The Limits of Hegel: Rabble, War, Sex and Marriage
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2011-05-12 · 1:23:07 · 10,998 words
ideologyhegel-dialecticscapitalismdemocracyfascism-populismrace-antisemitismecology-climatecinema-art-culturegeopolitics-warphilosophy-generalpsychoanalysisreligion-theology
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture ostensibly about Hegel, particularly Frank's book on Hegel's concept of the rabble (Pöbel), while weaving together ideology critique, neoliberalism, ecology, cinema analysis, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He argues that neoliberalism is ideological precisely because it does not exist in practice, that Hegel's notion of the king's constitutive stupidity anticipates problems of democratic authority, and that Pöbel (the rabble) is the genuine site of universality that Hegel failed to draw the correct conclusions from. The talk concludes with an extended, personally inflected discussion of anti-semitism, Zionism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, defending positions he has been attacked for from multiple directions.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 24
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Implicit in Žižek's claim that neoliberalism has material force as an ideology even though it 'doesn't exist', the abstraction operates materially regardless of whether it is practiced.
as “Staatskapitalismus”
State capitalism, used to describe Singapore and China as proof that actually-existing capitalism is not neoliberal but heavily state-directed.
as “Isolierung (isolation)”
Freudian mechanism by which information is stated publicly but stripped of its symbolic efficacy and consequences, functioning as ideological censorship without direct prohibition.
as “geoengineering”
Large-scale technological intervention in the atmosphere/oceans to counteract climate change, Žižek presents it as proof that governments have abandoned any faith in market regulation and systemic reform.
An ideological displacement of systemic ecological problems onto individual consumer choices (recycling, etc.) that functions as feel-good ideology rather than genuine political intervention.
as “interpassivity / magic thinking (football fans)”
Robert Pfaller's concept invoked by Žižek: the mechanism by which individual lifestyle acts (recycling, shouting at a TV) substitute for genuine collective action while providing an affective sense of participation.
The Lacanian object-cause of desire, the surplus element added to a commodity or experience (like milk in coffee) that is never simply itself but always supplemented by an elusive excess.
as “coffee without milk / coffee without cream”
Žižek's signature motif for the logic of negation and desire: the absent supplement (cream vs. milk) is not nothing but specifies what the subject lacks, revealing that coffee is always 'coffee with a hole.'
Plain coffee understood as always already structured by lack, it is never just itself but always defined by what is missing, pointing to the object-cause of desire.
as “List der Vernunft (Cunning of Reason)”
Usually read as a teleological guarantee that history serves rational purpose, but Žižek argues it means almost the opposite: whatever you take, something will go wrong, and the dialectical process is a series of failures.
The treasure or special quality perceived by others as residing deep within a person, which Žižek shows is always already outside the person, a projection of others' desires.
The Lacanian gap between a person's immediate reality and their symbolic title/status, which Žižek uses to explain the king's 'constitutive stupidity' and Martin Eden's disillusionment.
Žižek's formulation of Hegel's insight that a genuine king must fully accept that his authority has nothing to do with his actual qualities, he is 'a piece of shit attached to a symbolic title.'
as “Pöbel (the rabble)”
Hegel's term for the socially excluded underclass that Žižek reinterprets as the genuine site of concrete universality, the 'part of no part' whose exclusion reveals the universal.
Marx's concept of a ruler who represents nobody directly but plays each class against the others, Žižek uses it as the structural model for modern populist authoritarianism as a short-circuit between top (king) and bottom (rabble).
Hegel's concept that Žižek interprets as requiring the universal to find itself within its particular elements in the guise of the lowest element without proper place, not the corporate integration of all parts.
Following Rancière, the element formally included in a totality but possessing no proper place within it, which Žižek identifies as the structural position of the rabble and proletariat and the true bearer of universality.
Badiou's term for the excluded element in a totality that, per Žižek, stands for universality as such, used here synonymously with Rancière's 'part of no part' and Hegel's Pöbel.
Hegel's concept that the universal principle must find itself within its own particular elements in the guise of the lowest, Žižek's key to distinguishing left from right Hegelianism.
