The Hegelian Wound
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2014-11-26 · 2:01:21 · 12,255 words
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisideologyreligion-theologysexuality-genderlanguagehistorycommunism-socialismcapitalismphilosophy-general
Delivered at NYU's German department and introduced by Avital Ronell, this talk centers on Hegel's concept of the 'wound', the idea that catastrophe or deprivation is not merely overcome but is the very condition of what it creates. Žižek develops this through colonialism and language (India, Malcolm X), Wagner's Parsifal, Benjamin's translation theory via Lurianic Kabbalah, and Hegel's reading of Greek culture. The second half pivots to psychoanalytic sexuality: why infantile sexuality is the repressed truth of permissive culture, why the Church prohibits copulation rather than partial drives, and how sexuality is itself a form of metaphysics. A wide-ranging Q&A covers Laclau vs. Žižek on hegemony and slums, labor theory of value, Latin American politics, and European identity.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 18
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Introduced by Avital Ronell via Schlegel to characterize Žižek's disruptive style as belonging to the German romantic tradition of perpetual interruption.
Implicitly at stake in the discussion of colonized subjects who must resist or reappropriate through the very language imposed on them.
as “Hegelian wound”
The traumatic deprivation or catastrophe that does not merely need to be overcome but itself creates, through its very imposition, the thing it appears to destroy or suppress.
as “absoluter Gegenstoß (absolute recoil)”
Hegel's term for an entity that emerges as it were out of its own loss, the thing first disappears and through its loss it comes to be.
Lurianic Kabbalistic notion that the vessel of creation shattered at the moment of divine emanation, used here via Benjamin to argue that original and translation are co-equal fragments of a larger whole.
Benjamin's move, endorsed here, that transposes translation from a metaphoric substitute of the original to a metonymic fragment alongside it, so that original and translation are both broken parts of a greater language.
Freudian concept of childhood polymorphous-perverse drives that are neither biologically grounded nor culturally sanctioned; Žižek argues they never disappear but persist as the fantasmatic support that makes adult sexuality possible at all.
Freudian partial drives that in Žižek's reading function as the glue of social communion rather than anti-social forces, in contrast to the isolating heterosexual couple.
as “there is no sexual relationship”
Lacanian formula meaning we never achieve sexual maturity; up to the end sexuality requires a fantasmatic support beyond the biological act.
The denaturalized excess beyond natural sexuality, the metaphysical passion of absolute love (Tristan), which is the real target of cultural education and Christian prohibition.
as “decaffeinated sex / sex without sex”
The logic by which permissive culture offers sexuality stripped of its dangerous excess, healthy sex for the heart, like beer without alcohol or coffee without caffeine.
as “enlightened Western Buddhist hedonism”
Žižek's ironic label for the predominant contemporary ideology of creative self-reinvention through consumption and experimental sex, which conceals its own repressiveness.
Badiou's term used by Žižek to describe slums as potential (not guaranteed) loci of political rupture, against Laclau's dismissal of them.
The symbolic order with a pretense to consistency and grounding; Žižek's claim that 'there is no big Other' means there is no transcendental guarantee, not that empirical argument is impossible.
Implicitly invoked in the discussion of labor theory of value and exploitation as the structural feature of capitalism that cannot be reduced to a list of power struggles.
Marx's precise structural concept of exploitation, which Žižek insists the left cannot abandon without losing the term 'exploitation' itself.
Laclau–Mouffe concept of political articulation across plural struggles; Žižek accepts its theoretical achievement but rejects its flattening of capitalism into one struggle among many.
Hegel's dialectical sublation, invoked as near-identical in structure to Derridean différance.
Stories he reaches for 6
Žižek's Native American friends hate 'Native American' ('if we are native you are cultural or what?') and prefer 'Indian' because 'in this way our name is at least a tribute to white man's stupidity.'
“'In this way our name is at least a tribute to white man's stupidity,' you know. 'They thought they are in India.'”
Malcolm X chose 'X' to mark brutal deprivation of African roots, but was also fully aware this X opened a unique chance of freedom, searching for roots is precisely what colonialists want.
“He was fully aware that every search for roots, like 'Oh let's go back' or 'Let's reconnect with our roots' is precisely what colonialists want.”
The logic of contemporary permissiveness: you can have beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine, and sex, but it must be healthy, safe, careful, stripping the excess that makes each thing what it is.
“You can have a beer but without alcohol, you can have coffee without caffeine and hell, you can have sex but it must be healthy sex.”
Pro-apartheid literature justified racial separation not by Black inferiority but by the need to protect unique indigenous cultures, a case of inverted racism dressed as respect.
“It was not 'Blacks are inferior'. No... they said something like, 'If we just introduce universal egalitarian democracy into South Africa, what will happen with all those Bushmen, Hottentots with their unique culture?'”
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle stages the end of Tristan so that Tristan dies alone; Isolde's final arrival is only the dying man's imagination, revealing that the redemption scene is a wish-fulfillment fragment.
“In the last act Tristan dies alone... all that happens at the end of Wagner's opera... is just the imagination of dying Tristan.”
Augustine (De nuptiis et concupiscentia) argues that the penis was exempted from man's conscious control as God's punishment for Adam's arrogance in wanting to be like God, the organ that resists will is the theological payback.
“God punished him, how? By exempting from man's power the one organ: penis... it can rise when you don't want to, when you desperately want to it doesn't.”
Works invoked 19
Vertigo film
Mentioned in Žižek's joke that San Francisco was created so Hitchcock could shoot Vertigo, a throwaway but characteristic reference.
Quoted directly for the passage on evil and singularization as the emergence of universal spirituality; a key Hegelian text throughout.
Parsifal opera
Wagner's opera provides the central formula of the talk, 'Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug', used as the Hegelian thesis that the wound is healed only by what caused it.
Žižek's own book mentioned by a questioner as the source of the concept of acting without the big Other.
Tristan und Isolde opera
Used repeatedly: as an example of sexuality as metaphysical excess and as the source of Ponnelle's staging where Isolde's arrival is Tristan's hallucination.
Roots tv
Alex Haley's series is described as 'stupid TV' feel-good liberal identity politics, the exact opposite of Malcolm X's insight about the liberating X.
Don Giovanni opera
One of the three Mozart operas restaged by Peter Sellars; mentioned in passing.
Absolute Recoil book
Žižek's own forthcoming book is mentioned as developing the theme of absoluter Gegenstoß extensively with reference to Hegel.
Encore (Seminar XX) book
Lacan's seminar on feminine sexuality is quoted at length for the argument that Christianity's art is all exhibition of the body evoking jouissance without copulation.
Home Alone film
Cited as an example of the reactionary mythology of the innocent asexual child who is all-powerful precisely because pre-sexual; Žižek says he was always on the side of the two bad guys.
Laclau's claim therein that the real of capital is not in slums is the starting point of the Q&A dispute on political potential of slums.
Glas book
Derrida's book cited as the possible location of his acknowledgment that the difference between Aufhebung and différance is almost invisible.
Così fan tutte opera
Peter Sellars's restaging, revealing Alfonso and Despina as the true tragic couple, is praised as a stroke of genius exemplifying the broken-vessel approach.
Augustine's short text on sexuality is cited for the argument that the uncontrollable penis is God's punishment for Adam's arrogance.
Le Nozze di Figaro opera
One of the three Mozart operas restaged by Peter Sellars; mentioned in passing.
Zachary Mason's book is described as 'readable' but 'not a great book'; used as an example of co-equal fragmentary variations on the Odyssey myth.
Benjamin's essay is a central theoretical resource: its use of the broken vessel to reframe translation from metaphor to metonymy is extensively analyzed.
Hegel's text quoted for the description of how ancient Greeks repressed and transformed their Asiatic and African sources.
Laplanche's essays cited for the formulation that what is acquired through drives (infantile sexuality) precedes what is innate.
People invoked 36
Introduced Žižek; he responds affectionately-aggressively, describing their relationship as 'humiliating each other in all possible ways but with love beneath it.'
Mangosuthu Buthelezi negative
Cited as the pro-identity-politics Zulu leader who was on the payroll of the white apartheid regime, contrasted with the ANC's universalist position.
Mel Gibson negative
Grouped with Zeffirelli as one of 'two great artists, one more disgusting than the other' for the same narrative-stitching failure.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as 'my Slovene friend, the greatest Lacanian I claim,' writing a book on Freudian sexuality; cited for the point that natural copulation is banned from Christian imaginary.
Jacques Derrida positive
Despite 'problematic relationship,' Žižek defends Derrida against the caricature of crude anti-Hegelianism and endorses Derrida's own admission that différance and Aufhebung are almost indistinguishable.
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle positive
His version of Tristan und Isolde where Isolde's arrival is the dying Tristan's hallucination is repeatedly cited as exemplary of the broken-vessel approach to reinterpretation.
Rebecca Comay positive
Wrote a 'wonderful book on Hegel' on which Žižek relies for the enumeration of Hegel's terms for Greek repression of its origins.
Cited by Avital Ronell as the source of the concept of 'permanent parabasis' used to characterize Žižek's style.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited on 'there is no sexual relationship,' on Christianity and the body, and on the inexistence of the big Other; Žižek identifies as Lacanian here.
Gilles Deleuze negative
The Deleuzian view of infantile sexuality as pre-Oedipal paradise repressed by genital norm is explicitly rejected.
Peter Sellars positive
His stagings of Mozart's three great operas praised as 'a real stroke of genius' for revealing the hidden tragic structure of each work through minimal changes.
Mentioned briefly in connection with performative enactment of identity as part of contemporary 'enlightened hedonism' discourse.
Chantal Mouffe negative
Grouped with Laclau in the critique of flattening capitalism into one struggle among many.
Alex Haley negative
His TV series Roots is described as 'stupid' liberal feel-good identity politics that is the exact opposite of Malcolm X's insight.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited approvingly on Plato, Descartes, and Hegel as the three absolute philosophers; used for the concept of 'evental site'; Žižek shares his communism but notes he doesn't actually need Marxist political economy.
Giorgio Agamben negative
Grouped with Badiou and others who hold that authentic politics must be at a distance from state power, a position Žižek rejects as impractical.
Giovanni Gentile negative
Mentioned as an example of a fascist Hegelian who read the corporate state as Hegel's rational state, one of three incompatible Hegel receptions.
Tariq Ali negative
Mentioned as someone who enthusiastically says Europe should look to Latin America for political models, a position Žižek rejects.
Isaac Luria positive
16th-century Kabbalist whose notion of the broken vessel is mediated through Benjamin; the Lurianic Kabbalah is described as 'a wonderful thought.'
David Harvey negative
At a London debate declined to defend the labor theory of value; Žižek mocked him for this, saying his entire raison d'être was to explain it.
Fredric Jameson positive
Credited with drawing attention to the rise of liberal/Pittsburgh Hegelianism and with agreeing that the left needs a new theory of exploitation; Žižek has 'great problems with his knowledge of economy.'
Mentioned approvingly for her debate with Derrida; said to have 'defected' to the new materialists but joked that she misses Žižek's camp and will return.
Malcolm X positive
Praised for understanding that the X of deprivation is simultaneously an opening of freedom, and for rejecting the identity-politics search for roots.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Žižek credits his theory of antagonism and hegemony as 'a wonderful achievement' but rejects his dismissal of slums, his equation of capitalism with other struggles, and his late embrace of Chavismo; says Laclau 'spit on me whenever possible.'
Franco Zeffirelli negative
Along with Mel Gibson, criticized for stupidly stitching the seven last words of Christ into a single continuous narrative, destroying the proper superimposition of fragments.
Walter Benjamin positive
Used extensively via 'The Task of the Translator' and the broken vessel metaphor to argue that original and translation are co-equal fragments.
Jean Laplanche positive
Cited for his formulation that what is acquired through the drives (infantile sexuality) precedes what is innate and instinctual; described as 'half Lacanian, he turned later against him.'
Cited for a controversial 1968-era statement about child sexuality in a kindergarten, used to illustrate how the cultural valuation of infantile sexuality has completely reversed.
Augustine of Hippo positive
His De nuptiis et concupiscentia cited for the argument that erection is God's punishment for Adam's arrogance, and for the idea that sex in paradise was controlled and purposeful.
Zachary Mason positive
His Lost Books of the Odyssey is described as 'readable' though not a great book; used as an example of co-equal fragmentary variations on an original.
Mentioned in the context of Laclau's concession that good military dictatorship is possible once he endorsed Chavez.
René Descartes positive
Defended against widespread dismissal; cited alongside Plato and Hegel as one of the three absolute philosophers who defined entire epochs; praised for early insight into the contingency of one's own cultural standpoint.
Sigmund Freud positive
The key Freudian discovery of infantile sexuality is said to be the most repressed insight of contemporary permissive culture; Žižek defends Freud against the 'Freud is passé' consensus.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central philosophical authority throughout; Žižek reads him on wounds, the Fall, Greek culture, absolute recoil, and subjectivity as key resources.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for the definition of man as 'an animal who needs a master' due to a denaturalized excess, Wildheit, beyond natural instinct, which anticipates Freud's death drive.
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
Praised for the concept of unilateral gift and for passages showing that the need to dominate reveals weakness rather than strength.
What it argues
the Hegelian wound: deprivation as the condition of what it deprivescolonialism, language imposition, and decolonial freedomBenjamin's broken vessel and translation as supplementationinfantile sexuality as the repressed truth of permissive cultureChristianity's prohibition of copulation vs. celebration of partial drivesLaclau vs. Žižek on hegemony, capitalism, and slumsEuropean identity and the limits of Latin American political models
Dialectical moves 9
“The wound can be healed only by the spear that smote it — the very deprivation creates what it deprives.”
The Wagnerian/Hegelian paradox: colonization, the fall, catastrophe do not destroy a pre-existing good but generate through their very violence the liberated identity that then emerges.
“Fall is not fall from good into evil. First you lose a thing, and through its loss the thing emerges — you heal the wound by recognizing the wound itself as its own solution.”
The Hegelian inversion of the Fall: there is no prior paradise from which we fall; the fall itself creates retroactively the paradise it appears to leave.
“What dies on the cross is not just the son of God — it's God himself. The crucifixion means there is no higher power pulling the strings secretly. It means we are left to ourselves. And that's the freedom that God gave us.”
The apparent catastrophe of abandonment (God's death) is revealed as the highest gift, our freedom from an Other who guaranteed the world.
“The original itself is already the fragment of a broken vessel. A good translation retroactively devalues the original, making you aware of how the original itself is already a fragment.”
Translation is not a lesser copy of a perfect original but breaks the illusion of completeness, revealing the original to be as fragmentary as the translation.
“It is not the case that rational consideration has an external relationship to evil — it is itself what is evil.”
Hegel's point (cited): reason and evil are not opposed; subjectivity's very power of self-distinction is the same as evil, so there is no external vantage point of pure reason.
“The lesson of Freud is the exact opposite of what the caricature says: it's not that beneath the explicit wish for women lies the hidden fantasy — it's that the explicit wish is vulgar and the secret is the precise fantasmatic support.”
The true Freudian inversion: the surface is crude desire; the real repressed content is the specific fantasy scenario that alone makes sexuality possible.
“Far from being the repressed truth, polymorphous partial drives are not asocial — they are the very glue of society. In contrast to the heterosexual couple, which is effectively asocial.”
The reversal of the standard liberal/critical reading: 'perverse' partial drives are what binds communities; normative heterosexual coupling isolates.
“Christianity oppresses sexuality not because it is too bodily — but because it is too metaphysical.”
The Church does not fear the body but fears that passionate love is itself a metaphysical rival to Christian transcendence.
“The X in Malcolm X signals not only brutal deprivation but also the unique chance of freedom that this offers.”
What appears as pure loss of identity (the slave's X) is simultaneously the opening to a freedom unavailable to those who still possess roots.
