Or to put it in another way, virtuality is not exclusively a human symbolic dimension. You can have virtual dimension, void and so on, the effectivity of the void already in reality itself. Here, back to Alain, I would like to supplement here because would you allow me just really to conclude just one quote from Alain Badiou which I find really problematic. It is from his, in English, *Theoretical Writings*, when he asks this elementary question: where does event come from if all there is is being, the order of being? Here is the quote: "We must point out that in what concerns its material, the event is not a miracle. What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected with it and so on. In fact, so as not to succumb to an obscurantist theory of creation ex nihilo, we must accept that an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of being." Now this is my problem with Badiou: if an event is nothing but a fragment of being, why cannot we describe it as such? Because his total description is that an event cannot be reduced to the order of being. I claim that here we get Badiou's secret Kantianism. And although he will hate me for saying this, his secret link to finitude. Because here he exactly reproduces the Kantian duality. You know how Kant says in towards the end of his *Kritik der praktischen Vernunft* that we are only free from our finitude. Kant tries to imagine what were to happen to us if we humans were to gain full access to things in themselves, how things really are. And his answer well-known is: we would turn into puppets, we would lose our freedom because we would even if we were to act ethically, we would have done it out of a simple pragmatic insight—things are like this, I have to... we would... in other words our freedom, our ethical activity and so on, is only only emerges from the standpoint of our finitude. Now with Alain I have here a similar problem: if the event is nothing but a fragment of being, why then cannot we reduce it to being? His only consequent answer can be: because of our finitude. But I would like to say no, it's not only a fragment of being, the point is precisely that being is incomplete. You must introduce the non-all of being. That in other words—and this is okay it may get me too far—you know Badiou has this ontology of multiplicity, multiplicity of multiplicities and then you have the one comes secondary. I claim that we need maybe a different ontology but I don't have time. Okay, don't worry. Thank you Slavoj and I think this is an excellent point to start a discussion. And I'd like to... Please pull out the knife and do it. No no no, I mean on Badiou on Badiou I think there is going to be some strong and and fierce... I hope so. I'm completely on your side. And actually my question... I'm afraid to have you on my side. No but I will side I will leave aside one beautiful thing you said, then Felix helped you, but at one point you were on the foot of the torrent but you said "human thought is like Skype." You were talking through pirouette, you said "ice speed," and the pirouette came from him but you said it, I mean Steven recorded it, "human thought is like Skype." But I but I will tell you why I made this slip, because I never use Skype. You know why not? Because for me the meaning of phone conversation is to be able to lie. You know like I'm invited to talk, I don't want to go, I say "so sorry I would love to come but I am ill" and so on. The point is that if you are doing it on Skype you can see the other's face and it makes it much more difficult to lie. Skype animalizes you, you know like you cannot deceive that you are deceiving, you know like. But look, I have two points. Like on one hand I am very sympathetic to your critique of Badiou... Go to the "but." But... on Derrida, Lacan, the very beginning of your question. So very simple question: what would you say of deconstruction, more specifically of Derrida with regard to animality? Because if you if I got you right, at one point you even said Derrida in a sense goes beyond Lacan in so far as he warns against warns us against the risk of a certain retroactive illusion of which Lacan is himself prey and I would agree with you because I think Lacan in a sense when he speaks of the difference between the human and the animal he embraces in a quite non-critical way the old standard tradition of German philosophical anthropology. You know, "man is a wounded animal," man is mediation/negation of nature, which is then completely transvaluated into a kind of like hyper-determination, you know a super-determination, the lack of determination is a determination, right. But then at one point you also said that Lacan and Deleuze, unlike Derrida, do not carry out a retroactive totalization. So my question... Yeah with regard to philosophy only. Okay, with regard to history of philosophy. You know Derrida has this, which I find it sympathetic because basically we all philosophers secretly do it: we think that we finally got it right and all other idiots till now... I mean if you don't think that you are in some sense brighter than Hegel then... no but just to answer you quickly then we can go on. You know my answer here would have been that yes we had this Lacan which is this simplistic Lacan: "oh animals are caught into that, we humans," and also this idea that which is directly falsified by Stephen Jay Gould, as if nature is some kind of homeostasis and so on and only we humans introduce imbalance, chaos. But I claim that in his last years he started to problematize. First, you know how he often engages in very interesting speculations of where in this so-called animal kingdom already you find maybe like already proto-elements? For example he claims dolphins which play in a certain way with the fish, just dropping, throwing the fish one to another, but the point is not that at the end the master dolphin gets the fish and swallows him one, it's just the circulation as such is the message. And claims: isn't this maybe beyond this just signs, a kind of a phatic symbolic communication? So I think I think that Lacan, and maybe there is no clear answer here, oscillates between two, you know probably more of of of about Lacan here than me, but my impression is that he somehow oscillates between the two versions. One is that we have the human animal and then language is like a foreign body which distorts the animal, symbolizes, castrates it. On the other hand, a much more interesting theory is the opposite one: that you have that something went terribly pathologically wrong with an animal and language tries to bring order into it. And so he but in that... But very quickly, what what is that Derrida got right in this context? No, just problematizing this difference. Okay, just problematizing. But no, no, no, no, no, I'm not, if this mean if you are asking me an honest Stalinist question following your self-freely given confession that Stalin was basically right like, no I'm not a Derridean, you will not get me here. If you want to send me to GULAG you will have to find another sin. You try to you try to make me acknowledge that I'm a Stalinist without trying to make you acknowledge that your you know Derrida got it wrong most of the times but he got it right where it really matters. No, exactly the opposite. Adrian. All right, three questions. In the first, I have to ask you: are you familiar with a a strange book, sort of a cult classic from the 1970s, Julian Jaynes's book *The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind*? Yeah, but it didn't give me a multiple orgasm, was I wrong? No, I mean because it was immediately it was immediately reappropriated by New Agers. When I was young this was the New Age Bible. That's right. But of course in the interesting hypothesis there that in fact for instance with the ancient Greeks, and it's relevant to your drawing on Veyne, that according to Jaynes the very distinction that you and Veyne are using to ask "all right is it a matter of naive direct belief or the kind of inner ironic distance between we in our postmodern era," in fact it's the latter instead of the former. That with Jaynes the idea is that it is perhaps neither of those, that it isn't a matter of either sincerely believing or just pretending to believe, it's that they were literally directly hallucinating these voices in what you get the descriptions in in Homer for instance of hearing the voice of the god in one's you know chest etc., that this was you know basically equivalent to what you have with modern-day psychotics with auditory hallucinations. And even though it might not be correct, it suggests the possibility of a third way of relating to this that would be where the problem would be not retrojecting our idea of naive direct belief onto the Greeks but rather retrojecting the very, you know, false choice between naive direct belief or you know inner ironic, you know, "postmodern" distance. I see your point but my answer would have been that you don't even need this book, it's already if the choice is between post-ironic stance and naively believing, my point is that already an ordinary everyday human speech provides a third choice. Let's say, okay we are really friends, my old example: let's say we wouldn't be really friends and let's say we meet each other, you know my old example on the street. And what do I say when I see you? I say "oh nice to see you how are you?" What do I think? I think "fuck it why didn't I see you five seconds before so I can go to the other side of the street and I don't care if you drop dead here." Okay, what I claim is that what happens here is that we both know that I don't mean it seriously, but nonetheless at a higher level encoded I you know although we both know this is literally a lie. When I say "how are you," the last thing I expect from you is to tell me some boring story of how are you. It's for what I mean is that here exactly you have something which is not irony, there is no irony in this, but it's also not directly a and that's how symbolic order works all the time. You don't take it literally but nonetheless you take it more seriously than you are aware of. Just a quick follow-up. Just one other. Yeah so propos this theme though of neither nature nor culture, which you associate specifically with the word excess. Um, I wonder whether you would be better served by speaking of this as a deficit, which wouldn't carry with it the sense of oh some third option that would necessarily end up in a kind of supernaturalism. Because if you take a take a look at for example David J. Linden and Gary Marcus's work on the central nervous system as a "kluge," right? The idea is is that what makes us human is the lack of organic integration and of a full coordination between the components of our contingently plopped together central nervous system and you know organs of thought. But then the problem is not to turn that lack, which has been tested by people like Linden and and Marcus into a minus, right? Because if you try to turn a lack into a minus then you have a negative philosophical anthropology. Okay that's why some... here I would opt for a third version, which is precisely Deleuze formulated this very nicely. How for me lack and excess are strictly correlative. It's almost almost a kind of a parallax shift: you know what appears as a lack at the same time and again the beauty here Deleuze has some wonderful formulations in his *Logic of Sense*, where he claims how what defines human universe is a lack, an empty space in structure, and an excess, an object which cannot ever find its space. But his point is that precisely you cannot say "okay so let us squeeze the object into that empty space and everything will be nice." No, because the lack and the excess are the same thing from two perspectives as it were. So nonetheless I would because you know if you focus too much on lack, I precisely tried to avoid and here also I don't agree I don't like Lacan.
