The Event: Politics, Art, Ontology
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2013-05-09 · 1:55:53 · 13,350 words
philosophy-generalhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisreligion-theologysexuality-gendercinema-art-cultureideologyscience-physicshistory
Žižek delivers an introductory lecture developing the notion of 'event' as supplement to Badiou, arguing that the three key philosophers of Western thought, Plato, Descartes, Hegel, are each paradoxically philosophers of the event rather than anti-evental thinkers. He then pivots to a sustained account of infantile sexuality, drawing on Laplanche and Alenka Zupančič, to argue that sexuality is constitutively structured around a cognitive missing link, that there is no sexual relationship, and that the Church's libidinal economy actually suppresses copulation while embracing partial drives. The lecture closes with notes toward a materialist theology drawing on Kierkegaard, Schelling, Benjamin, and quantum physics to argue that nature itself is already 'denatured', out of joint with itself, and that humanity makes nature unconscious of its own discord.
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The ideas in it 24
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Plato, Descartes, and Hegel are identified as the only three key philosophers in Western thought because each uniquely defines an entire subsequent tradition through universal rejection rather than direct discipleship.
as “anti-Platonism”
The six main critical stances against Plato catalogued by Badiou, vitalist, empiricist-analytic, Marxist, existentialist, Heideggerian, and democratic, which together paradoxically define Western philosophy.
Hegelian sublation, used critically to describe the normative sexual ideology that treats perverse drives as mere foreplay legitimized only when aufgehoben into genital sex, which Žižek rejects.
as “the Platonic event”
The sudden encounter with an idea or love-object that wrenches a person out of everyday life and reorients their existence absolutely, Žižek's reframing of Plato as a philosopher of radical rupture rather than eternal stasis.
as “Cogito as event”
Žižek reads the Cartesian Cogito not as a substance but as a purely evental experience, existence sustained only in and by the act of thinking, with a mystical-spiritual undertone of radical inwardness.
as “the night of the world”
Hegel's figure for the zero-point of psychotic withdrawal from reality into the abyss of pure inwardness, which Žižek identifies as structurally identical to the Cartesian Cogito and as the precondition for rational symbolic order.
A radical cut or rupture that occurs at the level of ordinary daily life rather than as spectacular political upheaval; Žižek supplements Badiou by insisting the true political event is found in the apparently most common and vulgar everyday level.
The structurally necessary figure of an external gaze that does not know the truth of a situation; its perspective is socially determining and often more truthful than the participants' self-understanding.
as “the drama of false appearances”
Wolfenstein and Leites' concept, applied by Žižek to Lubitsch: a situation that appears morally transgressive to an innocent external observer may carry more truth about the participants than their inner self-experience does.
Implicitly operative in Žižek's account of how a false conceptual appearance (film noir as French misperception) achieves real determining force retroactively.
A misleading or foreign misreading of a phenomenon (e.g. French critics inventing 'film noir') can retroactively produce real effects and truths that the original object lacked, illustrating how appearance is immanent to truth.
as “la vérité surgit de la méprise”
Lacan's formulation, 'truth arises out of misrecognition', used to explain how a structurally false appearance (film noir, Derrida's American reception) can retroactively produce genuine truth.
Žižek's (after Zupančič) core claim that infantile sexuality is inseparable from cognitive questioning, 'where do children come from?', making it irreducible to either biology or cultural normativity.
The Deleuzian-Butlerian narrative of a primordial innocent plurality of drives that is then violently normalized by the genital-patriarchal order; Žižek rejects this as equally false to the normative view.
as “subject supposed to know”
Implicitly at stake in Žižek's account of the child's address to the other, 'what do you see in me?', as the original subjectivating question.
as “the enigma of the other's desire”
Laplanche's concept: the original experience of subjectivity is not 'what do I want?' but 'what do others see in me?', an unanswerable question that inaugurates infantile sexuality and fantasy.
Freud's concept invoked by Žižek (via Laplanche and Zupančič) to show that children's sexuality is neither biologically grounded nor culturally normative but is constitutively cognitive, tied to the unanswerable question of the other's desire.
as “there is no sexual relationship”
Lacan's formula, used here to mean that full genital copulation never delivers the knowledge or formula for sex that infantile sexuality sought; fantasy must sustain sexuality to the end.
Freudian pre-genital drives (oral, anal, scopophilic) which Žižek, following Lacan and Zupančič, argues are not subordinate perversions but the actual libidinal glue of social institutions like the Church and army.
Zupančič's formulation adopted by Žižek: animals and nature also lack instinctual knowledge of sex, but unlike humans they are not unconscious of this, they simply don't know that they don't know.
Lacan's figure for the undead libidinal object, invoked here to show that Lacan locates the gap or rupture of sexuality already at the level of animal (not exclusively human) sexuality.
as “denaturalizing nature”
Žižek's proposed materialist task: rather than naturalizing man (showing humans are just animals), one should show that nature itself is already out of joint, containing discord and gaps before humanity arrives.
Žižek's speculative project of reading theological motifs (God's anxiety about his own existence, Benjamin's redemption of nature's pain) in strictly materialist terms without metaphysical commitment.
Žižek's answer to Einstein's 'God doesn't cheat': at the quantum virtual level, events can occur that the total rational system does not register, so God, identified with the system of rationality, can be cheated even if he doesn't cheat.
Stories he reaches for 1
As a child Žižek knew sex made children but not the mechanism; he hypothesized that each sexual act contributes a body part (today the hair, tomorrow the nails) and that storks watching from the window bring the child as reward for good sex, a fantasy structure that combines two incompatible knowledge-sources.
“my idea was that when you fuck storks are observing you through the window and if you fuck nicely as a gratitude they bring you the child.”
Works invoked 21
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's own 'big fat book'; referenced as containing the developed account of madness in Hegel, denaturalizing nature, and related themes.
The Great Dictator film
Chaplin; used as an example of creative condensation (the secretary compresses Hynkel's five-minute speech to a single word).
Blue Velvet film
Lynch's film; Žižek uses the closet scene (via Chion's reading) to illustrate the fantasy structure of infantile sexuality and the cognitive missing link.
The Wire tv
Referenced via Jameson's remark about the show's universally acceptable bad guys as a symptom of contemporary ideological limits.
Encore (Seminar XX) book
Lacan's seminar cited for the crucial passage about Christ's body, the Church, and partial drives, used to argue the Church suppresses copulation while embracing partial drives.
Co-written with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau; referenced for the argument about how a misperception can hit the truth more successfully than those inside the phenomenon.
Glas book
Derrida's double book on Genet and Hegel; cited to show that Derrida himself knew the difference between Aufhebung and différance is almost imperceptible, distinguishing him from B-level deconstructionists.
Lubitsch film about pen-pal love between coworkers who hate each other in person; Žižek finds it 'a little bit overestimated' and uses it to explore fantasy versus real encounter.
Kierkegaard's text; cited for the Tornacensis example of God watching anxiously as philosophers try to prove his existence, used to develop materialist theology.
Descartes' Error book
Damasio's book cited as the canonical cognitivist rejection of Cartesian mind-body dualism; Žižek finds it insufficiently attentive to the complexity of Descartes' own Passions of the Soul.
Die Puppe film
Early Lubitsch film; illustrates the dialectical reversal of the Hoffmann doll motif, real woman plays doll, and the power of appearance.
Serial-killer solidarity TV series cited speculatively as a 'progressive answer', serial killers of the world unite.
Freud's text; cited directly for the argument that copulation is unfavorable to group formation and that artificial groups (army, church) have no room for woman as sexual object.
The seminar absent from Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, discovered in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv; described as the 'smoking gun' showing Heidegger's detailed theoretical endorsement of Nazism.
Cited as an example of contemporary TV drama where murderers remain points of identification, symptom of ideological relativization of villainy.
Descartes' third major work; cited to show that the standard cognitivist critique of Cartesian dualism misses the complexity of Descartes' own treatment of the passions.
Life of Pi film
Described as 'bullshit' and a 'shitty movie which should be publicly burned'; nonetheless the novel's formulation, 'you must do it because you cannot not do it', is cited as a correct expression of authentic ethical pressure.
Wolfenstein and Leites; described as 'an unknown masterpiece of theory'; systematically analyses Hollywood's drama of false appearances and how transgressive-seeming scenarios were used to bypass the Hays Code.
One Hour with You film
Lubitsch film with Maurice Chevalier; used to introduce the concept of the innocent bystander whose external observation is socially determining.
The Owl of Minerva book
Andrew Cutrofello's book repeating Hegel's phenomenological movement from Hegel's death to the present; described as 'wonderful' for showing Deleuze as today's Hegelian.
You've Got Mail film
Hollywood remake of Shop Around the Corner described as 'one of the absolutely disgusting Hollywood melodramas'.
People invoked 37
Ernst Nolte / Ernst Krieck negative
Ernst Krieck (minor Nazi philosopher, 'deservedly half-forgotten') is noted for his role in undermining Heidegger's bid for official Nazi philosopher status and for declaring Hegel dead on the day Hitler took power.
Mentioned as an example of the French tradition of media personalities sympathetic to the political right; his embrace of Russian and Uzbek 'democracy' is mocked.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Member of Žižek's 'Slovene Lacanian Stalinist troika'; her unpublished work on infantile sexuality, the Church's libidinal economy, and the link between sexuality and cognition is extensively credited and plagiarized by Žižek's own admission.
Michel Chion positive
French cinema theorist, described as 'half-forgotten' to Žižek's regret and as 'one of the best'; credited with the reading of the Blue Velvet closet scene as a child's audio hallucination of parental sex.
Jacques Derrida positive
Distinguished from B-level deconstructionists; his Glas is cited as showing the near-imperceptibility of the difference between Aufhebung and différance; his American misreception example is used affirmatively.
Rebecca Comay positive
Described as 'my two good friends'; she and Frank Ruda are presenting on the dash in Hegel's Logic at the conference.
Aaron Schuster positive
Described as 'a great young voice of progressive thought, which means a young Lacanian'; co-editor of the Lubitsch volume.
Jacques Lacan positive
Extensively cited: his formula 'there is no sexual relationship', 'la vérité surgit de la méprise', the concept of lamella, his reading of Christianity and partial drives in Encore, and his identification of a moment of madness in all rationality.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Žižek 'almost admires' Deleuze but rejects his dismissal of Hegel as a simple error to be forgotten; the irony that Deleuze is today's unaware Hegelian is a central dialectical point.
Frank Ruda positive
Collaborator presenting with Rebecca Comay on the status of the dash in Hegel's Logic at the conference.
Judith Butler negative
Included in the 'Deleuze-Butler narrative' of polymorphously perverse plurality crushed by genital norms, which Žižek rejects as false; also mentioned as co-author of Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as 'our good friend'; Žižek's notion of event is explicitly positioned as a supplement to Badiou's; he credits Badiou for the idea of the three key philosophers and for the catalogue of anti-Platonic positions.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited for the observation that today's only universally acceptable bad guys in popular culture are terrorists, serial killers, and pedophiliacs.
António Damásio negative
His Descartes' Error is noted as an example of cognitivist anti-Cartesianism; Žižek finds the critique insufficiently attentive to Descartes' own complexity (the Passions of the Soul).
Mladen Dolar positive
Member of the Slovenian Lacanian group; co-editor of the forthcoming Lubitsch volume.
Catherine Malabou positive
Credited with a good text developing the thesis that Deleuze is an unaware Hegelian; noted as attending the conference.
Michel Foucault negative
Criticized for his proposal to decouple pleasures from sexuality, Žižek points out this is exactly what the Church already does, making Foucault's programme unwittingly conservative; his remark on Western philosophy as critique of Plato is cited positively.
Ernesto Laclau positive
Co-author with Žižek and Butler of Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, cited as the context for the 'false appearances' argument in theory.
Martin Heidegger negative
Criticized for his Nazism as not mere opportunism but detailed theoretical elaboration; the missing seminar on Hegel and the State is presented as the smoking gun; his anti-Cartesianism and anti-Platonism are discussed neutrally but his Nazism is condemned.
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Presented as a director to be rediscovered at the level of Hitchcock; Žižek organized a conference on him and is co-editing a volume; his films are used extensively to illustrate appearance, truth, and the innocent observer.
Martha Wolfenstein positive
Co-author with Nathan Leites of Movies: A Psychological Study, described as 'an unknown masterpiece of theory' for its systematic analysis of Hollywood's drama of false appearances.
Hannah Arendt negative
Cited alongside Popper as a democratic anti-Platonist.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited as a source for the idea that discord is already in nature itself, along with Benjamin and Heidegger; the late Schelling is mentioned as initiating Lebensphilosophie critique of Hegel.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited for the idea that human language was created to give word to the pain already in nature and to redeem it, used to develop the materialist theology of denaturalized nature.
Jean Laplanche positive
Credited for the insight that infantile drives precede instinctual sexuality ('the seat already taken'), and for the concept of the enigma of the other's desire as the origin of subjectivity.
Joan Copjec positive
Called 'bright' and affectionately 'that bitch Joan Copjec'; editor of Umbra; credited for noting early the ideological significance of Home Alone as celebrating children's invincibility.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Used to argue that Christianity introduced the event into history; his Concept of Anxiety and the figure of Tornacensis are used to develop materialist theology; 'my guy Simon Tornacensis' is an affectionate reference.
Mentioned as Einstein's interlocutor in the quantum debate; Žižek sides against Einstein in favour of the quantum indeterminacy position.
Karl Popper negative
Cited as a proponent of democratic anti-Platonism, the view that Plato's Republic is a proto-totalitarian blueprint.
Plato positive
Defended against standard charges; Žižek argues Plato excludes neither women nor (implicitly) slaves in the Republic and that his philosophy centres on an evental encounter with love and ideas.
Aristotle negative
Contrasted unfavourably with Plato: Aristotle naturalizes slavery (slaves as 'talking tools') and provides ontological foundations for male superiority (form/matter), making the Marxist reading of Plato as elitist versus democratic Aristotle empirically false.
René Descartes positive
Defended; the Cogito is read as a purely evental mystical-spiritual experience rather than a thinking substance; standard critiques (Damasio, feminist, ecological) are acknowledged but qualified.
Sigmund Freud positive
Credited for the concept of infantile sexuality; his Schreber analysis is used to show paranoia as an attempt to cure madness; his group psychology text is quoted on copulation as unfavorable to group formation.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Defended as misunderstood; Žižek reads him as a philosopher of the event and of the constitutive role of madness in reason; the entire 19th-20th century is defined by rejection of Hegel.
Andrew Cutrofello positive
Author of The Owl of Minerva, a Hegelian tour from Hegel's death to the present, ending with Deleuze as the contemporary Hegelian; Žižek describes it as a 'wonderful book' and notes he is opening the Hegel colloquium.
Albert Einstein negative
His dictum 'God doesn't cheat' / 'God doesn't play dice' is reframed: Žižek argues that even if God doesn't cheat, he can be cheated at the quantum virtual level.
Gérard Wajcman positive
French Lacanian; cited for his argument in Umbra that the child has become the last sacred prohibition in a permissive society.
What it argues
the event and evental truth in Plato, Descartes, and Hegelinfantile sexuality as cognitive missing linkthe Church's suppression of copulation and embrace of partial drivesappearance, misperception, and the retroactive production of truthdenaturalizing nature—discord already in nature itselfmaterialist theology and God's dependence on proofthe three mega-thinkers defined by universal rejection
Dialectical moves 11
“Far from being anti-evental philosophers, Plato, Descartes, and Hegel are each philosophers of the event.”
The standard reading reverses the truth: these three thinkers commonly seen as closed-system metaphysicians are precisely the thinkers of radical rupture and evental truth.
“The true madness is the night of the world; the paranoiac system is already an attempt to cure oneself of madness.”
What appears as madness (the delusional system) is in fact an attempt at normality, while what appears as normal reality is a fragile construction erected against the underlying zero-point of madness.
“The truth arises out of a misrecognition—la vérité surgit de la méprise.”
A false or limited external perspective (French critics on Hollywood noir, American academics on Derrida) can produce genuine truth that those inside the phenomenon cannot see.
“What is acquired through drives precedes what is innate and instinctual.”
Contrary to the expected developmental order, unnatural infantile sexuality comes first and ruins the field for biological instinctual sexuality, which arrives to find the seat already taken.
“The Catholic Church, far from imposing normative genital heterosexuality, actually suppresses copulation while celebrating polymorphous partial drives.”
The supposed defender of normative sexuality is revealed as the institution that most thoroughly excludes copulation from its imaginary while saturating it with oral, anal, and incorporative drives.
“There is nothing necessarily asocial in partial drives; on the contrary, copulation is what is unfavorable to group formation.”
The standard view that perverse drives are asocial and genital sexuality grounds social bonds is exactly inverted: partial drives are the glue of institutions, and copulation dissolves them.
“It is not enough to say man is a denatured animal—nature itself is already denatured; it simply doesn't know that it doesn't know.”
The humanist/existentialist privilege of human 'lack' is reversed: the gap, discord, and absence of instinctual coordinates is already in nature itself, not introduced by the human symbolic order.
“God doesn't cheat—but he can be cheated.”
Einstein's dictum about God is reframed: even a total rational system can be bypassed at the quantum virtual level, leaving room for ontological cheating that the system never registers.