Claims 23
asserts
The wound of colonization (imposition of English) does not destroy a pre-existing authentic identity but creates the very thing — a new universalist democratic identity — that resistance then fights for.colonialism and decolonization
asserts
The first gesture of colonizers is hypocritical respect for the indigenous way of life, which is actually an inverted racism that traps the colonized in their 'authentic' identity.colonialism and identity politics
asserts
Malcolm X's adoption of 'X' as surname correctly recognized deprivation of ethnic roots as a unique chance of freedom rather than something to reverse by searching for roots.Black identity politics and decolonization
asserts
Hegel's account of ancient Greek culture shows that the 'Greek miracle' of originality was produced by a brutal repression of its Asiatic and African sources, not by some spontaneous origin.Hegel's philosophy of culture and Black Athena thesis
asserts
We heal the wound not by returning to a pre-wound unity but by reflectively recognizing the wound itself as its own solution.Hegelian dialectics and the concept of the wound
asserts
The fall (from paradise) is not a fall from an already existing good; the fall itself creates the good from which it is the fall.Hegel's reading of the Fall and theology
asserts
What dies on the cross is not only the Son of God but God himself, meaning there is no higher power pulling the strings — we are left to ourselves, which is the highest divine gift of freedom.Christianity, crucifixion, and atheist theology
asserts
A good translation does not reproduce the original as faithfully as possible but supplements it, retroactively devaluing the original and revealing it as already a fragment.Benjamin's theory of translation and the broken vessel
asserts
The goal of reading variant versions of a text (or staging operas differently) is not to recover the original but to superimpose all variants as equal fragments of a broken whole.hermeneutics, opera, and Benjamin
asserts
The key repressed element of Freudian discovery today is infantile sexuality, not explicit sex; our permissive culture is more repressive than ever precisely at this point.infantile sexuality and contemporary permissiveness
asserts
Infantile sexuality is neither biologically grounded nor culturally sanctioned — it is an epistemological category tied to the desire to know, a pure excess from the standpoint of adaptive behavior.infantile sexuality
asserts
We never reach sexual maturity; adult sexuality always requires a fantasmatic support derived from infantile partial drives.Freudian-Lacanian theory of sexuality
rejects
The Catholic Church does not repress polymorphous partial drives in favor of copulation; rather, it prohibits copulation while celebrating pre-genital partial drives as the stuff of communion.the standard critical thesis on Catholic sexual morality
asserts
Christianity prohibits sexuality not because it is too bodily but because it is too metaphysical — passionate love is the elementary form of metaphysics that disturbs natural biorhythm.Christianity and sexuality
rejects
Partial drives are not asocial; they are the very glue of social communion, while the heterosexual couple is effectively asocial, isolating itself from the community.the assumption that partial drives are antisocial
asserts
Augustine's account shows that the Fall's punishment was God exempting the penis from human control, as revenge for Adam's arrogance in wanting to be like God.Augustine's theology of sexuality and the Fall
rejects
Slums constitute a potential evental site, against Laclau's dismissal of them as mere hotbeds of religious fundamentalism or gang activity.Laclau's dismissal of slums as political sites
rejects
Capitalism is not just one struggle among many but the universal structuring principle of contemporary societies, making Marxist critique of political economy indispensable.Laclau and Mouffe's equivalence of struggles
asserts
If you drop the labor theory of value you lose the precise structural concept of exploitation and are left with empty moralizing.labor theory of value and Marxist political economy
rejects
Latin American socialist experiments (Venezuela, Bolivia, etc.) are not the formula of the new but at best better than nothing.Latin America as a new political horizon
asserts
The true danger to European identity is not immigration but the rise of anti-immigrant populism, which itself destroys the European legacy of egalitarianism worth defending.European identity and right-wing populism
rejects
Human rights are not simply an imperialist tool; from the very beginning they were the terrain of struggle, appropriated by women, blacks in Haiti, and others.the Marxist critique of human rights as purely imperialist
rejects
Hegel is not the philosopher of closed totality; Derrida himself acknowledged that the difference between Aufhebung and différance is almost invisible.the standard anti-Hegelian caricature in continental philosophy
Quotes 17
“Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug. The wound can be healed only by the spear that smote it.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian wound — Wagner's Parsifal as dialectical formula
“You heal the wound by reflectively recognizing the wound itself as its own solution. You just change your perspective and recognize again in the wound itself the solution.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian dialectics of the wound
“Fall is not fall from good into evil. First, you first lose a thing and through its loss, you... the thing emerges from you.”Slavoj Žižek · absolute recoil — the Hegelian ontology of loss
“What dies on the cross is not just God, it's not just the son of God, it's God himself. Crucifixion means there is no higher power pulling the strings secretly.”Slavoj Žižek · atheist Christianity — the crucifixion as gift of freedom
“The original itself is already the fragment of a broken vessel. A good translation retroactively devalues the original, makes you aware of how original itself is already a fragment.”Slavoj Žižek · Benjamin's broken vessel and translation
“The most refined and disgusting form of colonialism today is that shitty fake respect which is, I claim, just inverted racism.”Slavoj Žižek · inverted racism as the contemporary form of colonialism
“The first gesture of colonizers is always the message: 'You have a wonderful authentic wise way of life, it's much wiser than our vulgar Western materialist imperialist culture.'”Slavoj Žižek · hypocritical colonial respect as a mechanism of control
“He was fully aware that every search for roots, like 'Oh let's go back' or 'Let's reconnect with our roots' is precisely what colonialists want.”Slavoj Žižek · Malcolm X on decolonization and the trap of identity politics
“It is not the case that rational consideration has an external relationship to evil. It is itself what is evil.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel on subjectivity and evil — no external standpoint of pure reason
“With regard to sexuality we are never... we never reach maturity. No matter how adult we are, we always need something that fits the role of infantile sexuality.”Slavoj Žižek · infantile sexuality as permanent structure
“You can have a beer but without alcohol, you can have coffee without caffeine and hell, you can have sex but it must be healthy sex.”Slavoj Žižek · decaffeinated permissiveness — contemporary ideology of harmless enjoyment
“Christianity oppresses sexuality not because it's too bodily immediate. No, it's that precisely sexuality is too metaphysical.”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity vs. sexuality — the metaphysical rival
“There is nothing necessarily asocial in partial drives. They function as the glue of society. They are the very stuff of communion.”Slavoj Žižek · partial drives as social bond — reversal of the standard view
“If you drop value so-called labor theory of value, how then do you justify the use of the term exploitation?”Slavoj Žižek · labor theory of value as indispensable to Marxist analysis
“I'm almost getting more and more Eurocentric... not of course in the imperialist sense, but in the sense that there is something in European legacy worth fighting for: the idea of egalitarianism, radical emancipation.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's qualified Eurocentrism as defense of universalism
“There is an almost invisible almost no difference between Aufhebung and his deconstruction différance.”Slavoj Žižek · Derrida's own admission of proximity to Hegel
“Hegel knew this: how you overcome biology — precisely that you take an activity which has a biological goal but you suspend that goal. You make it into a goal in itself.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian sublimation and the suspension of biological ends
Transcript 33 turns
unknown
Thank you for coming out this Friday afternoon and Happy New Year with Wagner. I'm here to introduce this total diva or anti-diva and first however I'd like to express thanks for our sponsorship by the German department of NYU, Deutsches Haus, to the NYU vice provost Uli Baer for instigating and supporting the move to a larger space meant to show hospitality in conjunction with what Derrida calls hostipitality, reminding us of the originary link between hospitality and hostility. I'd like to ask that I can be permitted now to thank myself. Above all to thank myself for putting up with Slavoj's shit for so many years. Yet I come in peace even though he has maimed me and named me das Bitch. And even though it doesn't fit, it has caught on. The admittedly dubious vulgarity of this lexicon does not originate with me, but I must now own it and not resort to childish scenographies of urgently asserted justice. The child starts up the engine early on of designating the failure of justice. It's not fair. He started it. But my child parts will not prevail and unleash today, even though I have taken custody of this child Slavoj Žižek, this wunderkind, now wound-er-kind, the wonder and wound about to give us a close-up of Hegel's wounded site of utterance and philosophical questioning. The way Žižek afflicts or inscribes wounds deserves a number of victory laps on my part but I will desist as promised from taking aggressive stances even though he started it and will turn back into the Nietzsche baby that I was brought up to be, losing the ressentiment that could have been stored up all these years in a festering silo of toxicity. No, I'm mean but I'm clean. And I've said this before: I am Josephine, Queen of the Mousefolk, and will not be intimidated by a phallus-bearing Hegelian. Bring it on. Before I disappear I want
Thank you for coming out this Friday afternoon and Happy New Year with Wagner. I'm here to introduce this total diva or anti-diva and first however I'd like to express thanks for our sponsorship by the German department of NYU, Deutsches Haus, to the NYU vice provost Uli Baer for instigating and supporting the move to a larger space meant to show hospitality in conjunction with what Derrida calls hostipitality, reminding us of the originary link between hospitality and hostility. I'd like to ask that I can be permitted now to thank myself. Above all to thank myself for putting up with Slavoj's shit for so many years. Yet I come in peace even though he has maimed me and named me das Bitch. And even though it doesn't fit, it has caught on. The admittedly dubious vulgarity of this lexicon does not originate with me, but I must now own it and not resort to childish scenographies of urgently asserted justice. The child starts up the engine early on of designating the failure of justice. It's not fair. He started it. But my child parts will not prevail and unleash today, even though I have taken custody of this child Slavoj Žižek, this wunderkind, now wound-er-kind, the wonder and wound about to give us a close-up of Hegel's wounded site of utterance and philosophical questioning. The way Žižek afflicts or inscribes wounds deserves a number of victory laps on my part but I will desist as promised from taking aggressive stances even though he started it and will turn back into the Nietzsche baby that I was brought up to be, losing the ressentiment that could have been stored up all these years in a festering silo of toxicity. No, I'm mean but I'm clean. And I've said this before: I am Josephine, Queen of the Mousefolk, and will not be intimidated by a phallus-bearing Hegelian. Bring it on. Before I disappear I want
unknown
to name two tasks that I feel I have. I want to thank my best fiend for speaking to us this evening and to immunize the audience from any obscenity that may emerge in the course of his
to name two tasks that I feel I have. I want to thank my best fiend for speaking to us this evening and to immunize the audience from any obscenity that may emerge in the course of his
unknown
perfidious delivery. If these spirits have offended, think but this and all is mended. German intellectual history has hidden a deviant track off which literature and philosophy receive unceasing life-affirming energy. Our global distinguished professor Slavoj Žižek, who commands many continuous fields and several languages with authority and often poignant acuity, belongs to that part of the German tradition broken, searing, disturbing, run by rogue itineraries and disaster-prone and comes to us more originally from Greek theater, nailed by the German romantics and Schlegel, not Hegel, as permanent parabasis. That which disrupts, marked by deregulated outbursts, often dropping off a solar storm of insights and killer clusters of obscenity. You will need to understand Žižek according to the reading protocols of this
perfidious delivery. If these spirits have offended, think but this and all is mended. German intellectual history has hidden a deviant track off which literature and philosophy receive unceasing life-affirming energy. Our global distinguished professor Slavoj Žižek, who commands many continuous fields and several languages with authority and often poignant acuity, belongs to that part of the German tradition broken, searing, disturbing, run by rogue itineraries and disaster-prone and comes to us more originally from Greek theater, nailed by the German romantics and Schlegel, not Hegel, as permanent parabasis. That which disrupts, marked by deregulated outbursts, often dropping off a solar storm of insights and killer clusters of obscenity. You will need to understand Žižek according to the reading protocols of this
unknown
tradition minoritized and repressed in the context of cult vitality and stealth intelligence to grasp him as part of an essential articulation of a destiny. Thank you very much.
tradition minoritized and repressed in the context of cult vitality and stealth intelligence to grasp him as part of an essential articulation of a destiny. Thank you very much.