you very much. First, let me tell you how proud I am to be here for very precise reasons. I don't know to what extent you follow the politically correct fashions and pressures, but what disturbs me in the last couple of years, and you can vouch for me here, especially in United Kingdom, is how because on the one hand we have now this aggressive, let's call it naively, bourgeois liberal materialism, Dawkins, Hitchens, and so on, and because of the link with some Palestinians and so on, all of a sudden I noticed it's considered politically incorrect to simply emphasize that you are a materialist. Like I wrote once a comment claiming how not only you can be ethical by being a materialist, but only as a materialist you can be really ethical, blah blah, and then I got bombarded: my message is, I don't even mention Islam in that text, why did you turn into Islamophobia and so on and so on. It's as if not to offend Palestinians or whoever, it's better not to criticize even religion. So no, I remain an old-fashioned materialist. So let me begin with a strange starting point because it's not an author to whom I often refer: Jacques Derrida. In his book The Animal That Therefore I Am, although this title with obvious references to Descartes, although this title was intended as an ironic stab at Descartes, one should, I think, take it with more of a literal naivety. The Cartesian cogito is not a separate substance different from the body, as Descartes himself misunderstood his cogito. At the level of substantial content, I am nothing but the animal that I am. What makes me human is the very formal, formal declaration of being as an animal. Derrida's starting point is that every clear and general differentiation between humans and the animal that we know from the history of philosophy, from Aristotle to Heidegger, from Lacan to Levinas, should be deconstructed. What, what, Derrida's question, and here I think is Derrida at his best, here I agree with the tendency of his questioning: what, for example, really legitimates us to say that only humans speak while animals only emit signs? You know, this is the usual answer to that famous example of how one stupid bee finds honey at certain shrub then goes back to the tribe and performs a certain dance which precisely signals what direction, how far is the honey. The idea is these are only signals, this is not language proper. Or what legitimates us to say that only humans experience things as such, while animals are just captivated by their animal life-world? This is of Heidegger. Or that, another thesis by Lacan, that only humans can feign to feign, like reflexively: I lie that I lie, I tell the truth but I count that what is literally true will be taken as a lie, while animals just directly feign or lie. Furthermore, that only humans are mortal, experience death, while animals simply die. Or that animals enjoy a harmonious sexual relationship or instinctual mating, while only for us humans, as Lacan put it, il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel. Derrida displays here, I think, the best of what I'm tempted to call the common sense of deconstruction: asking naive questions which undermine philosophical propositions taken for granted for centuries. What, for example, legitimates Lacan to claim with such self-evidence, without providing any data or arguments, that animals cannot feign to feign? What legitimates Heidegger to claim as a self-evident fact that animals don't relate to their death? As Derrida emphasizes again and again, the point of this questioning is not to abolish the gap that separates man from other animals. It's not to attribute also to animals what we call spiritual properties. This, as you probably know, is the path of some eco-mystics who claim that not only animals but even trees and other plants communicate in a secret language of their own for which we humans are blind and so on and so on. The point is rather that all these differences should be rethought, conceived in a different way. Now I want to pursue this path. Such a negative characterization of animals: they are speechless, they exchange signals but they don't speak properly, or as Heidegger put it, they are world-less or rather, in a very interesting way, you know these famous passages from Heidegger's seminar from '29-'30 where Heidegger develops this triad of dead objects, animals, and humans and says objects are weltlos, without world, they just are there stupidly; animals are weltarm, they have a world but a narrow world into which they are absolutely captivated; while only humans do have properly a world. And of course, Heidegger himself immediately is aware of the problems here. How can you say that animals are weltarm? I mean, why this limitation? Isn't it that again you already presuppose humans? So the question is: are animals weltarm in themselves or just in comparison with humans? And I like the madness of Heidegger at that point where for a brief moment he regresses into romantic philosophy of nature, where he claims that what if animal life is in itself weltarm in the sense that they, animals themselves, experience their predicament condition as terribly constrained and... he quotes here, Heidegger quotes here Schelling which speaks about melancholy of all living beings, how living nature, pre-human nature itself strives towards its liberation, so that this is an old, as you probably know, Gnostic mythic motif, that human speech is not just an affair of the human, it retroactively liberates nature, living nature in its entirety. So again, such negative characterization of animals, speechless, worldless, engenders the appearance of a positive determination which is false. For example, when we claim that animals are captured by their environments and so on and so on. I think we encounter here the same phenomenon as the one in that is usually at work in traditional Eurocentric anthropology. Viewed through the lenses of the modern Western rational thought, as the standard of maturity, the other, non-European others cannot but appear as primitives caught into magic thinking, or those who really think that their tribe originated from some stupid totemic animal, or that a pregnant woman was really inseminated by a spirit and not by a man and so on and so on. You see, the parallel I try to draw is this one: that when modern anthropology, or rather the one from years ago in its early naivety, visited primitive tribes, they projected into them a certain pre-modern naivety, as if those idiots really believed in ghosts, they thought that they really originate from totem and so on and so on. But it's absolutely clear that this is not the case. This image of a primitive who really believes, is immediately caught into the appearance, is simply a retroactive construction of us humans. If anything, it can be proven that the so-called primitives or generally neuro-premodern people had, on the contrary, a much more refined sense of reflexive mediation or distance and so on. For example, let me mention a well-known book that I quote all the time or at least refer to: Paul Veyne, Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, where he demonstrates that no, definitely no, ancient Greeks were not idiots, they didn't think that if you climb to the Mount Olympus you will there see I don't know Zeus screwing Aphrodite or whatever. They... no. But you know, the question is what then did they think? And Paul Veyne also demonstrates that they also, it's also wrong to read it in our enlightened European way as simple metaphoric thinking. You know, people usually say no, Zeus was for them just a personalized metaphor of some cosmic creative force or whatever. No, this is also wrong. What is difficult for us to accept is that never did we reach that point of immediacy where words really meant or whatever. Here I think, incidentally, we should also reject so-called phenomenological reconstruction of meaning, which is based on the idea that originally we have the full experience which later gets ritualized, emptied, turned into a mere ritual and so on and so on. You know like I don't know, the idea is for example shaking hands: oh originally it meant a gesture of friendship because it's a proof that I don't hold a knife in my hand, but later it became an empty gesture or whatever. No, I think that precisely there never was this moment of full meaning which later became an empty form. From the very beginning, from the very beginning I claim the distance is here. Which is why for me, if there is naivety, the most naive position is precisely that of radical deconstructionism. Where do you encounter this naivety? Do you notice how if you read, okay now this style is already a little bit out of fashion, but if you read classical deconstructive works from years ago by Derrida or my personal friend, theoretical enemy, Judith Butler, the first thing that strikes the eye is the incredible amount of quotes, sorry quotation marks and conditional formulations. Like you will never get them to simply say, for example, my old ironic example, if you ask Judith Butler what is this, she wouldn't like to say this is a glass of water, she would say "if we temporarily for strategic reasons endorse the essentialist denotative functioning of language then..." and she likes to put it in this, "then maybe we can risk the hypothesis that this is the glass of water." It's the same as Umberto Eco pointed out, that today with this postmodern reflexive attitude you cannot even say "I love you," today you should somehow qualify it not to appear ridiculous, like "maybe as a poet would have put it, I love you." Yes but what... where's the mistake here? The mistake is precisely in the fear that if I say it directly, I would somehow have meant it too immediately. What the ancient people knew is that even when I say "I love you," all the distance, as the poets would have put it, is already included. We are the stupid ones today, we don't get it that also without all those quotation marks the distance is here. So what I'm saying again is that in the same way that modernity builds retroactively an image of natural immediacy, fullness, whatever you want, that the same goes also for this basic divide human-animal. So the first ideologico-critical operation here is, but then there's a second step this is even maybe more crucial, the first step I think it to dismantle this myth of pseudo-Hegelian myth—Hegel doesn't do this at all—that we start with some naive beautiful immediacy which then gets reflected, mediated. No, reflection, distance is here from the very beginning. For example, what is the beautiful beginning for Hegel? Ancient Greece, Antigone? Are you crazy? Hegel's whole point of reading Antigone is that the split, the cut is here from the very beginning. There never is a moment of authentic state, state emerges by way of being split. So again, the first point of course is to denaturalize our own opposition by way of introducing the moment of reflexivity, distance into the naive other. Again the very first step is to take into account how this naive other is a presupposition already for others themselves. You know I read some wonderful anthropological books where they inquired into for example one classic book that I read, they went to a tribe in Native American so-called Indians and asked them "do you really think that you originate from that totem or of your tribe, some stupid old bird?" and of course you get always the same answer: "Of course we are not stupid, we don't believe that we originate, but some people, some ancestors told us that way ago there were people who really believed it" and so on and so on. And of course you never encounter people who really believe it, you always encounter just people who heard about the other people that they believed in it and so on and so on, no? So the best example I can imagine here on this reflexivity, it's a beautiful story, I'm sorry if you know it but I like to repeat it, it happened around years ago I read, I think it's in New Guinea, New Guinea yeah, where so I heard that a group of anthropologists heard that there is in the middle of the island some terrible tribe and that they dance some terrible death, death dance with hot terrifying masks and so on. So okay they went into the jungle, finally they did reach this tribe and they arrived in the evening, they asked them "could you please dance for us this dance?" the tribe said "oh sorry we are tired, we are going to sleep." They went to sleep, in the morning when they awakened refreshed, the tribe members did dance this horrible dance for them, it was exactly what they expected no, horrible masks and so on, terrible sounds, then they left the tribe and wrote a report. Unfortunately another expedition joined the same tribe years ago and got the true story, which was that these members of the tribe simply wanted to be polite and they somehow guessed that these stupid anthropologists wanted some terrible dance with death masks and so on. So the whole night they were preparing these masks to satisfy them in the morning. So again it was already staged for their own eyes. So again this is what you know, this is the emancipatory moment of Kafka, you remember at the end of that famous parable in The Trial, when after the man from the country dies, the doorman says "this door was here only for you," like your gaze was implied for it, and in the same way that this dance was constructed for the gaze of the anthropologists, this image of nature or animal life in its naive immediacy, whatever, is constructed for our gaze. Rational thought thus engenders the figure of the irrational mythic thought. What we get here is the process of violent simplification which occurs with every rise of the new. In order to assert something radically new, the entire past has to be reduced to some basic defining feature. And now I want nonetheless to defend a little bit this measure, namely did you notice how every theory which presents itself as a radical break has to enact this violent retroactive totalization? Like Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (Thesis you know like "all philosophers till now have only interpreted, we now..." or Heidegger, "all philosophy till me is just metaphysics of presence," or or or... "all is ideology" and so on, you even even Derrida does this, the idea being till his deconstruction all philosophy is again a version of metaphysics of presence, phallogocentric and so on and so on. I think maybe the first step of a truly dialectical thought is to question this retroactive totalization. And here I think we get two strange bedfellows, Deleuze and Lacan, who in spite of all their differences they don't do this. One should admit for Lacan and for Deleuze they never totalize in this sense the past, they are like you know Deleuze picks out this philosopher, that philosopher particularly, they don't do this retroactive totalization. And but also in a at a different level we find the same operation for example from our Western Judeo-Christian tradition. We try to throw together all other traditions into the same Oriental or Pagan or whatever stance, obliterating the incredible wealth of positions covered up by the term Oriental thought. For example can you imagine something more different from Indian metaphysics, Upanishads, castes and so on, than the Chinese Confucianism, which is precisely agnostic