“The enigma of psychoanalysis is the opposite of pansexualism: not that everything is about sex, but what are we thinking about when we are doing it?”
The usual charge against Freud (reducing everything to sex) is inverted: the real puzzle is why sex itself requires a fantasy supplement, why it can never be purely tautological.
“The more you reduce the other to an object in sex, the more you have a spiritual surrender.”
The expected opposition between objectification and spiritual intimacy collapses: intense bodily reduction of the other to an object is the very mechanism of radical contact with the other.
“Deleuze, the great critic of Hegel, is today's Hegelian.”
Deleuze's philosophy, which explicitly dismisses Hegel as a simple error to be forgotten, is shown (by Malabou, Cutrofello) to repeat Hegel's movement unknowingly.
Claims 22
asserts
Plato, Descartes, and Hegel are the only three key philosophers in Western thought, definable by the fact that all subsequent philosophy is constituted as their rejection.the structure of Western philosophical tradition
rejects
The identification of Plato as proto-totalitarian and of Aristotle as the more democratic, materialist philosopher is empirically false—Aristotle naturalizes slavery and female subordination while Plato's Republic excludes both.Marxist and liberal anti-Platonism
reframes
Plato, Descartes, and Hegel are each, paradoxically, philosophers of the event rather than anti-evental thinkers.the standard reading of Plato, Descartes, and Hegel as closed-system anti-evental philosophers
asserts
The Platonic event is the sudden, passionate encounter with another person or an idea that absolutely reorients one's life—analogous to Saul's conversion—not the gradual ascent to eternal Ideas.the nature of Platonic experience
asserts
The Cartesian Cogito is not a thinking substance but a purely evental experience—existence sustained only within the process of thinking—with the structural character of a mystical night of the world.the correct reading of Descartes' Cogito
asserts
Rational order does not merely risk madness as a marginal failure; it emerges only as a defense against madness, making madness constitutive of reason.the relation between reason and madness in Hegel and Freud
asserts
A misleading appearance or misperception can trigger a process that makes itself retroactively true, as demonstrated by film noir (a French misreading that reshaped Hollywood) and Derrida's American reception.the Hegelian thesis that appearance is immanent to truth
asserts
Infantile sexuality is neither biologically grounded nor culturally normative but is constitutively cognitive, tied to the unanswerable question of the enigma of the other's desire.the nature of infantile sexuality
asserts
The structure of infantile sexuality—a cognitive missing link filled by fantasy—persists to the end of life; there is no maturation beyond it.the permanence of infantile sexuality
asserts
The Catholic Church's libidinal economy suppresses copulation while abundantly endorsing partial drives (oral, anal), making Christianity far from a defender of normative genital sexuality.the Church's sexual ideology
asserts
Copulation, not perverse partial drives, is the true threat to group social bonds—the Church and army are sustained by oral/anal drives precisely because two people in love suffice for each other and dissolve group feeling.the social function of sexuality (Freud on group psychology)
rejects
The Deleuzian-Butlerian narrative of a primordial polymorphous perverse paradise subsequently repressed by genital norms is false—infantile sexuality is never an innocent pre-normative ground.the Deleuze-Butler account of sexuality
rejects
Foucault's call to decouple pleasures from sexuality is something the Church already practices, making it a politically conservative gesture rather than a radical one.Foucault's programme of delinking pleasure from sexuality
asserts
It is not enough to say that man is a denatured animal; nature itself is already denatured—it simply doesn't know that it doesn't know.the naturalism/humanism debate in materialist theory
asserts
The true task of materialism today is not to naturalize man but to denaturalize nature.the programme of contemporary materialism
asserts
Quantum physics denaturalizes nature, yielding an image of reality that is neither culture nor nature in the conventional sense.the philosophical implications of quantum physics
rejects
God—understood as the system of rationality—can be cheated at the quantum virtual level even if he does not cheat, refuting Einstein's dictum.Einstein's claim that God does not play dice
asserts
Heidegger's involvement with Nazism was not mere political opportunism but involved detailed theoretical elaboration, as shown by the missing seminar on Hegel and the State.Heidegger's Nazism
reframes
The enigma of psychoanalysis is not Freudian pansexualism (everything is about sex) but its opposite: what are we thinking about when we are having sex?the Freudian theory of sexuality
asserts
With authentic ethics, one cannot not do something because one simply experiences it as a pressure—not because one must do it; the absolute is encountered as fragile but irresistible.the nature of ethical obligation and the encounter with the absolute
asserts
Today the only universally acceptable bad guys in popular culture are terrorists, serial killers, and pedophiliacs—all other bad guys are relativized by new TV drama.the ideological structure of contemporary popular culture
asserts
The contemporary prohibition on child sexuality is the price of permissiveness: everything is allowed except touching children, who function as the necessary innocent observers of adult transgression.contemporary sexual ideology and the figure of the child
Quotes 16
“A true political event would be something that happens at our apparently most common vulgar everyday level.”Slavoj Žižek · the event as everyday rather than spectacular
“The entire history of Western philosophy can be defined as the history of rejections or criticisms of Plato.”Slavoj Žižek · Plato's negative centrality in Western thought
“Our rational world as it were emerges only as a defense against the threat of madness.”Slavoj Žižek · madness as constitutive of reason
“La vérité surgit de la méprise—the truth can arise out of a misrecognition.”Slavoj Žižek · appearance and truth; misperception as generative
“When it comes to sexuality man is subject to the greatest of paradoxes. What is acquired through the drives precedes what is innate and instinctual.”Slavoj Žižek · the paradox of infantile sexuality preceding biological instinct
“Instinctual sexuality finds the seat already taken as it were by infantile drives already and always present in the unconscious.”Slavoj Žižek · infantile sexuality usurps the place of biological instinct
“The enigma of psychoanalysis is exactly the opposite of pansexualism: but what are we thinking when we are doing that?”Slavoj Žižek · the mystery of the fantasy supplement required for sex
“One should insist that there is nothing necessarily asocial in partial drives. They function as the glue of society, as the very stuff of communion, in contrast to the heterosexual couple.”Slavoj Žižek · partial drives as social glue; copulation as antisocial
“Christianity is indeed all about jouissance of the body... with the exclusion of sexual coupling.”Slavoj Žižek · the Church's libidinal economy: drives yes, copulation no
“The true battle is not in naturalizing man. The true battle is in denaturalizing nature.”Slavoj Žižek · denaturalizing nature as the task of materialism
“Nature in itself is already denatured, it just doesn't know it.”Slavoj Žižek · discord already in nature before the human symbolic order
“Both nature and man don't know how to do it, but nature simply doesn't know that it doesn't know.”Slavoj Žižek · the distinction between human unconscious and nature's ignorance
“Maybe God doesn't cheat but he can be cheated.”Slavoj Žižek · quantum physics and ontological cheating
“What the church wants to protect us from is precisely the metaphysical miraculous evental dimension of sexuality.”Slavoj Žižek · sexuality as evental—what the Church suppresses
“The more fragile it is the more its hold on you is absolute.”Slavoj Žižek · the fragility and absolute force of duty and love
“Speculation has assumed such authority that it has practically tried to make God feel uncertain of himself like a monarch anxiously waiting to learn whether the general assembly will make him an absolute or a limited monarch.”Slavoj Žižek · materialist theology; God's existence dependent on philosophical proof
Transcript 5 turns
Slavoj Žižek
We live in a time of madness. Some guys in Norway published a book of my jokes, just jokes from my books, and now MIT wants to reprint it as a coffee table book there. So I said, what does it mean coffee table book? I know, but I wanted them to be precise, and they told me it means you do nothing and you get royalties, because it will be an expensive coffee table book, of course. I said yes, but to cheat a little bit I added some new obscene jokes and they were so worried at MIT that they immediately consulted their lawyers, like, could we be prosecuted for, name it, antisemitism, Islamophobia, you know, all possible, you know? Because the like, you will find there that wonderful legal joke I like it. How can we be sure that maybe you know it I'm sorry that Judas from the Bible did not betray did not sell Christ to the Romans? Well, whatever you say about Jews, they know the value of what they are selling. No Jew would sell a God for mere silver coins or whatever, no? Sorry, I always fall for this cheap stuff you know. I've been... But I heard a new from do you want do you want me to sit next to you? You mean to ah I know what you want, to have some ball squeezer electric so that then you just press the button and you did it no but there is a nice one that I was told when I was in Moscow recently. It's a primitive one, you don't have to laugh, but what I like is that it's a Stalinist joke where you expect a some political stuff and it gets personal in a nice way, personal means sexual. Like, there is a boring local Communist cell meeting where one guy, local guy is having a long report for two three hours about political situation and he looks around and sees in the middle of his boring speech that one guy there is half asleep dozing off and asks him, are you listening what am I telling? Do you know who is, just a Russian name, who is Popov? The guy said awake, no, no idea who is Popov. Well, the lecturer tells him, well, if you were to listen to my long report, you would have known who Popov is, no? And then, then the guy who was awakened asked him back, but do you know who, name another name, who Alekseyev is? And the lecturer says, no idea. And the guy said well, if you were to give less talks here and stay more at home, you would have known that Alekseyev is a guy who is fucking your wife while you are giving boring talks here. Sorry, this is spirit for me no. Now a little bit more serious nonetheless. What Steven said before, it's unfortunately true. I counted on this that this is a smaller circle and I will really try to develop in this three days, today, Monday, Tuesday, a kind of a with a little bit of repeating my old stuff but basically nonetheless new stuff a kind of introductory notes towards the notion of event and so on. Why event? What I want to do is precisely to not to criticize him but to supplement my and our good friend Alain Badiou and I talked with him and we both came to the idea that, you know, usually people misinterpret his notion of event as some big spectacular thing, no, shattering event, somehow opposed to small daily life, while I think that more and more today a true political event would be something that happens at our apparently most common vulgar everyday level. Like it's easy to do big meetings, one million people on a square, and as we learn from Greece, from Egypt, it's much more difficult to change things afterwards when things return to their normal run, to make a difference there. So okay, let me now first recapitulate very briefly what I already often developed. In the sphere of philosophy there are, I claim, three key philosophers, only three in the entire Western thought: Plato, Descartes, Hegel. Why? A very simple negative proof. And again Alain Badiou gave me this idea. Did you notice how each of the three occupies a unique position in the sense that no one wants to be a pure Platonist, Cartesian, Hegelian? Already for Plato, Michel Foucault mentioned somewhere that the entire history of Western philosophy can be defined as the history of rejections or criticisms of Plato. It begins immediately with Aristotle, you know, a more nominalist view, Stoicism and so on and so on, like it's almost as if Western philosophy is defined by the impossibility of being a Platonist. You have to draw some kind of a distance. The same goes for Descartes. The entire modern philosophy is a history of critical rejections of Descartes. Not to mention Hegel, who in this negative way defines the last years. Just to give you a very brief shortened recapitulation of my idea. For example, Plato. Here I refer to Alain Badiou's seminar on Plato. You can find it online from a couple of years ago where he goes to six main anti-Platonic positions even now, okay now in the 20th century. First we have the vitalist anti-Platonism: Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze. The idea is that Plato deals with this gray abstract sterility of ideas, what Plato misses is the real of life, becoming, and so on and so on, this idea of Plato's empty intellectualism which misses, ignores the vital force of life. Then we have the empiricist-analytic critique of Plato. Plato believed in independent existence of ideas, but as Aristotle already knew, ideas don't exist independently of concrete particular things and so on and so on. Then we have the Marxist anti-Platonism. Plato's idealism as the first reaction, class reaction to ancient Greek materialism. This unfortunate idea, propagated even unfortunately again by Lenin, that the couple of Plato and Aristotle is the first couple of idealism-materialism. Like aristocratic, arrogant ruling class Plato versus more liberal popular whatever nominalist empiricist Aristotle. I, I think, repeat this every year here, that this is for me simply a ridiculous and to put it in British way empirically false statement. Just two things that I repeat all the time. A, if you know a little bit about Plato and Aristotle you must know that whatever we can say against Plato, there is no place for slaves in Plato's Republic, while Aristotle has even a concept you know slaves like talking talking tools, talking instruments, ontologically even lower level. And point two, a more beautiful one even, whatever you say against Plato, he explicitly states in his Republic that the subordinate position of women in the existing society is a historical contingency. In his ideal Republic whatever goes for men goes for women and vice versa, like it's not part of the concept. On the other hand, Aristotle, as you probably know, provides even the ontological foundation for the male superiority, you know like male versus masculine versus feminine principle is like form, active form versus passive matter and so on and so on. Let's go on. Existential anti-Platonism. Plato subordinates singular existence, its uniqueness to the universal. This point was developed mostly by Kierkegaard, like Socrates versus Christ. Socrates universal wisdom, Christ uniqueness of singular existence. Then we have Heideggerian anti-Platonism. You know Plato as the key as it were fall, forgetfulness of, forgetting the history of being, metaphysical obliteration of ontological difference. And finally, a democratic anti-Platonism. From Karl Popper to Hannah Arendt. The idea being that Plato in his Republic is the protototalitarian thinker. And that there is a straight line, as I think Terry Eagleton once mentioned, from Plato to NATO, like Western metaphysics. Okay, we know this. Then things get funny, now I'll try to be a little bit shorter, if you move to Descartes. It's almost the same matrix, as it were. We have Heideggerian anti-Cartesianism. You know in Heidegger's deployment of history of Western metaphysics, Descartes stands for the final moment of metaphysical how do you call it nihilism, of nihilism. Western nihilism, subjectivity, subject reducing all reality to objects opened up to imperialist domination, technological manipulation, and so on. Then we have ecological Cartesianism, even with Al Gore, who at least you know the ex-vice president who at least had a little bit of feeling for Hegelian temporal paradoxes because after he lost the Florida election against Bush for some time I read this, he used to introduce himself as I'm the guy who once was the future US president, like this is at least some sense for temporality. So among others Al Gore claims this, that while in medieval times humanity was still an integral element of the cosmic organic order, so we cannot simply exploit nature, we, humanity and nature are part of natural hierarchic order, with the Cartesian dualism it's we humans objectify, exploit nature, and there seems to be an argument for it. Namely the great problem Descartes has in conceiving in conceptualizing the status of living beings. Descartes basically has only space for res extensa, the extendent material stuff, and res cogitans, the thinking substance. And so where is life? Which is why many radical Cartesians simply try to prove, in a pretty cruel way incidentally, that animals don't even have feelings, that for example I don't know to be tastelessly vulgar, if you beat too harshly or squeeze some bones of a dog and dog appears to cry, that this is just like a metal scratching whatever squeezing that it's not a proper feeling, it's purely a mechanical reaction. So okay then we have this ecological critique of Cartesianism. We have then the, which I think incidentally is not quite justified, it's much more complex. Then we have cognitivist rejection of Descartes. For example maybe you know the bestselling book Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error. The idea is that Descartes drew a strict line of distinction between pure neutral abstract thinking and animal feelings, passions and so on. That he didn't see the unity of the two. Eh I wouldn't how should I put it sell my mother into slavery to defend this thesis because if you read the late the third great book by Descartes, Les Passions de l'âme, The Passions of the Soul, you can see it's much more complex. But okay we have this line. Then we have the feminist claim. Descartes apparently abstract Cogito, cogito, but in reality this cogito is in reality, in actuality, the notion of subject proposed by Descartes although again apparently neutral de facto privileges male features. Then we have the proponents of so-called linguistic turn who claim that up to Habermas, who claim that the Cartesian subject is monological, that Descartes doesn't see how every Cogito ergo sum, individual self-experience as thinking, doubting, and thereby existing is already grounded in linguistic intersubjectivity. Then again the vitalist critique of Descartes, as I already said, mechanical matter and thinking, where is the space for life? And the third one Hegel. Here things reach the extreme. Proponents of philosophy of life, Lebensphilosophie. It all begins already with Schelling, late Schelling and Schopenhauer. Claim that in Hegel, although Hegel claims that his dialectics try to tries to capture the living thought, that it's really artificial life, just logical paradoxes and so on, that real life is missing from Hegel's dialectics. Again existentialists. The same argument as against Plato. That Hegel privileges the universal, reduces the particular just to the form of appearance, a subordinate moment in self-mediation of the universal materialists. Of course Hegel idealist, Hegel has to be turned around. Historicists who claim historical process is open-ended and Hegel imposes onto history a certain Western Eurocentric teleology. Analytic philosophers and empiricists, they make fun of Hegel, of his speculative madness. Marxists of course. Traditional liberals who claim Hegel's divinization, celebration of state is again a model of of totalitarian spirit laying the foundations for fascism, although this again is even empirically a problematic statement. Because you know I'm not sure if it was Ernst Krieck, he was one of those minor, not minor then but today half-forgotten deservedly half-forgotten Nazi philosophers. The only interesting role of Ernst Krieck is that he was crucial in undermining Heidegger. You know Heidegger wanted to become the official Nazi philosopher, but for hardline Nazis he was not a racist biologist enough, he was too intellectual. Okay one of these guys was Ernst Krieck and Ernst Krieck made I think it's him the famous statement that on my god I don't know was it March April okay the day when Hitler took power, that this is the day that Hegel finally died and so on. No it's a famous statement. Although things are here much more interesting. Incidentally it's a good book not because it will have a text by me, although this will not hurt the book I hope, but my friends Gregory Fried and another guy are now editing something that comes closest to what one can call the smoking gun in the case against Heidegger. It was quite a detective work to discover this. What? If you look at official plan for Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, complete works, there is a seminar which is missing from Hegel and the State. And for good reasons it's missing. Heidegger tries to erase the traces because this is where Heidegger goes to the end in his support of Nazism. It's not only and simply this type of general political opportunism but it's a detailed theoretical elaboration of it. And so quite by chance a copy of this seminar was found of Heidegger's seminar because you know Heidegger was an obsessional, he prepared detailed notes for his lectures, was found in Deutsches Literaturarchiv, in German literary archive, and it will appear now in English half a year from now. Yes, it's interesting because there again it's no longer just you know how people who try to prove Heidegger Nazism, Heidegger's Nazism refer to some like turns of the phrase which sounds Nazi. No no here it's directly talk about how Hegel's legacy, legacy which was threatened by Weimar liberalism is now resuscitated by Nazism and so on and so on. But okay Heidegger is wrong here whatever, no? So let's go on. Sorry, Marxists, traditional liberals I said Hegel, religious moralists, for religious moralists especially Catholics I noticed Hegel is the the the notion of ethical nihilism, like whatever you can do it can be justified, good can become evil, evil can become good and so on and so on. More interesting is the case of deconstructionists. For them although the real deconstructionist in the good sense, they know that things