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. First, my of course instant reply to to Avital. I liked and it's very appropriate for an event taking place within a German department that he... how was it, he started it or what, no? I'm sure if Hitler were to be arrested in '45 and accused of crimes he would have said, 'No, the Jews started it,' you know and whatever. Another thing, I will also give now my compliment to Avital. You know, when I first met her and noticed her behavior, which sometimes reminds me of my own behavior, we... I was told by some friends that you know, this shouldn't distract you. Beneath all that sarcastic surface there is a warm human person. After knowing her I can guarantee it: there is no warm human person behind. He... she is what you see, you know. But now a more serious point to Avital. You know people often think why do we speak like this to each other and Avital... and I can tell you this. Look, there are ways... it's easy to speak... to be kind so that you speak kindly of a person. That's boring. You can be brutal and speak to a person in a brutal way. It's simple. Then you have the first inversion. British are... the British people are specialized in this, to humiliate someone but to do it in a very kind way. This is also... you just have to have some elementary clichés manners. But you know what we are doing: to humiliate each other in all possible ways but so that there is love beneath it that will... this is quite an art I think, no? and she is one of the few persons with whom I can do this. Okay, you mentioned the obscenities and so on. Unfortunately there will be only some of them at the end so let me go to it because I have some things which I consider, at least I do, important to say. Some minor stuff maybe I used already it in some other lectures but to my best knowledge not here in New York. So, Hegelian wound. I will believe with something that happened to me a couple of years ago in India, in New Delhi. We all spoke English there and then some postcolonial people from there complained like why do we speak English. They claimed the very fact of speaking English in India is a form of cultural colonialism which censors their own true identity. Their argument was something like, 'We have to speak in an imposed foreign language to express our inmost identity and does this not put us in a position of radical alienation? Even our resistance to colonization has to be formulated in the language of the colonizer.' Of course I exploded back. My first point and this is typical of big nations was that they treated me as if English is my native language, you know, as if for small shitty nations like mine, Slovene, it's normal that you are not allowed your language, no? But my basic reaction was a different one. Yes, you were imposed a foreign language, but this very... when you are colonized by a foreign language of course you experience this external imposition as a loss. Colonization being deprived of let's call it a true essence, I don't mean it in an essentialist nation, but like you are deprived of something and then you engage in decolonization, how to get your true identity back. But what I'm saying is that this very imposition of a foreign language, English in this case, created that very X, unknown quantity which was oppressed by it. That is to say, what when Indians feel oppressed, what... what is oppressed I claim is absolutely not the pre-colonial India. What they fight for is, let's call it and I totally support it of course, an authentic dream of a new universalist democratic India and this strictly emerged through colonization. The space for it was opened by colonization. So it is crucial to know... this is just a remark... that this role of English language was clearly perceived by many intellectuals especially among Dalits, the untouchables, among whom I have many friends, the lowest caste. A large section of Dalits, they still welcome English because their idea is that the English language is precisely because it's a foreign language, it provides a kind of a distance. For them it means a space not to feel entrapped into all the ancient hierarchies, castes and so on and so on. And I claim that this is a big lesson that we should learn today when we fight whatever remains of cultural and more and more economic colonization. Let me take a totally different example: Malcolm X. He was I claim following the same insight when he adopted X as his family name, Malcolm X. The point of choosing X and thereby signaling that the slave traders who brought the enslaved Africans from their homeland brutally deprived them of their ethnic roots and so on. X means we are deprived of our roots. The point with Malcolm X was not as in that stupid TV series to make you feel good liberal... it was very popular, Alex Haley who was the author, Roots, you remember. 'Let's search for our roots' and so on and so on. No, Malcolm X was well aware that this X signals on the one hand brutally being cut off, deprived from, but also the unique chance of freedom that this offers. He was fully aware of it. He was fully aware that every search for roots, like 'Oh let's go back' or 'Let's reconnect with our roots' is precisely what colonialists want. I claim that it's totally wrong to think that colonialism or today's post-neo-colonialism works as a... what some culture critics call this cheap consumerist Americanization, you know, like the colonizers wanted all us to be the way they are. No. If there is something they are afraid of, it's this. The first gesture of colonizers is always the message to local people and usually it is formed in this hypocritically respectful way: 'You have a wonderful authentic wise way of life, it's much wiser than our vulgar Western materialist imperialist culture.' Just look... they are wonderful reading... British colonial administrators, their memoirs of India. They are full of this bullshit, you know, like 'I learned from an ordinary poor Indian peasant more wisdom than from all Western managers' and so on and so on. And so I think that... don't also forget something that I remember from my youth: South Africa apartheid. You know, you should do something which not many people do: you should look a little bit into the official pro-apartheid literature. How did they justify apartheid? It was not 'Blacks are inferior'. No. It's of course it was hypocritical, but it's interesting what they said. They said something like, 'If we just introduce universal egalitarian democracy into South Africa, what will happen with all those Bushmen, Hottentots with their unique culture?' You know, they even like to evoke all this bullshit, you know, that 'When we Boers or Englishmen open up a mine, we just do it brutally. But when an African native mines into the earth or enters a mountain, he first asks the spirits of the mountain for permission' and so on, all that bullshit and so on. What I'm saying is that the first step of really fighting colonialism is to... I'm even tempted to say to treat them, the others, as ordinary dirty evil people as we are. You know, I think the most refined and disgusting form of colonialism today is that shitty fake respect which is I claim just inverted racism, you know, you know, in the sense of like celebrating Native Americans here, you know, like 'Oh my God,' again the same bullshit, you know. 'They speak with the spirit of the mountain, they don't just... they know that nature is their mother, they don't just exploit her' and so on. I totally understand some of my Native American, Indian I call them because they prefer this name... you must know my standing joke, you know. My... all my Native American friends hate the term Native American. They say, 'Ah if we are native you are cultural or what?' you know and they gave me an excellent argument to use the term Indian. They said, 'In this way our name is at least a tribute to white man's stupidity,' you know. 'They thought they are in India' and so on, you know. No, but you know one of them told me, 'I can prove you through historical writings that we did much more... we ruined much more nature than... we killed more buffaloes than one people, we burned more forests' and so on. But I understood them. They hate this patronizing respectful attitude. So, again, today more than ever I claim this is important, that of course to see how although colonialism was an extremely traumatic brutal wound, something which was undescribably brutal, but the solution is not to return back but precisely to see this deprivation, being deprived of ethnic roots and so on, as a unique chance of freedom, of opening. And among others for example as you probably know in South Africa, that was the whole policy of African National Congress. The one who was for identity politics, blacks should return to their own culture, was King Buthelezi who was on the payroll of the white regime of course, no? So what I want to say here is that this is how I read, I'm slowly coming to the title of my talk, this Hegelian wound. Wagner has this famous phrase towards the end of Parsifal, 'The wound can be healed only by the spear that smote it.' Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug. Which means the very disintegration of traditional forms of life opens up the space for liberation. Because again, I return to the case of India to make it clear. My point is that of course Indians want to get rid even today of the remainder of colonization. Of course they dream about something that they want to get back. But I claim what they want to return to has nothing to do with previous pre-colonial India. Now, I'm not saying that the pre-colonial India was neither a paradise nor a hell, but it was simply something outside of it. It was a vast complex network of different traditions, a heterogeneous mess. And so I claim that we should always again bear in mind, apropos decolonization, that what we are returning to it's always... it's something that emerges through this very return. It appears that we are returning to something but we are creating that something through the very return to it. Now I come slowly from here to Hegel, to what I consider one of Hegel's wonderful points. You know the thesis on Black Athens, Black Athena? The idea being that Hegel and others as Eurocentrists they were not aware how much the classical Greek culture borrowed from African and Oriental sources and so on. I mean did these guys read Hegel? Hegel not only knew it but emphasized it. Here is Hegel's surprising description of the ancient Greek, the great classical culture. I quote Hegel from his lectures on the history of fine arts. 'They certainly received the substantial beginnings of their religion, culture, and social relations more or less from Asia, Syria, and Egypt. But they have so very much obliterated (getilgt) the foreign aspect of this origin, transformed, reversed, and made it thoroughly different, that what they as we value, recognize, and love is essentially their own. They have so to speak ungratefully (undankbar) forgotten their foreign origin, put it in the background, perhaps burying it in the darkness of the mysteries which they have kept secret for even from even themselves. They have not only done this, they have not only used and enjoyed what they have brought before themselves and made from out of themselves, but they have become conscious of and gratefully and joyfully represented to themselves this at-homeness of their whole existence, their very own beginning and origin and so on and so on.' So Rebecca Comay, who wrote a wonderful book on Hegel and on whom I rely here, enumerated all the terms that Hegel uses for how ancient Greeks related to this... Asiatic and African cultures: conquering, then repressing (siegen, zurückdrängen), abolition (fortfallen), expunging (tilgen), annihilation (vertilgen), effacement (auslöschen), erasure (verwischen), stripping away (abstreifung), concealment (verstricken) and so on and so on. Now you will say but then doesn't this mean that Hegel simply thought yes, they got rid of all this shit to give birth to the noble Greek culture? No. We don't have time to go into it but just to intrigue you a little bit in Hegel. No, Hegel's point is here that this far from being something original like the miracle out of nowhere, this Greek miracle is an appearance of innocence and originality based on an extremely brutal repression which is even felt and then in a little bit naive way Hegel says that the fundamental feature of Greek statues is, which is in some naive way true even, at least from our later perspective, that their statues, the heads, have eyes but you don't feel the gaze in that eye. The object doesn't return the gaze. They do something what some later theorists, art theorist apropos Manet called 'looking without seeing.' And then Hegel claims... now this is nice point... because Hegel doesn't say yes, because we are naive at the beginning only afterwards all this comes, gaze... he says that this gaze is not simply absent from ancient Greek art, it's present in them as repressed (verdrängt), and he gives a wonderful example of that statue or mythical creature of Argos. You know, the disgusting divine figure with thousand eyes all around his body. And now you will say okay, but this is Oriental vulgarity. No, Hegel says... it's incredible... every work of art is in a way like this statue of Argos where every little piece of it, every surface is an eye staring back to you. And what I find so nice is that although Hegel still appears quite classicist like 'art is beautiful', but he evokes as a model of art some monstrously ugly figure. So let's go on. This brings us back to Wagner's Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug. Hegel's point if we generalize it is that we don't have some immediate naive beginning, that's the usual story of Hegel, no? you begin with some naive immediate beauty whatever and then you get alienation and so on and so on. No, the wound is at the beginning, a catastrophe. And then when things go on, you overcome the wound. You know Hegel's famous saying 'the spirit is strong enough to heal its own wounds.' But what Hegel is saying there is not the usual stupidity that spirit plays a game with itself, you know, you alienate yourself then you reappropriate your otherness. No, Hegel basically is saying that you heal the wound by reflectively recognizing the wound itself as its own solution. You just change your perspective and recognize again in the wound itself the solution. And we can immediately apply this to the example of India. Yes, the imposition of English language was the wound. But how do you fight it? Not by trying to return to some... to some pre-modern unity and so on, but fully endorsing accepting the wound in the sense of perceiving the... the liberating potential of the wound. And more generally, Hegel goes here to the end and elevates this paradox to the fundamental feature of subjectivity as such, subjectivity as self-consciousness. Let me quote a passage from... from... from Hegel's Phenomenology. It's incredible. I quote: 'Abstractly, being evil means singularizing myself in a way that cuts me off from the universal which is the rational, the law, the determinations of spirit. But along with this separation there arises being-for-itself and for the first time the universal spirituality, what ought to be. So it is not the case that rational consideration has an external relationship to evil. It is itself what is evil.' And Hegel's point is simply that... oh even he applies this even to... even to religion, that... Hegel is a great partisan of the fall. He claims that fall itself creates the good from which it is the fall. You don't have some even if it's only hypothetically presupposed, you don't have some goodness, paradise, whatever from which we fall. Fall itself creates that from which it is the fall. I don't have time to go with it but buy my next book Absolute Recoil where I develop this extensively with reference to Hegel's term absoluter Gegenstoß, absolute recoil. This means an entity for Hegel is... emerges as it were out of its own loss. Fall is not fall from good into evil. First, you first lose a thing and through its loss, you... the thing emerges from you and then you can try to... you can try to... to regain it. And again Hegel developed this but let's skip it now in detail apropos... apropos the fall, Adam and so on. Now let me go a step further and mention another notion which I think it's a beautiful notion from Kabbalah, first elaborated by the Kabbalic author, you know Isaac Luria, 16th century, the notion of broken vessel. You know the idea very briefly, God... no, it's a wonderful thought this Kabbalah, this part of Kabbalah, this so-called Lurianic Kabbalah. The idea is that first God was the infinite formless without purpose and so on, the pure energy. Then... and this all good theology at this moment... God doesn't directly create the world. First there must be a contraction. Like God must create first nothing in order to... to fill this nothing with something. But then, okay to go very quickly, the idea is that in this creation of external reality, there is the light of creation is too intense and the vessel, as the metaphor for the created universe, the vessel is shattered and then we humans should help God bringing it back together through our... through our spiritual exercises and so on and so on. Now the consequences of such an approach for literature were spelled out by Walter Benjamin in his early essay 'The Task of the Translator'. There Benjamin uses this Lurianic notion of the broken vessel to discern the inner working of a process of translation. Quote from Walter Benjamin: 'Just as fragments of a vessel in order to be articulated together must follow one another in the smallest detail but need not resemble one another, so instead of making itself similar to the meaning of the original, the translation must rather lovingly and in detail in its own language form itself according to the way of signifying of the original. To make both [both it means the original and the translation] recognizable as the broken parts of a greater language, just as fragments are broken parts of a vessel.' Are you aware what Benjamin is saying here? To put it in a simplified way, he transposes translation from metaphor into metonymy. Usually we conceive translation as a metaphoric substitute of the original. We have the original which is the real thing and then the translation should recapture as much as possible the spirit of the original. But for Benjamin, and that's the meaning of the idea of broken vessel here, original and translation are both fragments. They are put at the same level. So in a great... in a good translation, the point is not to be as similar as possible to recapture the spirit of the original, but precisely again to treat the original as a fragment and then to fill in precisely if you want what is already missing in the original, so that translation original and other translations together form some kind of totality. In other words, the gap that in the traditional view separates the original from its always imperfect translation is transposed back into the original itself. The original itself is already the fragment of a broken vessel. So that the goal of the translation is not to achieve fidelity to the original, but to supplement the original, to treat the original as a broken fragment and to produce another fragment which again will not imitate the original but will fit it as one... as a fragment of a broken whole may fit another. What this means is a very nice paradox is that... already the... what this means is that a good translation as it were breaks the vessel even more. Because before translation you think the original is it, what we have. But a good translation retroactively devalues the original, makes you aware of how original itself is already a fragment. And now to make this clear I want to give you two other examples of the same procedure. They concern not a translation but something that I always love in works of art. You know you find it, it's fashionable for the last years, the stagings of great operas where you just change the narrative a little bit. I claim if you really do it in a good way, it's precisely like another fragment of a broken vessel. The original appears to you in a totally different way. For example, my... one of my examples that I like is you can get it on DVDs. Peter Sellars, already some years ago, he staged the three great Mozart operas: Così fan tutte, Figaro, and Don Giovanni, but without changing any notes or libretto, he changed just a little bit as for example... I hope you know the story so that I don't lose time telling it... in Così fan tutte, you know that Don Alfonso the philosopher and Despina... I think it's Despina, the poor servant girl... Despina is usually presented as just flirtatious lower-class... Peter Sellars in a real stroke of a genius, he staged it so that it looks that the true traumatic love is between philosopher Alfonso and poor Despina. And because the two of them cannot enact their love they play all the games with other couples. This is the tragic couple. Or such other small changes. For example I always quote it in my books. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's version of Tristan where in the last act Tristan dies alone. I mean for Isolde this was a night adventure then let him die. Why should she join him, no? She was pardoned by her father and all that happens at the end of Wagner's opera especially... you know Tristan dying but then in the last minute Isolde comes and is just the imagination of dying Tristan. And I think that... there is even another example more modest... it's not a great book but it's readable. It was published a couple of years ago by Farrar, Straus and so on... Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey. It's a... again readable variation on the official story. You find for example in one of the variations old Odysseus visited Troy and finds that there is a whole cultural industry there already, you know. They are selling fragments of the... of the... of the... arrow by which Paris killed Achilles and tell the stories and Odysseus intervenes there, 'No, you got it wrong' and they laugh at him, 'Oh idiot you don't get it' and so on. And then in another version when he, Odysseus, returns to Ithaca he finds that his wife Penelope is happily married with the new guy and he says 'Why should I disturb this?' and gracefully he withdraws and so on. So what's my point here? My point is that... I'm not saying... you see, this is my point... I'm not saying that this is better than the original, some repressed truth. No. What I'm saying is that this is a Benjaminian approach. To... the true lesson is that in order to get what Ulysses, Odyssey is about, you have to superimpose all these stories, all the variants. The point is not to reconstruct the original story but to read all these variations as equal. And now if you are good God-fearing Christians I will give you the ultimate example: the seven last words of Christ, you know: 'Father forgive them for they know not what they do,' then 'Truly I say to you today you will be with me in paradise,' and so on and so on, you know them. 'My God why have you forsaken me,' 'It is finished,' 'Father into your hands I commit my spirit,' then 'I thirst, I'm thirsty,' and so on. Now the most stupid thing you can do here is what the two great artists do, one more disgusting than other: Franco Zeffirelli and Mel Gibson. They try to reconstruct a whole narrative so that somehow all these words are spoken, no? and the result is so vulgar. Like you have Christ says, I forgot in which movie, 'My God why have you forsaken me' and then as if part of this being forsaken is 'Hmm I'm so thirsty' and then they give him to drink and then says 'Okay now I feel better, now it is finished, I commit myself to my'... you know it's total stupidity. The whole point is that they should be as it were superimposed, you know. It's wrong to ask but what is the real word. And this perhaps I claim is the ultimate lesson of Christianity, that precisely to celebrate the breaking of the vessel. In the sense that all you can get is superimposed fragments. Okay, this is the first introductory part. Now comes the surprise. Out of this I will try to apply the lesson of all this: wound as a redeeming wound. And... and... and you know where I see, okay to give you another example why am I a totally atheist Christian? You know in what sense Christ brings freedom? I think the only way to understood it is in this way. You are desperate. Christ was crucified, you are alone, you cannot count on divine help. I follow Hegel here: what dies on the cross is not just God, it's not just the son of God, it's God himself. Crucifixion means there is no higher power pulling the strings secretly. It means we are left to ourselves. And you said 'It's horrible, we are alone,' blah blah. Yeah but that's the freedom that God gave us. You see, to see the very thing that appears as catastrophe as the highest divine gift. Which is why I think the Bible is Hegelian, in what sense Hegelian. It's not that you have first bad news and then good news. No. The message of Christ: you think these are bad news, look again and you will see that this very news is good news. Like 'I die, I erase myself.' It's bad news? Yes, but it's your freedom, you cannot rely on me. It's good news. So what does this mean? Ah, now comes a little bit now to repay you for your patience with this more boring part. Now we go into sex and obscenity. I claim that it's only against this Hegelian background that we can really understand, and I say this consciously against the predominant fashion according to which you know Freud is passé, you know, like 'Who needs Freud today, we live in permissive times, everything is permitted, you can do whatever you want' and so on and so on. I claim that no, the key element of Freudian discovery is now oppressed more than ever: infantile sexuality. I... and this happened in the last years. I think this is the truth of our permissiveness. How yes, you can do whatever you want with cats, with dogs, with I don't know sex I mean, but children are out. This figure of an innocent child who shouldn't be corrupted with sexuality returned in a forceful way. I even think that even movies like Home Alone are part of this reactionary mythology, you know, because the small kid there is all-powerful because he is pre-sexual, this pure monster and so on. So... I incidentally when I was... when I went to cinema years ago to see Home Alone and I was always on the side of the two bad guys. I would like so much for them to just squash that creep. But what I wanted to say is that it's truly how today again the sole remaining prohibition has to do with children. Child sexuality is... this is why child molestation is today almost the highest crime. It's very easy... I think the best way to do an analysis of an epoch is to see what are the ultimate forms of evil in that epoch, no? One is again, child molestation. Now, of course, when it really happens as rape, Catholic priests and so on, I am against it. I just want to draw attention to the fact that how this changed. I remember when I was young, '60s early '70s, hippie movement revolution. At that point it was the opposite. I remember in communes all around Europe the whole point was to not only to reassert child sexuality but even argue that it's part of good education that parents should play sexual games with their own children. I remember, maybe you remember it if you are old enough, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the great figure of May '68 who is now member of European Parliament and so on even... In an interview from that time he said that as a young student he worked in a kindergarten where to relax the attitude he softly marched to the... wait small girls there preschool and they masturbated him and that it worked nicely and so on. Imagine some guy from kindergarten were to say this today. Now let's go a step further. Why? Why is infantile sexuality prohibited? Why are children as it were presumed innocent? What is so difficult for us to grasp, to accept in infantile sexuality? I think it's two features which are of course two sides, two aspects of the same coin. Incidentally I rely here partially to my Slovene friend, the greatest Lacanian I claim, Alenka Zupančič who wrote... who is now writing a book on Freudian sexuality and philosophy. First, are we aware what a strange thing infantile sexuality is? It's a weird entity which is neither biologically grounded... it's unnatural. Sorry, by unnatural I mean normal straight sexuality is allegedly biologically grounded, no? We copulate children and so on. But child sexuality is one big epistemological mess. It comes from this uncertainty 'where do children come from?' It's basically an epistemological category. So it's neither biologically grounded... biologically grounded is if you... we can say this at all, it's so-called straight normal sexuality... nor is it part of our symbolic cultural norms. So it's neither natural nor cultural. And now comes the really strange thing about it. The Lacanian pupil, half Lacanian, he turned later against him but he's quite good theorist, Jean Laplanche, put this nicely when he says, I quote from Laplanche's essays on otherness: '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 in such a way that at the time it emerges instinctual sexuality which is adaptive [so-called normal sexuality with the function of procreation] finds the seat already taken by infantile drives.' Now why? and the reason for this is the link between sexuality and cognition. Infantile sexuality is always linked with this... with this desire to know, cognitive probing 'where do children come from, what's the mystery of sexuality' and so on and so on. Again this is the first paradox of infantile sexuality. Why at all there? Again it has no adaptive... we find something which is from the standpoint of adaptive behavior, reproduction and so on, totally unnecessary. It's again totally useless unnecessary, a kind of excess from the standpoint of adaptive behavior, plus it's not part of our cultural identity. On the contrary, it's prohibited. Now next thing where... which is missed even by people who usually support or elaborate infantile sexuality, is that it is not enough to assert infantile sexuality as the plural multiplicity 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 base of sexuality which is then oppressed totalized regulated by the genital norm. You know this is vaguely the Deleuzian and of some others' view that infantile sexuality is this pre-Oedipal paradise multiplicity of drives inconsistent polymorphous domain of freedom and then bad Oedipus comes totalizes it, subordinates it to genital heterosexual norm and so on and so on. I think we should reject this view. Sexuality, that's at least the Lacanian view to which I subscribe, sexuality is defined by the fact that there is no sexual relationship. And polymorphous perverse play of partial drives only takes place against the background of this impossibility or antagonism. Sexual act, copulation, has thus two sides. On the one hand there is the orgasmic culminating moment of sexuality. On the other side there is a deadlock of impossibility. It is in performing the act of copulation that the subject experiences this impossibility. Which is why we need fantasies, fantasies which are usually fantasies linked to polymorphous pre-genital perverse drives to do it at all, to be able as it were to be able to perform. What does this mean? Again what is fantasy? The original site of fantasy for Freud already is that of a small child overhearing or witnessing parental coitus and unable to make sense of it. What does all this mean? What are my parents doing? and so on. So you fantasize. Now you know all for example, you know all that what Freud called infantile sexual theories, how children are made and so on and so on. Now you will say okay, this is a phase for children, but once you grow up you simply discover what it's all about, how you make love and you no longer need all these fantasies. The basic insight of Freud and of Lacan is that with regard to sexuality we are never... we never reach maturity. No matter how adult we are, we always need something that fits the role of infantile sexuality, some... some type of crazy fantasy which sustains our sexual activity. What do I mean by this? I remember, maybe you know the story I'm sorry if I repeat myself... I remember from my youth I think it was Der Stern, the German weekly magazine, published in its summer edition a primitive caricature, drawings of four-five men who are asked in a mock interview 'What do you dream, what do you want to do, what do you plan to do during the following holiday... during summer holidays?' And then you have answers for them. One said, 'Oh I want to just read good books.' Another guy said, 'I want to spend my time on the beach.' The third guy says, 'I want to visit some eccentric country.' And then to mock them you know, while a man five-six of them is saying this, with each of them you have like in... in comic books this cloud which shows what they really mean want to do. Of course in every cloud there is a naked woman, you know. Now I claim this is theoretically wrong. If anything the lesson of Freud is the exact opposite. Probably in our male chauvinist permissive times every man would have answered if he is not gay something like 'Oh I want to whatever screw women.' But the secret would be precisely what fantasmatic support does he imagine. You know, one would like to do it I don't know... there are men whom I know whose idea is, and it's almost I like it a beautiful dream... it is that... that the woman should feign indifference. For example woman leans forward on her knees and is reading a book while you do bam-bam from behind. What find... what is attractive is the idea that woman ignores it, you know, that she is reading a book and I had a friend who even found it the most sexual thing where you are all sweating, the man behind doing your work, and then the woman asks you something like, 'Oh my God that's a nice thought here in Heidegger, have you any idea how you...' So, you know, others they want to do it on a beach, on an exotic... The lesson of all this you see is that the infantile fantasies never disappear. What Lacan means by 'There is no sexual relationship' is precisely this, that we never grow mature. Up to the end sex needs a fantasmatic support. It's never just you and your partner. That's the first point. And even when you know how it is done, then something happens when you are adult, which is best exemplified by what happened when I was young to a friend of mine. I love this, it's a beautiful thing. It's of course nonsense story, but the logic it's the right one. This guy finally learned that you do... in order to get children you have to copulate, perform sexual act. But at the same time he was a little bit spiritual Christian, he couldn't accept it that something so vulgar, sweating bodies there doing those stupid repetitive movements, how can out of that something so noble as a child emerge. He said nonetheless, 'So it must be true that something like a stork brings the child,' no? and then he invented a wonderful myth bringing the two together. 'Yes, you have to make love to produce a child. But you have to do it beautifully gently because while you make love the stork is observing you. And if you impress her by doing it nicely, the stork brings you the child,' you know. I mean this is how our sexuality... this is how our sexuality effectively functions. So what this means... ah now I come to my Lacanian point... is that we should reject the predominant view according to which hegemonic ideology in all its aspects, social, legal, economic, ethical, religious, privileges natural sexuality, the standard reproductive copulation and tries to repress or suppress the polymorphous perverse sexuality of partial drives, which is considered asocial dangerous and it's tolerated only as a subordinate preparatory moment of the normal sexual act, like fondling, kissing as a foreplay and so on. The best argument against this predominant view is the history of the greatest advocate of this view, of Christianity. Here is an important passage but always ignored from Jacques Lacan from his Encore, Seminar on feminine sexuality. I quote it: '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 incorporated. [Wait, oral drive!] The means of communion is incorporation with which Christ's wife the church 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. And you can lend credence to the testimony of someone who has just come back from an orgy of churches in Italy but without copulation.' End of quote. So Lacan is very clear here. One should reject the endlessly repeated critical thesis that the Catholic sexual morality 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, we should insist that there is nothing necessarily asocial in partial drives. They function as the glue of society. They are the very stuff of communion. In contrast to the heterosexual couple which is, as Freud emphasizes, effectively asocial, isolating itself the couple from its community and is therefore distrusted by church and by army. Let's recall that Freud's two models of crowd, of social link as an amorphous crowd, church, army, both precisely exclude heterosexual link. It's just gang-rapes and so on. Let me quote Freud here: 'Directly sexual tendencies are unfavorable to the formation of groups. The love relation between men and women remains outside this social organization. Even where groups are formed which are composed of both men and women, the distinction between sexes plays no part.' Or to quote Alenka Zupančič's commentary of this: 'Natural copulation is utterly banned from the Christian religious imaginary.' For example, but which are full of this pre-genital sexuality. For example images of canonized saints eating the excrements of another person and so on and so on. So the idea is this one, that if you look at the imaginary field of all already medieval Christian mythology, what saints are doing and so on, it's a brutal intrusion precisely of pre-genital partial drives. The prohibited thing is precisely copulation. Why? Why does the church admit or celebrate precisely these allegedly perverse partial drives and prohibits, elevating it even in the ultimate scene if it's not done within marriage, why does it repress copulation? Here we should make just the last step. I claim that here we have another problem even with Hegel, namely why is Christianity... Lacan made this point nicely... why is sexuality so traumatic for Christianity? Lacan spells out the secret. It's not that because we have a big struggle between spirituality of belief and brutal bodily satisfaction, lust. No. Christianity is prohibited precisely because it's on its own too spiritual, too metaphysical even. Because what does sexuality mean? Passionate love, Tristan and so on. It's precisely the elementary form of metaphysics, of moving beyond natural needs of copulation and so on and so on. This is why Freud focuses on sexuality, not because it's the most natural thing about us but because there as it were metaphysics begin. In what sense? Just imagine, it's a very stupid example. Imagine that you live like a human animal, you have a nice time and so on and then you got obsessed by sexual passion. It's exactly the same as a metaphysical passion. All your daily rhythms, biorhythms are perturbed, you are obsessed by a properly metaphysical idea, an idea which totally disturbs your normal biorhythm and so on and so on. So in hating, in oppressing sexuality Christianity fights its internal enemy. It's not that sexuality is too bodily immediate. No, it's that precisely sexuality is too metaphysical. Christianity allows for sexuality, people tend to neglect this, even in paradise. In paradise as Saint Augustine knew it well, you have sex, but it's common natural sex. He says, Augustine, then, 'Of course Adam and Eve were doing certain things in paradise.' But he claims it didn't have this excessive passionate element. He says erection was not this excessive uncontrollable thing. He says that for Adam to get an erection was just the same act at your disposal as raising your hand. You know you did it just as another job. And then Augustine incidentally, you must read this, it's in De nuptiis et concupiscentia, his work on sexuality, short text where in a wonderful way he develops how sexuality proper is not sin, but it's a punishment for our sin. The idea is this one, that by eating from the tree of knowledge Adam wanted to be like gods, you know, like know too much and so on, be master of the universe. So God punished him, how? By exempting from man's power the one organ: penis. He says literally, Augustine quotes some example of Hindu saints who can control even their heartbeat and so on, but he says but we cannot control our penis. I mean it can rise when you don't want to, when you desperately want to it doesn't. And he says this is divine intervention to remind us 'Who are you to be like me when you don't control even elements in your own house as it were.' So again the problem is arrogance to be like God. And it would be wonderful, I don't have time now, to provide a Freudian reading of the Bible along these lines. For example already Hegel drew attention to one contradiction, inconsistency which is crucial. You know what happens with the fall? On the one hand, you know the idea is that as a punishment for eating from the tree of knowledge and so on, it says in the Bible that Adam became mortal, has to work and so on, so is the fall from immortality to mortality. But at the same time the reproach is that Adam ate from the tree of knowledge because he wants to become more than natural like... it gets much more complex. So again, what I want to say here is that... that's... you know, the lesson is this one, that we have something maybe, I'm even not sure about that, we have something like natural sexuality maybe with animals. But then, and here Hegel is too short... why? because Hegel's description of sexuality is still that there is natural sexuality like just you know copulation, you follow your instincts like every I don't know when animals copulate whatever and then we humans civilize it, culturalize it like if I want to sleep with a woman I just don't knock her down with a stone and do it, but I write poems, I invite whatever... like we do it with more civilized way. But Hegel I think is here not at his own level and so on. Because he should have known that there is something in between the two. What we try to culturalize through our symbolic practices of seduction is not natural sexuality. It's precisely that metaphysical excess of death drive, for example as in Tristan and Isolde, the night of the world, the end of all and so on and so on. There is and Kant himself also had a presentiment of this when he develops in his writings of education... they are wonderful... he says that there he provides this unique definition of human being. He says man is an animal who needs a master. Why? Then he goes into this that human... that human is an animal which has in excess for natural needs a kind of perverse Wildheit, wild height, a rage and so on which is totally uncontrollable, totally unnatural and this so the target of education is not our nature, our natural instincts but a weird denaturalized excess which is incidentally what Freud calls death drive and so on and so on. And now just to, if you allow me just to tiny little bit just to conclude, I claim that today, where we live today... it's a very contradictory time, it's a very general diagnosis but nonetheless. This wound of sexuality, this danger of sexuality, excess of sexuality, this radical negativity in sexuality, absolute passion, we try to control it more and more. And although we live in permissive times, it's effectively they are more and more oppressive times at the same time. Because you know to repeat my old joke like it's like that story that I always repeat, you know, you are... you know, you can have a beer but without alcohol, you can have coffee without caffeine and hell, you can have sex but it must be healthy sex and whatever and so on and so on. And I think the model of sex, I experienced it once... no don't be afraid I didn't do it I just read it... when I was flying across Atlantic in one of those, how is it called, Hemispheres or what, the journal you get there the review for United... United Airlines and it was a text praising sex. But you know how? it totally depressed me. It proved that we should make love as often as possible because it's good for our heart, it counts like training, it's better than jogging, then especially if you do it in different positions, your muscles will be well developed. And then the most depressive part: if you kiss a lot and do a lot of fellatio and cunnilingus it's a much greater chance that when you will be old saliva will not be dripping from your mouth. It's totally... you know that's totally totally depressing. So now the concluding moment. I claim that more and more we are libidinally, even if we do it with another partner, still the logic is more and more that of pre-genital partial drives. Which is why just a couple of points which maybe already know them I develop them all the time. Two features. First, first did you notice how more and more what is our everyday ideology? It's no longer that you know love is a good... you know this traditional. Okay, the original traditional one in Catholic Church was sex is okay if it's for procreation, you know, which incidentally always intrigued me. Because if you want to be a Christian it means you must be metaphysical. Copulation shouldn't be... if copulation is something spiritual it precisely shouldn't be just procreation. I mean I'm always tempted to say to a priest who gives me this bullshit that 'You know sex yes but for children', like 'Are you a vulgar materialist or what?' I mean, you know the the... Hegel knew this, that how you overcome biology: precisely that you take an activity which has a biological goal but you suspend that goal. You make it into a goal in itself. So again, it's interesting how today what is our predominant ideology? It's no longer mega-passionate affair. No. We are more and more... it's something like what I call ironically enlightened Western Buddhist hedonism, you know. 