The Hegelian concept Žižek insists must remain constitutively unresolved, the excess of rabble, madness, war, and desire that cannot be aufgehoben into any rational totality.
as “Absolutes Wissen (Absolute Knowledge)”
Not omniscience but the most radical historical limitation, the point where you cannot see outside your own horizon, even with full reflexivity.
In Nietzsche's sense, violence that does not confront the real thing (capitalism) but depoliticizes and returns things to normality, Žižek's characterization of Hitler's violence as ultimately conservative.
Žižek's characterization of Israeli policy in the West Bank as administrative and bureaucratic control rather than overt physical violence, referencing a book's phrase.
as “je sais bien mais quand même (I know very well, but)”
Octave Mannoni's formula for fetishist disavowal, deployed by Žižek to describe catastrophism and lifestyle ecology: knowing the truth at one level while behaving as if one doesn't at another.
Stories he reaches for 9
In Lubitsch's Ninotchka, a customer asks for coffee without cream; the waiter says they only have milk, so can he have coffee without milk? The result is the same plain coffee, but the difference matters: the absent supplement specifies the desire and reveals that coffee is never just coffee but always structured by lack.
“Sorry, we run out of cream, we only have milk, so can I get you coffee without milk?”
In Brassed Off, Ewan McGregor's character is invited upstairs 'for a coffee'; he says he doesn't like coffee; she replies she doesn't have any. Through double negation, the erotic invitation is conveyed more intensely than any direct statement could achieve, illustrating how ideology works by offering and denying simultaneously.
“Would you care to come up to my place for a coffee? / I don't like coffee. / No problem, I don't have any.”
Chinese authorities banned TV shows and films involving time travel or alternate realities on the grounds that history is too serious for such games, Žižek reads this as proof that even dreaming of alternatives must be suppressed, and compares it to Western 'Isolierung' of alternatives.
“history is a too serious matter to be left to such trifling games”
The ideal commodity is never just itself, like a Kinder Surprise egg, it includes a surplus (a plastic toy). This is the structure of objet petit a in commodity form: you never buy just the thing but always the something extra.
“Like Kinder Surprise egg you get a surplus, in this case a plastic toy... an ideal commodity is never just a commodity”
During the Austro-Prussian war, the Prussian king watched what seemed like defeat from a hill while General von Moltke actually commanded. Moltke turned to the king and said 'May I be the first to congratulate Your Majesty for a brilliant victory?' The king is the embodiment of symbolic authority who does nothing, his 'constitutive stupidity' is the condition of sovereign legitimacy.
“May I be the first to congratulate Your Majesty for a brilliant victory?”
Žižek reads the film as showing how the coach (Geoffrey Rush) trains the stuttering king not to speak well but to accept his symbolic stupidity, to believe 'I'm king by God's will!' The film is reactionary because it celebrates the restoration of symbolic authority through the undoing of critical self-awareness.
“Because I'm king by God's will, it's my right! / Now you are. I congratulate you.”
Jack London's Martin Eden becomes a famous writer but realizes nothing in him changed, his fame is purely fictitious, a projection of others' dreams. He commits suicide because he cannot accept the radical decentering: his 'treasure' (Agalma) was always outside him. Žižek uses this to illustrate symbolic castration and the gap between the symbolic title and the real person.
“the stuff he had written had appeared inside the covers of books... it was not for any real value, but for a purely fictitious value that he is famous”
Pascal says 'act as if you believe and belief will come'; Žižek argues the Church's real wisdom is the opposite: if you believe too much you become a dangerous Gnostic or fanatic; better to let ritual do the believing for you and not believe too intensely yourself.
“'Do you believe too much? Act as if you believe and you will no longer have to believe, rituals will do it for you.'”
Žižek argues The Black Swan repeats the Hoffmann-to-Kieślowski myth that a woman who fully identifies with her public mission will self-destruct, while a man can combine mission and private life. He traces it from Hoffmann's Tales to Kieślowski's Double Life of Véronique.
“a woman cannot do it, a woman have to choose. Either your public mission... or your private life”
Works invoked 14
Ninotchka film
Lubitsch's film provides the central coffee-without-cream/milk scene; Žižek calls it 'wonderful' and argues it treats communism with a 'half even respectful' seriousness rather than violent anti-communism.