with Hegel are much more ambiguous, but the B level standard deconstructionists, for them it's this big opposition: Hegel the ultimate metaphysician, everything is sublated, integrated in the system and then the big point of deconstructionist, no but there is a remainder, something resists, everything cannot be totalized and so on and so on. Good for Derrida, this is not Derrida. Read his Glas, his big double book on Genet and on the other side Hegel, where for example Derrida says that the difference between Hegelian Aufhebung, overcoming, sublation, and what he Derrida calls différance is almost imperceptible. It's difficult even to distinguish them. So Derrida knew what he was talking about. And then we get the extreme case of Deleuze, who I almost admire him, who claims Hegel is so such a big as it were mistake that he should simply be forgotten, ignored. It's a simple error, let's forget Hegel. The irony is what? Tomorrow there will be in this building I don't know even where or will they also be moving us around a small colloquium that I'm organizing on Hegel and it will be opened by a guy from Chicago, Andrew Cutrofello, who among other things wrote some years ago a wonderful book called The Owl of Minerva which tries to repeat the movement of Hegel's phenomenology but in the epoch after Hegel, like the beginning is Hegel's death, then then the split of Hegel's pupils into Old-New Hegelians and then it's all a kind of a deduction of everything that happened from analytic philosophy to Heidegger, Derrida, and in a nice twist of irony the end, the absolute knowing resuscitated is Deleuze of course, today's Hegelian. No well it's very mist... So this point that Hegel is, sorry, that Deleuze is Hegelian unaware of it but nonetheless was also developed by Catherine Malabou in a good text and ah ah she will also be here no on Saturday. On Saturday I warn you there will be a true orgy. First my two good friends Rebecca Comay from Toronto and Frank Ruda from Berlin will do an orgy. They will talk for two hours and a half about the status of how do you call that sign dash in Hegel. That's something to go into you know because because the very beginning of Hegel's Logic, not introductions, the beginning is "Sein, reines Sein und nicht anderes," being, pure being dash, like why dash? What's the status of this being pure being? Is this a Hegelian repetition? Is this a contradiction? At the like the enigma of the very beginning. And she, that's Frank Ruda, she, that is to say Rebecca Comay will go to the very end of phenomenology where Hegel quotes Schiller, some stupid song about spirit recognizing itself in the in the explosion of its appearances and there there is also a dash, but you don't find this dash in Schiller himself. Because you know Hegel is a master of as all philosophers are of falsifying quotations. Like whenever Hegel seems to quote someone as a rule he makes a mistake, but this mistakes are extremely interesting. You can learn a lot of them. I think usually they have a certain truth value. For example don't take this personally. It's not against the Greeks, it's more against the Russians. You know when Hegel talks in his his lessons on the history of religion about the difference between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Christianity. Eastern Orthodoxy means Russian Orthodoxy not Buddhism this Christian east. He makes a wonderful mistake. And it's just a mistake because elsewhere he put he put it correctly, he knows. He says that the difference in theological terms is that for the Orthodox orientation, you know it's so-called question of the role of the son, son Jesus Christ in Holy Ghost, that for Orthodoxy the Holy Ghost originates only from God the Father while for Western Christianity it's co-generated by Father and Son. What does Hegel do? He says he moves it one step further but correctly. Hegel says that for Orthodoxy Holy Ghost originates from Father and Son, while for Western Christianity only from the Son. And I think Hegel was right because in his reading at least you know what dies on the cross is Father. There is no Father. You have only Son and when the Son is obliterated you have only the Communist Party, the collective, which is called Holy Ghost there and so on and so on. So okay let me now nonetheless return to the main line. I hope I made clear with this brief exposition what's the as it were strategic place of these three thinkers. They are mega-thinkers not not just because of this negative reason. They determine the entire field that comes after them but not directly, that they are all Hegelians. They are all anti-Hegelians. Like the entire philosophy of 19th-20th century is in one or another way rejection of Platonism, the entire modern philosophy one or another way rejection of Descartes, the entire post-Hegelian philosophy as already the name says rejection of Hegel. But I think we should make here two further moves. One is how systematically, and I'm sad I don't have time to develop it more in detail, how systematically with each of the three philosophers madness intervenes, the concept of madness. Already Plato, if you know how for example in some of his dialogues how he describes Socrates being seized by an idea. Already Lacan noted it how it's really a description of someone in a hysterical seizure, you know all of a sudden immobilized, like a moment of madness. Then we know all the story of Plato that the hypothesis of the evil spirit and so on, universalized madness. You probably know the polemics between Foucault and Derrida concerning the status of madness. Not to mention Hegel, who is by common-sense philosophers considered dismissed as the ultimate madman in philosophy. It's incredible how many it's almost now no longer, now there is a weird rehabilitation of Hegel even within the Anglo-Saxon tradition, but I'm unfortunately old enough to know that when I was young it was still that even the let's call them tolerant liberal Anglo-Saxons they were ready to concede maybe there is something in Kant maybe here there but not Hegel. Hegel is the point of complete madness. Madness in this ridiculous sense, you know, the idiot who doesn't see there is reality out there, who thinks he can read the mind of God blah blah and so on and so on. Now the third point, most interesting maybe at least for me, is that these three philosophers are usually conceived, understood as anti-evental philosophers. Like what can be more anti-evental than the Platonic idea that we have some eternal order of well notions, ideas, existing in an immutable way and that nothing really happens, all that happens is anamnesis, it's remembrance. All our the movement of our soul is rediscovering what already is deep within ourselves. Nothing new happens. We just rediscover the truth that is already there. As you may know you of course of course the idea is that this is Kierkegaard's idea that only with Christianity something new happens. Christianity is event. Kierkegaard develops this very nicely. How the death of Christ is precisely a temporary event which can be even empirically located and that um ah I'm sorry, it's a... Do I talk too fast or no? It's... (A little bit slower would be good but...) Okay, okay, I can make an honest attempt whatever will be the result of it eh. So again Plato seems to be the ultimate philosopher of anti-event. Nothing new under the sun. Nothing happens. The eternal order is here. The only movement is a movement of the German said Zerfall, disintegration. And the point is how to get back to the original undisturbed state. The same thing the same may appear for Descartes and even more for Hegel. Hegel nonetheless has a system although Hegel may appear to be the philosopher of event, dialectical movement, but as Hegel himself put it, in the course of dialectical movement things are only becoming what they always already eternally are. So we have a closed circle. Is it like this? Now I want to develop a little bit why I think it's not like this. Of course if we look at immediately at the content of Plato's thought of course there seems to be no event there. But look what actually happens in Plato, and here again I follow Alain Badiou's wonderful reading. What's the as it were zero level of the Platonic experience? Is it is that we live our ordinary daily life immersed in our ordinary interests, fears, whatever, and then we encounter an idea. And this is the Platonic event. It's like, you know, Saul's conversion into Saint Paul and so on. Something happens, a radical cut, you discover another dimension. That's the Platonic that's the Platonic event. No wonder that Plato was celebrating love, love as madness, and Plato emphasized the love as the beginning of wisdom. Usually this is only taken as a moment of gradual ascension, you know like first you love a concrete body, then you generalize it to all beautiful bodies, then you drop the body itself to the idea of beauty and so on. But nonetheless, I think that we should never forget how it all begins for Plato. Again you are in your daily universe thinking about this, that, pleasures, blah blah, and suddenly you encounter someone who brutally confronts you as the object of your love. And everything turns around. Your life is forever, your life is forever changed. You can feel in Plato this brutal encounter in all its strength. The encounter which is in a way beyond good and evil. If you are passionately in love, then you know even your most intimate rational interests, parents, children, colleagues, all can vanish. Your entire life is re-focused. You experience a weird indifference towards your moral obligations with regard to the people around you and so on and so on. So this falling in love is the Platonic event. I think that precisely this is what is at least for me, I know whenever I mention this it gets me into big trouble, but I think that this dimension, the way I see it again, is missing in I hate the term, I'm accused of racism when I use it, Oriental thought. What I want to say is this, and here I am on the side of Plato, that what for Oriental approach is as it were the origin of evil, the fall, like no, the Oriental idea is you are in some kind of undisturbed state of bliss and then you get too engaged, you fall into. But what Plato celebrates is precisely this falling into as full engagement. So this would be the Plato event. Then Descartes. Don't forget that Descartes' Cogito is precisely a pure event. It's not, here Descartes immediately misunderstands himself. Cogito is not a substance which is thinking, this is already Descartes' metaphysics. No, Cogito is this experience that of a thing that exists only insofar as it is thinking, only in the course of the process of thinking. And what is crucial here I think, maybe even absolutely crucial, is not to forget that when he describes this pure experience of Cogito, Descartes is not playing some intellectual games. He is describing a very concrete, let's call it mystical-spiritual experience. I don't know how deep you are in mysticism but you know you have this wonderful notion of the night of the world, when you withdraw in a kind of psychotic reduction, eh eh you withdraw from reality into the abyss of your soul. It's the point of darkness, but darkness as the ultimate depth of your soul. And I claim and this again, what Descartes is describing as Cogito ergo sum is precisely this thought disconnected from reality, this pure moment of inwardness, which is at the same time the moment of madness. The thesis is, and I don't have time to develop it, I did it in my big fat book which was mentioned, that Hegel was well aware of how in order for human spirit, our symbolic universe to develop, we have to go through this zero point of madness. Hegel is here more Foucaultian than maybe than Michel Foucault himself in this idea that madness is not just a possibility that thing goes wrong, but our rational world as it were emerges only as a defense against the threat of madness. Hegel says this openly that even if empirically we are not, most of us, mad, but the only way to understand human reason is as a reaction to madness, maybe even as a form of madness in what sense? There is a wonderful passage in Freud's reading of of his basic his big analysis of paranoia, the so-called Judge Schreber case, where Freud says something very important which is usually misunderstood. Freud says that in a paranoiac system, what we usually take as the sign of madness is on the contrary an attempt to get out of madness. Namely the paranoiac construct is a kind of ersatz pseudo-normality. The true madness is the night of the world, the withdrawal from reality, the disintegration of your psychic universe. And again the paranoiac system is already an attempt, of course a crazy attempt, but an attempt to cure yourself. Lacan sometimes I'm not sure one should do this radical step, but nonetheless Lacan sometimes along these lines proposed that there is a moment of madness in all rationality, in the sense that every rationality is a mad attempt to get out of madness. So in now okay we got this. The three philosophers, the philosophers of event. Plato, Platonic event you encounter the idea and as you I hope you got it how that's what I want to deliver to you how we can formulate the basic Platonic experience independently of all this idealist-substantialist metaphysics. There I'm I'm not claiming that there are eternal ideas existing independently of ah and so on and so on. I'm just saying that in authentic moments of love, political engagement, we encounter some kind of absolute. And again I don't mean absolute in any bullshity metaphysical sense or whatever, just something strikes you and as someone also morality there is a nice can work as an absolute, in what sense? I forgot who in some novel I know in which novel because it's a shitty novel and a shitty movie which should be publicly burned, I hate it. Did you see that bullshit The Life of Pi? Yeah, and I'm embarrassed because through James Schamus I know Ang Lee, and he now wants to meet me... No no I'm not boasting now because I'm afraid to meet him he wants from me some kind of a metaphysical justification how deep the movie is, fuck him it's bullshit I claim. But but in the novel Life of Pi there is a deep correct formulation where you find the statement that um when you must do something when you experience something as ethical pressure you must do it because you cannot not do it. And I think this is important with authentic ethics it's not the other way around. It's not you cannot not do it because you must do it, but you simply experience again that you cannot not do it. This is encountering the absolute. And you can see how I'm not talking about any metaphysics, I even claim that that would be I claim the materialist theory of the absolute. Absolute is something much more fragile and um belongs to the order of appearance than ordinary reality. Absolute is like you have a duty, there is no direct power in duty. You can say fuck off if you are an unethical person. But you know once you are caught in duty you cannot not do it. With love it's the same. You can ignore love but then you awaken in the middle of the night and so on. You know this idea of an entity which is totally powerless, fragile, but nonetheless you cannot get rid of it. The more fragile it is the more its hold on you is absolute. So again we have this Platonic event, we have the Cartesian event, which is again for the first time the absolute anchor of ontological edifice is purely evental. It's just I think therefore I am, which means I am only insofar as I am caught in the process of thinking. With all the mystical undertones of this absolute inwardness and then Hegel. Ah now let's go further. In what sense is Hegel the philosopher of the event? In what sense is for Hegel truth, truth itself evental? Now of course what immediately arises in our minds are these textbook stupidities, you know like Hegel Hegel yes dialectical development and so on and so on truth develops. No no no it's not as simple as that. It's a much more complex process. It concerns the way for Hegel appearance, misleading false appearance is immanent to truth. But how? Your first association here is wrong, mine also, which says yeah of course first you cling to some idea it's one-sided it's just partially true then the opposite it's partially true and then in the higher synthesis all the aspect. No no no. What does Hegel mean here? The starting point should be precisely the power of appearances, how this is I think the ABC of Hegel that in the conflict between appearance and what you experience as the reality behind appearance the truth is in appearance. What does this mean? Uh I wonder did I already sell here the joke but it's such a nice one that I will nonetheless repeat it about Jesus Christ and Tiger Woods. Where did I do it? No you don't remember it. (Last year.) Last year. Okay if I were to be politically incorrect I would have said fuck you but okay who asked you something, okay. Then I will go directly to my newly okay I skip this. (No no we want it.) No no no no no I... fuck you if you want it buy the new book. Okay. Eh let me begin with a movie and at least I know that this one I didn't yet use here because I saw it only recently, we in Ljubljana even in province interesting things things can happen, we just organized a beautiful conference and I'm not praising Slovene greatness mostly there were foreigners who were talking there about Ernst Lubitsch. The director, you know? I think he is the one to be rediscovered as the great one, maybe at the level of Hitchcock and so on and so on. We have now a volume which will be edited all my friends the Slovene gang Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar our Aaron Schuster a great young voice of progressive thought which means a young Lacanian no and so on. So let me begin at the zero level. All the movies I'm telling you I'm not making propaganda for DVD industry, now I'm slowly getting used to it I'm an idiot but my years old son is slowly teaching me how to do it all these downloading bit torrents and so on all these movies you can get them for free. There is already an early Lubitsch, Die Puppe, The Doll, which is incredible, why? Because it turns around it yeah it's from Uh but you can get it now. Uh it turns around the standard motive of the of the doll which is in Hoffmann, E.T.A. Hoffmann you know you think you are seducing a I'm sorry but I cannot restrain from asking you whenever I see people I warn you it will be an obscenity whenever I see people interpreting for them no I'm always looking for that you have some obscene code you know you pretend then you do this then you do this do you have signs like that like how do you... I always watch carefully will I see something dirty there you know. I hope you have them that you will not... that's that's your secret you know. I also hope that you interpret creatively that when I talk you tell the guy now he is bullshitting forget or whatever you know like creative translating you know. That's your job my god you know like did you see Charlie Chaplin The Great Dictator? There you have a mega example when Hynkel Hitler the dictator is dictating to his secretary. And at some point he talks for five minutes and the secretary just: up. And then as if reacting to our spectator's surprise Hitler is surprised and looks at the paper and says okay okay she got it correctly like he's talking five minutes... I always believe in this that you translators know more than we know you know what I mean like you cut the bullshit. Sorry let me go on. So Lubitsch, Die Puppe. The standard version is the Hoffmann version. You think it's a real woman but oh when you embrace her you discover it's just a mechanical doll. I don't have time to go into it but already in his early film Lubitsch in an ingenious way turns it around. A certain rich guy nephew of a prince has to get married because that's the only way for him to get money from his uncle the count or whatever but he hates women so some priests convince him to marry a doll, a perfect doll who can act as a woman. But then on the night before the marriage ceremony a catastrophe happens that doll is broken by mistake. So they convince a real girl to play a doll you know to move like did then of course ha ha ha in the middle of the night they he discovers that nonetheless this is not a doll and so on. But it's a wonderful reversal. Why? Let me go to a later film by Lubitsch from his early Hollywood, it's with Maurice Chevalier you know the French blah whom I hate frankly. You know why? Ah no he was this typically corrupted French collaborationist you know. It makes me very sad I was in Paris two a couple of months ago you remember when Gérard Depardieu discovered the greatness of Russian and Uzbekistan democracy? And and I told Alain Badiou what's going on and he told me that we have a totally wrong idea of you know associating usually pop figures singers actors with some kind of at least liberal progressive... He told me no that in France there is a long tradition of this of amusement media personality corrupted not on the left. Then I told him but what about two well-known actresses who are well known for being at least relative progressive Emmanuelle Béart and Juliette Binoche? And he told me yes they are well known because they are the only two more or less no and so he told me it's no it's just name them most of the big names were like Edith Piaf, uh she was playing singing for Germans during World War II and so on, just name them you know that there is a long tradition in French again mediatic cinema singing industry so that Carla Bruni okay she is Italian it shouldn't surprise you whom she married and so on. Let's go on. So it's with Maurice Chevalier One Hour with You. Here you have a minimum Lubitsch situation. A couple called in the movie Mitzi and André. They are both married, not to each other, to girls to their own guys and by mistake they appear they are find themselves together sharing a taxi and then the conversation develops where we see them like one they try to ignore each other not being connected. Uh she is looking through the window, he André is looking is reading a newspaper and then she Mitzi says look look at us he reads a newspaper she looks through the window aren't we like an old married couple and so on and then they try to then they start to play on this and you can imagine what happens love develops out of it and so on. Why am I mentioning this? Because here we encounter a crucial category. A category of innocent bystander where you are in a certain situation and what matters is not what you sincerely think deep in yourself but how your situation appears to an innocent observer who doesn't know and usually even if this appearance is false socially it is determining. It's stronger. And this is one of the crucial mechanisms in Lubitsch in what sense. Of course there was a whole book written on this an unknown masterpiece of theory Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study from a book which systematically develops what is says the