pragmatic stance explicitly rejecting metaphysics and so on and so on. So that's again the first step of dialectical critique of metaphysics which should also be applied to animals. We should not forget that among others as Roxana was saying before but others also I think that animal is a differential category. Animal emerges, there is no unity of the animal. Animal emerges with the rise of man and you can compute the issue, the issue and this would be a nice if some of you are stupid young students, I advise you to do when you study philosophy a kind of a small seminar or what it would be wonderful, namely what kind of a seminar? You know when philosophers say "the animal," you can easily discover how they usually have in mind a very specific animal which mysteriously is selected. For example with Heidegger it's a lizard, I think. What is this fascin... nature or what, but when he always when in his seminar '29-'30, *Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik*, yeah he always mentions a lizard there sitting on a... lying on a rock and basking in hot sun and so on. It's always a stupid lizard like why not an ape, why not this, why not that, no? And so again sometimes it's an ape or whatever but I claim you know it's always totalized under the hegemony of one animal. Now in the next step, I want nonetheless to defend this procedure of retroactive totalization. It's easy to claim here to be against binary logic, but I claim that maybe it's time against all this post... you know one of the easy senses of post... easy cheap rhetorical tricks of postmodernism is to to reject binary logic. When you say "this against that," if you don't have any good arguments the easiest thing to say is "yes but you are caught in binary logic" and so on, no? The proof of this bullshit of attacking binary logic is for me a wonderful paraphrase I bought a book, I hope it's translated into German: Politically Correct Guide to the Bible, where they take the biggest hits from the Bible and they translate them in a politically correct way, you know. For example, you know that famous passage "though I walk through the valley of shadow but I feel no fear no evil, because..." and then you have the politically correct version I love, I think I told her—she was mad at me—to Judith Butler, that probably she was targeted here, it's like "I walk in the valley of shadow but I fear no evil, because I know that good and evil are only binary metaphysical opposites." I mean the way to answer this, there is even a better one in a song by a Black rapper you find it, it's even better: "I walk in the valley of shadow but I fear no evil, because I'm the meanest motherfucker in the whole valley." That's I think the revolutionary answer. Okay but let me go on. So be very careful how when you have this emphasis on multiplicity against binary logic, it usually works to obfuscate a certain central antagonism. You know this is how for example the next step of course is then against class binary logic: not only two classes, there are more classes, there are more sexes and so on and so on. I I think that even if this retroactive totalization when you do a cut and violently totalize all that comes before, even if it's in a way violent imposition, there is a moment of truth in it. That is to say, what if the multiplicity of animal forms is to be conceived as a series of attempts to resolve some basic tension which defines animality, a tension which can only be formulated from a minimal distance? So again you see this would be for me a properly dialectical solution. What emerges through the animal is of course not this romantic bullshit of "oh the whole nature was suffering, now we humans liberate nature by starting to talk," but it's only through this minimal distance of speech that retroactively we can formulate what? Not the eternal essence of animality, but the deadlock of animality. I think the problem of fighting essentialism is not to drop the notion of essence, but to redefine the notion of essence. Here, I'm so sad I don't have the time to go into it because here I have a problem with nominalism. I'm absolute realist of the universal. Not of course in the stupid pseudo-Platonic sense of there are universal essences, but in the sense of that the proper dialectical relationship between universal and particular is not a nominalist one, but it's to introduce a tension between universality and the particular as such. Against the New Age bullshit where you say "particular elements are struggling with each other and universality is the space of this struggle," we should say: no, the first antagonism is not between particular moments of the universality, but between universality and its particular forms. What if universality is a name of a certain antagonism and particular forms are attempts to mystify, to deal with this antagonism? This is why, incidentally, I'm opposed to this politically correct bullshit of "whoo there is no capitalism, there are only concrete forms of capitalism." I agree, what concretely exist are only, you know, corporate capitalism, liberal capitalism, capitalism with Asian values, which of course has nothing to do with Asia but has a lot to do with the fact that—and this is a wonderful dialectical point—that today this is the ultimate revenge of Stalinism, Stalinist communism on capitalism. Okay, maybe Fukuyama was right, communism lost, but look at China. But communists are today the best managers of capitalism. So okay, there are only different capitalisms, but they all try to resolve, obfuscate, control the same antagonism. What unites all capitalisms are not some abstract universal features, but it's a certain deadlock. What if we can apply the same to animals? What do I mean by this? Recall the well-known elaboration of the general equivalent from the first edition of Marxist *Of Capital* by Marx. This is a sentence you find only in the first edition, Marx then as you know for the second edition he rearranged the first chapter and this passage disappears. I quote him, Marx is describing here the logic of money as general equivalent: "It is as if alongside and external to lions, tigers, rabbits and all other actual animals, which form when grouped together the various kinds, species, subspecies of the animal kingdom, there existed in addition the animal, the individual das Tier, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom." End of quote. This image of money as "the animal" romping alongside all the heterogeneous instances of particular sorts of animality that exist around us, does it not lend itself to capture what what Derrida describes as the gap that separates "the animal" from the multiplicity of actual animal life? Now I want to apply here the big rule of Hegelian dialectics which, as Frank developed in detail in his book on Hegel's *Pöbel* (rabble), Hegel didn't follow consequently, namely that in each Hegelian totality or concrete universality, universality itself is one of its own species. It encounters itself among its species as its own *gegensätzliche Bestimmung*, oppositional determination. And this is where Hegel is not radical enough. For example, the rabble, Hegel is good enough to discover the necessity of producing this excess, *Pöbel*. What he is not ready, but he should have done to posit, is that precisely as such, as non-society, as the element which sticks out with no place in society, rabble is the only point of universality. It is as if in rabble, in rabble, human as a social being as such exists. All others are just particular, precisely in the outcast the universality comes to exist as such. So I would claim: which is then this animal which is "the animal"? We humans. This is how I'm tempted to read early Marx's determination of man as *Gattungswesen*, a being of species. It does not mean that humans are one—some ecologists read this as "oh you see Marx was already close to ecology, humans are one among the species"—no no, *Gattungswesen* means precisely something more radical: a species which relates to itself as a universal being, as a species. Incidentally Marx is here of course very much embedded in German idealist heritage. And I claim that now I want to make my next point: I claim that what if this *das Tier*, this animal as such, does exist and these are we humans. And this is the horror that animals see in us. We are "the animal" for precisely as non-animal, we are "the animal" for others, for other animals. So let me go on here, next point. It is not enough to say that that while the determination of animals as speechless and so on is wrong, the determination of humans as rational speaking beings and so on is right. So again, you got my point when I oppose this naive idea of defining animals with some immediate capture, like captivation, like animals are just immediately caught into their environments, speechless, *weltarm* and so on. The point is not we can see what we humans are, but we mystify the other. The entire field is wrong. Which is why the first step is that we should demystify the other, that is to say animals are not in this sense naive, immediately caught into their environments, this is clearly just a retroactive projection, a kind of symmetrical mirror image: if we humans can do it, animals cannot do that and so on and so on. I think that the true mystification is in that what this opposition, standard opposition, obfuscates: we speak, animals don't speak, we relate to death, animals don't relate to death. What effectively disappears here is not so much what animals truly are in themselves in the sense of we already reduce animals to our human perspective, they are just reduced to what we are not, what we really miss is the most radical dimension of what we humans are. Here, in spite of their opposition, Kierkegaard and Hegel are share the same point of opposing becoming (*Werden*) and being (*Sein*). The standard opposition animal/human is formulated from the perspective of human being. We are already constituted and we measure with our standard—reason, speech, whatever—animals. What this perspective cannot think is the human in its becoming. It thinks animals from within the given human standpoint. It cannot think the human from the animal standpoint. What do I mean by this? Here I claim psychoanalysis enters. Now I will provide the formula then I will develop it. I think that the—and here I'm sad that Alenka Zupančič, she had some sad problems, this is why she asked me to and Mladen Dolar who has different medical problems, and I as you can see am ill, I'm getting here KGBed that there was some reactionary plot to prevent us from coming—she got an operation today, Alenka, of her... what is this stupid big bone... spine or what? Yeah, some discs there putting pressure on her nerves and she stopped feeling her legs, her left leg, which I immediately interpreted as the hysterical disavowal of her left-wing orientation, that's one private joke. But I'm sad because she precisely wanted to develop this: the notion of drive, the Freudian *Trieb*, as precisely that which is not yet culture in the sense of symbolic universe but no longer, no longer animal instinct. The idea being that something is in between, no longer animal life but not yet human culture. And here we should, I would like to follow Alenka, she developed this in detail, she wanted to develop it here, of how... I'm so sad we don't have time, how well he translated here Meillassoux, *Après la finitude*, no? So maybe some of you translated it or what? You published it? Okay. So maybe some people read it. Alenka elaborated I think a nice Lacanian answer to Meillassoux's two central points. The first one about this universal contingency: her point is that while agreeing with his point of asserting contingency, the point is that she mobilizes here the Lacanian opposition, dialectic of "non-all" (*pas-tout*). Meillassoux reads universal contingency in what Lacan would have called masculine formulas of sexuation: a universality, everything is radically contingent based on an exception, contingency itself is necessary. And Alenka, I think, in a detailed pages-long analysis shows how you get a much more provocative result if you apply if you read contingency along the what Lacan calls the feminine logic of sexuation. That is to say, contingency is non-all precisely because you cannot totalize it through exception. Not because something is not contingent but precisely because there is nothing which is not contingent and then okay. Her second, even more triumphant argument against Meillassoux I think, and this is the best introduction to the point I want to make, concerns precisely the problem of fossils. You know the, you know what this problem is about. Meillassoux claims that entire transcendental legacy, transcendental Kantian, post-Kantian philosophy cannot provide a clear answer to the status of fossils, like you see a fossil. If you take it ontologically seriously, it refers to something which existed, to cut a long story short, before there was any transcendental horizon which constituted it and so on and so on. And in a very convincing way, I agree, Meillassoux demonstrates how all the usual transcendental tricks don't work here. But I think that Meillassoux even—we were talking so much about Darwinism, no—here I am on if we want to isolate the dimension that maybe Darwin didn't see, I would like to rehabilitate, I forgot his name, a well-known friend of Darwin but at the same time a theologian, who you must know the theory it's wonderful, Stephen Jay Gould wrote about it, who provided I think the best answer, theological answer to Darwinism. He tried to bring together Darwinism and theology. His problem was the following one: Darwinism unambiguously demonstrates that fossils, there was life, blah blah, thousand, tens of thousand of years, millions before there were human beings. How to bring this together with the well-known fact which must be true because my god the Bible is true, it's the word of God, that the world was created I think about and years ago. There is even a wonderful British empiricist claim that God created the world minus BC at in the morning. It's a wonderful idea like God took breakfast and so on. Okay, and this priest friend of Darwin proposed, you must know it, a wonderful solution, which I think is of course wrong as a scientific theory but it's beautiful as the theory of ideology. It's that of course how can God be wrong? God created the world years whatever BC, but he created directly fossils as such to give us humans the wrong impression of openness. You know like when you create a world for a child and put on windows like a kind of a... like in movies, you know, when they create the false background so that the world appears larger and... So the idea... and although of course this is maybe nonsense biologically, maybe, I say maybe yeah, but it's absolutely true I claim as a theory of ideology. This is how in ideology we are all the time doing it, even literally. Did you translated into German a wonderful book by Eric Hobsbawm—no he is just the editor—The Invention of Tradition? It's a wonderful book which goes in different nations about and for example: what do you know about Scotland? You know kilts and you know that they were invented in the late 19th century? Absolutely nothing to... no, how most of the traditions that we celebrate as blah blah were invented, invented