'Do it but first be creative, change partners, experiment, reinvent yourself' and then here I can quote Judith Butler, this performative enactment of our particular identity, the birth of authentic, not this politically correct shit, multiculturalism is... you know when at the beginning of Meditations, I don't know where, Descartes says, 'As a young boy I found foreign cultures strange, weird. But then I asked myself, what if from the foreigner's standpoint ours is all...' You know this, it's not enough to tolerate others. You have to experience the contingency of your own position. This was Descartes. So I never got this fury against Descartes, how everyone almost today... you know Descartes as absolute shared enemy of almost everyone today, you know, like Heidegger, Descartes, birth of modern subjectivism, name them: Habermas, Heidegger, too mono-, non-dialogical, we need community or whatever and so on and so on. No, I think that... I agree here on many points, I don't agree with him, but here I agree with Alain Badiou that three the three absolute philosophers in the history of philosophy are Plato, Descartes and Hegel. Why? Because they defined an entire epoch in a negative way. Apropos Descartes, Foucault said in a wonderful way, already early Foucault, that the entire philosophy, history of philosophy can be defined as a history of attempts to refute Descartes... sorry, Plato, no? and the same goes for the entire modern philosophy: different ways to screw Plato and 19th-20th century how to be anti-Hegelian. You know, and these are I think still the three great the three great guys. Maybe another one or... No, but what I also like about Nietzsche is he has this wonderful idea of unilateral gift, how to break out of... what he says about disarmament for example... and you know that Nietzsche whom all people usually take as 'Oh the philosopher of domination master,' no? He has some wonderful passages on how vulgar the idea of a master, how broken what a miserable entity you have to be if you have the need to dominate others and so on and so on, you know. You seem penetrated by Nietzsche to me. You mean this in a Deleuzian way? You know what I mean, you know Deleuze said that philosophy is anal penetration and so on. I do mean it that way. Okay, one more. Please. Isn't this Hegelian ontology of internal difference also open for other appropriations in the sense that how can there be any defense against the Hegelian who locates difference internally but locates the real of capital differently? Like for example in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Laclau says that you're incorrect to say that the real of capital is in the slums, in the favelas, right? He says that they're actually just the hotbed for radical for... like gangs and some other like activities, he says 'do your homework.' So how can you prove Laclau wrong? Right? Any recourse that you have would be towards... wouldn't it be reinscription into a big Other or reliance upon a certain rationalization? So how can this type of... if politics is to act without the big Other, how can we solve disputes of which acts are without the big Other, how can we solve the disputes of the real? Do you see? Yeah. I see. Okay, let me first answer to that slums and so on. I think I was just shocked when Ernesto when Laclau wrote that. I definitely don't mean to elevate slums into a privileged new revolutionary subject and so on. I'm just saying that it's to use Badiou's terms, one of the potential evental sites. I'm well aware I was there on the reality of slums, mostly either religious fundamentalists or mafia, gang-dominated, whatever. But first you know what a massive phenomenon slums are. I mean like one fifth of the people on our earth already are living on slums. And I think that to exclude them... but I think that the least you can say is that Ernesto's dismissing of slums for example... in Brazil they were furious when he said that. You know that... one of the most sublime resistance movements, Canudos in Brazil, South... no sorry, Bahia, Northern Brazil, the end of 19th century, a miracle happened. A guy called Conselheiro Antonio or whatever, kind of religious fanatic I admit leader, gathered people followers who constituted Canudos inside from Salvador, a city which I think had a couple of tens of thousands people, and it went on. All people from all around Brazil: bandits, women, I mean single women, they all came there and it worked for years and they bothered no one. And out of pure irrational violence Brazilian government sent the army and killed them all. And then Ernesto dismisses this as 'Oh they were religious fanatics' and so on, like our scum. No, even today they are mythical figure in... So, so first, I think Ernesto is too much excluding them. You know, in his last years Ernesto was for my taste a little bit too much obsessed by becoming the Argentinian state philosopher, you know. No it's not dismissal, I still appreciate him. What are you using to okay to to argue that like he's wrong that the slums actually have some potential? Fine, potential. But even to assert that, even to assert that don't you have to what are you relying upon to assert that? Some type of empirical theory? right some empiricism you're giving an empirical example? right which is fine but wouldn't that be to reinscribe into the big Other in that sense and thus to for-... Oh my God now we would have to go into into... If you raise the standard so high that every every listing of empirical arguments is reinscription into the great Other... But isn't that yours? that's your standard. Why? Why because isn't the political act precisely acting without a big Other? I mean that's what you write in In Defense of Lost Causes, right? That is a political... Maybe we would get lost today with this because you know things are much more complex in the sense that what does it mean act like the way you put it: acting without big Other means to be a self-murdering self-killing psychotic or whatever. I mean what I mean by there is no big Other is simply what Lacan calls like there is no Other of the Other, no transcendental guarantee contingency of the act and so on and so on. What I'm... but what for example let's go back to Buddhism. My problem with Buddhism is elsewhere but it's true that the same as Buddhism I also and I say this, it's with Hegel and with Lacan. Look, with Hegel we had it was even predominant for some time, the conservative Hegel. Hegel was read as a critic of this Western individualist liberalism, usually even some fascists like in Italy Giovanni Gentile and so on you have fascist Hegelians who read fascism,
Thank you very much. First, my of course instant reply to to Avital. I liked and it's very appropriate for an event taking place within a German department that he... how was it, he started it or what, no? I'm sure if Hitler were to be arrested in '45 and accused of crimes he would have said, 'No, the Jews started it,' you know and whatever. Another thing, I will also give now my compliment to Avital. You know, when I first met her and noticed her behavior, which sometimes reminds me of my own behavior, we... I was told by some friends that you know, this shouldn't distract you. Beneath all that sarcastic surface there is a warm human person. After knowing her I can guarantee it: there is no warm human person behind. He... she is what you see, you know. But now a more serious point to Avital. You know people often think why do we speak like this to each other and Avital... and I can tell you this. Look, there are ways... it's easy to speak... to be kind so that you speak kindly of a person. That's boring. You can be brutal and speak to a person in a brutal way. It's simple. Then you have the first inversion. British are... the British people are specialized in this, to humiliate someone but to do it in a very kind way. This is also... you just have to have some elementary clichés manners. But you know what we are doing: to humiliate each other in all possible ways but so that there is love beneath it that will... this is quite an art I think, no? and she is one of the few persons with whom I can do this. Okay, you mentioned the obscenities and so on. Unfortunately there will be only some of them at the end so let me go to it because I have some things which I consider, at least I do, important to say. Some minor stuff maybe I used already it in some other lectures but to my best knowledge not here in New York. So, Hegelian wound. I will believe with something that happened to me a couple of years ago in India, in New Delhi. We all spoke English there and then some postcolonial people from there complained like why do we speak English. They claimed the very fact of speaking English in India is a form of cultural colonialism which censors their own true identity. Their argument was something like, 'We have to speak in an imposed foreign language to express our inmost identity and does this not put us in a position of radical alienation? Even our resistance to colonization has to be formulated in the language of the colonizer.' Of course I exploded back. My first point and this is typical of big nations was that they treated me as if English is my native language, you know, as if for small shitty nations like mine, Slovene, it's normal that you are not allowed your language, no? But my basic reaction was a different one. Yes, you were imposed a foreign language, but this very... when you are colonized by a foreign language of course you experience this external imposition as a loss. Colonization being deprived of let's call it a true essence, I don't mean it in an essentialist nation, but like you are deprived of something and then you engage in decolonization, how to get your true identity back. But what I'm saying is that this very imposition of a foreign language, English in this case, created that very X, unknown quantity which was oppressed by it. That is to say, what when Indians feel oppressed, what... what is oppressed I claim is absolutely not the pre-colonial India. What they fight for is, let's call it and I totally support it of course, an authentic dream of a new universalist democratic India and this strictly emerged through colonization. The space for it was opened by colonization. So it is crucial to know... this is just a remark... that this role of English language was clearly perceived by many intellectuals especially among Dalits, the untouchables, among whom I have many friends, the lowest caste. A large section of Dalits, they still welcome English because their idea is that the English language is precisely because it's a foreign language, it provides a kind of a distance. For them it means a space not to feel entrapped into all the ancient hierarchies, castes and so on and so on. And I claim that this is a big lesson that we should learn today when we fight whatever remains of cultural and more and more economic colonization. Let me take a totally different example: Malcolm X. He was I claim following the same insight when he adopted X as his family name, Malcolm X. The point of choosing X and thereby signaling that the slave traders who brought the enslaved Africans from their homeland brutally deprived them of their ethnic roots and so on. X means we are deprived of our roots. The point with Malcolm X was not as in that stupid TV series to make you feel good liberal... it was very popular, Alex Haley who was the author, Roots, you remember. 'Let's search for our roots' and so on and so on. No, Malcolm X was well aware that this X signals on the one hand brutally being cut off, deprived from, but also the unique chance of freedom that this offers. He was fully aware of it. He was fully aware that every search for roots, like 'Oh let's go back' or 'Let's reconnect with our roots' is precisely what colonialists want. I claim that it's totally wrong to think that colonialism or today's post-neo-colonialism works as a... what some culture critics call this cheap consumerist Americanization, you know, like the colonizers wanted all us to be the way they are. No. If there is something they are afraid of, it's this. The first gesture of colonizers is always the message to local people and usually it is formed in this hypocritically respectful way: 'You have a wonderful authentic wise way of life, it's much wiser than our vulgar Western materialist imperialist culture.' Just look... they are wonderful reading... British colonial administrators, their memoirs of India. They are full of this bullshit, you know, like 'I learned from an ordinary poor Indian peasant more wisdom than from all Western managers' and so on and so on. And so I think that... don't also forget something that I remember from my youth: South Africa apartheid. You know, you should do something which not many people do: you should look a little bit into the official pro-apartheid literature. How did they justify apartheid? It was not 'Blacks are inferior'. No. It's of course it was hypocritical, but it's interesting what they said. They said something like, 'If we just introduce universal egalitarian democracy into South Africa, what will happen with all those Bushmen, Hottentots with their unique culture?' You know, they even like to evoke all this bullshit, you know, that 'When we Boers or Englishmen open up a mine, we just do it brutally. But when an African native mines into the earth or enters a mountain, he first asks the spirits of the mountain for permission' and so on, all that bullshit and so on. What I'm saying is that the first step of really fighting colonialism is to... I'm even tempted to say to treat them, the others, as ordinary dirty evil people as we are. You know, I think the most refined and disgusting form of colonialism today is that shitty fake respect which is I claim just inverted racism, you know, you know, in the sense of like celebrating Native Americans here, you know, like 'Oh my God,' again the same bullshit, you know. 'They speak with the spirit of the mountain, they don't just... they know that nature is their mother, they don't just exploit her' and so on. I totally understand some of my Native American, Indian I call them because they prefer this name... you must know my standing joke, you know. My... all my Native American friends hate the term Native American. They say, 'Ah if we are native you are cultural or what?' you know and they gave me an excellent argument to use the term Indian. They said, 'In this way our name is at least a tribute to white man's stupidity,' you know. 'They thought they are in India' and so on, you know. No, but you know one of them told me, 'I can prove you through historical writings that we did much more... we ruined much more nature than... we killed more buffaloes than one people, we burned more forests' and so on. But I understood them. They hate this patronizing respectful attitude. So, again, today more than ever I claim this is important, that of course to see how although colonialism was an extremely traumatic brutal wound, something which was undescribably brutal, but the solution is not to return back but precisely to see this deprivation, being deprived of ethnic roots and so on, as a unique chance of freedom, of opening. And among others for example as you probably know in South Africa, that was the whole policy of African National Congress. The one who was for identity politics, blacks should return to their own culture, was King Buthelezi who was on the payroll of the white regime of course, no? So what I want to say here is that this is how I read, I'm slowly coming to the title of my talk, this Hegelian wound. Wagner has this famous phrase towards the end of Parsifal, 'The wound can be healed only by the spear that smote it.' Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug. Which means the very disintegration of traditional forms of life opens up the space for liberation. Because again, I return to the case of India to make it clear. My point is that of course Indians want to get rid even today of the remainder of colonization. Of course they dream about something that they want to get back. But I claim what they want to return to has nothing to do with previous pre-colonial India. Now, I'm not saying that the pre-colonial India was neither a paradise nor a hell, but it was simply something outside of it. It was a vast complex network of different traditions, a heterogeneous mess. And so I claim that we should always again bear in mind, apropos decolonization, that what we are returning to it's always... it's something that emerges through this very return. It appears that we are returning to something but we are creating that something through the very return to it. Now I come slowly from here to Hegel, to what I consider one of Hegel's wonderful points. You know the thesis on Black Athens, Black Athena? The idea being that Hegel and others as Eurocentrists they were not aware how much the classical Greek culture borrowed from African and Oriental sources and so on. I mean did these guys read Hegel? Hegel not only knew it but emphasized it. Here is Hegel's surprising description of the ancient Greek, the great classical culture. I quote Hegel from his lectures on the history of fine arts. 