drama of false appearances. Here the axis is rather the opposite one: that two people are engaged in some activity which may appear evil morally unacceptable to an external observer. And the theory of this book is that this was the way Hollywood in the 40s and 50s tried to transgress bypass the Hays Code. For example homosexuality was prohibited but they smuggled the topic in so that two guys were just friends but to some external observer they appeared as as if they are gay. Usually the conclusion is or the denouement is reactionary here. It's simply that at the end everything gets clear it was just blah blah but what Lubitsch knew is that nonetheless there is there can be more truth precisely in this superficial appearance. She's what precisely the one who are engaged in it from their inner self-experience what they don't see. I will not now go too much into it. I just want to say how in ah I developed this much more in detail in that triple orgy book Hegemonies Whatever Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and me. Namely how this works even for theory. For example how a concept which is clearly a misunderstanding, the result of a foreign limited perspective, can bring out a dimension which hits the truth much more successfully than those who are in it. For example I developed this example in that early book of mine I mean co-written, you know the notion of film noir. You know that this is a concept that emerged in now you are doing your obscenities again... sorry. I'm observing you I'm observing you I'm like the evil girl from the movie I will report to you then. Sorry sorry that you know that all of a sudden in '46 because the war was over six seven movies were shown at the same time in Paris and the French critics invented the notion film noir. And a French theorist Marc Vernet demonstrated how as to the level of content they are totally wrong. All the features that they identified as typical were already there before whatever you want, but nonetheless the notion now comes the beauty not only survived but had even a retroactive influence on Hollywood itself. So that you see the paradox. The notion of noir was a French misperception of what goes on in Hollywood then Hollywood became influenced by this misperception and based on it made some very good films. Or another example and my friend Eduardo Cadava told me he mentioned this to Derrida and Derrida agreed. You remember you don't you are too young when in the early 80s I would say maybe late 70s Derrida's influence began in United States. It was a clear simplified misperception but in an interesting direction. If you look at Derrida's text till that period they were abstract philosophical analysis of Husserl and so on. All this political ethical religious more engaged stance was the result of the American misperception. And the beauty this is not a critique of Derrida on the contrary then Derrida started to imitate his American followers who misread him and the results were extremely interesting good and so on and so on. You see this is the power of this is the power of misperception. Here you can get the first glimpse of what Hegel means or of what Lacan is aiming at when he says la vérité surgit de la méprise, the truth can arise out of a misrecognition. Let's go on. In Lubitsch himself you have among others his classic film, I think it's a little bit overestimated but nonetheless, The Shop Around the Corner. It takes place in a Budapest store. There are two coworkers who dislike each other but then they they exchange letters, they don't each of them doesn't know that the other guy with whom he or she is exchanging letter is the guy there in the store, but just an ideal partner and of course they fall in love through letters although they as persons know each other and hate each other. I think that what is wrong in this film is the idea that this can work in the sense that let's say there is one of you I hate you you hate me we exchange letters we fall in love with our fantasy images. I maybe you know more here Steven. I don't think this would have worked. It would be rather a catastrophe to discover oh my god but it's you. I don't think the result would have been now I know you're a good guy we share the same dreams and so on because one argument against this film is that it was later remade as one of the absolutely disgusting Hollywood melodramas You've Got Mail. You remember with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? It's just here it's even more believable because it's it's cyberspace and so on. Uh I wonder if I maybe I did mention this already here I'm mentioning this story because and this is the shock because do you know that a couple of years ago in Sarajevo of all the places just after the war the same thing happened in real life? It was reported in our at least in ex-Yugoslavia media. A husband and the wife no longer loved each other and each of them it's so ridiculous each of them started a virtual love affair exchanging passionate letters then with an unknown partner then finally they decided to meet they were themselves. But here the result was much more truthful. No it wasn't oh now we know we love each other, it was nightmare. It was over. Okay so let's go on. So I will maybe cut short this a little bit. Ah okay. Now I already developed in my books and I will drop it here the idea of how this immanence of appearance to truth, something starts as appearance obviously a misleading appearance but it triggers a process as it were making it true. How this holds for the Hegelian dialectical process. This is its minimal formula, that how again a misleading appearance triggers the mechanism for it to become true. What I want to develop now, and it will be a little bit more complex, and I must also acknowledge my debts here I will refer to one of my Slovene Lacanian Stalinist troika Alenka Zupančič who is now deep in it, how this same paradox of evental status of a truth in the sense that the truth emerges out of an series of events out of a through an evental process, what begins as a misleading appearance becomes truth, how this holds at the most fundamental level for sexuality. Now this is now new stuff a little bit more complex. Why is sexuality structured like that? Let me begin with what usually is taken to be Freud's basic discovery: infantile sexuality. And I hope you noticed how this notion is oppressed today. It is as if this is the price we are paying for our so-called permissivity. I claim this is absolutely crucial. In the sense that everything is permitted today. You can have cats to lick your vagina, dogs whatever do whatever you want but children are innocent. Pedophilia became the ultimate crime. Gérard Wajcman, French Lacanian, made did this point nicely in a text published in Umbra, that annual volume edited by Joan Copjec at Umbra The quote, a quote from Gérard Wajcman: The sole remaining prohibition, the one sacred value in our society that seems to remain is to do with children. It is forbidden to touch a hair on their little blond heads as if children had rediscovered that angelic purity on which Freud managed to cast some doubt. And it is undoubtedly the diabolical figure of Freud that we condemn today seeing him as the one who by uncovering the relationship of childhood to sexuality quite simply depraved our virginal childhoods in an age when sexuality is exhibited on every street corner the image of the innocent child has strangely returned with a vengeance. Why am I mentioning this? You will say what has this to do with that idea of innocent observer? Yeah precisely everything. Children are the innocent observers. We can participate in orgies whatever children must not be aware of it. And I know even some of my friends I was never doing it who participated in how do you call those horrors... when people meet and have group sex there is a term... swinging? Yes. Parents who are swinging blah blah blah but like one of them told me after telling me all which I hated even to hear but then if you mention one of this to my son I will kill you and so on. You know like you can do whatever you want on condition that the child doesn't know it. We need an innocent gaze. Why? So we should ask if today again because also it's interesting one of the ways to make an analysis of an epoch I claim is to ask who are the typical bad guys? Like did you notice how Fredric Jameson makes this remark apropos The Wire the series, how today the only universally acceptable bad guys in horror movies are only two or maybe three: terrorists, serial killers, and pedophiliacs. It's as if all others are relativized, like in all these new TV series you can have ordinary murderers who murder for business, you can all of them can be bad and they are still presented as like this the last one how is it called series, I don't have time to see it Game of Cards or House of Cards with Kevin Spacey. (House of Cards.) (House of Cards and Game of Thrones, both of them are out.) Okay whatever yeah. But what I mean is that you know anything goes you can be a murderer whatever you can still be the point of identification although there is a series with Kevin Bacon I think now maybe that one is an interesting one. I forgot the title but isn't there now a new series where one serial killer tries to constitute a... (The Following.) Yeah The Following. That should be a progressive answer I claim of how like serial killers of the world unite something I mean like this this maybe could be something you know. But okay so again why infantile? And I agree with Joan Copjec who told me that she is bright that bitch Joan Copjec. She told me that you remember fifteen years ago, twenty or where there was that hit series which I hated, Home Alone. And she got paranoia that that's already some kind of this celebration of these children who invincible they always win and so on. She immediately read that series as a kind of you know a protection of this innocence all... Okay so now let's go a step further. What is so scandalous about infantile sexuality? It is not simply the fact that even children presumed innocent are already sexualized. One has to be much more precise here. The scandal resides in two features which are of course two sides of the same coin. First, and here I plagiarize shamelessly Alenka Zupančič who in a really intelligent way drew observed this fact although already Jean Laplanche noted it. Which fact? That infantile sexuality is something very weird in the sense that it's neither biologically grounded nor fitting symbolic cultural norms. Biologically sexuality is made for copulation no? Something specifically human children sexuality. It's something that intrudes, pervades the field before biologically mature sexuality. The problem here and this is what Jean Laplanche pointed out nicely is that it's not that we have first this too early infantile sexuality to fill in the years before puberty and then once puberty enters oh we can say fuck off now I can fuck in a normal psychological way or whatever. No it ruins the entire field. You cannot... the topics the way infantile sexuality as it were approaches sexual topic remains in power to the end. Or here is this nice quote from Jean Laplanche: when it comes to sexuality man is subject to the greatest of paradoxes. What is acquired through the drives, drives which are not biological here, precedes what is innate and instinctual. You see the point which is such a simple point and I'm angry at myself that I didn't notice it. Instinctually at the level of inborn mechanisms it's genital screwing to make children which is like biologically grounded. But it's not as one would have expected that you start at the most primitive level with what is biologically grounded innate and then if you're a corrupted cultural guy you pervert it. No you start with unnatural sexuality. In such a way, I continue here the quote, that at the time it emerges, instinctual sexuality which is adaptive, to put it simply instinctual sexuality you fuck to get children is adaptive in the evolutionary sense, I mean it has an evolutionary function to bring to the world more monsters like ourselves whatever, finds the seat already taken as it were by infantile drives already and always present in the unconscious. So again this is the first paradox. Why this strange intrusion in children? Neither biology because biologically infantile sexuality again is meaningless, non-functional, nor culture. Culture in the sense of normativity and so on, but some weird in between. Why? Ah. The reason, now it's me plagiarizing Alenka Zupančič not Jean Laplanche, the reason for this strange excess is the link between sexuality and cognition. Against the standard idea of sexuality as some kind of instinctual vital force which is then repressed or sublimated through the work of culture, since in its raw state it poses a threat to culture, one should assert the link between sexuality and cognition. That's the other aspect which is not so often noted but which is absolutely crucial for Freud. That children's sexuality is not some Deleuzian polymorphously perverse paradise of I don't know this masturbatory pregenital gestures you squeeze this, that, I will not be concrete whatever and you enjoy it. It's deeply cognitive. It's connected with all this you know mysterious questioning: where do children come from, how, and so on and so on, which is why it's also deeply embedded in fantasies because as we know fantasies are precisely answers to all this. You know the small children that's the Freudian myth but I think it's true here a small child sees some strange things. As Jean Laplanche would have put it, the enigma of the other's desire. Like others want he feels something obscene in adults. What do they want from me? Obviously they are not aware what do they want from me. This is for Jean Laplanche and I think he is right here the original experience of subjectivity: not what do I want, but what do the others see in me? Is this idea that I have something in me that others see in me but I don't know what, and I try to answer it through some mythic narrative. So the again the idea is that children's sexuality is grounded in such a cognitive search but there is always a missing link. You never get the answer. That's why you have fantasies and to repeat myself I cannot resist it because all women that I to whom I tell this story love it, even I love it. I myself love some of these myths. Okay for obvious reason women evil they want to sex all the time no wonder they like it. Namely I remember, I'm sorry if I repeat myself but whatever, when I was young basically I already knew how children are made. You make love. But I didn't know the exact mechanism. So I must admit it for some four five years like from five till ten I thought that with a little bit of a sperm you don't directly inseminate the woman but that it's like a building block you know today we fuck for the hair of our child, tomorrow we do the nails then of course ha ha ha then you have to you know like my darling what will we be doing today shall we do the eyes of our child, the fingers, fuck them of course women like this you have to work all the time there I mean but no you see the point. I even once when I was a child I really love this example. I tried to bring the two together and I think it's a nice story. On the one hand I knew you have to make love. On the other hand I didn't know the mechanism of that insemination all that horror all those horrors. So I thought of course it must have something to do with how do you call the disgusting birds... storks? Yes. So then I tried to bring the two together and my idea was that when you fuck storks are observing you through the window and if you fuck nicely as a gratitude they bring you the child. And even now I think maybe it seems to me much more reasonable than this disgusting insemination idea or whatever. But okay let's now become a little bit more serious. What I'm saying is that two things. First it is now you will say okay these are childish fantasies but then when you reach puberty you know fuck is fuck, forget about all this. No the point of Freud is fuck is never fuck. You need fantasy to the end. That's what Lacan means by there is no sexual relationship. Of course rationally you know you make children like this but to maintain the arousal and so on you need some fantasy excess that you know the story I'm repeating it all the time that's the Freudian point that the mystery that the the problem for psychoanalysis is not this vulgar pansexualism whatever you are doing you are thinking about that. No the the enigma of psychoanalysis is exactly the opposite one: but what are we thinking when we are doing that? The idea is that when you are making love it cannot be purely tautological like you make love and you think you are making love. There has to be some detail. You imagine I don't know how the hair of a woman is curled, somebody observing you whatever. So you see my point in this sense the structure of infantile sexuality which is a cognitive missing link filled in with if this is too dirty should I talk faster so that then you will not be able to translate all to to save your moral upright sorry sorry. No but so again that's the next lesson that the missing link remains here to the end. We never reach maturity. That's the point about human sexuality. The this structure of sexuation through cognitive missing link and fantasies this structure remains this structure remains to the end. But now comes the next as and... ah yes let me give you another example I know I'm repeating it but it's again crucial because it's a nice
We live in a time of madness. Some guys in Norway published a book of my jokes, just jokes from my books, and now MIT wants to reprint it as a coffee table book there. So I said, what does it mean coffee table book? I know, but I wanted them to be precise, and they told me it means you do nothing and you get royalties, because it will be an expensive coffee table book, of course. I said yes, but to cheat a little bit I added some new obscene jokes and they were so worried at MIT that they immediately consulted their lawyers, like, could we be prosecuted for, name it, antisemitism, Islamophobia, you know, all possible, you know? Because the like, you will find there that wonderful legal joke I like it. How can we be sure that maybe you know it I'm sorry that Judas from the Bible did not betray did not sell Christ to the Romans? Well, whatever you say about Jews, they know the value of what they are selling. No Jew would sell a God for mere silver coins or whatever, no? Sorry, I always fall for this cheap stuff you know. I've been... But I heard a new from do you want do you want me to sit next to you? You mean to ah I know what you want, to have some ball squeezer electric so that then you just press the button and you did it no but there is a nice one that I was told when I was in Moscow recently. It's a primitive one, you don't have to laugh, but what I like is that it's a Stalinist joke where you expect a some political stuff and it gets personal in a nice way, personal means sexual. Like, there is a boring local Communist cell meeting where one guy, local guy is having a long report for two three hours about political situation and he looks around and sees in the middle of his boring speech that one guy there is half asleep dozing off and asks him, are you listening what am I telling? Do you know who is, just a Russian name, who is Popov? The guy said awake, no, no idea who is Popov. Well, the lecturer tells him, well, if you were to listen to my long report, you would have known who Popov is, no? And then, then the guy who was awakened asked him back, but do you know who, name another name, who Alekseyev is? And the lecturer says, no idea. And the guy said well, if you were to give less talks here and stay more at home, you would have known that Alekseyev is a guy who is fucking your wife while you are giving boring talks here. Sorry, this is spirit for me no. Now a little bit more serious nonetheless. What Steven said before, it's unfortunately true. I counted on this that this is a smaller circle and I will really try to develop in this three days, today, Monday, Tuesday, a kind of a with a little bit of repeating my old stuff but basically nonetheless new stuff a kind of introductory notes towards the notion of event and so on. Why event? What I want to do is precisely to not to criticize him but to supplement my and our good friend Alain Badiou and I talked with him and we both came to the idea that, you know, usually people misinterpret his notion of event as some big spectacular thing, no, shattering event, somehow opposed to small daily life, while I think that more and more today a true political event would be something that happens at our apparently most common vulgar everyday level. Like it's easy to do big meetings, one million people on a square, and as we learn from Greece, from Egypt, it's much more difficult to change things afterwards when things return to their normal run, to make a difference there. So okay, let me now first recapitulate very briefly what I already often developed. In the sphere of philosophy there are, I claim, three key philosophers, only three in the entire Western thought: Plato, Descartes, Hegel. Why? A very simple negative proof. And again Alain Badiou gave me this idea. Did you notice how each of the three occupies a unique position in the sense that no one wants to be a pure Platonist, Cartesian, Hegelian? Already for Plato, Michel Foucault mentioned somewhere that the entire history of Western philosophy can be defined as the history of rejections or criticisms of Plato. It begins immediately with Aristotle, you know, a more nominalist view, Stoicism and so on and so on, like it's almost as if Western philosophy is defined by the impossibility of being a Platonist. You have to draw some kind of a distance. The same goes for Descartes. The entire modern philosophy is a history of critical rejections of Descartes. Not to mention Hegel, who in this negative way defines the last years. Just to give you a very brief shortened recapitulation of my idea. For example, Plato. Here I refer to Alain Badiou's seminar on Plato. You can find it online from a couple of years ago where he goes to six main anti-Platonic positions even now, okay now in the 20th century. First we have the vitalist anti-Platonism: Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze. The idea is that Plato deals with this gray abstract sterility of ideas, what Plato misses is the real of life, becoming, and so on and so on, this idea of Plato's empty intellectualism which misses, ignores the vital force of life. Then we have the empiricist-analytic critique of Plato. Plato believed in independent existence of ideas, but as Aristotle already knew, ideas don't exist independently of concrete particular things and so on and so on. Then we have the Marxist anti-Platonism. Plato's idealism as the first reaction, class reaction to ancient Greek materialism. This unfortunate idea, propagated even unfortunately again by Lenin, that the couple of