usually late 19th century and so on. So but we are doing this all the time, I claim. And I claim that maybe every national identity is based on fossils in a way. Because you know Ernst Renan, great guy, okay a dirty racist, one of these early scientific French racists, but he provided I think the best definition of what is a nation that we can imagine. He said nation is a large group of people characterized by three features: they are kept together by lies about their past, shared enemies in their present, and stupid illusions about their future. I don't know how it is with you, for us Slovenians I think this holds true. We are kept together by lies about our past: for example, the most popular lie is now that we are really not Slavic, we are barbarian, we are Etruscans, you know even more ancient and so on. Then present enemies, they change that's the problem, no? When I was younger Albanians, then with Milošević Serbs were Albanians were good, now Albanians are also becoming bad and I must tell you Croats are... it looks bad. Then there are also Italians and so on. And illusions about the future: I mean the dream of Slovenian right-wingers is let's get rid of the communist plot, you know every honest Slovenian knows that secretly communists still dominate the nation, no, if we get rid of them in four years we will be wealthier than Switzerland, no? It works. So what I'm saying is that maybe I would like to combine a truly dialectical Darwinism would have been the one which would include this dimension, of course not as a fact but as a necessary fiction constitutive of reality. This retroactivity is not simply subjective. I will not develop it now, it would take too much time which I'm already losing. What I only want to say is that it's too simple to say oh this is just the retroactive illusion and so on and so on. But okay, going back to the point. Fossils. So I claim that the true problem, and this brings us to Lacanian psychoanalysis to what Lacan calls object A, the impossible objectal equivalent of the subject, Lacanian answer to Meillassoux would have been that the true problem is not the fossil out there like was there life on earth before human beings, no problem. The true fossil are we ourselves. That is to say, it's part of our identity as humans that we are unable to see ourselves in becoming. We should not get caught into this problem of "we and the animals, do we see animals the way they are in themselves?" No, the problem is that we cannot see ourselves as well what we are in itself as it were. The problem, what's the problem? Let me give you a religious parallel. It's easy to claim oh we Christians cannot read properly pagan religions, we already reduce them to our perspective. It's also easy to play these games with claiming like all of my Jewish friends are claiming this: "that you stupid Christians, you have a supercessionist view, you reduce us to just a step before like Judaism and then Christianity, you miss what Judaism is" and so on and so on. Maybe, but what I'm saying is that what we miss even more is how to put it, what was Christ before he became a Christian? This is the true perversion. What kind of... are we aware what kind of monstrosity Jesus Christ was for the eyes of the Jews before he as it were created his own horizon of meaning with the story he told about himself. Because the way we perceive Christianity it's already from the perspective of the book. In one of the Bruegel paintings—is it Bruegel? I think so—on crucifixion, you know it's this wonderful detail which is historically true, ideologically not historically sorry. You have crucifixion and then you have the two robbers crucified and to one of them, one of them was good one I think, no? You see the good one already making confession to a priest who holds in his hand the Bible, you know like... But this is how we perceive the past, it's true, as if it's always already here. So the problem is to see it in becoming, when... so you see my point? What the truth of Christianity is, what was Christ before he became a Christian? That's the truly traumatic point. This is how we should read that wonderful anecdote about Napoleon, you know when Napoleon crowned himself as an emperor. You know the story, the Pope approached him and Napoleon took the crown from Pope's hand and put it on. Eh, but you know what Pope told them, Napoleon? Pope was a modern guy, he told Napoleon "I know why you are doing this to me, you want to destroy Christianity." And then the Pope went on like this. So that maybe the whole of Christianity as institution is a struggle not against the pagan tradition, but against its own excess. And in a similar way I claim the whole of being human, symbolic stories and so on, is one struggle to control not our animal nature, but the excess which marked our break with nature. You find even, I'm repeating myself a little bit here I know, you find traces of this even in books like sorry in Kant's philosophy. For example there is a wonderful passage in Kant's lesser-known Immanuel Kant's small text on education where Kant proposes his famous thesis that man is an animal who needs a master. And then he went on, he goes on, Kant, why? And he says because only humans have a certain—while he uses a same German strange word I forgot it, it means a kind of an unruliness, wild freedom unruliness which as Kant emphasizes has to be cultivated, it's not culture but it's not natural. It's also not nature. It's a kind of a wild explosion of a noumenal freedom which is already a break with nature, but has to be cultivated. And which is why again only humans need a master. It's a very nice thesis because again it totally undermines the idea that we need culture to control our the brutality of our animal nature or whatever. No no, the brutality is precisely the Freudian drive, the Freudian Trieb. You know who made this point, my I'm sorry to quote him all the time, my favorite Catholic philosopher, G.K. Chesterton, in his Everlasting Man? It's a wonderful dialectical text, you can find it on the net. He precisely tries to imagine this scene of how the first humans must have appeared to natural animals around them. A quote: "The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being, almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. Man cannot sleep in his own skin, he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called cloth, he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter, as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals, he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being" and so on and so on. So again I this would be my first point: that the excess that needs to be explained it's not can we understand the animals, it's the other side as it were. The true invisible fossil is what we humans are in ourselves, what was lost the moment we got caught into our ideological self-perception. Now what is this point? Here I want to do some wild Darwinian speculation. I am where am I now... okay, no I will now really try to condense it. My first point here would have been that I disagree with those vulgar Darwinians who try to naturalize human mind, who look for the solution in what human mind can do, its complexities and so on, you know like we can talk, we can have infinitesimal mathematics account and so on and so on. I claim that maybe a much more productive way would have been to begin with what Alain Badiou noted when he pointed out that what defines a world are primarily not its positive features, but the way the structure of a world relates to its own inherent point of impossibility. And the true changes in the structure of the world are changes in the status of this impossibility, which doesn't simply mean that the impossible becomes possible. It's just somehow integrated as impossible. For example, the big revolution in mathematics in the 19th century is when the so-called imaginary numbers, the square root of became operative. Before it was simply dismissed as nonsense. There can be no square root of a negative number so it's useless. Even to make an anti-Marxist step, even Marx in his mathematical manuscripts dismisses the square root of as simple nonsense. But you see, the big revolution of mathematics occurred when you proved that even if the square root of is in a way impossible, nonsensical, you can use it, you can integrate it, it functions. My god you can build buildings based on mathematical accounts which use the square root of and so on and so on. So I claim: is not something similar with democracy and with capitalism? What is great about democracy is that it takes something which was for previous forms of government simple traumatic impossibility: my god the throne is empty, let's, you know, you find this even in Stalinism it returns. Like you know in Stalinism always when the leader dies, usually people learn about it a couple of days later because the void has to be filled in immediately. You cannot afford a couple of days where you don't know who is in power, no? But democracy integrates this and makes it the very the very instrument of its, okay, relative stability. Or capitalism does the same: the impossibility of stability, the system always revolutionizes itself, it makes it the very mode of its, okay, yeah mobility. What I claim is that what if we should look for what makes us humans humans rather at this level? Not at what we do but the changed status of what we cannot do, the same integration of impossibility. What do I mean by this? I totally agree when you mention people like Dennett that they should be mentioned, they are not idiots. We cannot... it's possible not to agree with them but here and there they have good examples, they make a nice dialectical point. The one who is an idiot, I don't concede here compromise, is Steven Pinker. The proof: in his, I forgot which book, he confronts this problem of how is it that we cannot naturalize our own consciousness, our own mind. And he tries to provide a simple evolutionary answer. His, Pinker's answer is that simply, of course we cannot understand ourselves because our mind was not created in the course of evolutionary adaptive process for this aim. And he uses this metaphor: he says in the same way that rabbits cannot understand infinitesimal calculus or whatever because simply it's not part of their life, life-world, they need this what, to evade, to evade foxes, to get to get to get some stupid vegetables to eat whatever, in the same way we humans developed our intelligence for certain adaptive survival purposes—sexual seduction, collective work collaboration and so on, not to solve metaphysical problems: how does our mind work and so on and so on. I agree, but there is one problem here, which is that although there are problems which we cannot solve maybe, metaphysical problems, there is one problem, one crucial difference: rabbits are not obsessed by infinitesimal calculus, it's simply external, they don't care about it. But we, how is it that we humans obsessively care again and again all the time for a problem for which which has no adaptive value and so on and so on? And even further, what can be shown if you look really close at the history of science is how is how, for example if you look at the development of modern machinery and so on, it's not in a vulgar Marxist way that you know first they were using machinery for concrete economic purposes and then also... no, it started as a superfluous aesthetic endeavor. You know in the court of Louis XIV they had many machine... only later they said oh my god we have this pure useless excess why don't we apply it to some... So I claim that I claim that what if human intelligence is basically defined at the zero level? It's not a positive achievement, it's more a kind of a getting stuck with a certain impossibility, like I want to resolve it but I cannot and I don't drop it, I go on and on and on. I'm tempted to say that since plasticity was so much celebrated today, but are you aware... okay I will tell you the source, it's my good friend from Duke now he's somewhere else, a Turkish anthropologist but he enjoyed years ago a top position at Duke University, Güven Güzeldere, who told me he made himself experiments with apes and told me how if anything when confronted to a libidinal object, apes are much more plastic, you know? Like you propose to an ape two sexual partners, one obviously more attractive than the other, then okay first the ape selects the more attractive one, tries to if it doesn't go he said "okay fuck off" and go to the second one. With humans, no, you know, the more impossible it is, if anything, humans are much more fixed, an impossibility you you remain, you get you get stuck onto it. And I claim that this maybe is precisely what Freud calls the drive, this fixation on the impossibility, this you know you fail but you repeat you kind of get caught into a you get caught into a circle. So now, in order to avoid me getting caught into a circle, I will just conclude with Alain Badiou. It is here I think that my usual polemical point against Badiou that I think we should reject, I'm tempted to reject his duality of human animal and subject as the being of an event, in the sense of we are human animals caught into our ordinary pleasures and so on, utilitarian, servicing the goods, but then from time to time the miracle happens, we are interpolated by the event and so on and so on. Usually Alain Badiou is attacked here for his idealism like "oh my god where does this come this event, is it this a remainder of some metaphysics or whatever?" I tend to formulate exactly the opposite criticism. If there is something to be learned from not only psychoanalysis but even from good really good Darwinians you mentioned him like Stephen Jay Gould and so on, is that the problem is not there is no subject of the event, that is to say the event should be reduced to or deduced from antagonisms whatever of human animal. There is a lesson from psychoanalysis: it's that there is no human animal. That is to say this image of a human animal, if there is any meaning in in psychoanalysis, is that we humans in our as it were not only as beings of event but in our as it were nature itself, we don't strive for balance, happiness and so on, we sabotage American ourselves all the time. Here American Constitution is wrong, you know "the pursuit of happiness," no it's the pursuit of unhappiness which defines us. So what I want to say is that I see the problem there in this idea of human, I think that what Badiou calls human animal, of course there exists something like human animal, but it's strictly a secondary ideological formation. And I think this would be my point: that the duality of human animal and subject of the event is not enough, there must be a third level which I precisely call the Freudian drive, which is something which already disturbs nature but it's not yet culture. Okay, I don't want now to go on for too long because one can develop things here very much in detail. I tried to develop this a little bit in my *Parallax View* where I have a long chapter around debating evolutionary biology and so on. I'm in great sympathy with them, but what I claim is that reading, okay not many but yeah about some books of, I always noticed how whenever evolutionary biologists try to portray that magic moment when out of animal instincts human thought, whatever you