Brassed Off film
English working-class melodrama providing the double-negation coffee seduction scene; Žižek uses it to illustrate how ideology communicates through denial.
Das Kapital book
First chapter cited for Marx's formulation: 'this man is not a king because he is a king but because other people treat him as a king', used to illustrate symbolic constitution of authority.
The King's Speech film
Described as reactionary: the film is about rendering the king stupid enough to function as symbolic authority, undoing critical self-awareness in the service of restoring symbolic power.
Black Swan film
Called 'deeply anti-feminist', repeats the reactionary romantic myth that a woman cannot fully identify with her public mission without self-destruction, unlike a man.
Kieślowski film cited as a contemporary version of the Hoffmann myth: the Véronique who chooses singing/mission drops dead, the one who retreats to private life survives.
Hegel's work directly quoted on the definition of the king as one who need only provide the subjective 'I will' to decisions prepared by the rational apparatus.
Martin Eden book
Jack London's novel used as a case study in symbolic castration: the hero's suicide results from his inability to accept that his fame is purely fictitious, not grounded in his real qualities.
Tales of Hoffmann opera
Cited as the origin of the myth that a woman who sings (pursues her mission) dies, she is tempted by the devil to sing while ill and sings herself to death.
Cited for Hegel's prescient remark (1820s) that the next century would belong to the US and Russia, used to show Hegel's system is not closed and self-relativizes.
Marx's analysis of Bonapartism cited for its three apparently contradictory but complementary accounts of Napoléon III's social base, farmers, class circulation, and the rabble.
Marx's early critique, specifically the sarcastic note that the Hegelian monarch is 'an appendix to his penis', Žižek argues Marx missed the point; Hegel was saying exactly that, as a feature not a bug.
The Anthropologie chapter's theory of madness cited as 'breathtaking', Hegel argues the possibility of madness is constitutive of becoming human, more Foucauldian than Foucault.
Žižek's own book in German; contains quotes from Ben-Gurion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; caused controversy for the 'Hitler not violent enough' statement.
People invoked 39
E.T.A. Hoffmann positive
Cited as the origin of the romantic myth (woman singing herself to death, woman must choose between mission and life) that Žižek traces through to Black Swan.
Mentioned as having called Chávez to ask him to retract tasteless remarks about Jews.
Glenn Beck negative
Described as a 'crazy right-wing commentator of Fox News' who initially supported Zionism but eventually 'turned directly anti-semitic and was fired.'
The actual strategist of the Prussian army who congratulated the king on a victory the king didn't realize was happening, key figure in the 'constitutive stupidity of the king' anecdote.
Juliano Mer-Khamis positive
Half-Jewish, half-Palestinian founder of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin; described as 'a unique person'; shot in the head by Hamas.
Robert Solomon positive
Cited as an intelligent Hegel reader who correctly argues that Absolutes Wissen is not omniscience but a radical limitation; Žižek notes he doesn't always agree with him.
Thomas Jefferson positive
Cited for the 'totalitarian statement' that the tree of freedom must be watered by blood, used to argue that Hegel's deduction of war should have been replaced by a deduction of the necessity of internal rebellion.
Udi Aloni positive
Friend and collaborator; organized the cinema theory summer school at Jenin's Freedom Theatre; attacked by Zionists in terms Žižek compares to 19th-century anti-semitic language.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Fellow Parteigenossin (party comrade); Žižek credits her with the Ninotchka coffee joke analysis presented at a conference two months prior.
John McDowell negative
Grouped with Pippin and Brandom as a Pittsburgh Hegelian whose liberal reading of Hegel eliminates the concept of negativity.
Robert Pippin negative
Named as representative of the liberal 'recognition' reading of Hegel (with Brandom, McDowell) which Žižek calls the true counter-revolution in Hegel scholarship.
Blaise Pascal negative
Žižek argues Pascal's wager ('act as if you believe and belief will come') is wrong; the Church's real wisdom is the inverse, not to believe too intensely, and let ritual do the work.
Robert Brandom negative
Grouped with Pippin and McDowell as Pittsburgh Hegelians producing a domesticated liberal Hegel of recognition that eliminates radical negativity.
Mentioned only as the reason Jack London was popular in the USSR, his casual approval in illness was enough to set canonical status.