Plato and Aristotle is the first couple of idealism-materialism. Like aristocratic, arrogant ruling class Plato versus more liberal popular whatever nominalist empiricist Aristotle. I, I think, repeat this every year here, that this is for me simply a ridiculous and to put it in British way empirically false statement. Just two things that I repeat all the time. A, if you know a little bit about Plato and Aristotle you must know that whatever we can say against Plato, there is no place for slaves in Plato's Republic, while Aristotle has even a concept you know slaves like talking talking tools, talking instruments, ontologically even lower level. And point two, a more beautiful one even, whatever you say against Plato, he explicitly states in his Republic that the subordinate position of women in the existing society is a historical contingency. In his ideal Republic whatever goes for men goes for women and vice versa, like it's not part of the concept. On the other hand, Aristotle, as you probably know, provides even the ontological foundation for the male superiority, you know like male versus masculine versus feminine principle is like form, active form versus passive matter and so on and so on. Let's go on. Existential anti-Platonism. Plato subordinates singular existence, its uniqueness to the universal. This point was developed mostly by Kierkegaard, like Socrates versus Christ. Socrates universal wisdom, Christ uniqueness of singular existence. Then we have Heideggerian anti-Platonism. You know Plato as the key as it were fall, forgetfulness of, forgetting the history of being, metaphysical obliteration of ontological difference. And finally, a democratic anti-Platonism. From Karl Popper to Hannah Arendt. The idea being that Plato in his Republic is the protototalitarian thinker. And that there is a straight line, as I think Terry Eagleton once mentioned, from Plato to NATO, like Western metaphysics. Okay, we know this. Then things get funny, now I'll try to be a little bit shorter, if you move to Descartes. It's almost the same matrix, as it were. We have Heideggerian anti-Cartesianism. You know in Heidegger's deployment of history of Western metaphysics, Descartes stands for the final moment of metaphysical how do you call it nihilism, of nihilism. Western nihilism, subjectivity, subject reducing all reality to objects opened up to imperialist domination, technological manipulation, and so on. Then we have ecological Cartesianism, even with Al Gore, who at least you know the ex-vice president who at least had a little bit of feeling for Hegelian temporal paradoxes because after he lost the Florida election against Bush for some time I read this, he used to introduce himself as I'm the guy who once was the future US president, like this is at least some sense for temporality. So among others Al Gore claims this, that while in medieval times humanity was still an integral element of the cosmic organic order, so we cannot simply exploit nature, we, humanity and nature are part of natural hierarchic order, with the Cartesian dualism it's we humans objectify, exploit nature, and there seems to be an argument for it. Namely the great problem Descartes has in conceiving in conceptualizing the status of living beings. Descartes basically has only space for res extensa, the extendent material stuff, and res cogitans, the thinking substance. And so where is life? Which is why many radical Cartesians simply try to prove, in a pretty cruel way incidentally, that animals don't even have feelings, that for example I don't know to be tastelessly vulgar, if you beat too harshly or squeeze some bones of a dog and dog appears to cry, that this is just like a metal scratching whatever squeezing that it's not a proper feeling, it's purely a mechanical reaction. So okay then we have this ecological critique of Cartesianism. We have then the, which I think incidentally is not quite justified, it's much more complex. Then we have cognitivist rejection of Descartes. For example maybe you know the bestselling book Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error. The idea is that Descartes drew a strict line of distinction between pure neutral abstract thinking and animal feelings, passions and so on. That he didn't see the unity of the two. Eh I wouldn't how should I put it sell my mother into slavery to defend this thesis because if you read the late the third great book by Descartes, Les Passions de l'âme, The Passions of the Soul, you can see it's much more complex. But okay we have this line. Then we have the feminist claim. Descartes apparently abstract Cogito, cogito, but in reality this cogito is in reality, in actuality, the notion of subject proposed by Descartes although again apparently neutral de facto privileges male features. Then we have the proponents of so-called linguistic turn who claim that up to Habermas, who claim that the Cartesian subject is monological, that Descartes doesn't see how every Cogito ergo sum, individual self-experience as thinking, doubting, and thereby existing is already grounded in linguistic intersubjectivity. Then again the vitalist critique of Descartes, as I already said, mechanical matter and thinking, where is the space for life? And the third one Hegel. Here things reach the extreme. Proponents of philosophy of life, Lebensphilosophie. It all begins already with Schelling, late Schelling and Schopenhauer. Claim that in Hegel, although Hegel claims that his dialectics try to tries to capture the living thought, that it's really artificial life, just logical paradoxes and so on, that real life is missing from Hegel's dialectics. Again existentialists. The same argument as against Plato. That Hegel privileges the universal, reduces the particular just to the form of appearance, a subordinate moment in self-mediation of the universal materialists. Of course Hegel idealist, Hegel has to be turned around. Historicists who claim historical process is open-ended and Hegel imposes onto history a certain Western Eurocentric teleology. Analytic philosophers and empiricists, they make fun of Hegel, of his speculative madness. Marxists of course. Traditional liberals who claim Hegel's divinization, celebration of state is again a model of of totalitarian spirit laying the foundations for fascism, although this again is even empirically a problematic statement. Because you know I'm not sure if it was Ernst Krieck, he was one of those minor, not minor then but today half-forgotten deservedly half-forgotten Nazi philosophers. The only interesting role of Ernst Krieck is that he was crucial in undermining Heidegger. You know Heidegger wanted to become the official Nazi philosopher, but for hardline Nazis he was not a racist biologist enough, he was too intellectual. Okay one of these guys was Ernst Krieck and Ernst Krieck made I think it's him the famous statement that on my god I don't know was it March April okay the day when Hitler took power, that this is the day that Hegel finally died and so on. No it's a famous statement. Although things are here much more interesting. Incidentally it's a good book not because it will have a text by me, although this will not hurt the book I hope, but my friends Gregory Fried and another guy are now editing something that comes closest to what one can call the smoking gun in the case against Heidegger. It was quite a detective work to discover this. What? If you look at official plan for Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, complete works, there is a seminar which is missing from Hegel and the State. And for good reasons it's missing. Heidegger tries to erase the traces because this is where Heidegger goes to the end in his support of Nazism. It's not only and simply this type of general political opportunism but it's a detailed theoretical elaboration of it. And so quite by chance a copy of this seminar was found of Heidegger's seminar because you know Heidegger was an obsessional, he prepared detailed notes for his lectures, was found in Deutsches Literaturarchiv, in German literary archive, and it will appear now in English half a year from now. Yes, it's interesting because there again it's no longer just you know how people who try to prove Heidegger Nazism, Heidegger's Nazism refer to some like turns of the phrase which sounds Nazi. No no here it's directly talk about how Hegel's legacy, legacy which was threatened by Weimar liberalism is now resuscitated by Nazism and so on and so on. But okay Heidegger is wrong here whatever, no? So let's go on. Sorry, Marxists, traditional liberals I said Hegel, religious moralists, for religious moralists especially Catholics I noticed Hegel is the the the notion of ethical nihilism, like whatever you can do it can be justified, good can become evil, evil can become good and so on and so on. More interesting is the case of deconstructionists. For them although the real deconstructionist in the good sense, they know that things with Hegel are much more ambiguous, but the B level standard deconstructionists, for them it's this big opposition: Hegel the ultimate metaphysician, everything is sublated, integrated in the system and then the big point of deconstructionist, no but there is a remainder, something resists, everything cannot be totalized and so on and so on. Good for Derrida, this is not Derrida. Read his Glas, his big double book on Genet and on the other side Hegel, where for example Derrida says that the difference between Hegelian Aufhebung, overcoming, sublation, and what he Derrida calls différance is almost imperceptible. It's difficult even to distinguish them. So Derrida knew what he was talking about. And then we get the extreme case of Deleuze, who I almost admire him, who claims Hegel is so such a big as it were mistake that he should simply be forgotten, ignored. It's a simple error, let's forget Hegel. The irony is what? Tomorrow there will be in this building I don't know even where or will they also be moving us around a small colloquium that I'm organizing on Hegel and it will be opened by a guy from Chicago, Andrew Cutrofello, who among other things wrote some years ago a wonderful book called The Owl of Minerva which tries to repeat the movement of Hegel's phenomenology but in the epoch after Hegel, like the beginning is Hegel's death, then then the split of Hegel's pupils into Old-New Hegelians and then it's all a kind of a deduction of everything that happened from analytic philosophy to Heidegger, Derrida, and in a nice twist of irony the end, the absolute knowing resuscitated is Deleuze of course, today's Hegelian. No well it's very mist... So this point that Hegel is, sorry, that Deleuze is Hegelian unaware of it but nonetheless was also developed by Catherine Malabou in a good text and ah ah she will also be here no on Saturday. On Saturday I warn you there will be a true orgy. First my two good friends Rebecca Comay from Toronto and Frank Ruda from Berlin will do an orgy. They will talk for two hours and a half about the status of how do you call that sign dash in Hegel. That's something to go into you know because because the very beginning of Hegel's Logic, not introductions, the beginning is "Sein, reines Sein und nicht anderes," being, pure being dash, like why dash? What's the status of this being pure being? Is this a Hegelian repetition? Is this a contradiction? At the like the enigma of the very beginning. And she, that's Frank Ruda, she, that is to say Rebecca Comay will go to the very end of phenomenology where Hegel quotes Schiller, some stupid song about spirit recognizing itself in the in the explosion of its appearances and there there is also a dash, but you don't find this dash in Schiller himself. Because you know Hegel is a master of as all philosophers are of falsifying quotations. Like whenever Hegel seems to quote someone as a rule he makes a mistake, but this mistakes are extremely interesting. You can learn a lot of them. I think usually they have a certain truth value. For example don't take this personally. It's not against the Greeks, it's more against the Russians. You know when Hegel talks in his his lessons on the history of religion about the difference between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Christianity. Eastern Orthodoxy means Russian Orthodoxy not Buddhism this Christian east. He makes a wonderful mistake. And it's just a mistake because elsewhere he put he put it correctly, he knows. He says that the difference in theological terms is that for the Orthodox orientation, you know it's so-called question of the role of the son, son Jesus Christ in Holy Ghost, that for Orthodoxy the Holy Ghost originates only from God the Father while for Western Christianity it's co-generated by Father and Son. What does Hegel do? He says he moves it one step further but correctly. Hegel says that for Orthodoxy Holy Ghost originates from Father and Son, while for Western Christianity only from the Son. And I think Hegel was right because in his reading at least you know what dies on the cross is Father. There is no Father. You have only Son and when the Son is obliterated you have only the Communist Party, the collective, which is called Holy Ghost there and so on and so on. So okay let me now nonetheless return to the main line. I hope I made clear with this brief exposition what's the as it were strategic place of these three thinkers. They are mega-thinkers not not just because of this negative reason. They determine the entire field that comes after them but not directly, that they are all Hegelians. They are all anti-Hegelians. Like the entire philosophy of 19th-20th century is in one or another way rejection of Platonism, the entire modern philosophy one or another way rejection of Descartes, the entire post-Hegelian philosophy as already the name says rejection of Hegel. But I think we should make here two further moves. One is how systematically, and I'm sad I don't have time to develop it more in detail, how systematically with each of the three philosophers madness intervenes, the concept of madness. Already Plato, if you know how for example in some of his dialogues how he describes Socrates being seized by an idea. Already Lacan noted it how it's really a description of someone in a hysterical seizure, you know all of a sudden immobilized, like a moment of madness. Then we know all the story of Plato that the hypothesis of the evil spirit and so on, universalized madness. You probably know the polemics between Foucault and Derrida concerning the status of madness. Not to mention Hegel, who is by common-sense philosophers considered dismissed as the ultimate madman in philosophy. It's incredible how many it's almost now no longer, now there is a weird rehabilitation of Hegel even within the Anglo-Saxon tradition, but I'm unfortunately old enough to know that when I was young it was still that even the let's call them tolerant liberal Anglo-Saxons they were ready to concede maybe there is something in Kant maybe here there but not Hegel. Hegel is the point of complete madness. Madness in this ridiculous sense, you know, the idiot who doesn't see there is reality out there, who thinks he can read the mind of God blah blah and so on and so on. Now the third point, most interesting maybe at least for me, is that these three philosophers are usually conceived, understood as anti-evental philosophers. Like what can be more anti-evental than the Platonic idea that we have some eternal order of well notions, ideas, existing in an immutable way and that nothing really happens, all that happens is anamnesis, it's remembrance. All our the movement of our soul is rediscovering what already is deep within ourselves. Nothing new happens. We just rediscover the truth that is already there. As you may know you of course of course the idea is that this is Kierkegaard's idea that only with Christianity something new happens. Christianity is event. Kierkegaard develops this very nicely. How the death of Christ is precisely a temporary event which can be even empirically located and that um ah I'm sorry, it's a... Do I talk too fast or no? It's... (A little bit slower would be good but...) Okay, okay, I can make an honest attempt whatever will be the result of it eh. So again Plato seems to be the ultimate philosopher of anti-event. Nothing new under the sun. Nothing happens. The eternal order is here. The only movement is a movement of the German said Zerfall, disintegration. And the point is how to get back to the original undisturbed state. The same thing the same may appear for Descartes and even more for Hegel. Hegel nonetheless has a system although Hegel may appear to be the philosopher of event, dialectical movement, but as Hegel himself put it, in the course of dialectical movement things are only becoming what they always already eternally are. So we have a closed circle. Is it like this? Now I want to develop a little bit why I think it's not like this. Of course if we look at immediately at the content of Plato's thought of course there seems to be no event there. But look what actually happens in Plato, and here again I follow Alain Badiou's wonderful reading. What's the as it were zero level of the Platonic experience? Is it is that we live our ordinary daily life immersed in our ordinary interests, fears, whatever, and then we encounter an idea. And this is the Platonic event. It's like, you know, Saul's conversion into Saint Paul and so on. Something happens, a radical cut, you discover another dimension. That's the Platonic that's the Platonic event. No wonder that Plato was celebrating love, love as madness, and Plato emphasized the love as the beginning of wisdom. Usually this is only taken as a moment of gradual ascension, you know like first you love a concrete body, then you generalize it to all beautiful bodies, then you drop the body itself to the idea of beauty and so on. But nonetheless, I think that we should never forget how it all begins for Plato. Again you are in your daily universe thinking about this, that, pleasures, blah blah, and suddenly you encounter someone who brutally confronts you as the object of your love. And everything turns around. Your life is forever, your life is forever changed. You can feel in Plato this brutal encounter in all its strength. The encounter which is in a way beyond good and evil. If you are passionately in love, then you know even your most intimate rational interests, parents, children, colleagues, all can vanish. Your entire life is re-focused. You experience a weird indifference towards your moral obligations with regard to the people around you and so on and so on. So this falling in love is the Platonic event. I think that precisely this is what is at least for me, I know whenever I mention this it gets me into big trouble, but I think that this dimension, the way I see it again, is missing in I hate the term, I'm accused of racism when I use it, Oriental thought. What I want to say is this, and here I am on the side of Plato, that what for Oriental approach is as it were the origin of evil, the fall, like no, the Oriental idea is you are in some kind of undisturbed state of bliss and then you get too engaged, you fall into. But what Plato celebrates is precisely this falling into as full engagement. So this would be the Plato event. Then Descartes. Don't forget that Descartes' Cogito is precisely a pure event. It's not, here Descartes immediately misunderstands himself. Cogito is not a substance which is thinking, this is already Descartes' metaphysics. No, Cogito is this experience that of a thing that exists only insofar as it is thinking, only in the course of the process of thinking. And what is crucial here I think, maybe even absolutely crucial, is not to forget that when he describes this pure experience of Cogito, Descartes is not playing some intellectual games. He is describing a very concrete, let's call it mystical-spiritual experience. I don't know how deep you are in mysticism but you know you have this wonderful notion of the night of the world, when you withdraw in a kind of psychotic reduction, eh eh you withdraw from reality into the abyss of your soul. It's the point of darkness, but darkness as the ultimate depth of your soul. And I claim and this again, what Descartes is describing as Cogito ergo sum is precisely this thought disconnected from reality, this pure moment of inwardness, which is at the same time the moment of madness. The thesis is, and I don't have time to develop it, I did it in my big fat book which was mentioned, that Hegel was well aware of how in order for human spirit, our symbolic universe to develop, we have to go through this zero point of madness. Hegel is here more Foucaultian than maybe than Michel Foucault himself in this idea that madness is not just a possibility that thing goes wrong, but our rational world as it were emerges only as a defense against the threat of madness. Hegel says this openly that even if empirically we are not, most of us, mad, but the only way to understand human reason is as a reaction to madness, maybe even as a form of madness in what sense? There is a wonderful passage in Freud's reading of of his basic his big analysis of paranoia, the so-called Judge Schreber case, where Freud says something very important which is usually misunderstood. Freud says that in a paranoiac system, what we usually take as the sign of madness is on the contrary an attempt to get out of madness. Namely the paranoiac construct is a kind of ersatz pseudo-normality. The true madness is the night of the world, the withdrawal from reality, the disintegration of your psychic universe. And again the paranoiac system is already an attempt, of course a crazy attempt, but an attempt to cure yourself. Lacan sometimes I'm not sure one should do this radical step, but nonetheless Lacan sometimes along these lines proposed that there is a moment of madness in all rationality, in the sense that every rationality is a mad attempt to get out of madness. So in now okay we got this. The three philosophers, the philosophers of event. Plato, Platonic event you encounter the idea and as you I hope you got it how that's what I want to deliver to you how we can formulate the basic Platonic experience independently of all this idealist-substantialist metaphysics. There I'm I'm not claiming that there are eternal ideas existing independently of ah and so on and so on. I'm just saying that in authentic moments of love, political engagement, we encounter some kind of absolute. And again I don't mean absolute in any bullshity metaphysical sense or whatever, just something strikes you and as someone also morality there is a nice can work as an absolute, in what sense? I forgot who in some novel I know in which novel because it's a shitty novel and a shitty movie which should be publicly burned, I hate it. Did you see that bullshit The Life of Pi? Yeah, and I'm embarrassed because through James Schamus I know Ang Lee, and he now wants to meet me... No no I'm not boasting now because I'm afraid to meet him he wants from me some kind of a metaphysical justification how deep