call it, emerges, they systematically refer to the same metaphor, which is the metaphor of a self-relating circle. Like one of them uses the wonderful metaphor of how, you know, in ice dancing, how a dancer you make this movement that you... pirouette? Yeah, pirouette. And then said "human thought is as if this pirouette starts to turn in itself and magically you persist in the air." Another biologist uses this wonderful metaphor, he says that usually we are caught in this distance of stimulus-reaction, but that what characterizes human being is that what is for animals a secondary reaction that we generate our own stimulus, this self-stimul... it's a certain self-referential closure which they described, which I think again is precisely the Freudian drive. And let me be here very clear: I'm not saying—this is absolutely not meant in a non-naturalist way—I'm not saying somebody from above had to screw things up for us. No, I claim that here I agree with what you were saying and I would have said this happened probably, if we were to get an answer—this is my dream—it would have been if we would get probably a totally stupid not interesting answer: maybe something went genetically wrong, something something went simply wrong, we got stuck. There is no, I don't believe in great origin of humanity, it was something which malfunctioned and we were born humans when we started to enjoy this malfunctioning. Let me put it in this way. And all the big things then, you see this is my properly Hegelian dialectics: that we we got so dynamic precisely because originally we got stuck. "We human" means you find that, a libidinal object, and you got stuck to it, you fail to reach it but you... so again there is something here which I think nonetheless raises a couple of questions. One question is, which is totally legitimate, which was raised many times today: how can something like this happen in the order of nature? I think one way, the wrong one, would have been of course to say nonetheless another dimension intervenes, blah blah. No, I think a much more, and here I refer to what you said Roxana, another much more radical dimension should be mentioned here. What if the only way to account for things like this—human symbolic order and so on—is to claim that you know the moment you ask the problem you formulate the problem in these terms "we have a complete natural causal order and then oh how can human freedom consciousness emerge," here you get caught, either it's supernatural or you must do what even Dennett in *Freedom Evolves* does: he nonetheless claims that ultimately there is no freedom, that what you experience as freedom is simply when we can freely like without obstacles follow our predispositions and so on and so on. But there is I claim another solution, which does not mean that freedom is just, as they like to call it, users' illusion, but it also doesn't mean a higher tendency intervenes. It's simply: what if reality, objective reality, is ontologically non-all? I think we must include—and this is for me answering, I'm who formulated this question? You, yeah—this is for me the lesson to be drawn from quantum physics and so on. I'm totally materialist, I hate this idea of you know quantum physics oh my god our mind is creating reality or whatever. No, but there is one lesson of quantum physics, which is again reality in itself is not fully ontologically constituted. There are gaps in reality. Or to put it in another way, virtuality is not exclusively a human symbolic dimension. You can have virtual dimension, void and so on, the effectivity of the void already in reality itself. Here, back to Alain, I would like to supplement here because would you allow me just really to conclude just one quote from Alain Badiou which I find really problematic. It is from his, in English, *Theoretical Writings*, when he asks this elementary question: where does event come from if all there is is being, the order of being? Here is the quote: "We must point out that in what concerns its material, the event is not a miracle. What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected with it and so on. In fact, so as not to succumb to an obscurantist theory of creation ex nihilo, we must accept that an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of being." Now this is my problem with Badiou: if an event is nothing but a fragment of being, why cannot we describe it as such? Because his total description is that an event cannot be reduced to the order of being. I claim that here we get Badiou's secret Kantianism. And although he will hate me for saying this, his secret link to finitude. Because here he exactly reproduces the Kantian duality. You know how Kant says in towards the end of his *Kritik der praktischen Vernunft* that we are only free from our finitude. Kant tries to imagine what were to happen to us if we humans were to gain full access to things in themselves, how things really are. And his answer well-known is: we would turn into puppets, we would lose our freedom because we would even if we were to act ethically, we would have done it out of a simple pragmatic insight—things are like this, I have to... we would... in other words our freedom, our ethical activity and so on, is only only emerges from the standpoint of our finitude. Now with Alain I have here a similar problem: if the event is nothing but a fragment of being, why then cannot we reduce it to being? His only consequent answer can be: because of our finitude. But I would like to say no, it's not only a fragment of being, the point is precisely that being is incomplete. You must introduce the non-all of being. That in other words—and this is okay it may get me too far—you know Badiou has this ontology of multiplicity, multiplicity of multiplicities and then you have the one comes secondary. I claim that we need maybe a different ontology but I don't have time. Okay, don't worry. Thank you Slavoj and I think this is an excellent point to start a discussion. And I'd like to... Please pull out the knife and do it. No no no, I mean on Badiou on Badiou I think there is going to be some strong and and fierce... I hope so. I'm completely on your side. And actually my question... I'm afraid to have you on my side. No but I will side I will leave aside one beautiful thing you said, then Felix helped you, but at one point you were on the foot of the torrent but you said "human thought is like Skype." You were talking through pirouette, you said "ice speed," and the pirouette came from him but you said it, I mean Steven recorded it, "human thought is like Skype." But I but I will tell you why I made this slip, because I never use Skype. You know why not? Because for me the meaning of phone conversation is to be able to lie. You know like I'm invited to talk, I don't want to go, I say "so sorry I would love to come but I am ill" and so on. The point is that if you are doing it on Skype you can see the other's face and it makes it much more difficult to lie. Skype animalizes you, you know like you cannot deceive that you are deceiving, you know like. But look, I have two points. Like on one hand I am very sympathetic to your critique of Badiou... Go to the "but." But... on Derrida, Lacan, the very beginning of your question. So very simple question: what would you say of deconstruction, more specifically of Derrida with regard to animality? Because if you if I got you right, at one point you even said Derrida in a sense goes beyond Lacan in so far as he warns against warns us against the risk of a certain retroactive illusion of which Lacan is himself prey and I would agree with you because I think Lacan in a sense when he speaks of the difference between the human and the animal he embraces in a quite non-critical way the old standard tradition of German philosophical anthropology. You know, "man is a wounded animal," man is mediation/negation of nature, which is then completely transvaluated into a kind of like hyper-determination, you know a super-determination, the lack of determination is a determination, right. But then at one point you also said that Lacan and Deleuze, unlike Derrida, do not carry out a retroactive totalization. So my question... Yeah with regard to philosophy only. Okay, with regard to history of philosophy. You know Derrida has this, which I find it sympathetic because basically we all philosophers secretly do it: we think that we finally got it right and all other idiots till now... I mean if you don't think that you are in some sense brighter than Hegel then... no but just to answer you quickly then we can go on. You know my answer here would have been that yes we had this Lacan which is this simplistic Lacan: "oh animals are caught into that, we humans," and also this idea that which is directly falsified by Stephen Jay Gould, as if nature is some kind of homeostasis and so on and only we humans introduce imbalance, chaos. But I claim that in his last years he started to problematize. First, you know how he often engages in very interesting speculations of where in this so-called animal kingdom already you find maybe like already proto-elements? For example he claims dolphins which play in a certain way with the fish, just dropping, throwing the fish one to another, but the point is not that at the end the master dolphin gets the fish and swallows him one, it's just the circulation as such is the message. And claims: isn't this maybe beyond this just signs, a kind of a phatic symbolic communication? So I think I think that Lacan, and maybe there is no clear answer here, oscillates between two, you know probably more of of of about Lacan here than me, but my impression is that he somehow oscillates between the two versions. One is that we have the human animal and then language is like a foreign body which distorts the animal, symbolizes, castrates it. On the other hand, a much more interesting theory is the opposite one: that you have that something went terribly pathologically wrong with an animal and language tries to bring order into it. And so he but in that... But very quickly, what what is that Derrida got right in this context? No, just problematizing this difference. Okay, just problematizing. But no, no, no, no, no, I'm not, if this mean if you are asking me an honest Stalinist question following your self-freely given confession that Stalin was basically right like, no I'm not a Derridean, you will not get me here. If you want to send me to GULAG you will have to find another sin. You try to you try to make me acknowledge that I'm a Stalinist without trying to make you acknowledge that your you know Derrida got it wrong most of the times but he got it right where it really matters. No, exactly the opposite. Adrian. All right, three questions. In the first, I have to ask you: are you familiar with a a strange book, sort of a cult classic from the 1970s, Julian Jaynes's book *The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind*? Yeah, but it didn't give me a multiple orgasm, was I wrong? No, I mean because it was immediately it was immediately reappropriated by New Agers. When I was young this was the New Age Bible. That's right. But of course in the interesting hypothesis there that in fact for instance with the ancient Greeks, and it's relevant to your drawing on Veyne, that according to Jaynes the very distinction that you and Veyne are using to ask "all right is it a matter of naive direct belief or the kind of inner ironic distance between we in our postmodern era," in fact it's the latter instead of the former. That with Jaynes the idea is that it is perhaps neither of those, that it isn't a matter of either sincerely believing or just pretending to believe, it's that they were literally directly hallucinating these voices in what you get the descriptions in in Homer for instance of hearing the voice of the god in one's you know chest etc., that this was you know basically equivalent to what you have with modern-day psychotics with auditory hallucinations. And even though it might not be correct, it suggests the possibility of a third way of relating to this that would be where the problem would be not retrojecting our idea of naive direct belief onto the Greeks but rather retrojecting the very, you know, false choice between naive direct belief or you know inner ironic, you know, "postmodern" distance. I see your point but my answer would have been that you don't even need this book, it's already if the choice is between post-ironic stance and naively believing, my point is that already an ordinary everyday human speech provides a third choice. Let's say, okay we are really friends, my old example: let's say we wouldn't be really friends and let's say we meet each other, you know my old example on the street. And what do I say when I see you? I say "oh nice to see you how are you?" What do I think? I think "fuck it why didn't I see you five seconds before so I can go to the other side of the street and I don't care if you drop dead here." Okay, what I claim is that what happens here is that we both know that I don't mean it seriously, but nonetheless at a higher level encoded I you know although we both know this is literally a lie. When I say "how are you," the last thing I expect from you is to tell me some boring story of how are you. It's for what I mean is that here exactly you have something which is not irony, there is no irony in this, but it's also not directly a and that's how symbolic order works all the time. You don't take it literally but nonetheless you take it more seriously than you are aware of. Just a quick follow-up. Just one other. Yeah so propos this theme though of neither nature nor culture, which you associate specifically with the word excess. Um, I wonder whether you would be better served by speaking of this as a deficit, which wouldn't carry with it the sense of oh some third option that would necessarily end up in a kind of supernaturalism. Because if you take a take a look at for example David J. Linden and Gary Marcus's work on the central nervous system as a "kluge," right? The idea is is that what makes us human is the lack of organic integration and of a full coordination between the components of our contingently plopped together central nervous system and you know organs of thought. But then the problem is not to turn that lack, which has been tested by people like Linden and and Marcus into a minus, right? Because if you try to turn a lack into a minus then you have a negative philosophical anthropology. Okay that's why some... here I would opt for a third version, which is precisely Deleuze formulated this very nicely. How for me lack and excess are strictly correlative. It's almost almost a kind of a parallax shift: you know what appears as a lack at the same time and again the beauty here Deleuze has some wonderful formulations in his *Logic of Sense*, where he claims how what defines human universe is a lack, an empty space in structure, and an excess, an object which cannot ever find its space. But his point is that precisely you cannot say "okay so let us squeeze the object into that empty space and everything will be nice." No, because the lack and the excess are the same thing from two perspectives as it were. So nonetheless I would because you know if you focus too much on lack, I precisely tried to avoid and here also I don't agree I don't like Lacan.