'They certainly received the substantial beginnings of their religion, culture, and social relations more or less from Asia, Syria, and Egypt. But they have so very much obliterated (getilgt) the foreign aspect of this origin, transformed, reversed, and made it thoroughly different, that what they as we value, recognize, and love is essentially their own. They have so to speak ungratefully (undankbar) forgotten their foreign origin, put it in the background, perhaps burying it in the darkness of the mysteries which they have kept secret for even from even themselves. They have not only done this, they have not only used and enjoyed what they have brought before themselves and made from out of themselves, but they have become conscious of and gratefully and joyfully represented to themselves this at-homeness of their whole existence, their very own beginning and origin and so on and so on.' So Rebecca Comay, who wrote a wonderful book on Hegel and on whom I rely here, enumerated all the terms that Hegel uses for how ancient Greeks related to this... Asiatic and African cultures: conquering, then repressing (siegen, zurückdrängen), abolition (fortfallen), expunging (tilgen), annihilation (vertilgen), effacement (auslöschen), erasure (verwischen), stripping away (abstreifung), concealment (verstricken) and so on and so on. Now you will say but then doesn't this mean that Hegel simply thought yes, they got rid of all this shit to give birth to the noble Greek culture? No. We don't have time to go into it but just to intrigue you a little bit in Hegel. No, Hegel's point is here that this far from being something original like the miracle out of nowhere, this Greek miracle is an appearance of innocence and originality based on an extremely brutal repression which is even felt and then in a little bit naive way Hegel says that the fundamental feature of Greek statues is, which is in some naive way true even, at least from our later perspective, that their statues, the heads, have eyes but you don't feel the gaze in that eye. The object doesn't return the gaze. They do something what some later theorists, art theorist apropos Manet called 'looking without seeing.' And then Hegel claims... now this is nice point... because Hegel doesn't say yes, because we are naive at the beginning only afterwards all this comes, gaze... he says that this gaze is not simply absent from ancient Greek art, it's present in them as repressed (verdrängt), and he gives a wonderful example of that statue or mythical creature of Argos. You know, the disgusting divine figure with thousand eyes all around his body. And now you will say okay, but this is Oriental vulgarity. No, Hegel says... it's incredible... every work of art is in a way like this statue of Argos where every little piece of it, every surface is an eye staring back to you. And what I find so nice is that although Hegel still appears quite classicist like 'art is beautiful', but he evokes as a model of art some monstrously ugly figure. So let's go on. This brings us back to Wagner's Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug. Hegel's point if we generalize it is that we don't have some immediate naive beginning, that's the usual story of Hegel, no? you begin with some naive immediate beauty whatever and then you get alienation and so on and so on. No, the wound is at the beginning, a catastrophe. And then when things go on, you overcome the wound. You know Hegel's famous saying 'the spirit is strong enough to heal its own wounds.' But what Hegel is saying there is not the usual stupidity that spirit plays a game with itself, you know, you alienate yourself then you reappropriate your otherness. No, Hegel basically is saying that you heal the wound by reflectively recognizing the wound itself as its own solution. You just change your perspective and recognize again in the wound itself the solution. And we can immediately apply this to the example of India. Yes, the imposition of English language was the wound. But how do you fight it? Not by trying to return to some... to some pre-modern unity and so on, but fully endorsing accepting the wound in the sense of perceiving the... the liberating potential of the wound. And more generally, Hegel goes here to the end and elevates this paradox to the fundamental feature of subjectivity as such, subjectivity as self-consciousness. Let me quote a passage from... from... from Hegel's Phenomenology. It's incredible. I quote: 'Abstractly, being evil means singularizing myself in a way that cuts me off from the universal which is the rational, the law, the determinations of spirit. But along with this separation there arises being-for-itself and for the first time the universal spirituality, what ought to be. So it is not the case that rational consideration has an external relationship to evil. It is itself what is evil.' And Hegel's point is simply that... oh even he applies this even to... even to religion, that... Hegel is a great partisan of the fall. He claims that fall itself creates the good from which it is the fall. You don't have some even if it's only hypothetically presupposed, you don't have some goodness, paradise, whatever from which we fall. Fall itself creates that from which it is the fall. I don't have time to go with it but buy my next book Absolute Recoil where I develop this extensively with reference to Hegel's term absoluter Gegenstoß, absolute recoil. This means an entity for Hegel is... emerges as it were out of its own loss. Fall is not fall from good into evil. First, you first lose a thing and through its loss, you... the thing emerges from you and then you can try to... you can try to... to regain it. And again Hegel developed this but let's skip it now in detail apropos... apropos the fall, Adam and so on. Now let me go a step further and mention another notion which I think it's a beautiful notion from Kabbalah, first elaborated by the Kabbalic author, you know Isaac Luria, 16th century, the notion of broken vessel. You know the idea very briefly, God... no, it's a wonderful thought this Kabbalah, this part of Kabbalah, this so-called Lurianic Kabbalah. The idea is that first God was the infinite formless without purpose and so on, the pure energy. Then... and this all good theology at this moment... God doesn't directly create the world. First there must be a contraction. Like God must create first nothing in order to... to fill this nothing with something. But then, okay to go very quickly, the idea is that in this creation of external reality, there is the light of creation is too intense and the vessel, as the metaphor for the created universe, the vessel is shattered and then we humans should help God bringing it back together through our... through our spiritual exercises and so on and so on. Now the consequences of such an approach for literature were spelled out by Walter Benjamin in his early essay 'The Task of the Translator'. There Benjamin uses this Lurianic notion of the broken vessel to discern the inner working of a process of translation. Quote from Walter Benjamin: 'Just as fragments of a vessel in order to be articulated together must follow one another in the smallest detail but need not resemble one another, so instead of making itself similar to the meaning of the original, the translation must rather lovingly and in detail in its own language form itself according to the way of signifying of the original. To make both [both it means the original and the translation] recognizable as the broken parts of a greater language, just as fragments are broken parts of a vessel.' Are you aware what Benjamin is saying here? To put it in a simplified way, he transposes translation from metaphor into metonymy. Usually we conceive translation as a metaphoric substitute of the original. We have the original which is the real thing and then the translation should recapture as much as possible the spirit of the original. But for Benjamin, and that's the meaning of the idea of broken vessel here, original and translation are both fragments. They are put at the same level. So in a great... in a good translation, the point is not to be as similar as possible to recapture the spirit of the original, but precisely again to treat the original as a fragment and then to fill in precisely if you want what is already missing in the original, so that translation original and other translations together form some kind of totality. In other words, the gap that in the traditional view separates the original from its always imperfect translation is transposed back into the original itself. The original itself is already the fragment of a broken vessel. So that the goal of the translation is not to achieve fidelity to the original, but to supplement the original, to treat the original as a broken fragment and to produce another fragment which again will not imitate the original but will fit it as one... as a fragment of a broken whole may fit another. What this means is a very nice paradox is that... already the... what this means is that a good translation as it were breaks the vessel even more. Because before translation you think the original is it, what we have. But a good translation retroactively devalues the original, makes you aware of how original itself is already a fragment. And now to make this clear I want to give you two other examples of the same procedure. They concern not a translation but something that I always love in works of art. You know you find it, it's fashionable for the last years, the stagings of great operas where you just change the narrative a little bit. I claim if you really do it in a good way, it's precisely like another fragment of a broken vessel. The original appears to you in a totally different way. For example, my... one of my examples that I like is you can get it on DVDs. Peter Sellars, already some years ago, he staged the three great Mozart operas: Così fan tutte, Figaro, and Don Giovanni, but without changing any notes or libretto, he changed just a little bit as for example... I hope you know the story so that I don't lose time telling it... in Così fan tutte, you know that Don Alfonso the philosopher and Despina... I think it's Despina, the poor servant girl... Despina is usually presented as just flirtatious lower-class... Peter Sellars in a real stroke of a genius, he staged it so that it looks that the true traumatic love is between philosopher Alfonso and poor Despina. And because the two of them cannot enact their love they play all the games with other couples. This is the tragic couple. Or such other small changes. For example I always quote it in my books. Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's version of Tristan where in the last act Tristan dies alone. I mean for Isolde this was a night adventure then let him die. Why should she join him, no? She was pardoned by her father and all that happens at the end of Wagner's opera especially... you know Tristan dying but then in the last minute Isolde comes and is just the imagination of dying Tristan. And I think that... there is even another example more modest... it's not a great book but it's readable. It was published a couple of years ago by Farrar, Straus and so on... Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey. It's a... again readable variation on the official story. You find for example in one of the variations old Odysseus visited Troy and finds that there is a whole cultural industry there already, you know. They are selling fragments of the... of the... of the... arrow by which Paris killed Achilles and tell the stories and Odysseus intervenes there, 'No, you got it wrong' and they laugh at him, 'Oh idiot you don't get it' and so on. And then in another version when he, Odysseus, returns to Ithaca he finds that his wife Penelope is happily married with the new guy and he says 'Why should I disturb this?' and gracefully he withdraws and so on. So what's my point here? My point is that... I'm not saying... you see, this is my point... I'm not saying that this is better than the original, some repressed truth. No. What I'm saying is that this is a Benjaminian approach. To... the true lesson is that in order to get what Ulysses, Odyssey is about, you have to superimpose all these stories, all the variants. The point is not to reconstruct the original story but to read all these variations as equal. And now if you are good God-fearing Christians I will give you the ultimate example: the seven last words of Christ, you know: 'Father forgive them for they know not what they do,' then 'Truly I say to you today you will be with me in paradise,' and so on and so on, you know them. 'My God why have you forsaken me,' 'It is finished,' 'Father into your hands I commit my spirit,' then 'I thirst, I'm thirsty,' and so on. Now the most stupid thing you can do here is what the two great artists do, one more disgusting than other: Franco Zeffirelli and Mel Gibson. They try to reconstruct a whole narrative so that somehow all these words are spoken, no? and the result is so vulgar. Like you have Christ says, I forgot in which movie, 'My God why have you forsaken me' and then as if part of this being forsaken is 'Hmm I'm so thirsty' and then they give him to drink and then says 'Okay now I feel better, now it is finished, I commit myself to my'... you know it's total stupidity. The whole point is that they should be as it were superimposed, you know. It's wrong to ask but what is the real word. And this perhaps I claim is the ultimate lesson of Christianity, that precisely to celebrate the breaking of the vessel. In the sense that all you can get is superimposed fragments. Okay, this is the first introductory part. Now comes the surprise. Out of this I will try to apply the lesson of all this: wound as a redeeming wound. And... and... and you know where I see, okay to give you another example why am I a totally atheist Christian? You know in what sense Christ brings freedom? I think the only way to understood it is in this way. You are desperate. Christ was crucified, you are alone, you cannot count on divine help. I follow Hegel here: what dies on the cross is not just God, it's not just the son of God, it's God himself. Crucifixion means there is no higher power pulling the strings secretly. It means we are left to ourselves. And you said 'It's horrible, we are alone,' blah blah. Yeah but that's the freedom that God gave us. You see, to see the very thing that appears as catastrophe as the highest divine gift. Which is why I think the Bible is Hegelian, in what sense Hegelian. It's not that you have first bad news and then good news. No. The message of Christ: you think these are bad news, look again and you will see that this very news is good news. Like 'I die, I erase myself.' It's bad news? Yes, but it's your freedom, you cannot rely on me. It's good news. So what does this mean? Ah, now comes a little bit now to repay you for your patience with this more boring part. Now we go into sex and obscenity. I claim that it's only against this Hegelian background that we can really understand, and I say this consciously against the predominant fashion according to which you know Freud is passé, you know, like 'Who needs Freud today, we live in permissive times, everything is permitted, you can do whatever you want' and so on and so on. I claim that no, the key element of Freudian discovery is now oppressed more than ever: infantile sexuality. I... and this happened in the last years. I think this is the truth of our permissiveness. How yes, you can do whatever you want with cats, with dogs, with I don't know sex I mean, but children are out. This figure of an innocent child who shouldn't be corrupted with sexuality returned in a forceful way. I even think that even movies like Home Alone are part of this reactionary mythology, you know, because the small kid there is all-powerful because he is pre-sexual, this pure monster and so on. So... I incidentally when I was... when I went to cinema years ago to see Home Alone and I was always on the side of the two bad guys. I would like so much for them to just squash that creep. But what I wanted to say is that it's truly how today again the sole remaining prohibition has to do with children. Child sexuality is... this is why child molestation is today almost the highest crime. It's very easy... I think the best way to do an analysis of an epoch is to see what are the ultimate forms of evil in that epoch, no? One is again, child molestation. Now, of course, when it really happens as rape, Catholic priests and so on, I am against it. I just want to draw attention to the fact that how this changed. I remember when I was young, '60s early '70s, hippie movement revolution. At that point it was the opposite. I remember in communes all around Europe the whole point was to not only to reassert child sexuality but even argue that it's part of good education that parents should play sexual games with their own children. I remember, maybe you remember it if you are old enough, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the great figure of May '68 who is now member of European Parliament and so on even... In an interview from that time he said that as a young student he worked in a kindergarten where to relax the attitude he softly marched to the... wait small girls there preschool and they masturbated him and that it worked nicely and so on. Imagine some guy from kindergarten were to say this today. Now let's go a step further. Why? Why is infantile sexuality prohibited? Why are children as it were presumed innocent? What is so difficult for us to grasp, to accept in infantile sexuality? I think it's two features which are of course two sides, two aspects of the same coin. Incidentally I rely here partially to my Slovene friend, the greatest Lacanian I claim, Alenka Zupančič who wrote... who is now writing a book on Freudian sexuality and philosophy. First, are we aware what a strange thing infantile sexuality is? It's a weird entity which is neither biologically grounded... it's unnatural. Sorry, by unnatural I mean normal straight sexuality is allegedly biologically grounded, no? We copulate children and so on. But child sexuality is one big epistemological mess. It comes from this uncertainty 'where do children come from?' It's basically an epistemological category. So it's neither biologically grounded... biologically grounded is if you... we can say this at all, it's so-called straight normal sexuality... nor is it part of our symbolic cultural norms. So it's neither natural nor cultural. And now comes the really strange thing about it. The Lacanian pupil, half Lacanian, he turned later against him but he's quite good theorist, Jean Laplanche, put this nicely when he says, I quote from Laplanche's essays on otherness: '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 in such a way that at the time it emerges instinctual sexuality which is adaptive [so-called normal sexuality with the function of procreation] finds the seat already taken by infantile drives.' Now why? and the reason for this is the link between sexuality and cognition. Infantile sexuality is always linked with this... with this desire to know, cognitive probing 'where do children come from, what's the mystery of sexuality' and so on and so on. Again this is the first paradox of infantile sexuality. Why at all there? Again it has no adaptive... we find something which is from the standpoint of adaptive behavior, reproduction and so on, totally unnecessary. It's again totally useless unnecessary, a kind of excess from the standpoint of adaptive behavior, plus it's not part of our cultural identity. On the contrary, it's prohibited. Now next thing where... which is missed even by people who usually support or elaborate infantile sexuality, is that it is not enough to assert infantile sexuality as the plural multiplicity 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 base of sexuality which is then oppressed totalized regulated by the genital norm. You know this is vaguely the Deleuzian and of some others' view that infantile sexuality is this pre-Oedipal paradise multiplicity of drives inconsistent polymorphous domain of freedom and then bad Oedipus comes totalizes it, subordinates it to genital heterosexual norm and so on and so on. I think we should reject this view. Sexuality, that's at least the Lacanian view to which I subscribe, sexuality is defined by the fact that there is no sexual relationship. And polymorphous perverse play of partial drives only takes place against the background of this impossibility or antagonism. Sexual act, copulation, has thus two sides. On the one hand there is the orgasmic culminating moment of sexuality. On the other side there is a deadlock of impossibility. It is in performing the act of copulation that the subject experiences this impossibility. Which is why we need fantasies, fantasies which are usually fantasies linked to polymorphous pre-genital perverse drives to do it at all, to be able as it were to be able to perform. What does this mean? Again what is fantasy? The original site of fantasy for Freud already is that of a small child overhearing or witnessing parental coitus and unable to make sense of it. What does all this mean? What are my parents doing? and so on. So you fantasize. Now you know all for example, you know all that what Freud called infantile sexual theories, how children are made and so on and so on. Now you will say okay, this is a phase for children, but once you grow up you simply discover what it's all about, how you make love and you no longer need all these fantasies. The basic insight of Freud and of Lacan is that with regard to sexuality we are never... we never reach maturity. No matter how adult we are, we always need something that fits the role of infantile sexuality, some... some type of crazy fantasy which sustains our sexual activity. What do I mean by this? I remember, maybe you know the story I'm sorry if I repeat myself... I remember from my youth I think it was Der Stern, the German weekly magazine, published in its summer edition a primitive caricature, drawings of four-five men who are asked in a mock interview 'What do you dream, what do you want to do, what do you plan to do during the following holiday... during summer holidays?' And then you have answers for them. One said, 'Oh I want to just read good books.' Another guy said, 'I want to spend my time on the beach.' The third guy says, 'I want to visit some eccentric country.' And then to mock them you know, while a man five-six of them is saying this, with each of them you have like in... in comic books this cloud which shows what they really mean want to do. Of course in every cloud there is a naked woman, you know. Now I claim this is theoretically wrong. If anything the lesson of Freud is the exact opposite. Probably in our male chauvinist permissive times every man would have answered if he is not gay something like 'Oh I want to whatever screw women.' But the secret would be precisely what fantasmatic support does he imagine. You know, one would like to do it I don't know... there are men whom I know whose idea is, and it's almost I like it a beautiful dream... it is that... that the woman should feign indifference. For example woman leans forward on her knees and is reading a book while you do bam-bam from behind. What find... what is attractive is the idea that woman ignores it, you know, that she is reading a book and I had a friend who even found it the most sexual thing where you are all sweating, the man behind doing your work, and then the woman asks you something like, 'Oh my God that's a nice thought here in Heidegger, have you any idea how you...' So, you know, others they want to do it on a beach, on an exotic... The lesson of all this you see is that the infantile fantasies never disappear. What Lacan means by 'There is no sexual relationship' is precisely this, that we never grow mature. Up to the end sex needs a fantasmatic support. It's never just you and your partner. That's the first point. And even when you know how it is done, then something happens when you are adult, which is best exemplified by what happened when I was young to a friend of mine. I love this, it's a beautiful thing. It's of course nonsense story, but the logic it's the right one. This guy finally learned that you do... in order to get children you have to copulate, perform sexual act. But at the same time he was a little bit spiritual Christian, he couldn't accept it that something so vulgar, sweating bodies there doing those stupid repetitive movements, how can out of that something so noble as a child emerge. He said nonetheless, 'So it must be true that something like a stork brings the child,' no? and then he invented a wonderful myth bringing the two together. 