the movie is, fuck him it's bullshit I claim. But but in the novel Life of Pi there is a deep correct formulation where you find the statement that um when you must do something when you experience something as ethical pressure you must do it because you cannot not do it. And I think this is important with authentic ethics it's not the other way around. It's not you cannot not do it because you must do it, but you simply experience again that you cannot not do it. This is encountering the absolute. And you can see how I'm not talking about any metaphysics, I even claim that that would be I claim the materialist theory of the absolute. Absolute is something much more fragile and um belongs to the order of appearance than ordinary reality. Absolute is like you have a duty, there is no direct power in duty. You can say fuck off if you are an unethical person. But you know once you are caught in duty you cannot not do it. With love it's the same. You can ignore love but then you awaken in the middle of the night and so on. You know this idea of an entity which is totally powerless, fragile, but nonetheless you cannot get rid of it. The more fragile it is the more its hold on you is absolute. So again we have this Platonic event, we have the Cartesian event, which is again for the first time the absolute anchor of ontological edifice is purely evental. It's just I think therefore I am, which means I am only insofar as I am caught in the process of thinking. With all the mystical undertones of this absolute inwardness and then Hegel. Ah now let's go further. In what sense is Hegel the philosopher of the event? In what sense is for Hegel truth, truth itself evental? Now of course what immediately arises in our minds are these textbook stupidities, you know like Hegel Hegel yes dialectical development and so on and so on truth develops. No no no it's not as simple as that. It's a much more complex process. It concerns the way for Hegel appearance, misleading false appearance is immanent to truth. But how? Your first association here is wrong, mine also, which says yeah of course first you cling to some idea it's one-sided it's just partially true then the opposite it's partially true and then in the higher synthesis all the aspect. No no no. What does Hegel mean here? The starting point should be precisely the power of appearances, how this is I think the ABC of Hegel that in the conflict between appearance and what you experience as the reality behind appearance the truth is in appearance. What does this mean? Uh I wonder did I already sell here the joke but it's such a nice one that I will nonetheless repeat it about Jesus Christ and Tiger Woods. Where did I do it? No you don't remember it. (Last year.) Last year. Okay if I were to be politically incorrect I would have said fuck you but okay who asked you something, okay. Then I will go directly to my newly okay I skip this. (No no we want it.) No no no no no I... fuck you if you want it buy the new book. Okay. Eh let me begin with a movie and at least I know that this one I didn't yet use here because I saw it only recently, we in Ljubljana even in province interesting things things can happen, we just organized a beautiful conference and I'm not praising Slovene greatness mostly there were foreigners who were talking there about Ernst Lubitsch. The director, you know? I think he is the one to be rediscovered as the great one, maybe at the level of Hitchcock and so on and so on. We have now a volume which will be edited all my friends the Slovene gang Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar our Aaron Schuster a great young voice of progressive thought which means a young Lacanian no and so on. So let me begin at the zero level. All the movies I'm telling you I'm not making propaganda for DVD industry, now I'm slowly getting used to it I'm an idiot but my years old son is slowly teaching me how to do it all these downloading bit torrents and so on all these movies you can get them for free. There is already an early Lubitsch, Die Puppe, The Doll, which is incredible, why? Because it turns around it yeah it's from Uh but you can get it now. Uh it turns around the standard motive of the of the doll which is in Hoffmann, E.T.A. Hoffmann you know you think you are seducing a I'm sorry but I cannot restrain from asking you whenever I see people I warn you it will be an obscenity whenever I see people interpreting for them no I'm always looking for that you have some obscene code you know you pretend then you do this then you do this do you have signs like that like how do you... I always watch carefully will I see something dirty there you know. I hope you have them that you will not... that's that's your secret you know. I also hope that you interpret creatively that when I talk you tell the guy now he is bullshitting forget or whatever you know like creative translating you know. That's your job my god you know like did you see Charlie Chaplin The Great Dictator? There you have a mega example when Hynkel Hitler the dictator is dictating to his secretary. And at some point he talks for five minutes and the secretary just: up. And then as if reacting to our spectator's surprise Hitler is surprised and looks at the paper and says okay okay she got it correctly like he's talking five minutes... I always believe in this that you translators know more than we know you know what I mean like you cut the bullshit. Sorry let me go on. So Lubitsch, Die Puppe. The standard version is the Hoffmann version. You think it's a real woman but oh when you embrace her you discover it's just a mechanical doll. I don't have time to go into it but already in his early film Lubitsch in an ingenious way turns it around. A certain rich guy nephew of a prince has to get married because that's the only way for him to get money from his uncle the count or whatever but he hates women so some priests convince him to marry a doll, a perfect doll who can act as a woman. But then on the night before the marriage ceremony a catastrophe happens that doll is broken by mistake. So they convince a real girl to play a doll you know to move like did then of course ha ha ha in the middle of the night they he discovers that nonetheless this is not a doll and so on. But it's a wonderful reversal. Why? Let me go to a later film by Lubitsch from his early Hollywood, it's with Maurice Chevalier you know the French blah whom I hate frankly. You know why? Ah no he was this typically corrupted French collaborationist you know. It makes me very sad I was in Paris two a couple of months ago you remember when Gérard Depardieu discovered the greatness of Russian and Uzbekistan democracy? And and I told Alain Badiou what's going on and he told me that we have a totally wrong idea of you know associating usually pop figures singers actors with some kind of at least liberal progressive... He told me no that in France there is a long tradition of this of amusement media personality corrupted not on the left. Then I told him but what about two well-known actresses who are well known for being at least relative progressive Emmanuelle Béart and Juliette Binoche? And he told me yes they are well known because they are the only two more or less no and so he told me it's no it's just name them most of the big names were like Edith Piaf, uh she was playing singing for Germans during World War II and so on, just name them you know that there is a long tradition in French again mediatic cinema singing industry so that Carla Bruni okay she is Italian it shouldn't surprise you whom she married and so on. Let's go on. So it's with Maurice Chevalier One Hour with You. Here you have a minimum Lubitsch situation. A couple called in the movie Mitzi and André. They are both married, not to each other, to girls to their own guys and by mistake they appear they are find themselves together sharing a taxi and then the conversation develops where we see them like one they try to ignore each other not being connected. Uh she is looking through the window, he André is looking is reading a newspaper and then she Mitzi says look look at us he reads a newspaper she looks through the window aren't we like an old married couple and so on and then they try to then they start to play on this and you can imagine what happens love develops out of it and so on. Why am I mentioning this? Because here we encounter a crucial category. A category of innocent bystander where you are in a certain situation and what matters is not what you sincerely think deep in yourself but how your situation appears to an innocent observer who doesn't know and usually even if this appearance is false socially it is determining. It's stronger. And this is one of the crucial mechanisms in Lubitsch in what sense. Of course there was a whole book written on this an unknown masterpiece of theory Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study from a book which systematically develops what is says the drama of false appearances. Here the axis is rather the opposite one: that two people are engaged in some activity which may appear evil morally unacceptable to an external observer. And the theory of this book is that this was the way Hollywood in the 40s and 50s tried to transgress bypass the Hays Code. For example homosexuality was prohibited but they smuggled the topic in so that two guys were just friends but to some external observer they appeared as as if they are gay. Usually the conclusion is or the denouement is reactionary here. It's simply that at the end everything gets clear it was just blah blah but what Lubitsch knew is that nonetheless there is there can be more truth precisely in this superficial appearance. She's what precisely the one who are engaged in it from their inner self-experience what they don't see. I will not now go too much into it. I just want to say how in ah I developed this much more in detail in that triple orgy book Hegemonies Whatever Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and me. Namely how this works even for theory. For example how a concept which is clearly a misunderstanding, the result of a foreign limited perspective, can bring out a dimension which hits the truth much more successfully than those who are in it. For example I developed this example in that early book of mine I mean co-written, you know the notion of film noir. You know that this is a concept that emerged in now you are doing your obscenities again... sorry. I'm observing you I'm observing you I'm like the evil girl from the movie I will report to you then. Sorry sorry that you know that all of a sudden in '46 because the war was over six seven movies were shown at the same time in Paris and the French critics invented the notion film noir. And a French theorist Marc Vernet demonstrated how as to the level of content they are totally wrong. All the features that they identified as typical were already there before whatever you want, but nonetheless the notion now comes the beauty not only survived but had even a retroactive influence on Hollywood itself. So that you see the paradox. The notion of noir was a French misperception of what goes on in Hollywood then Hollywood became influenced by this misperception and based on it made some very good films. Or another example and my friend Eduardo Cadava told me he mentioned this to Derrida and Derrida agreed. You remember you don't you are too young when in the early 80s I would say maybe late 70s Derrida's influence began in United States. It was a clear simplified misperception but in an interesting direction. If you look at Derrida's text till that period they were abstract philosophical analysis of Husserl and so on. All this political ethical religious more engaged stance was the result of the American misperception. And the beauty this is not a critique of Derrida on the contrary then Derrida started to imitate his American followers who misread him and the results were extremely interesting good and so on and so on. You see this is the power of this is the power of misperception. Here you can get the first glimpse of what Hegel means or of what Lacan is aiming at when he says la vérité surgit de la méprise, the truth can arise out of a misrecognition. Let's go on. In Lubitsch himself you have among others his classic film, I think it's a little bit overestimated but nonetheless, The Shop Around the Corner. It takes place in a Budapest store. There are two coworkers who dislike each other but then they they exchange letters, they don't each of them doesn't know that the other guy with whom he or she is exchanging letter is the guy there in the store, but just an ideal partner and of course they fall in love through letters although they as persons know each other and hate each other. I think that what is wrong in this film is the idea that this can work in the sense that let's say there is one of you I hate you you hate me we exchange letters we fall in love with our fantasy images. I maybe you know more here Steven. I don't think this would have worked. It would be rather a catastrophe to discover oh my god but it's you. I don't think the result would have been now I know you're a good guy we share the same dreams and so on because one argument against this film is that it was later remade as one of the absolutely disgusting Hollywood melodramas You've Got Mail. You remember with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? It's just here it's even more believable because it's it's cyberspace and so on. Uh I wonder if I maybe I did mention this already here I'm mentioning this story because and this is the shock because do you know that a couple of years ago in Sarajevo of all the places just after the war the same thing happened in real life? It was reported in our at least in ex-Yugoslavia media. A husband and the wife no longer loved each other and each of them it's so ridiculous each of them started a virtual love affair exchanging passionate letters then with an unknown partner then finally they decided to meet they were themselves. But here the result was much more truthful. No it wasn't oh now we know we love each other, it was nightmare. It was over. Okay so let's go on. So I will maybe cut short this a little bit. Ah okay. Now I already developed in my books and I will drop it here the idea of how this immanence of appearance to truth, something starts as appearance obviously a misleading appearance but it triggers a process as it were making it true. How this holds for the Hegelian dialectical process. This is its minimal formula, that how again a misleading appearance triggers the mechanism for it to become true. What I want to develop now, and it will be a little bit more complex, and I must also acknowledge my debts here I will refer to one of my Slovene Lacanian Stalinist troika Alenka Zupančič who is now deep in it, how this same paradox of evental status of a truth in the sense that the truth emerges out of an series of events out of a through an evental process, what begins as a misleading appearance becomes truth, how this holds at the most fundamental level for sexuality. Now this is now new stuff a little bit more complex. Why is sexuality structured like that? Let me begin with what usually is taken to be Freud's basic discovery: infantile sexuality. And I hope you noticed how this notion is oppressed today. It is as if this is the price we are paying for our so-called permissivity. I claim this is absolutely crucial. In the sense that everything is permitted today. You can have cats to lick your vagina, dogs whatever do whatever you want but children are innocent. Pedophilia became the ultimate crime. Gérard Wajcman, French Lacanian, made did this point nicely in a text published in Umbra, that annual volume edited by Joan Copjec at Umbra The quote, a quote from Gérard Wajcman: The sole remaining prohibition, the one sacred value in our society that seems to remain is to do with children. It is forbidden to touch a hair on their little blond heads as if children had rediscovered that angelic purity on which Freud managed to cast some doubt. And it is undoubtedly the diabolical figure of Freud that we condemn today seeing him as the one who by uncovering the relationship of childhood to sexuality quite simply depraved our virginal childhoods in an age when sexuality is exhibited on every street corner the image of the innocent child has strangely returned with a vengeance. Why am I mentioning this? You will say what has this to do with that idea of innocent observer? Yeah precisely everything. Children are the innocent observers. We can participate in orgies whatever children must not be aware of it. And I know even some of my friends I was never doing it who participated in how do you call those horrors... when people meet and have group sex there is a term... swinging? Yes. Parents who are swinging blah blah blah but like one of them told me after telling me all which I hated even to hear but then if you mention one of this to my son I will kill you and so on. You know like you can do whatever you want on condition that the child doesn't know it. We need an innocent gaze. Why? So we should ask if today again because also it's interesting one of the ways to make an analysis of an epoch I claim is to ask who are the typical bad guys? Like did you notice how Fredric Jameson makes this remark apropos The Wire the series, how today the only universally acceptable bad guys in horror movies are only two or maybe three: terrorists, serial killers, and pedophiliacs. It's as if all others are relativized, like in all these new TV series you can have ordinary murderers who murder for business, you can all of them can be bad and they are still presented as like this the last one how is it called series, I don't have time to see it Game of Cards or House of Cards with Kevin Spacey. (House of Cards.) (House of Cards and Game of Thrones, both of them are out.) Okay whatever yeah. But what I mean is that you know anything goes you can be a murderer whatever you can still be the point of identification although there is a series with Kevin Bacon I think now maybe that one is an interesting one. I forgot the title but isn't there now a new series where one serial killer tries to constitute a... (The Following.) Yeah The Following. That should be a progressive answer I claim of how like serial killers of the world unite something I mean like this this maybe could be something you know. But okay so again why infantile? And I agree with Joan Copjec who told me that she is bright that bitch Joan Copjec. She told me that you remember fifteen years ago, twenty or where there was that hit series which I hated, Home Alone. And she got paranoia that that's already some kind of this celebration of these children who invincible they always win and so on. She immediately read that series as a kind of you know a protection of this innocence all... Okay so now let's go a step further. What is so scandalous about infantile sexuality? It is not simply the fact that even children presumed innocent are already sexualized. One has to be much more precise here. The scandal resides in two features which are of course two sides of the same coin. First, and here I plagiarize shamelessly Alenka Zupančič who in a really intelligent way drew observed this fact although already Jean Laplanche noted it. Which fact? That infantile sexuality is something very weird in the sense that it's neither biologically grounded nor fitting symbolic cultural norms. Biologically sexuality is made for copulation no? Something specifically human children sexuality. It's something that intrudes, pervades the field before biologically mature sexuality. The problem here and this is what Jean Laplanche pointed out nicely is that it's not that we have first this too early infantile sexuality to fill in the years before puberty and then once puberty enters oh we can say fuck off now I can fuck in a normal psychological way or whatever. No it ruins the entire field. You cannot... the topics the way infantile sexuality as it were approaches sexual topic remains in power to the end. Or here is this nice quote from Jean Laplanche: when it comes to sexuality man is subject to the greatest of paradoxes. What is acquired through the drives, drives which are not biological here, precedes what is innate and instinctual. You see the point which is such a simple point and I'm angry at myself that I didn't notice it. Instinctually at the level of inborn mechanisms it's genital screwing to make children which is like biologically grounded. But it's not as one would have expected that you start at the most primitive level with what is biologically grounded innate and then if you're a corrupted cultural guy you pervert it. No you start with unnatural sexuality. In such a way, I continue here the quote, that at the time it emerges, instinctual sexuality which is adaptive, to put it simply instinctual sexuality you fuck to get children is adaptive in the evolutionary sense, I mean it has an evolutionary function to bring to the world more monsters like ourselves whatever, finds the seat already taken as it were by infantile drives already and always present in the unconscious. So again this is the first paradox. Why this strange intrusion in children? Neither biology because biologically infantile sexuality again is meaningless, non-functional, nor culture. Culture in the sense of normativity and so on, but some weird in between. Why? Ah. The reason, now it's me plagiarizing Alenka Zupančič not Jean Laplanche, the reason for this strange excess is the link between sexuality and cognition. Against the standard idea of sexuality as some kind of instinctual vital force which is then repressed or sublimated through the work of culture, since in its raw state it poses a threat to culture, one should assert the link between sexuality and cognition. That's the other aspect which is not so often noted but which is absolutely crucial for Freud. That children's sexuality is not some Deleuzian polymorphously perverse paradise of I don't know this masturbatory pregenital gestures you squeeze this, that, I will not be concrete whatever and you enjoy it. It's deeply cognitive. It's connected with all this you know mysterious questioning: where do children come from, how, and so on and so on, which is why it's also deeply embedded in fantasies because as we know fantasies are precisely answers to all this. You know the small children that's the Freudian myth but I think it's true here a small child sees some strange things. As Jean Laplanche would have put it, the enigma of the other's desire. Like others want he feels something obscene in adults. What do they want from me? Obviously they are not aware what do they want from me. This is for Jean Laplanche and I think he is right here the original experience of subjectivity: not what do I want, but what do the others see in me? Is this idea that I have something in me that others see in me but I don't know what, and I try to answer it through some mythic narrative. So the again the idea is that children's sexuality is grounded in such a cognitive search but there is always a missing link. You never get the answer. That's why you have fantasies and to repeat myself I cannot resist it because all women that I to whom I tell this story love it, even I love it. I myself love some of these myths. Okay for obvious reason women evil they want to sex all the time no wonder they like it. Namely I remember, I'm sorry if I repeat myself but whatever, when I was young basically I already knew how children are made. You make love. But I didn't know the exact mechanism. So I must admit it for some four five years like from five till ten I thought that with a little bit of a sperm you don't directly inseminate the woman but that it's like a building block you know today we fuck for the hair of our child, tomorrow we do the nails then of course ha ha ha then you have to you know like my darling what will we be doing today shall we do the eyes of our child, the fingers, fuck them of course women like this you have to work all the time there I mean but no you see the point. I even once when I was a child I really love this example. I tried to bring the two together and I think it's a nice story. On the one hand I knew you have to make love. On the other hand I didn't know the mechanism of that insemination all that horror all those horrors. So I thought of course it must have something to do with how do you call the disgusting birds... storks? Yes. So then I tried to bring the two together and my idea was that when you fuck storks are observing you through the window and if you fuck nicely as a gratitude they bring you the child. And even now I think maybe it seems to me much more reasonable than this disgusting insemination idea or whatever. But okay let's now become a little bit more serious. What I'm saying is that two things. First it is now you will say okay these are childish fantasies but then when you reach puberty you know fuck is fuck, forget about all this. No the point of Freud is fuck is never fuck. You need fantasy to the end. That's what Lacan means by there is no sexual relationship. Of course rationally you know you make children like this but to maintain the arousal and so on you need some fantasy excess that you know the story I'm repeating it all the time that's the Freudian point that the mystery that the the problem for psychoanalysis is not this vulgar pansexualism whatever you are doing you are thinking about that. No the the enigma of psychoanalysis is exactly the opposite one: but what are we thinking when we are doing that? The idea is that when you are making love it cannot be purely tautological like you make love and you think you are making love. There has to be some detail. You imagine I don't know how the hair of a woman is curled, somebody observing you whatever. So you see my point in this sense the structure of infantile sexuality which is a cognitive missing link filled in with if this is too dirty should I talk faster so that then you will not be able to translate all to to save your moral upright sorry sorry. No but so again that's the next lesson that the missing link remains here to the end. We never reach maturity. That's the point about human sexuality. The this structure of sexuation through cognitive missing link and fantasies this structure remains this structure remains to the end. But now comes the next as and... ah yes let me give you another example I know I'm repeating it but it's again crucial because it's a nice