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You know that this tradition of "oh humans are animals who lost their instinctual
You know that this tradition of "oh humans are animals who lost their instinctual
Slavoj Žižek
foundation," you know you know that this
foundation," you know you know that this
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theory has a long right-wing tradition. For example Arnold Gehlen, the German anthropologist developed it and it was also used directly to justify fascist authoritarianism. That's why humans need strong state power and so on. So
theory has a long right-wing tradition. For example Arnold Gehlen, the German anthropologist developed it and it was also used directly to justify fascist authoritarianism. That's why humans need strong state power and so on. So
Slavoj Žižek
I am not too soft on this celebration of lack, you know. Wait. Yes? No that's what Adrian said, but move on to scrap... the Central Committee will decide what he was saying himself. No but we don't know who is the Central Committee right? I know, I prefer not to know. But yes, yeah. Yeah one question concerning what you
I am not too soft on this celebration of lack, you know. Wait. Yes? No that's what Adrian said, but move on to scrap... the Central Committee will decide what he was saying himself. No but we don't know who is the Central Committee right? I know, I prefer not to know. But yes, yeah. Yeah one question concerning what you
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said: "we are humans by what we cannot do." In to put it in if I got you correctly—why am I sounding like Robocop?—but um if we cannot see ourselves how we are in ourselves—this was the phrase you used—one could say "for ourselves we cannot understand what we are in ourselves," to put it in Hegelian terms. Therefore we could say that which is not anymore animal life but not yet culture is the loss of the "in-itself." This is how I understood your reference to the species being in for example animal. But it is the in-itself so we constantly get stuck "for ourselves," this is why we're constantly responsible with a lack of essence. So it's not the negation of essence, it's some sort of let's say "un-essence," "non-essence" with reference to but you said Badiou... No no only one point. Um, this
said: "we are humans by what we cannot do." In to put it in if I got you correctly—why am I sounding like Robocop?—but um if we cannot see ourselves how we are in ourselves—this was the phrase you used—one could say "for ourselves we cannot understand what we are in ourselves," to put it in Hegelian terms. Therefore we could say that which is not anymore animal life but not yet culture is the loss of the "in-itself." This is how I understood your reference to the species being in for example animal. But it is the in-itself so we constantly get stuck "for ourselves," this is why we're constantly responsible with a lack of essence. So it's not the negation of essence, it's some sort of let's say "un-essence," "non-essence" with reference to but you said Badiou... No no only one point. Um, this
Slavoj Žižek
is I would say what
is I would say what
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Badiou calls the voided animal somehow. Right now the whole question is: are you more of a Cartesian than him or not? And this would be my Badiouan reproach. Because for Badiou, the human animal is the voided animal precisely in these terms: there is a
Badiou calls the voided animal somehow. Right now the whole question is: are you more of a Cartesian than him or not? And this would be my Badiouan reproach. Because for Badiou, the human animal is the voided animal precisely in these terms: there is a
Slavoj Žižek
non-essence which then can be via an emergence of a subject re-termed and so forth, but the void as such is not yet subject. It can be subjectivized. To place this is why in *Being and Event* claims the whole debate between
non-essence which then can be via an emergence of a subject re-termed and so forth, but the void as such is not yet subject. It can be subjectivized. To place this is why in *Being and Event* claims the whole debate between
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Lacan, Descartes,
Lacan, Descartes,
Slavoj Žižek
and himself is about placing the void. So if you're saying the void is proto-subjective via calling it drive, you're more Cartesian than Badiou because Badiou would say there is something void in the situation from which a subjectivization an effect of subjectivization can happen and this engenders the human animal because it has to deal with that void and re-determine it constantly. I I agree with this you you I would say okay why not I am more Cartesian why not. All I would say is that do you know that in one of his early texts which I find extremely interesting, *Louis Althusser* in early sixties just before he formulated his standard theory of ideological interpolation, subjectivity and so on, she played with an alternate idea where he claimed that this ideological subject is just one of the modalities of the subject. He I think has ideological subject, scientific subject, I don't know what for. Then after a long struggle as it were, he identified subject of ideology with subjectivity as such. And it is exactly as you said, his great argument is precisely that the void, the void in of or in or of subject cannot be itself considered a subject. Now, my point here but I is that first, did you noticed how in what a strange way Badiou's notion of event reproduces some features of Althusserian ideological interpolation? It is only "you are called upon" and so on and so on. So I would even go further here than you: the problem here is also the problem of anxiety and so on. Like you have a certain Alain agrees with this, you have a certain let's say disturbance of human animal: anxiety, horror, and so on. And here I agree with Alain that there is no event without horror, anxiety, and so on, because event emerges only against the background out from this situation. The problem I agree with you is where is the subject here? For reasons which are obviously philosophical, I I opt for
and himself is about placing the void. So if you're saying the void is proto-subjective via calling it drive, you're more Cartesian than Badiou because Badiou would say there is something void in the situation from which a subjectivization an effect of subjectivization can happen and this engenders the human animal because it has to deal with that void and re-determine it constantly. I I agree with this you you I would say okay why not I am more Cartesian why not. All I would say is that do you know that in one of his early texts which I find extremely interesting, *Louis Althusser* in early sixties just before he formulated his standard theory of ideological interpolation, subjectivity and so on, she played with an alternate idea where he claimed that this ideological subject is just one of the modalities of the subject. He I think has ideological subject, scientific subject, I don't know what for. Then after a long struggle as it were, he identified subject of ideology with subjectivity as such. And it is exactly as you said, his great argument is precisely that the void, the void in of or in or of subject cannot be itself considered a subject. Now, my point here but I is that first, did you noticed how in what a strange way Badiou's notion of event reproduces some features of Althusserian ideological interpolation? It is only "you are called upon" and so on and so on. So I would even go further here than you: the problem here is also the problem of anxiety and so on. Like you have a certain Alain agrees with this, you have a certain let's say disturbance of human animal: anxiety, horror, and so on. And here I agree with Alain that there is no event without horror, anxiety, and so on, because event emerges only against the background out from this situation. The problem I agree with you is where is the subject here? For reasons which are obviously philosophical, I I opt for
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this position that there that the moment you have anxiety, anxiety and void in this sense, there must be subjectivity here. Now up to a point we can maybe even resolve what we maybe you know
this position that there that the moment you have anxiety, anxiety and void in this sense, there must be subjectivity here. Now up to a point we can maybe even resolve what we maybe you know
Slavoj Žižek
because Bruno, Bruno Bosteels who maybe also should have been here, he provides here a much
because Bruno, Bruno Bosteels who maybe also should have been here, he provides here a much
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more radical solution which I reject, I hope you also. His solution is that even in order to have anxiety/terror, there must already be at least a perspective of the event. That is to say that that anxiety/terror, this disturbance of living animal, is just the shadow of how an event affects animal life. No, I think I think nonetheless you have this
more radical solution which I reject, I hope you also. His solution is that even in order to have anxiety/terror, there must already be at least a perspective of the event. That is to say that that anxiety/terror, this disturbance of living animal, is just the shadow of how an event affects animal life. No, I think I think nonetheless you have this
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clearance of horror, anxiety and then maybe you get an event, maybe not. I but okay we don't have time now to go into this but I agree with you, this is totally the key question: where and especially what do we mean by subject? I am not saying that we can... I'm not opting for the pseudo-theoretical solution which would have been a false friendly reconsideration "oh we simply mean different things by subject, you mean subject of event, I mean whatever." No no, it's not as simple as that. Problems, true problems cannot ever be resolved through simple terminological
clearance of horror, anxiety and then maybe you get an event, maybe not. I but okay we don't have time now to go into this but I agree with you, this is totally the key question: where and especially what do we mean by subject? I am not saying that we can... I'm not opting for the pseudo-theoretical solution which would have been a false friendly reconsideration "oh we simply mean different things by subject, you mean subject of event, I mean whatever." No no, it's not as simple as that. Problems, true problems cannot ever be resolved through simple terminological
Slavoj Žižek
specifications. But but for reasons because you know I claim that first, I would have to go into Lacanian stuff here. First, in order to have this voided subject, you again here I go at this lack and surplus, ne? The voided subject always has something as a kind of a object with fills in this void. I don't believe in this pure, and Alain also not, existentialist bullshit of "oh my god I'm just a void" and so on whatever, no? And here we have a certain level of what Lacan would have called relationship between subject and object small A, a contingent object which doesn't work without again again without some without some form of of of subjectivity and so on. Because another problem here is, okay I will answer you this question then, which I already did maybe you gave me the good answer I forgot. The problem is a very simple
specifications. But but for reasons because you know I claim that first, I would have to go into Lacanian stuff here. First, in order to have this voided subject, you again here I go at this lack and surplus, ne? The voided subject always has something as a kind of a object with fills in this void. I don't believe in this pure, and Alain also not, existentialist bullshit of "oh my god I'm just a void" and so on whatever, no? And here we have a certain level of what Lacan would have called relationship between subject and object small A, a contingent object which doesn't work without again again without some without some form of of of subjectivity and so on. Because another problem here is, okay I will answer you this question then, which I already did maybe you gave me the good answer I forgot. The problem is a very simple
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one: is there a place in Alain Badiou's edities for drive in the Freudian sense? I noticed how he oscillates: sometimes he even uses, this is Alain at his lowest, the term death drive as a simple almost ethical disgust. Like "oh that that decadent death drive" and so on and so on. You know, I I am here more not even Cartesian, maybe even Hegelian. You know I was recently for my that short booklet only pages on Hegel, re-reading Hegel on madness where Hegel has this idea, again wonderful, much better formulated than in Michel Foucault himself, of how the possibility of madness, this radical negativity of madness,
one: is there a place in Alain Badiou's edities for drive in the Freudian sense? I noticed how he oscillates: sometimes he even uses, this is Alain at his lowest, the term death drive as a simple almost ethical disgust. Like "oh that that decadent death drive" and so on and so on. You know, I I am here more not even Cartesian, maybe even Hegelian. You know I was recently for my that short booklet only pages on Hegel, re-reading Hegel on madness where Hegel has this idea, again wonderful, much better formulated than in Michel Foucault himself, of how the possibility of madness, this radical negativity of madness,
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is constitutive of being human. And Hegel puts it literally: even if this doesn't mean we all have to be crazy at some point, but the only way to account for human culture is a preemptive or whatever
is constitutive of being human. And Hegel puts it literally: even if this doesn't mean we all have to be crazy at some point, but the only way to account for human culture is a preemptive or whatever
Slavoj Žižek
reaction against the threat of madness. In this sense I claim you have to have this death drive, radical negativity that then you can something can emerge, something not. And again, as you know following your book, I even want to rehabilitate at this level the Hegel which is considered the most anti-Habermasian anti-democratic crazy, the Hegel of justifying war. You know usually this is taken as a reactionary Hegel. No no, I think what we have to do there is only to to re-Hegeler, to be more Hegelian than Hegel himself. Because Hegel has the right reasoning: that negativity has to re-emerge from time to time to remind us of our pure subjectivity against being immersed into social order. The strange thing is that why does Hegel translate this simply in external war? What about—I would prefer to read this necessity of negativity in the style, for example, of Thomas Jefferson, you know the one who said "the tree of freedom has to be watered with blood from time to time," no? Like why not inner destabilization because... So again here, but I agree with you I don't have simple solutions here, but I talk too much and I know...
reaction against the threat of madness. In this sense I claim you have to have this death drive, radical negativity that then you can something can emerge, something not. And again, as you know following your book, I even want to rehabilitate at this level the Hegel which is considered the most anti-Habermasian anti-democratic crazy, the Hegel of justifying war. You know usually this is taken as a reactionary Hegel. No no, I think what we have to do there is only to to re-Hegeler, to be more Hegelian than Hegel himself. Because Hegel has the right reasoning: that negativity has to re-emerge from time to time to remind us of our pure subjectivity against being immersed into social order. The strange thing is that why does Hegel translate this simply in external war? What about—I would prefer to read this necessity of negativity in the style, for example, of Thomas Jefferson, you know the one who said "the tree of freedom has to be watered with blood from time to time," no? Like why not inner destabilization because... So again here, but I agree with you I don't have simple solutions here, but I talk too much and I know...