'Yes, you have to make love to produce a child. But you have to do it beautifully gently because while you make love the stork is observing you. And if you impress her by doing it nicely, the stork brings you the child,' you know. I mean this is how our sexuality... this is how our sexuality effectively functions. So what this means... ah now I come to my Lacanian point... is that we should reject the predominant view according to which hegemonic ideology in all its aspects, social, legal, economic, ethical, religious, privileges natural sexuality, the standard reproductive copulation and tries to repress or suppress the polymorphous perverse sexuality of partial drives, which is considered asocial dangerous and it's tolerated only as a subordinate preparatory moment of the normal sexual act, like fondling, kissing as a foreplay and so on. The best argument against this predominant view is the history of the greatest advocate of this view, of Christianity. Here is an important passage but always ignored from Jacques Lacan from his Encore, Seminar on feminine sexuality. I quote it: '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 incorporated. [Wait, oral drive!] The means of communion is incorporation with which Christ's wife the church 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. And you can lend credence to the testimony of someone who has just come back from an orgy of churches in Italy but without copulation.' End of quote. So Lacan is very clear here. One should reject the endlessly repeated critical thesis that the Catholic sexual morality 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, we should insist that there is nothing necessarily asocial in partial drives. They function as the glue of society. They are the very stuff of communion. In contrast to the heterosexual couple which is, as Freud emphasizes, effectively asocial, isolating itself the couple from its community and is therefore distrusted by church and by army. Let's recall that Freud's two models of crowd, of social link as an amorphous crowd, church, army, both precisely exclude heterosexual link. It's just gang-rapes and so on. Let me quote Freud here: 'Directly sexual tendencies are unfavorable to the formation of groups. The love relation between men and women remains outside this social organization. Even where groups are formed which are composed of both men and women, the distinction between sexes plays no part.' Or to quote Alenka Zupančič's commentary of this: 'Natural copulation is utterly banned from the Christian religious imaginary.' For example, but which are full of this pre-genital sexuality. For example images of canonized saints eating the excrements of another person and so on and so on. So the idea is this one, that if you look at the imaginary field of all already medieval Christian mythology, what saints are doing and so on, it's a brutal intrusion precisely of pre-genital partial drives. The prohibited thing is precisely copulation. Why? Why does the church admit or celebrate precisely these allegedly perverse partial drives and prohibits, elevating it even in the ultimate scene if it's not done within marriage, why does it repress copulation? Here we should make just the last step. I claim that here we have another problem even with Hegel, namely why is Christianity... Lacan made this point nicely... why is sexuality so traumatic for Christianity? Lacan spells out the secret. It's not that because we have a big struggle between spirituality of belief and brutal bodily satisfaction, lust. No. Christianity is prohibited precisely because it's on its own too spiritual, too metaphysical even. Because what does sexuality mean? Passionate love, Tristan and so on. It's precisely the elementary form of metaphysics, of moving beyond natural needs of copulation and so on and so on. This is why Freud focuses on sexuality, not because it's the most natural thing about us but because there as it were metaphysics begin. In what sense? Just imagine, it's a very stupid example. Imagine that you live like a human animal, you have a nice time and so on and then you got obsessed by sexual passion. It's exactly the same as a metaphysical passion. All your daily rhythms, biorhythms are perturbed, you are obsessed by a properly metaphysical idea, an idea which totally disturbs your normal biorhythm and so on and so on. So in hating, in oppressing sexuality Christianity fights its internal enemy. It's not that sexuality is too bodily immediate. No, it's that precisely sexuality is too metaphysical. Christianity allows for sexuality, people tend to neglect this, even in paradise. In paradise as Saint Augustine knew it well, you have sex, but it's common natural sex. He says, Augustine, then, 'Of course Adam and Eve were doing certain things in paradise.' But he claims it didn't have this excessive passionate element. He says erection was not this excessive uncontrollable thing. He says that for Adam to get an erection was just the same act at your disposal as raising your hand. You know you did it just as another job. And then Augustine incidentally, you must read this, it's in De nuptiis et concupiscentia, his work on sexuality, short text where in a wonderful way he develops how sexuality proper is not sin, but it's a punishment for our sin. The idea is this one, that by eating from the tree of knowledge Adam wanted to be like gods, you know, like know too much and so on, be master of the universe. So God punished him, how? By exempting from man's power the one organ: penis. He says literally, Augustine quotes some example of Hindu saints who can control even their heartbeat and so on, but he says but we cannot control our penis. I mean it can rise when you don't want to, when you desperately want to it doesn't. And he says this is divine intervention to remind us 'Who are you to be like me when you don't control even elements in your own house as it were.' So again the problem is arrogance to be like God. And it would be wonderful, I don't have time now, to provide a Freudian reading of the Bible along these lines. For example already Hegel drew attention to one contradiction, inconsistency which is crucial. You know what happens with the fall? On the one hand, you know the idea is that as a punishment for eating from the tree of knowledge and so on, it says in the Bible that Adam became mortal, has to work and so on, so is the fall from immortality to mortality. But at the same time the reproach is that Adam ate from the tree of knowledge because he wants to become more than natural like... it gets much more complex. So again, what I want to say here is that... that's... you know, the lesson is this one, that we have something maybe, I'm even not sure about that, we have something like natural sexuality maybe with animals. But then, and here Hegel is too short... why? because Hegel's description of sexuality is still that there is natural sexuality like just you know copulation, you follow your instincts like every I don't know when animals copulate whatever and then we humans civilize it, culturalize it like if I want to sleep with a woman I just don't knock her down with a stone and do it, but I write poems, I invite whatever... like we do it with more civilized way. But Hegel I think is here not at his own level and so on. Because he should have known that there is something in between the two. What we try to culturalize through our symbolic practices of seduction is not natural sexuality. It's precisely that metaphysical excess of death drive, for example as in Tristan and Isolde, the night of the world, the end of all and so on and so on. There is and Kant himself also had a presentiment of this when he develops in his writings of education... they are wonderful... he says that there he provides this unique definition of human being. He says man is an animal who needs a master. Why? Then he goes into this that human... that human is an animal which has in excess for natural needs a kind of perverse Wildheit, wild height, a rage and so on which is totally uncontrollable, totally unnatural and this so the target of education is not our nature, our natural instincts but a weird denaturalized excess which is incidentally what Freud calls death drive and so on and so on. And now just to, if you allow me just to tiny little bit just to conclude, I claim that today, where we live today... it's a very contradictory time, it's a very general diagnosis but nonetheless. This wound of sexuality, this danger of sexuality, excess of sexuality, this radical negativity in sexuality, absolute passion, we try to control it more and more. And although we live in permissive times, it's effectively they are more and more oppressive times at the same time. Because you know to repeat my old joke like it's like that story that I always repeat, you know, you are... you know, you can have a beer but without alcohol, you can have coffee without caffeine and hell, you can have sex but it must be healthy sex and whatever and so on and so on. And I think the model of sex, I experienced it once... no don't be afraid I didn't do it I just read it... when I was flying across Atlantic in one of those, how is it called, Hemispheres or what, the journal you get there the review for United... United Airlines and it was a text praising sex. But you know how? it totally depressed me. It proved that we should make love as often as possible because it's good for our heart, it counts like training, it's better than jogging, then especially if you do it in different positions, your muscles will be well developed. And then the most depressive part: if you kiss a lot and do a lot of fellatio and cunnilingus it's a much greater chance that when you will be old saliva will not be dripping from your mouth. It's totally... you know that's totally totally depressing. So now the concluding moment. I claim that more and more we are libidinally, even if we do it with another partner, still the logic is more and more that of pre-genital partial drives. Which is why just a couple of points which maybe already know them I develop them all the time. Two features. First, first did you notice how more and more what is our everyday ideology? It's no longer that you know love is a good... you know this traditional. Okay, the original traditional one in Catholic Church was sex is okay if it's for procreation, you know, which incidentally always intrigued me. Because if you want to be a Christian it means you must be metaphysical. Copulation shouldn't be... if copulation is something spiritual it precisely shouldn't be just procreation. I mean I'm always tempted to say to a priest who gives me this bullshit that 'You know sex yes but for children', like 'Are you a vulgar materialist or what?' I mean, you know the the... Hegel knew this, that how you overcome biology: precisely that you take an activity which has a biological goal but you suspend that goal. You make it into a goal in itself. So again, it's interesting how today what is our predominant ideology? It's no longer mega-passionate affair. No. We are more and more... it's something like what I call ironically enlightened Western Buddhist hedonism, you know. 'Do it but first be creative, change partners, experiment, reinvent yourself' and then here I can quote Judith Butler, this performative enactment of our particular identity, the birth of authentic, not this politically correct shit, multiculturalism is... you know when at the beginning of Meditations, I don't know where, Descartes says, 'As a young boy I found foreign cultures strange, weird. But then I asked myself, what if from the foreigner's standpoint ours is all...' You know this, it's not enough to tolerate others. You have to experience the contingency of your own position. This was Descartes. So I never got this fury against Descartes, how everyone almost today... you know Descartes as absolute shared enemy of almost everyone today, you know, like Heidegger, Descartes, birth of modern subjectivism, name them: Habermas, Heidegger, too mono-, non-dialogical, we need community or whatever and so on and so on. No, I think that... I agree here on many points, I don't agree with him, but here I agree with Alain Badiou that three the three absolute philosophers in the history of philosophy are Plato, Descartes and Hegel. Why? Because they defined an entire epoch in a negative way. Apropos Descartes, Foucault said in a wonderful way, already early Foucault, that the entire philosophy, history of philosophy can be defined as a history of attempts to refute Descartes... sorry, Plato, no? and the same goes for the entire modern philosophy: different ways to screw Plato and 19th-20th century how to be anti-Hegelian. You know, and these are I think still the three great the three great guys. Maybe another one or... No, but what I also like about Nietzsche is he has this wonderful idea of unilateral gift, how to break out of... what he says about disarmament for example... and you know that Nietzsche whom all people usually take as 'Oh the philosopher of domination master,' no? He has some wonderful passages on how vulgar the idea of a master, how broken what a miserable entity you have to be if you have the need to dominate others and so on and so on, you know. You seem penetrated by Nietzsche to me. You mean this in a Deleuzian way? You know what I mean, you know Deleuze said that philosophy is anal penetration and so on. I do mean it that way. Okay, one more. Please. Isn't this Hegelian ontology of internal difference also open for other appropriations in the sense that how can there be any defense against the Hegelian who locates difference internally but locates the real of capital differently? Like for example in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Laclau says that you're incorrect to say that the real of capital is in the slums, in the favelas, right? He says that they're actually just the hotbed for radical for... like gangs and some other like activities, he says 'do your homework.' So how can you prove Laclau wrong? Right? Any recourse that you have would be towards... wouldn't it be reinscription into a big Other or reliance upon a certain rationalization? So how can this type of... if politics is to act without the big Other, how can we solve disputes of which acts are without the big Other, how can we solve the disputes of the real? Do you see? Yeah. I see. Okay, let me first answer to that slums and so on. I think I was just shocked when Ernesto when Laclau wrote that. I definitely don't mean to elevate slums into a privileged new revolutionary subject and so on. I'm just saying that it's to use Badiou's terms, one of the potential evental sites. I'm well aware I was there on the reality of slums, mostly either religious fundamentalists or mafia, gang-dominated, whatever. But first you know what a massive phenomenon slums are. I mean like one fifth of the people on our earth already are living on slums. And I think that to exclude them... but I think that the least you can say is that Ernesto's dismissing of slums for example... in Brazil they were furious when he said that. You know that... one of the most sublime resistance movements, Canudos in Brazil, South... no sorry, Bahia, Northern Brazil, the end of 19th century, a miracle happened. A guy called Conselheiro Antonio or whatever, kind of religious fanatic I admit leader, gathered people followers who constituted Canudos inside from Salvador, a city which I think had a couple of tens of thousands people, and it went on. All people from all around Brazil: bandits, women, I mean single women, they all came there and it worked for years and they bothered no one. And out of pure irrational violence Brazilian government sent the army and killed them all. And then Ernesto dismisses this as 'Oh they were religious fanatics' and so on, like our scum. No, even today they are mythical figure in... So, so first, I think Ernesto is too much excluding them. You know, in his last years Ernesto was for my taste a little bit too much obsessed by becoming the Argentinian state philosopher, you know. No it's not dismissal, I still appreciate him. What are you using to okay to to argue that like he's wrong that the slums actually have some potential? Fine, potential. But even to assert that, even to assert that don't you have to what are you relying upon to assert that? Some type of empirical theory? right some empiricism you're giving an empirical example? right which is fine but wouldn't that be to reinscribe into the big Other in that sense and thus to for-... Oh my God now we would have to go into into... If you raise the standard so high that every every listing of empirical arguments is reinscription into the great Other... But isn't that yours? that's your standard. Why? Why because isn't the political act precisely acting without a big Other? I mean that's what you write in In Defense of Lost Causes, right? That is a political... Maybe we would get lost today with this because you know things are much more complex in the sense that what does it mean act like the way you put it: acting without big Other means to be a self-murdering self-killing psychotic or whatever. I mean what I mean by there is no big Other is simply what Lacan calls like there is no Other of the Other, no transcendental guarantee contingency of the act and so on and so on. What I'm... but what for example let's go back to Buddhism. My problem with Buddhism is elsewhere but it's true that the same as Buddhism I also and I say this, it's with Hegel and with Lacan. Look, with Hegel we had it was even predominant for some time, the conservative Hegel. Hegel was read as a critic of this Western individualist liberalism, usually even some fascists like in Italy Giovanni Gentile and so on you have fascist Hegelians who read fascism,
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fascist
fascist
Slavoj Žižek
corporate state as a contemporary
corporate state as a contemporary
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version
version
Slavoj Žižek
of Hegel's rational state. Then you have revolutionary Hegelians and as Fred Jameson demonstrated drew attention to somewhere in
of Hegel's rational state. Then you have revolutionary Hegelians and as Fred Jameson demonstrated drew attention to somewhere in
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a very nice
a very nice
Slavoj Žižek
way, the real
way, the real
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big news in Hegel studies political news of the last decades is the rise of a third liberal
big news in Hegel studies political news of the last decades is the rise of a third liberal
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Hegel. All these Pittsburgh Hegelians: recognition. The world where how you detect them the shibboleth or what is recognition. To
Hegel. All these Pittsburgh Hegelians: recognition. The world where how you detect them the shibboleth or what is recognition. To
Slavoj Žižek
focus on recognition. But what I find... I find again this Hegel very problematic this... this simple liberal Hegel. But what I'm saying is that... this is nothing that goes nothing new nothing that goes only for only for only for Buddhism or whatever, this ambiguity. But your basic point like that in order to argue or whatever you need the big Other... what what do you mean here by exactly by big Other? Big Other is not just symbolic order as such. Big Other is symbolic order let's say with a pretense to consistency, grounding and so on. And the point here there is no difference here at this level between me and Ernesto. By his version Ernesto's, Laclau's, sorry, of there is no big Other is simply society doesn't exist. That's to say society is an open field of hegemonic struggle and so on and so on. My problem with Laclau is elsewhere. It's not as he accuses me that I still believe in some working-class fundamentalism and so on. It's maybe capitalism. I don't accept his idea that fighting capitalism is just one in among the plurality of struggle. You know his idea is that we have a whole series of struggles: feminist struggle, anticapitalist struggle, political struggle, whatever, and that they are just a chain without privileging one. No, I claim that that the structuring principle of today's society... and I'm not demonizing capitalism, it's the most dynamic productive invention in the history of humanity. But I claim... and I don't think this is essentially an... this is necessarily an essentialist thesis... that capitalism is something stronger, is the universal structuring principle of our societies. By this I mean the following. I claim that for Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe that they are also not consequent in their in their defense of the idea that there is multiplicity of struggles which are contingent, open and so on. They clearly privilege political struggle. You know, it's absolutely clear that and here they effectively are part of, although they are not French, of the French tradition. This is my general problem also with my excellent friend Alain Badiou. He proclaims to be, and he is in a sense, communist blah blah, but did you notice how in all his political texts apart from generalities about 'Whoo! exploitation capital,' he really doesn't need Marxist critique of political economy. Does Ernesto need it? No. I think we need it more than ever today. And I'm not saying we shouldn't be critical of Marx here. There is a big problem and I in London at a debate you know your big capital popularizer guy David Harvey. I asked him a simple question: because he said he tries to popularize, you know show the actuality of Capital. I asked him a simple question: so-called labor theory of value, yes or no? He said,