unknown
example
example
Slavoj Žižek
from cinema. I used it years ago. Did you see, I wonder if it still works, does it happen to you that when you have a movie which you remember well as a mythic memory from decades ago I'm often afraid to see them again because sometimes it works but quite often when you see it now you are terribly disappointed and you lose one illusion no? So I'm afraid to see
from cinema. I used it years ago. Did you see, I wonder if it still works, does it happen to you that when you have a movie which you remember well as a mythic memory from decades ago I'm often afraid to see them again because sometimes it works but quite often when you see it now you are terribly disappointed and you lose one illusion no? So I'm afraid to see
unknown
again David Lynch's
again David Lynch's
Slavoj Žižek
Blue Velvet. I wonder if it still works. But nonetheless this is I think a nice fantasy structure. You remember that maybe the best known scene there when Kyle MacLachlan, the Twin Peaks guy, observes from the closet Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper playing a sadomasochist game you know he is breathing through some oxygen mask and shouting whatever and Michel Chion, the French cinema theorist who is now half-forgotten, I think it's very sad this, I think he is one of the best, he developed I was so mad at him because it's such an obvious solution and it works, that the only way to read that scene is to read it as a visualized eh eh audio hallucination. That is to say why you remember how Edward Hopper puts on a an a mask and kind of oxygen breathing. That you should imagine this as a child listening to the parents copulating and he hears strange sounds. He doesn't know what sex is about so he tries to imagine: daddy breathing what is he doing maybe he has an oxygen mask? It's a beautiful reading I claim. So okay we know now this. Now comes the truly revolutionary point where I follow... ah now women have to take over and... yeah... truly revolutionary point. Uh... now comes the point that I want to make today. You know the let's call it the Deleuze-Judith Butler narrative. It's not quite fair, I know they are not the same but and it's more refined. But at least what I will tell you now is how it works popularly. We have the official narrative, let's call it like this, which is there is normal sex, heterosexual straight whatever and then we have these childish games which if they are not refocused on normal straight copulation they remain a perversion. The only justification for perversions if is if they are in a Hegelian sense aufgehoben, sublated, synthesize sublated eh eh kept but changed transfunctionalized whatever used as subordinated moments for genital sex. Like if I like to look at you naked and kiss you it's bad if this is the ultimate goal, if it's a foreplay to proper penetration it's okay to be vulgar. This is I agree the standard patriarchal normative version blah blah. But I claim the opposite version, the let's call it Butler-Deleuze version, which is that we have some kind of a polymorphous perverse paradise of particular practices this paradisiac almost plurality which is then in a violent way synthesized or normativized through their subordination to genital patriarchal paradigm is also false. There is no primordial innocent pregenital paradise of plurality of perversions which we can enjoy and then bad patriarchal order comes and subordinates it. In other words, it is not enough to reassert infantile sexuality as the plural multitude of polymorphous perverse drives which are then totalized by the Oedipal genital norm. Infantile sexuality is not a truth or base or some kind of original productive site of sexuality which is then oppressed, totalized, regulated by the genital norm. The idea here is that, and here again I admire Alenka Zupančič, she developed this now in an it's still unpublished wonderful text, that nonetheless copulation to be vulgar, fuck, is a central point. But precisely as such it escapes normativity. This is what Lacan means by there is no sexual relationship, that this cognitive question as it were is never answered. That how to put it, we do have these perverse polymorphous more masturbatory practices, I kiss you you squeeze me whatever or even more but all this is already against the background of a certain gap, hole. And this hole, cognitive hole could have could have been filled in by a full fuck if you want full genital sex but precisely this cannot be done. There is no knowledge here. There is no formula for sex. Which is why real sex in the sense of full sex copulation has to be forever filled in its space has to be sustained by perverse by perverse scenarios. What do I mean by this? And now comes the the nice point that I want to make. I hope this will convince you. Already Lacan says something which is so typical that it was absolutely censored. You can correct me if I'm wrong but I did my best asking around and no one told me of even one example where someone noticed this absolutely crucial statement in Lacan's seminar feminine sexuality, Encore, where Lacan says something again I hate people when they do this because I would like to be the one to do this. You know this simple observation that once you make it it's so obvious. Namely Lacan turns around completely the standard idea that Catholic, Christian, especially Catholic Church, its sexual teaching privileges genital sexuality, normative sexuality at the expense of ah at the expense of oppressed perverse infantile whatever drives and so on and so on. As if you know all these perverse drives they are oppressed the only thing that the church tolerates is genital straight heterosexuality and so on and so on. It's absolutely not true. The opposite is true. Here is the quote from Lacan, the crucial one, from ah yes, Encore: Christ, even when resurrected from the dead is valued for his body and his body is the means by which communion in his presence is incorporation, oral drive, with which Christ's wife the church as it is called contents itself very well, having nothing to expect from copulation. In everything that followed from the effects of Christianity particularly in art everything is exhibition of the body evoking jouissance, excessive enjoyment. And you can lend credence to the testimony of someone who has just come back from an orgy of churches in Italy and so on and so on. So what Lacan again is saying here is that if you look at the church imaginary and art it is full of these oral, anal drives. You can have saints eating shit, fondling each other, burning whatever, never fucking. Copulation is prohibited in church imaginary. So again Lacan is very clear here. One should reject the endlessly repeated critical thesis that the Catholic sexual morality implies imposes normative heterosexuality on the subversive and destabilizing polymorphous sexuality of humans. In contrast to the idea that partial drives are masturbatory, asocial and so on while genital sexuality grounds social link, family as an elementary social form, one should insist that there is nothing necessarily asocial in partial drives. They function as the glue of society, as the very stuff of communion, in contrast to the heterosexual couple. That's the basic thesis of Lacan, that if you look at these institutions which are for Freud in his crowd group psychology and analysis of the ego the model of groups, army, church, they are full of these famous pregenital oral anal drives mechanisms of incorporation anal destruction and so on. What they feel threatened by is precisely a couple, copulation. And Freud says this directly in his crowd group psychology. I quote Freud: directly sexual tendencies are unfavorable to the formation of groups. Two people coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction are making a demonstration against the herd instinct against the group feeling. The more they are in love the more completely they are sufficient for each other. In the great artificial groups there is no room for woman as a sexual object and so on and so on. So again, I quote here Alenka Zupančič who puts this in wonderful terms: So there is something profoundly disruptive at stake in copulation. For the kind of social bond it proposes, copulation, Christianity doesn't need sorry for the kind of social bond that Christianity proposes it doesn't need copulation, which functions as the superfluous element, something on top of what would be ideally needed. Indeed natural copulation is utterly banned from the religious imaginary whereas this imaginary doesn't recede from images of canonized saints eating the excrement, shit of another person. If looked at from this perspective Christianity is indeed all about jouissance of the body, about the body of God as constituting another person's jouissance. Partial drives and the satisfaction they procure are rather abundantly present and in this sense one would be justified in claiming that in its libidinal aspect the Christian religion massively relies on what belongs to the register of infantile sexuality, satisfaction and bonding by way of partial objects with the exclusion of sexual coupling. The pure enjoyment, enjoyment for the sake of enjoyment is not exactly what is banned here. What is banned or repressed is its link with sexuality particularly in the form of copulation. And here I go against Foucault who proposes as a big revolution that we should delink decoupling pleasures from sexuality. Well then that's what the church is doing, I mean. So again Christianity fully acknowledges the polymorphous perverse satisfactions of drives but it de-sexualizes the pleasure they provide. Pleasures as such again are not problematic. As you know Christian literature abound with the descriptions of ecstatic heavenly pleasures provided by meditations, prayers, rituals and so on rituals and so on and so on. Uh... again why? Why this oppression of sexuality? Okay maybe it's time slowly for me to stop, just to conclude now I come to the crucial crucial point. I would say that because what happens in copulation is precisely a certain link, coupling of two dimensions which make it problematic for this church vision. We have on the one hand sexuality in the sense of partial drives, you cannot find satisfaction do this touch the person that way put a finger up there squeeze him that way maybe it will work blah blah. This is the technical stuff of how to do it. And then we have the let's call it intersubjective link. But isn't the tendency today that the two should be kept apart or subordinated to each other? Either on the one hand if you are frigid, impotent, whatever, it's treated as a problem of partial drives. I claim that the ideal today is that is that is that a drive is that sorry is that sexual topic is reduced to the problem of partial drives as if it's just some malfunctioning you cannot get an erection do this blah blah blah. On the other hand of course we hear a lot about good human relations blah blah blah. But here again sexuality is subordinated to you know does it contribute to the depth of your relation to the other and so on and so on. But what happens in an intense copulation is that the two dimensions fall together. That's for me sorry for getting in my old age when you dream about things that you are no longer doing at least not a lot, is that the mystery of sexuality is that it's at the same time an intense bodily enjoyment and an absolute contact with the other. Not in this metaphysical sense while I make love to you it's really that I try to communicate with your soul. No no, fuck soul, it's brutally concrete. Isn't this the paradox of fanatical love or sex with love that the more you reduce the other to an object the more you have a spiritual surrender. Which is why I claim when the church I read somewhere when I was young already that the church prefers missionary position claiming that in this way sexuality is not only animal but you whisper some stupidities to the other's ear and so on. No this is a way to maintain distance towards the other I claim. Even a spiritual distance. In other words what the church wants to protect us from is precisely the metaphysical miraculous evental dimension of sexuality. Sexuality as you know a traumatic event which again cannot be reduced to functional pleasure in copulation and so on and so on. So again now the last thing I don't have time to go to the end but maybe the most important thing. Ah when I mentioned this missing link no sexual relationship and so on and so on. The last trap here and here one has to be up to a point critical even of Lacan himself is where? If you read Lacan really carefully you must have noticed a certain ambiguity. On the one hand Lacan massively endorses this standard philosophical topic of the opposition between animals and humans. There is sexual relationship for animals. Animals are purely determined by instinctual knowledge, a call of nature not in that sense of but in the sense of you know when to copulate blah blah blah. It's not a problem there. With animals it functions. With us humans we need poetry, fantasies, it doesn't function. But does it really function with animals? I think that this idea of opposing nature as a domain of some naive immediate balance and then you know all this bombastic existentialist topic of man as nature sick unto death. With man nature no longer provides instinctual knowledge so we need intelligence, poetry to fill in the gap and so on and so on. I think that here we have to do a step, maybe I will speak about it later, you find some about it already in my big fat book Less Than Nothing. Namely this idea that it's not enough to say man is a denatured animal. Nature in itself is already denatured, it just doesn't know it. What do I mean by it? What is unconscious? Here Alenka Zupančič uses a wonderful game of words where you know the usual expression is are you aware of something, are you conscious of something? She introduces the term to be unconscious of something. That to be unconscious of does not mean you don't know it, that precisely repressed knowledge and so on and so on. That both nature and man don't know how to do it, but nature simply doesn't know that it doesn't know. It's not unconscious of it. But a catastrophe imbalance is already in nature. Okay. Lacan gives also some hints in this direction. For example if you read carefully in Seminar when he introduces this notion of lamella, the undead object, he locates the gap the rupture signaled by the term lamella this undead object already at the level of animal sexuality. Lacan is much more radical here. Lacan I think oscillates here between again this simple celebration of humanity as at a loss you know this standard topic: man doesn't have instinctual foundation coordinates of instinctual knowledge which is why it has to invent things it's creative blah blah blah. No there is already a gap in nature itself and that would be for me at least again the great task of materialism today. How to denaturalize nature. I think the true battle is there. The true battle is not in naturalizing man. The true battle is in denaturalizing nature. The ultimate the ultimate idealist resistance is the very naivety of naturalism, like we have nature which knows how and then somehow I don't know how things go wrong with humans. What I'm trying to give you, that's what I developed in my book, is sorry this wonderful idea that you find in Schelling, in Walter Benjamin, even Heidegger takes it over. This idea that there is okay of course this is mystical topic but I claim we can get a materialist version of it that that you know Benjamin says somewhere that human language was created or humans invented language to give word to the pain which is already in nature and to redeem the pain in nature. It's a wonderful speculation of course one shouldn't give it this direct mythic reading, but I again if we of course drop this mystical topic and if we simply say some kind of radical discord and so on which is already in nature and that with humanity nature as it were becomes unconscious of its own discord. This is as you maybe know the way I also read quantum physics in the sense that quantum physics denaturalizes nature. The image of reality that we get there it's not culture but it's also not nature in the usual sense that we understand nature and so on and so on. There were of course many other things that I wanted to develop here uh that I wanted to develop here uh what I wanted to develop just one more point so that I yeah I still have three minutes. Ah you will now demand how do you call this when you are paid more the overtime, yeah. If you buy if we split the profit then I will sign it for you that you... just as a final note what would be materialist theology. Recently I was rereading Kierkegaard's concept of anxiety where he evokes a wonderful tremendous materialist idea. He Kierkegaard evokes this is my guy Simon Tornacensis, a 13th century scholastic who tried to develop a logical proof of God's existence and then the idea of Tornacensis is that God himself is while he Tornacensis is writing this trying to deduce the necessity of existence of God that God himself is watching him with anxiety as if if he fails with this proof God will like that proverbial cat that falls down God will discover that he doesn't exist you know as if God oh my god what will happen to me if they will not succeed in proving that I exist and then with his incredible political sense Kierkegaard says this story of this guy who thought that God's existence itself depends on will we philosophers proof his existence this story has numerous analogies and in our time speculation has assumed such authority that it has practically tried to make God feel uncertain of himself like a monarch who is anxiously waiting to learn whether the general assembly will make him an absolute or a limited monarch. And I like this idea that philosopher will decide: are you God truly a master, are you just a deist God with limited powers and so on and so on. And again I think that crazy as it may sound each of us as subjects are in this position of God in the sense that literally our existence depends on the other. You know it's literally when you are ah you know it's not now you will say but fuck it no I exist even if the whole world disappears. Yeah but you exist then as what, as a stupid human animal? For you to exist at the most radical level as a human being you depend on the others radically and again in this sense here I see also I'm jumping now just to conclude the last minute the lesson of quantum physics. For example you know this idea that at a micro level things can go on that the system doesn't register you can cheat ontologically. And here I think it's the ultimate materialist answer to that big question you know you know namely you know Einstein's answer to Niels Bohr: God doesn't cheat. God of course I am not a believer we if by God we simply say the system of rationality whatever. The answer to Einstein should be: okay maybe God doesn't cheat but he can be cheated. In the sense that at the virtual quantum level things can happen that God doesn't notice and there you can quickly cheat. And interestingly enough there are more about this on Monday there are theologians who draw this wonderful conclusion that it's not a problem of of is God cheating? No we can cheat on God. God precisely as all-powerful nonetheless doesn't know everything. Sorry for this confusion on Monday on Monday we go on if you survive the Hegelian bullshit. Unfortunately with great pleasure I tell you now I'm so infinitely sad that there is no time for debate haha. No you know what I mean. No thank you very much.