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Yeah, your final provocational critique of Badiou I think is mistaken on one very fundamental level. Tell me. Which is that the entire point of his ontology is to assert that being is infinite. And so the and so the event is not its exception. So the finite-infinite relationship doesn't work at all there. Sorry, could you be clearer here? Because you you invoke shown event, you invoke the notion that the ethical act is precisely what makes the hear in Kant, makes the human subject in touch with an infinite as a break out of the finitude of of of nature. But precisely in Badiou, being in its most banal sense is infinite, so so there's no the distinction isn't at all cast in that along those lines. And I think... Can you elaborate a bit? Yes, because because the starting point of of Badiou's ontology actually is "is not all." I mean the the the sprawling infinite of the inconsistent multiple is is is is is is the discourse that is trying to be captured it's the being that is trying to be captured by ontology. So so that in the most banal level sprawling unclosed infinite. So so so the exception to that, which is event as you've you've pointed out, is not at all a mappable onto the Kantian distinction between finitude and... You know first I have problems with that, but I think that actually can point to another place that I think you were mistaken earlier. You talked about the the imaginary number being a sort of revolutionized. Actually, I mean the infinite number was already quite operative, I mean especially in if you look at Euler, for example, who already had his formula, his famous formula, you know natural exponent to
Yeah, your final provocational critique of Badiou I think is mistaken on one very fundamental level. Tell me. Which is that the entire point of his ontology is to assert that being is infinite. And so the and so the event is not its exception. So the finite-infinite relationship doesn't work at all there. Sorry, could you be clearer here? Because you you invoke shown event, you invoke the notion that the ethical act is precisely what makes the hear in Kant, makes the human subject in touch with an infinite as a break out of the finitude of of of nature. But precisely in Badiou, being in its most banal sense is infinite, so so there's no the distinction isn't at all cast in that along those lines. And I think... Can you elaborate a bit? Yes, because because the starting point of of Badiou's ontology actually is "is not all." I mean the the the sprawling infinite of the inconsistent multiple is is is is is is the discourse that is trying to be captured it's the being that is trying to be captured by ontology. So so that in the most banal level sprawling unclosed infinite. So so so the exception to that, which is event as you've you've pointed out, is not at all a mappable onto the Kantian distinction between finitude and... You know first I have problems with that, but I think that actually can point to another place that I think you were mistaken earlier. You talked about the the imaginary number being a sort of revolutionized. Actually, I mean the infinite number was already quite operative, I mean especially in if you look at Euler, for example, who already had his formula, his famous formula, you know natural exponent to
Slavoj Žižek
PI times I plus equals the famous formula that encapsulates all the most important constants in mathematics. Um what what happened actually was precisely because the but it was present and people accepted it and used it but it wasn't very important. What happened precisely in in the 19th century is that the explosion of the use of and the positivization of the in of the of the imaginary number, and that is what happens with in the event actually. In that sense it's not that you have a different sort of infinite, but you have the kind of thing that opens up being such that you didn't know how big it was before. You knew it was infinite but this the event brings cracks off a piece of fragment like you in the passage that you quoted, a fragment of being, that makes you realize that the infinite that you thought that it was was actually not all. So it was even bigger than you thought. So I would just put it that... Okay, that's the second point. I'm well aware of all this and then Cantor and and different... but that's another story. I'm well aware of that. So I concede this point in the simple sense that I just took this example, I literally quoted it of imaginary, so okay. If you say it's not so, what do I know about history of mathematics? Then I can simply use this was just a neutral example. But still, the first point that you made: what I don't see is precisely the problematic point of Badiou is that to be even more brutal now. He promises to do something in his Logics of the World to elaborate the passage or how the multiplicity of being structures itself, whatever you want, into the multiplicity of worlds. I claim this is exactly what he doesn't do. I claim there is absolutely no passage whatsoever between this purely mathematicized infinity and different worlds. How can a work... he doesn't approach what for a Hegelian would have been the basic problem. How can something like a world emerge within the multiplicity, this multiplicity of multiplicities and so on and so on of being? In other words, I also don't see then where do you see the link between this infinity multiplicity and this Kantian what what I called nominal madness? No you suggested the comparison, so what I'm saying is in what sense? Because I said nominal and nominal in this would be Badiou's nominal or what? No no no, I'm saying the the comparison is not it's not apt. The comparison between the event's exceptional status and and the exceptional status of the the Kantian ethical act that you made, it's not comparable in those senses is what I'm saying. Because because the difference isn't finite-infinite. Yeah, yeah. No no no let me be... But but wait a minute, wait a minute. Where was I using even these terms here? Okay let me be very clear here. My first point is that I think that some that for me Badiou's ontology in the strict sense—not Logics of the World, but ontology multiplicity of multiplicity and so on—is for me simply too flat. It doesn't have any inherent antagonism, tension, and so on. As such it cannot do the work. Second point. Can you be more clear here? I know we must be boring but for me this is the central point. Again put it clearly, the I suggested a homology between what? You suggested a homology between being and event and the event is exceptional on being, right? In what precise sense it is an exception of being? I know that Alain says... In the sense that it is a transformation of the ways in which multiplicity can be ordered. Yeah but is this still part of the same multiplicity or not? Because multiplicity was inconsistent in the first place, you can't say if it's the same or not. So it is not a question of essence. Why is there an
PI times I plus equals the famous formula that encapsulates all the most important constants in mathematics. Um what what happened actually was precisely because the but it was present and people accepted it and used it but it wasn't very important. What happened precisely in in the 19th century is that the explosion of the use of and the positivization of the in of the of the imaginary number, and that is what happens with in the event actually. In that sense it's not that you have a different sort of infinite, but you have the kind of thing that opens up being such that you didn't know how big it was before. You knew it was infinite but this the event brings cracks off a piece of fragment like you in the passage that you quoted, a fragment of being, that makes you realize that the infinite that you thought that it was was actually not all. So it was even bigger than you thought. So I would just put it that... Okay, that's the second point. I'm well aware of all this and then Cantor and and different... but that's another story. I'm well aware of that. So I concede this point in the simple sense that I just took this example, I literally quoted it of imaginary, so okay. If you say it's not so, what do I know about history of mathematics? Then I can simply use this was just a neutral example. But still, the first point that you made: what I don't see is precisely the problematic point of Badiou is that to be even more brutal now. He promises to do something in his Logics of the World to elaborate the passage or how the multiplicity of being structures itself, whatever you want, into the multiplicity of worlds. I claim this is exactly what he doesn't do. I claim there is absolutely no passage whatsoever between this purely mathematicized infinity and different worlds. How can a work... he doesn't approach what for a Hegelian would have been the basic problem. How can something like a world emerge within the multiplicity, this multiplicity of multiplicities and so on and so on of being? In other words, I also don't see then where do you see the link between this infinity multiplicity and this Kantian what what I called nominal madness? No you suggested the comparison, so what I'm saying is in what sense? Because I said nominal and nominal in this would be Badiou's nominal or what? No no no, I'm saying the the comparison is not it's not apt. The comparison between the event's exceptional status and and the exceptional status of the the Kantian ethical act that you made, it's not comparable in those senses is what I'm saying. Because because the difference isn't finite-infinite. Yeah, yeah. No no no let me be... But but wait a minute, wait a minute. Where was I using even these terms here? Okay let me be very clear here. My first point is that I think that some that for me Badiou's ontology in the strict sense—not Logics of the World, but ontology multiplicity of multiplicity and so on—is for me simply too flat. It doesn't have any inherent antagonism, tension, and so on. As such it cannot do the work. Second point. Can you be more clear here? I know we must be boring but for me this is the central point. Again put it clearly, the I suggested a homology between what? You suggested a homology between being and event and the event is exceptional on being, right? In what precise sense it is an exception of being? I know that Alain says... In the sense that it is a transformation of the ways in which multiplicity can be ordered. Yeah but is this still part of the same multiplicity or not? Because multiplicity was inconsistent in the first place, you can't say if it's the same or not. So it is not a question of essence. Why is there an
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exception?
exception?
Slavoj Žižek
There's no substance. Why is there an exception? Because it's because it presents a purely different orthogonal form of... But but but multiplicity already is differences! Why is it an exception then? Because in order for us to call it a multiplicity, we need to find some modes of distinction. Otherwise it's no. Alain says there is nothing outside multiplicity. Multiplicities of multiplicities and so on. Yeah how can you say there is an exception? Because because of the way in which it is multiple, to put it very simply. No, I don't frankly I don't think this works because again again but because again it is a fragment of being, it's just a different mode of multiplicity. But multiplicities are multiplicities of multiplicities and so on and so on. Just to intervene and then move on, but
There's no substance. Why is there an exception? Because it's because it presents a purely different orthogonal form of... But but but multiplicity already is differences! Why is it an exception then? Because in order for us to call it a multiplicity, we need to find some modes of distinction. Otherwise it's no. Alain says there is nothing outside multiplicity. Multiplicities of multiplicities and so on. Yeah how can you say there is an exception? Because because of the way in which it is multiple, to put it very simply. No, I don't frankly I don't think this works because again again but because again it is a fragment of being, it's just a different mode of multiplicity. But multiplicities are multiplicities of multiplicities and so on and so on. Just to intervene and then move on, but
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I also think maybe what you're trying
I also think maybe what you're trying
Slavoj Žižek
to say, I think this is the the debate between the two of you is in a way that Slavoj correct me if I'm wrong that in the end in Badiou there is a totalization of multiplicity. No no, I wouldn't agree with that. I would put it like this: when you say that multiplicities are multiplicity of multiplicities, this means that multiplicities are already composed only of exceptions. So you add a void. Exactly. That's the whole point. So what's so special? No Alain doesn't want to say this. He's much more
to say, I think this is the the debate between the two of you is in a way that Slavoj correct me if I'm wrong that in the end in Badiou there is a totalization of multiplicity. No no, I wouldn't agree with that. I would put it like this: when you say that multiplicities are multiplicity of multiplicities, this means that multiplicities are already composed only of exceptions. So you add a void. Exactly. That's the whole point. So what's so special? No Alain doesn't want to say this. He's much more
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emphatic. This is the fundamental thesis of being an event. That it's that ontology is the discourse of the void. Yeah. And that's why it's flat. Yeah, okay but again how then why then
emphatic. This is the fundamental thesis of being an event. That it's that ontology is the discourse of the void. Yeah. And that's why it's flat. Yeah, okay but again how then why then
Slavoj Žižek
is an event simply part of the order of
is an event simply part of the order of
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being ontology? In what sense is this an exception? Because it's a new form. I mean what is new what is an
being ontology? In what sense is this an exception? Because it's a new form. I mean what is new what is an
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exceptional is precisely a new form. And this new form expresses multiplicity in a way that according to his notion of history which is fundamentally different in terms of its presentation of multiplicity. Here we... okay let's stop now because here I have another problem, which even more fundamental, there will be a long chapter on this in my book. Read it. That this is for me the true problem with Alain: that his ontology and phenomenology relies all too much on the opposition between presence and representation. Ultimately even in his politics this brings him to this anti-statist, as if we have some authentic presentation mass movement, authentic in politics, and then you have the form of state which is kind of a... this is even maybe the Sartrean legacy, you know this idea *pratico-inerte* and so on. And here I am for full rehabilitation of representation, state. But this is another topic. Okay, we do have time for a couple of more questions. Do we? Oh yeah okay. Sorry? You know let me tell you a joke which I heard the Frenchman... no. I once spoke to the lady from Germany who told me that she she has sex with her husband only once every two months. And I told ask her "why at all?" And she told me "yes so that it's just so that she can tell her psychiatrist that she still has sex with her husband," you know like. Just so just let's have one question so that we can claim that we had a debate, no? Yeah but this was the inner circle I mean yeah exactly. I think it's better if is there any other question? Yes? I feel very embarrassed here because the three of us