focus on recognition. But what I find... I find again this Hegel very problematic this... this simple liberal Hegel. But what I'm saying is that... this is nothing that goes nothing new nothing that goes only for only for only for Buddhism or whatever, this ambiguity. But your basic point like that in order to argue or whatever you need the big Other... what what do you mean here by exactly by big Other? Big Other is not just symbolic order as such. Big Other is symbolic order let's say with a pretense to consistency, grounding and so on. And the point here there is no difference here at this level between me and Ernesto. By his version Ernesto's, Laclau's, sorry, of there is no big Other is simply society doesn't exist. That's to say society is an open field of hegemonic struggle and so on and so on. My problem with Laclau is elsewhere. It's not as he accuses me that I still believe in some working-class fundamentalism and so on. It's maybe capitalism. I don't accept his idea that fighting capitalism is just one in among the plurality of struggle. You know his idea is that we have a whole series of struggles: feminist struggle, anticapitalist struggle, political struggle, whatever, and that they are just a chain without privileging one. No, I claim that that the structuring principle of today's society... and I'm not demonizing capitalism, it's the most dynamic productive invention in the history of humanity. But I claim... and I don't think this is essentially an... this is necessarily an essentialist thesis... that capitalism is something stronger, is the universal structuring principle of our societies. By this I mean the following. I claim that for Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe that they are also not consequent in their in their defense of the idea that there is multiplicity of struggles which are contingent, open and so on. They clearly privilege political struggle. You know, it's absolutely clear that and here they effectively are part of, although they are not French, of the French tradition. This is my general problem also with my excellent friend Alain Badiou. He proclaims to be, and he is in a sense, communist blah blah, but did you notice how in all his political texts apart from generalities about 'Whoo! exploitation capital,' he really doesn't need Marxist critique of political economy. Does Ernesto need it? No. I think we need it more than ever today. And I'm not saying we shouldn't be critical of Marx here. There is a big problem and I in London at a debate you know your big capital popularizer guy David Harvey. I asked him a simple question: because he said he tries to popularize, you know show the actuality of Capital. I asked him a simple question: so-called labor theory of value, yes or no? He said,
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'I don't know, I'm not sure.' My God! because you know the problem is this one, and this is for me the deadlock of today's Marxists and so on. If you apply labor theory of value literally in a too direct way,
'I don't know, I'm not sure.' My God! because you know the problem is this one, and this is for me the deadlock of today's Marxists and so on. If you apply labor theory of value literally in a too direct way,
Slavoj Žižek
you must say today that United States are exploiting Venezuela. Because it's clear that most of the wealth of Venezuela comes from oil, and the irony is that when Marx tries to demonstrate that the exclusive, I agree here with Marx but it should be put in a different way more refined, the only source of value is labor, that natural products don't have in this sense value. You know what's Marx's example of Marx? Oil, precisely oil. So what I'm claiming is that if you drop value so-called labor theory of value, how then do you justify the use of the term exploitation? Because you know Marx is very precise here. For Marx exploitation is just this empirical fact, I exploit you. It has the precise structure: surplus value and so on and so on. So if you... so it was a very comical scene in London. He said, 'No, I don't know' and so on. And then I went into my religious mood. I started in a friendly way to shout at him. I said that Jesus was created to redeem us, you know. The city of Lo- of San Francisco was created so that Hitchcock was able to shoot Vertigo in it, no? and you were created by God to explain what is a labor theory of value, no? how can you justify your... No, you know what I think? This is absolutely... so I agree here with Fred Jameson, although I have great problems with his knowledge of economy, that... one of the things that
you must say today that United States are exploiting Venezuela. Because it's clear that most of the wealth of Venezuela comes from oil, and the irony is that when Marx tries to demonstrate that the exclusive, I agree here with Marx but it should be put in a different way more refined, the only source of value is labor, that natural products don't have in this sense value. You know what's Marx's example of Marx? Oil, precisely oil. So what I'm claiming is that if you drop value so-called labor theory of value, how then do you justify the use of the term exploitation? Because you know Marx is very precise here. For Marx exploitation is just this empirical fact, I exploit you. It has the precise structure: surplus value and so on and so on. So if you... so it was a very comical scene in London. He said, 'No, I don't know' and so on. And then I went into my religious mood. I started in a friendly way to shout at him. I said that Jesus was created to redeem us, you know. The city of Lo- of San Francisco was created so that Hitchcock was able to shoot Vertigo in it, no? and you were created by God to explain what is a labor theory of value, no? how can you justify your... No, you know what I think? This is absolutely... so I agree here with Fred Jameson, although I have great problems with his knowledge of economy, that... one of the things that
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I don't like about this Frenchified French political theory is their exclusive focus almost on power, power relations and the opposition to state, you know, like multitude versus state,
I don't like about this Frenchified French political theory is their exclusive focus almost on power, power relations and the opposition to state, you know, like multitude versus state,
Slavoj Žižek
representation and so on and so on. And it's... where is exploitation? I think that if the left will somehow, I'm more and more doubtful, reinvent itself, we have to have a new theory of exploitation. This all this power analysis, are we controlled by blah blah blah, it's not enough. I'm all these micromechanisms of power blah blah, it's exploitation disappears. Which is why... and that's another consequence... I also don't share what many French theorists have: this absolute opposition to state power. You know as if this is the great motto that even if they are enemies all of them agree with mostly: Agamben, Badiou, name them, that namely that authentic politics is at a distance from state. Okay, then I always ask them, but what does this mean? That we don't care who is in power in state? Then they say, 'No, no, not...' I think that I'm here much more brutal. That's why I support Syriza in Greece. I'm brutal here. Grab all the power you can, my God! And even if at the end it will not work, it's worth trying, to put it in naive terms. You know, I'm not a Marxist, I'm a Hegelian here. Marx was for me too naive. He thought he has a formula of historical development. He thought that we can see almost in a theological way the orientation of history and that we can act accordingly, no? Working class organized into proletarian movement,
representation and so on and so on. And it's... where is exploitation? I think that if the left will somehow, I'm more and more doubtful, reinvent itself, we have to have a new theory of exploitation. This all this power analysis, are we controlled by blah blah blah, it's not enough. I'm all these micromechanisms of power blah blah, it's exploitation disappears. Which is why... and that's another consequence... I also don't share what many French theorists have: this absolute opposition to state power. You know as if this is the great motto that even if they are enemies all of them agree with mostly: Agamben, Badiou, name them, that namely that authentic politics is at a distance from state. Okay, then I always ask them, but what does this mean? That we don't care who is in power in state? Then they say, 'No, no, not...' I think that I'm here much more brutal. That's why I support Syriza in Greece. I'm brutal here. Grab all the power you can, my God! And even if at the end it will not work, it's worth trying, to put it in naive terms. You know, I'm not a Marxist, I'm a Hegelian here. Marx was for me too naive. He thought he has a formula of historical development. He thought that we can see almost in a theological way the orientation of history and that we can act accordingly, no? Working class organized into proletarian movement,
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you see the
you see the
Slavoj Žižek
necessity of... not a necessity, it's more open like the
necessity of... not a necessity, it's more open like the
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unique
unique
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chance of proletarian... For Hegel this is way too much to say. Hegel would never have accepted something like this. For Hegel... Hegel was aware of something which was amply confirmed by 20th century, that in an act always fails. You try to do something, something else emerges and so on and so on. This is why I think Hegel would be fascinated by the 20th century. How October revolution, an authentic at the beginning I still
chance of proletarian... For Hegel this is way too much to say. Hegel would never have accepted something like this. For Hegel... Hegel was aware of something which was amply confirmed by 20th century, that in an act always fails. You try to do something, something else emerges and so on and so on. This is why I think Hegel would be fascinated by the 20th century. How October revolution, an authentic at the beginning I still
Slavoj Žižek
believe up to a point in Lenin, you know, attempt of liberation... up, you get Stalinism then and so on. These are wonderful reversals. So I simply, I don't think we can propose a vision of the new in that sense. I think you try, you do something, you fail but as a byproduct... the entire situation changes and so on and so on. So again my problem with Laclau, especially although again in contrast to him who really spit on me whenever possible, dismiss me, I want to draw attention that I still treat him basically in respectful way. I admit that his theory of antagonism, hegemony is a wonderful achievement, it's a great achievement and so on and so on, you know. My problem with him is just that like we had this big clash about democracy when he was still for democracy. But then with Chavez he all of a sudden conceded that you also can have good military dictatorship or whatever. Things get complex. But what I think, maybe this was the biggest... sorry then I will stop, I talk too much I know. My problem was that, and maybe some of
believe up to a point in Lenin, you know, attempt of liberation... up, you get Stalinism then and so on. These are wonderful reversals. So I simply, I don't think we can propose a vision of the new in that sense. I think you try, you do something, you fail but as a byproduct... the entire situation changes and so on and so on. So again my problem with Laclau, especially although again in contrast to him who really spit on me whenever possible, dismiss me, I want to draw attention that I still treat him basically in respectful way. I admit that his theory of antagonism, hegemony is a wonderful achievement, it's a great achievement and so on and so on, you know. My problem with him is just that like we had this big clash about democracy when he was still for democracy. But then with Chavez he all of a sudden conceded that you also can have good military dictatorship or whatever. Things get complex. But what I think, maybe this was the biggest... sorry then I will stop, I talk too much I know. My problem was that, and maybe some of
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you
you
Slavoj Žižek
will disagree with
will disagree with
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me, that with
me, that with
Slavoj Žižek
all
all
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my sympathy
my sympathy
Slavoj Žižek
for what is happening in some Latino American countries, I don't think they are
for what is happening in some Latino American countries, I don't think they are
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it, you know. The
it, you know. The
Slavoj Žižek
formula of the new. No. It's
formula of the new. No. It's
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not it. It's nice, it's better than happening nothing, but it's
not it. It's nice, it's better than happening nothing, but it's
Slavoj Žižek
not like it really happens there now. It's not the formula of the new if you ask me. I don't believe that this is like some people like Tariq Ali, all enthusiastic, says now Europe should look towards Latin America. No, I mean I'm almost getting more and more Eurocentric, you know in what sense like friends are telling me now, 'Oh Europe is out, you see things are now happening, that's the new hope, Egypt, all those countries, no, Tunis,' and then I tell them, 'Yeah I know, that's why they are building walls because Europeans try to emigrate there,' you know what I mean. Like I'm sorry, I think that you know in what sense I'm Eurocentric, not of course in the imperialist sense, but in the sense that there is something in European legacy worth fighting for: the idea of egalitarianism, radical emancipation and so on and so on. We should shamelessly assert it. And this doesn't mean falling to Islamophobia and so on and so on. No, no, I know. My idea is that Europe is very successful in ruining itself now. The true danger to European identity is this new rise of anti-immigrant right, which you know in the last European elections, they were a total ethico-political catastrophe. In many countries, great countries like France, England, the anti-immigrant populists emerged as the strongest single party. This is the true danger to Europe. But I still think that I wouldn't because of this simply discard Europe. I even I even don't accept this simple stupid rejection of 'Oh human rights are just an imperialist tool,' you know. It's more complex. From the very beginning they were, of course human rights, you can make this Marxist analysis, you know. They were really secretly privileging white rich people and so on. But from the very beginning they were the terrain of the struggle. Women said 'Why not we also,' blacks said in Haiti 'Why not we also,' and so on. So how many courses are you still teaching at NYU, too? So people should go to these courses because he has so much to teach... No, no. This is a polite and a nice way to say shut up and fuck off. But I would also add a name who who treats the question that you raised, that's... Derrida about the appropriations of Nietzsche and Hegel and how they can become part of a fascist or a left-wing move- movement and how how these philosophical texts and rogue itineraries get get picked up. Here I totally agree with you. I must say this with all my problematic relationship to Derrida but I must say something, Derrida never was this caricatural image of a simplistic deconstructionist 'Oh Hegel is totality, the worst'. No, when he was asked or addresses the point in I think maybe even La différance or some early already short text, is there one name in the history of philosophy which is like almost already there? He names Hegel. Right? He was well aware that you know this stupid idea that Hegel is the embodiment of all there you know, totality everything rationally explained and then you come with this bullshit, 'But there is something that resists Aufhebung' and so on. No, Derrida even says I think in Glas or where, that there is an almost invisible almost no difference between Aufhebung and his deconstruction différance. Exactly, he's a big Hegelian. Yeah, just like you. This is why I liked the debate between him and Catherine Malabou before she unfortunately joined our enemies, no? Yeah Badiou. Yeah heard together she joined the new materialists, no? Yeah. Yeah well we can get her back I think. Yeah but she needs these kinds of filibuster... Not here. You know how you get her back? Not directly gulag re-education camp, getting up at in the morning, long in the evening writing her confession. I think she misses us. Sorry, she misses us. She defected but she wants to come back, I can feel it. We will read you because it's not a problem because in re-education camp she will have friends like you there to to be... That's a bitch. Okay, everyone thank you so much.
not like it really happens there now. It's not the formula of the new if you ask me. I don't believe that this is like some people like Tariq Ali, all enthusiastic, says now Europe should look towards Latin America. No, I mean I'm almost getting more and more Eurocentric, you know in what sense like friends are telling me now, 'Oh Europe is out, you see things are now happening, that's the new hope, Egypt, all those countries, no, Tunis,' and then I tell them, 'Yeah I know, that's why they are building walls because Europeans try to emigrate there,' you know what I mean. Like I'm sorry, I think that you know in what sense I'm Eurocentric, not of course in the imperialist sense, but in the sense that there is something in European legacy worth fighting for: the idea of egalitarianism, radical emancipation and so on and so on. We should shamelessly assert it. And this doesn't mean falling to Islamophobia and so on and so on. No, no, I know. My idea is that Europe is very successful in ruining itself now. The true danger to European identity is this new rise of anti-immigrant right, which you know in the last European elections, they were a total ethico-political catastrophe. In many countries, great countries like France, England, the anti-immigrant populists emerged as the strongest single party. This is the true danger to Europe. But I still think that I wouldn't because of this simply discard Europe. I even I even don't accept this simple stupid rejection of 'Oh human rights are just an imperialist tool,' you know. It's more complex. From the very beginning they were, of course human rights, you can make this Marxist analysis, you know. They were really secretly privileging white rich people and so on. But from the very beginning they were the terrain of the struggle. Women said 'Why not we also,' blacks said in Haiti 'Why not we also,' and so on. So how many courses are you still teaching at NYU, too? So people should go to these courses because he has so much to teach... No, no. This is a polite and a nice way to say shut up and fuck off. But I would also add a name who who treats the question that you raised, that's... Derrida about the appropriations of Nietzsche and Hegel and how they can become part of a fascist or a left-wing move- movement and how how these philosophical texts and rogue itineraries get get picked up. Here I totally agree with you. I must say this with all my problematic relationship to Derrida but I must say something, Derrida never was this caricatural image of a simplistic deconstructionist 'Oh Hegel is totality, the worst'. No, when he was asked or addresses the point in I think maybe even La différance or some early already short text, is there one name in the history of philosophy which is like almost already there? He names Hegel. Right? He was well aware that you know this stupid idea that Hegel is the embodiment of all there you know, totality everything rationally explained and then you come with this bullshit, 'But there is something that resists Aufhebung' and so on. No, Derrida even says I think in Glas or where, that there is an almost invisible almost no difference between Aufhebung and his deconstruction différance. Exactly, he's a big Hegelian. Yeah, just like you. This is why I liked the debate between him and Catherine Malabou before she unfortunately joined our enemies, no? Yeah Badiou. Yeah heard together she joined the new materialists, no? Yeah. Yeah well we can get her back I think. Yeah but she needs these kinds of filibuster... Not here. You know how you get her back? Not directly gulag re-education camp, getting up at in the morning, long in the evening writing her confession. I think she misses us. Sorry, she misses us. She defected but she wants to come back, I can feel it. We will read you because it's not a problem because in re-education camp she will have friends like you there to to be... That's a bitch. Okay, everyone thank you so much.