Blue Velvet. I wonder if it still works. But nonetheless this is I think a nice fantasy structure. You remember that maybe the best known scene there when Kyle MacLachlan, the Twin Peaks guy, observes from the closet Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper playing a sadomasochist game you know he is breathing through some oxygen mask and shouting whatever and Michel Chion, the French cinema theorist who is now half-forgotten, I think it's very sad this, I think he is one of the best, he developed I was so mad at him because it's such an obvious solution and it works, that the only way to read that scene is to read it as a visualized eh eh audio hallucination. That is to say why you remember how Edward Hopper puts on a an a mask and kind of oxygen breathing. That you should imagine this as a child listening to the parents copulating and he hears strange sounds. He doesn't know what sex is about so he tries to imagine: daddy breathing what is he doing maybe he has an oxygen mask? It's a beautiful reading I claim. So okay we know now this. Now comes the truly revolutionary point where I follow... ah now women have to take over and... yeah... truly revolutionary point. Uh... now comes the point that I want to make today. You know the let's call it the Deleuze-Judith Butler narrative. It's not quite fair, I know they are not the same but and it's more refined. But at least what I will tell you now is how it works popularly. We have the official narrative, let's call it like this, which is there is normal sex, heterosexual straight whatever and then we have these childish games which if they are not refocused on normal straight copulation they remain a perversion. The only justification for perversions if is if they are in a Hegelian sense aufgehoben, sublated, synthesize sublated eh eh kept but changed transfunctionalized whatever used as subordinated moments for genital sex. Like if I like to look at you naked and kiss you it's bad if this is the ultimate goal, if it's a foreplay to proper penetration it's okay to be vulgar. This is I agree the standard patriarchal normative version blah blah. But I claim the opposite version, the let's call it Butler-Deleuze version, which is that we have some kind of a polymorphous perverse paradise of particular practices this paradisiac almost plurality which is then in a violent way synthesized or normativized through their subordination to genital patriarchal paradigm is also false. There is no primordial innocent pregenital paradise of plurality of perversions which we can enjoy and then bad patriarchal order comes and subordinates it. In other words, it is not enough to reassert infantile sexuality as the plural multitude of polymorphous perverse drives which are then totalized by the Oedipal genital norm. Infantile sexuality is not a truth or base or some kind of original productive site of sexuality which is then oppressed, totalized, regulated by the genital norm. The idea here is that, and here again I admire Alenka Zupančič, she developed this now in an it's still unpublished wonderful text, that nonetheless copulation to be vulgar, fuck, is a central point. But precisely as such it escapes normativity. This is what Lacan means by there is no sexual relationship, that this cognitive question as it were is never answered. That how to put it, we do have these perverse polymorphous more masturbatory practices, I kiss you you squeeze me whatever or even more but all this is already against the background of a certain gap, hole. And this hole, cognitive hole could have could have been filled in by a full fuck if you want full genital sex but precisely this cannot be done. There is no knowledge here. There is no formula for sex. Which is why real sex in the sense of full sex copulation has to be forever filled in its space has to be sustained by perverse by perverse scenarios. What do I mean by this? And now comes the the nice point that I want to make. I hope this will convince you. Already Lacan says something which is so typical that it was absolutely censored. You can correct me if I'm wrong but I did my best asking around and no one told me of even one example where someone noticed this absolutely crucial statement in Lacan's seminar feminine sexuality, Encore, where Lacan says something again I hate people when they do this because I would like to be the one to do this. You know this simple observation that once you make it it's so obvious. Namely Lacan turns around completely the standard idea that Catholic, Christian, especially Catholic Church, its sexual teaching privileges genital sexuality, normative sexuality at the expense of ah at the expense of oppressed perverse infantile whatever drives and so on and so on. As if you know all these perverse drives they are oppressed the only thing that the church tolerates is genital straight heterosexuality and so on and so on. It's absolutely not true. The opposite is true. Here is the quote from Lacan, the crucial one, from ah yes, Encore: Christ, even when resurrected from the dead is valued for his body and his body is the means by which communion in his presence is incorporation, oral drive, with which Christ's wife the church as it is called contents itself very well, having nothing to expect from copulation. In everything that followed from the effects of Christianity particularly in art everything is exhibition of the body evoking jouissance, excessive enjoyment. And you can lend credence to the testimony of someone who has just come back from an orgy of churches in Italy and so on and so on. So what Lacan again is saying here is that if you look at the church imaginary and art it is full of these oral, anal drives. You can have saints eating shit, fondling each other, burning whatever, never fucking. Copulation is prohibited in church imaginary. So again Lacan is very clear here. One should reject the endlessly repeated critical thesis that the Catholic sexual morality implies imposes normative heterosexuality on the subversive and destabilizing polymorphous sexuality of humans. In contrast to the idea that partial drives are masturbatory, asocial and so on while genital sexuality grounds social link, family as an elementary social form, one should insist that there is nothing necessarily asocial in partial drives. They function as the glue of society, as the very stuff of communion, in contrast to the heterosexual couple. That's the basic thesis of Lacan, that if you look at these institutions which are for Freud in his crowd group psychology and analysis of the ego the model of groups, army, church, they are full of these famous pregenital oral anal drives mechanisms of incorporation anal destruction and so on. What they feel threatened by is precisely a couple, copulation. And Freud says this directly in his crowd group psychology. I quote Freud: directly sexual tendencies are unfavorable to the formation of groups. Two people coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction are making a demonstration against the herd instinct against the group feeling. The more they are in love the more completely they are sufficient for each other. In the great artificial groups there is no room for woman as a sexual object and so on and so on. So again, I quote here Alenka Zupančič who puts this in wonderful terms: So there is something profoundly disruptive at stake in copulation. For the kind of social bond it proposes, copulation, Christianity doesn't need sorry for the kind of social bond that Christianity proposes it doesn't need copulation, which functions as the superfluous element, something on top of what would be ideally needed. Indeed natural copulation is utterly banned from the religious imaginary whereas this imaginary doesn't recede from images of canonized saints eating the excrement, shit of another person. If looked at from this perspective Christianity is indeed all about jouissance of the body, about the body of God as constituting another person's jouissance. Partial drives and the satisfaction they procure are rather abundantly present and in this sense one would be justified in claiming that in its libidinal aspect the Christian religion massively relies on what belongs to the register of infantile sexuality, satisfaction and bonding by way of partial objects with the exclusion of sexual coupling. The pure enjoyment, enjoyment for the sake of enjoyment is not exactly what is banned here. What is banned or repressed is its link with sexuality particularly in the form of copulation. And here I go against Foucault who proposes as a big revolution that we should delink decoupling pleasures from sexuality. Well then that's what the church is doing, I mean. So again Christianity fully acknowledges the polymorphous perverse satisfactions of drives but it de-sexualizes the pleasure they provide. Pleasures as such again are not problematic. As you know Christian literature abound with the descriptions of ecstatic heavenly pleasures provided by meditations, prayers, rituals and so on rituals and so on and so on. Uh... again why? Why this oppression of sexuality? Okay maybe it's time slowly for me to stop, just to conclude now I come to the crucial crucial point. I would say that because what happens in copulation is precisely a certain link, coupling of two dimensions which make it problematic for this church vision. We have on the one hand sexuality in the sense of partial drives, you cannot find satisfaction do this touch the person that way put a finger up there squeeze him that way maybe it will work blah blah. This is the technical stuff of how to do it. And then we have the let's call it intersubjective link. But isn't the tendency today that the two should be kept apart or subordinated to each other? Either on the one hand if you are frigid, impotent, whatever, it's treated as a problem of partial drives. I claim that the ideal today is that is that is that a drive is that sorry is that sexual topic is reduced to the problem of partial drives as if it's just some malfunctioning you cannot get an erection do this blah blah blah. On the other hand of course we hear a lot about good human relations blah blah blah. But here again sexuality is subordinated to you know does it contribute to the depth of your relation to the other and so on and so on. But what happens in an intense copulation is that the two dimensions fall together. That's for me sorry for getting in my old age when you dream about things that you are no longer doing at least not a lot, is that the mystery of sexuality is that it's at the same time an intense bodily enjoyment and an absolute contact with the other. Not in this metaphysical sense while I make love to you it's really that I try to communicate with your soul. No no, fuck soul, it's brutally concrete. Isn't this the paradox of fanatical love or sex with love that the more you reduce the other to an object the more you have a spiritual surrender. Which is why I claim when the church I read somewhere when I was young already that the church prefers missionary position claiming that in this way sexuality is not only animal but you whisper some stupidities to the other's ear and so on. No this is a way to maintain distance towards the other I claim. Even a spiritual distance. In other words what the church wants to protect us from is precisely the metaphysical miraculous evental dimension of sexuality. Sexuality as you know a traumatic event which again cannot be reduced to functional pleasure in copulation and so on and so on. So again now the last thing I don't have time to go to the end but maybe the most important thing. Ah when I mentioned this missing link no sexual relationship and so on and so on. The last trap here and here one has to be up to a point critical even of Lacan himself is where? If you read Lacan really carefully you must have noticed a certain ambiguity. On the one hand Lacan massively endorses this standard philosophical topic of the opposition between animals and humans. There is sexual relationship for animals. Animals are purely determined by instinctual knowledge, a call of nature not in that sense of but in the sense of you know when to copulate blah blah blah. It's not a problem there. With animals it functions. With us humans we need poetry, fantasies, it doesn't function. But does it really function with animals? I think that this idea of opposing nature as a domain of some naive immediate balance and then you know all this bombastic existentialist topic of man as nature sick unto death. With man nature no longer provides instinctual knowledge so we need intelligence, poetry to fill in the gap and so on and so on. I think that here we have to do a step, maybe I will speak about it later, you find some about it already in my big fat book Less Than Nothing. Namely this idea that it's not enough to say man is a denatured animal. Nature in itself is already denatured, it just doesn't know it. What do I mean by it? What is unconscious? Here Alenka Zupančič uses a wonderful game of words where you know the usual expression is are you aware of something, are you conscious of something? She introduces the term to be unconscious of something. That to be unconscious of does not mean you don't know it, that precisely repressed knowledge and so on and so on. That both nature and man don't know how to do it, but nature simply doesn't know that it doesn't know. It's not unconscious of it. But a catastrophe imbalance is already in nature. Okay. Lacan gives also some hints in this direction. For example if you read carefully in Seminar when he introduces this notion of lamella, the undead object, he locates the gap the rupture signaled by the term lamella this undead object already at the level of animal sexuality. Lacan is much more radical here. Lacan I think oscillates here between again this simple celebration of humanity as at a loss you know this standard topic: man doesn't have instinctual foundation coordinates of instinctual knowledge which is why it has to invent things it's creative blah blah blah. No there is already a gap in nature itself and that would be for me at least again the great task of materialism today. How to denaturalize nature. I think the true battle is there. The true battle is not in naturalizing man. The true battle is in denaturalizing nature. The ultimate the ultimate idealist resistance is the very naivety of naturalism, like we have nature which knows how and then somehow I don't know how things go wrong with humans. What I'm trying to give you, that's what I developed in my book, is sorry this wonderful idea that you find in Schelling, in Walter Benjamin, even Heidegger takes it over. This idea that there is okay of course this is mystical topic but I claim we can get a materialist version of it that that you know Benjamin says somewhere that human language was created or humans invented language to give word to the pain which is already in nature and to redeem the pain in nature. It's a wonderful speculation of course one shouldn't give it this direct mythic reading, but I again if we of course drop this mystical topic and if we simply say some kind of radical discord and so on which is already in nature and that with humanity nature as it were becomes unconscious of its own discord. This is as you maybe know the way I also read quantum physics in the sense that quantum physics denaturalizes nature. The image of reality that we get there it's not culture but it's also not nature in the usual sense that we understand nature and so on and so on. There were of course many other things that I wanted to develop here uh that I wanted to develop here uh what I wanted to develop just one more point so that I yeah I still have three minutes. Ah you will now demand how do you call this when you are paid more the overtime, yeah. If you buy if we split the profit then I will sign it for you that you... just as a final note what would be materialist theology. Recently I was rereading Kierkegaard's concept of anxiety where he evokes a wonderful tremendous materialist idea. He Kierkegaard evokes this is my guy Simon Tornacensis, a 13th century scholastic who tried to develop a logical proof of God's existence and then the idea of Tornacensis is that God himself is while he Tornacensis is writing this trying to deduce the necessity of existence of God that God himself is watching him with anxiety as if if he fails with this proof God will like that proverbial cat that falls down God will discover that he doesn't exist you know as if God oh my god what will happen to me if they will not succeed in proving that I exist and then with his incredible political sense Kierkegaard says this story of this guy who thought that God's existence itself depends on will we philosophers proof his existence this story has numerous analogies and in our time speculation has assumed such authority that it has practically tried to make God feel uncertain of himself like a monarch who is anxiously waiting to learn whether the general assembly will make him an absolute or a limited monarch. And I like this idea that philosopher will decide: are you God truly a master, are you just a deist God with limited powers and so on and so on. And again I think that crazy as it may sound each of us as subjects are in this position of God in the sense that literally our existence depends on the other. You know it's literally when you are ah you know it's not now you will say but fuck it no I exist even if the whole world disappears. Yeah but you exist then as what, as a stupid human animal? For you to exist at the most radical level as a human being you depend on the others radically and again in this sense here I see also I'm jumping now just to conclude the last minute the lesson of quantum physics. For example you know this idea that at a micro level things can go on that the system doesn't register you can cheat ontologically. And here I think it's the ultimate materialist answer to that big question you know you know namely you know Einstein's answer to Niels Bohr: God doesn't cheat. God of course I am not a believer we if by God we simply say the system of rationality whatever. The answer to Einstein should be: okay maybe God doesn't cheat but he can be cheated. In the sense that at the virtual quantum level things can happen that God doesn't notice and there you can quickly cheat. And interestingly enough there are more about this on Monday there are theologians who draw this wonderful conclusion that it's not a problem of of is God cheating? No we can cheat on God. God precisely as all-powerful nonetheless doesn't know everything. Sorry for this confusion on Monday on Monday we go on if you survive the Hegelian bullshit. Unfortunately with great pleasure I tell you now I'm so infinitely sad that there is no time for debate haha. No you know what I mean. No thank you very much.