exceptional is precisely a new form. And this new form expresses multiplicity in a way that according to his notion of history which is fundamentally different in terms of its presentation of multiplicity. Here we... okay let's stop now because here I have another problem, which even more fundamental, there will be a long chapter on this in my book. Read it. That this is for me the true problem with Alain: that his ontology and phenomenology relies all too much on the opposition between presence and representation. Ultimately even in his politics this brings him to this anti-statist, as if we have some authentic presentation mass movement, authentic in politics, and then you have the form of state which is kind of a... this is even maybe the Sartrean legacy, you know this idea *pratico-inerte* and so on. And here I am for full rehabilitation of representation, state. But this is another topic. Okay, we do have time for a couple of more questions. Do we? Oh yeah okay. Sorry? You know let me tell you a joke which I heard the Frenchman... no. I once spoke to the lady from Germany who told me that she she has sex with her husband only once every two months. And I told ask her "why at all?" And she told me "yes so that it's just so that she can tell her psychiatrist that she still has sex with her husband," you know like. Just so just let's have one question so that we can claim that we had a debate, no? Yeah but this was the inner circle I mean yeah exactly. I think it's better if is there any other question? Yes? I feel very embarrassed here because the three of us
Slavoj Žižek
totally monopolized, my god this is an obscenity, we totally monopolized... so please somebody should save democracy so that we can claim a lively debate with people. We give him the front opportunity. Okay. No debate, no discussion. Okay so it was just no debate, no discussion just one comment and one quick question. One comment: maybe it's interesting if you if you draw or somebody that you follow draws to do some kind of comic to compile your references because... To do... to do some kind of comic to compile your references. Comic like like... Yeah, like bad logic comics that... Sorry comic or comic book? Comic book. A comic book, yeah yeah. Okay this would be an honor to be a comic with you. Yeah but I would say because some of your references you know would make interesting animation you know like some of these things. Anyway a child could draw them. No no no but it's precisely because there was a book
totally monopolized, my god this is an obscenity, we totally monopolized... so please somebody should save democracy so that we can claim a lively debate with people. We give him the front opportunity. Okay. No debate, no discussion. Okay so it was just no debate, no discussion just one comment and one quick question. One comment: maybe it's interesting if you if you draw or somebody that you follow draws to do some kind of comic to compile your references because... To do... to do some kind of comic to compile your references. Comic like like... Yeah, like bad logic comics that... Sorry comic or comic book? Comic book. A comic book, yeah yeah. Okay this would be an honor to be a comic with you. Yeah but I would say because some of your references you know would make interesting animation you know like some of these things. Anyway a child could draw them. No no no but it's precisely because there was a book
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now on me Slavoj Žižek and this kind of visual interaction... Yeah but maybe you should take control of that. But you're better she's saying you're better as a fictional... No
now on me Slavoj Žižek and this kind of visual interaction... Yeah but maybe you should take control of that. But you're better she's saying you're better as a fictional... No
Slavoj Žižek
I'm not saying that! No
I'm not saying that! No
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this is not a this is not an insult I'm
this is not a this is not an insult I'm
Slavoj Žižek
serious. Okay, um but besides that I was thinking what if you or maybe you can draw some of this so it would be interesting. Um another thing is maybe do you feel it would be useful maybe to delve into a dialectic beyond if we come as humans to understand or admit, risk admitting this ethnocentric type of categorization of the non-human animal, the human animal. If we think it might be interesting to set up some papers or talks that move an and psychoanalytical
serious. Okay, um but besides that I was thinking what if you or maybe you can draw some of this so it would be interesting. Um another thing is maybe do you feel it would be useful maybe to delve into a dialectic beyond if we come as humans to understand or admit, risk admitting this ethnocentric type of categorization of the non-human animal, the human animal. If we think it might be interesting to set up some papers or talks that move an and psychoanalytical
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discourse that move beyond
discourse that move beyond
Slavoj Žižek
those
those
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categorizations into the animal, the similar drive, the similar even rationalization we can say in similar experiences of non-human human animals to move beyond the distinction, because even as Native
categorizations into the animal, the similar drive, the similar even rationalization we can say in similar experiences of non-human human animals to move beyond the distinction, because even as Native
Slavoj Žižek
American
American
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person, the totemic they've already moved beyond that. There's no distinction between the
person, the totemic they've already moved beyond that. There's no distinction between the
Slavoj Žižek
non-animal and the animal. The symbolism is strong and it's real and it's not
non-animal and the animal. The symbolism is strong and it's real and it's not
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magical as you say and and it's it moved beyond that that
magical as you say and and it's it moved beyond that that
Slavoj Žižek
distinction doesn't exist um because the drive um and the understanding of whether or not you know understanding
distinction doesn't exist um because the drive um and the understanding of whether or not you know understanding
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of "death blah blah blah" is beyond the meaning of why we would have the symbols of animal or the you know... So maybe it would be interesting to have that kind of philosophical discourse um that moved beyond the distinction of the non-animal and to the similar experience and to assume a type of rationalization that
of "death blah blah blah" is beyond the meaning of why we would have the symbols of animal or the you know... So maybe it would be interesting to have that kind of philosophical discourse um that moved beyond the distinction of the non-animal and to the similar experience and to assume a type of rationalization that
Slavoj Žižek
non-human animals can have in similar experiences as we have similar needs. Yeah but the problem for me with this is that I agree with you that this is how pre-modern world functions, but you know like I'll give you an example now not from comics but from
non-human animals can have in similar experiences as we have similar needs. Yeah but the problem for me with this is that I agree with you that this is how pre-modern world functions, but you know like I'll give you an example now not from comics but from
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cartoons. What often
cartoons. What often
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fascinated me is for example
fascinated me is for example
Slavoj Žižek
in Tom and Jerry and some others, you know sometimes and I like those scenes where a cat like who is who Tom is the cat, yeah okay he is caught into something and part of his skin gets like ripped off and you see beneath a human body even with shorts and so on. And I think there is a deep truth in that in cartoons animals are basically humans dressed up as animals. And I claim that you know which is why this is my suspicion about this pre-modern non-anthropomorphic worlds: that are
in Tom and Jerry and some others, you know sometimes and I like those scenes where a cat like who is who Tom is the cat, yeah okay he is caught into something and part of his skin gets like ripped off and you see beneath a human body even with shorts and so on. And I think there is a deep truth in that in cartoons animals are basically humans dressed up as animals. And I claim that you know which is why this is my suspicion about this pre-modern non-anthropomorphic worlds: that are
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they really non-anthropomorphic? What if they are even more violently anthropomorphic? I mean
they really non-anthropomorphic? What if they are even more violently anthropomorphic? I mean
Slavoj Žižek
I'm always very suspicious of this New Age religions which praise you know "we are just tiny part of nature, nature in its beauty blah blah blah," but then you can see that this nature in itself with some deep ecologists... okay I'll put it like this. I don't know any more brutally violent anthropomorphism than so-called deep ecologists. Precisely in their description of "you know nature like a..." an idiot, I was so glad when he dropped dead, a Slovenian
I'm always very suspicious of this New Age religions which praise you know "we are just tiny part of nature, nature in its beauty blah blah blah," but then you can see that this nature in itself with some deep ecologists... okay I'll put it like this. I don't know any more brutally violent anthropomorphism than so-called deep ecologists. Precisely in their description of "you know nature like a..." an idiot, I was so glad when he dropped dead, a Slovenian
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mountain climber was accused of risking his life and then he said "no you know before I climb the mountain I listen to the mountain and only
mountain climber was accused of risking his life and then he said "no you know before I climb the mountain I listen to the mountain and only
Slavoj Žižek
if the mountain invites me I go up," no? And this is common non-anthropomorphism. Like no, you know like I'm I mean I'm here generally skeptical, you know, also in the sense of like my great respect for for Buddhism and so on, but I don't think that that I don't believe in I think that especially these so-called deep spiritual experiences can serve perfectly to justify unimaginable brutality, cruelty and so on. This is this is a misunderstanding. In my experience in Native America, it's not an anthropomorphizing of the animals really. What we're saying when we say "Crow's wife did this and Crow reacted this way," you actually doing the opposite and placing the template of the animal on us. And that's understood in that religion. No no, I agree with you but but okay then I will give you another example which I like of how I think we should really break of our at least Western... for example, what I really hate and I got some friends with them who confirmed this to me, you know this left-liberal painting
if the mountain invites me I go up," no? And this is common non-anthropomorphism. Like no, you know like I'm I mean I'm here generally skeptical, you know, also in the sense of like my great respect for for Buddhism and so on, but I don't think that that I don't believe in I think that especially these so-called deep spiritual experiences can serve perfectly to justify unimaginable brutality, cruelty and so on. This is this is a misunderstanding. In my experience in Native America, it's not an anthropomorphizing of the animals really. What we're saying when we say "Crow's wife did this and Crow reacted this way," you actually doing the opposite and placing the template of the animal on us. And that's understood in that religion. No no, I agree with you but but okay then I will give you another example which I like of how I think we should really break of our at least Western... for example, what I really hate and I got some friends with them who confirmed this to me, you know this left-liberal painting
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of Native Americans—I prefer the term Indians and you must know why because we in Missoula, Montana I spoke with one of them and he told me he
of Native Americans—I prefer the term Indians and you must know why because we in Missoula, Montana I spoke with one of them and he told me he
Slavoj Žižek
changed the term which is now politically correct
changed the term which is now politically correct
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"Native Americans," he said "what, we are native and you are culture or what? We are part of nature" and so on, he told me—maybe you know the joke I'm sorry—he told me "I much prefer to be called Indians because in this way my name is at least a monument to white man's stupidity," you know like, they thought they are in India and they came no? And he told me that he's so sick and tired of this you know "we white people, we are violent imperialist Cartesian reducing nature to mechanism while you Native Americans you have a holistic attitude of dialogue." And then she tried to convince me, I loved it, how "fuck you white people, we burned more forests, we killed more buffaloes, we destroyed more nature than you ever will do, stupid white people" and so on. I mean they got such a simple but deep insight into how this false celebration of the ethnic other as you know holistic, organic whatever is really secretly to use my old
"Native Americans," he said "what, we are native and you are culture or what? We are part of nature" and so on, he told me—maybe you know the joke I'm sorry—he told me "I much prefer to be called Indians because in this way my name is at least a monument to white man's stupidity," you know like, they thought they are in India and they came no? And he told me that he's so sick and tired of this you know "we white people, we are violent imperialist Cartesian reducing nature to mechanism while you Native Americans you have a holistic attitude of dialogue." And then she tried to convince me, I loved it, how "fuck you white people, we burned more forests, we killed more buffaloes, we destroyed more nature than you ever will do, stupid white people" and so on. I mean they got such a simple but deep insight into how this false celebration of the ethnic other as you know holistic, organic whatever is really secretly to use my old
Slavoj Žižek
joke about all this, it's the decaffeinated other. It's the most brutally violent reduction of the other. Okay, one final question on series because I thought that Bruno... Yes, I think that um you were a bit anxious to get back on what was the theme of articulation which came up at the last part of your paper which was that articulation between the human animal and the subject because a procedure of distinction is needed and the whole problem is that as Frank was correctly pointing already
joke about all this, it's the decaffeinated other. It's the most brutally violent reduction of the other. Okay, one final question on series because I thought that Bruno... Yes, I think that um you were a bit anxious to get back on what was the theme of articulation which came up at the last part of your paper which was that articulation between the human animal and the subject because a procedure of distinction is needed and the whole problem is that as Frank was correctly pointing already
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in
in
Slavoj Žižek
Badiou the subject is not a substance as long as it is a procedure and it is not a substance first and foremost because it is not a void so a negative substance or voided substance but is that which allows
Badiou the subject is not a substance as long as it is a procedure and it is not a substance first and foremost because it is not a void so a negative substance or voided substance but is that which allows
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a...
a...