Theodor W. Adorno negative
Criticized for 'Das Ganze ist das Unwahre', Žižek argues Adorno misread Hegel and that the correct formulation (das Ganze ist das Wahre) is actually what Hegel meant.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for objet petit a, the madman-king formulation, and symbolic castration; foundational to Žižek's reading of desire, negation, and authority.
Moshe Dayan positive
Cited for his 1956 funeral speech: 'Let's not condemn them. In their place we would do the same thing', praised as a moment of honesty about the conflict.
Markus Gabriel positive
Co-author with Žižek of a German book that included analysis of Hegel's theory of madness in the Anthropologie section of the Philosophy of Spirit.
Frank Ruda positive
The direct interlocutor whose book on Hegel's Pöbel is the occasion for the lecture; Žižek praises his analysis as correct and important.
Her memoirs contain the remark that Lenin liked Jack London, which caused London to be reprinted in millions in the USSR.
Robert Pfaller positive
Austrian friend; cited for the mechanism of interpassivity (football fans, magical thinking) deployed to critique lifestyle ecology.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited for the 'symptomal point' and the concept of subtraction from organic social order; equated with Rancière's part of no part in Žižek's reading.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Sharply criticized for claiming anti-capitalism is today a mask for anti-semitism, Žižek calls this the reductio ad absurdum of collapsing any criticism of Israel into anti-semitism.
Friedrich Engels negative
Criticized for the 'boring mantra' of the contradiction between Hegel's open method and closed system, Žižek argues this misses that Hegel's system is not closed.
Wang Hui positive
Chinese friend who told Žižek the rule for reading Chinese state media: if the state explicitly denies something, it is true.
David Ben-Gurion positive
Cited as an 'authentic fighter' who honestly acknowledged Jewish settlers had no right to the land and that it would come down to who would win, praised for not 'bullshitting.'
Michel Foucault positive
Mentioned to note that Hegel's theory of madness is 'more Foucauldian than Foucault himself.'
Referred to as 'ex-friend'; mocked for trying to get Chávez to display his populism book the way Chomsky displayed his at the UN.
Jack London positive
Martin Eden used as a key illustration of symbolic castration and the gap between real qualities and symbolic status.
Jacques Rancière positive
Cited for the concept 'part of no part', the element formally included in a totality but without proper place, which Žižek equates with Hegel's Pöbel.
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Called 'a great materialist friend of Hegel'; his Ninotchka provides the coffee-without-cream/milk joke central to Žižek's analysis of negation and desire.
Krzysztof Kieślowski negative
The Double Life of Véronique cited as a contemporary instance of the anti-feminist myth: the Véronique who chooses singing dies, the one who withdraws to private life survives.
Hannah Arendt positive
Cited approvingly for being aware of the problem of elevating Hitler to a diabolical greatness rather than insisting on his cowardice and reactive violence.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Named as allied with the Pittsburgh liberal Hegel of recognition, the 'Habermas-ized' reading Žižek opposes.
Hugo Chávez negative
Cited as a limit case: his populist project has 'faithful limitations' evidenced by occasionally tasteless remarks about Jews, signaling something wrong with his '21st-century socialism.'
Andrei Tarkovsky negative
Grouped with Hoffmann and Kieślowski as perpetuating the reactionary myth that a woman cannot fully commit to a public mission without self-destruction.
Mentioned only as the model for the Chávez-at-UN book display episode.
Karl Marx positive
Cited approvingly on Bonapartism, the Eighteenth Brumaire, and the proletariat as 'part of no part'; criticized for missing Hegel's point about the king (appendix to his penis remark) and for the boring Engels mantra of method vs. system.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central figure of the talk; Žižek defends Hegel against misreadings (totalitarian, omniscient, closed system) while arguing Hegel is 'not Hegelian enough' on the Pöbel and contingency.
What it argues
neoliberalism as ideology that does not exist in practiceHegel's Pöbel (rabble) as the true site of universalitythe constitutive stupidity of authority and symbolic castrationnegation and the logic of 'without' in desire and ideologyanti-semitism, Zionism, and the leftcontingency and democratic legitimacyexcesses of negativity that cannot be reintegrated into rational totality
Dialectical moves 15
“When somebody says 'we are finally out of ideology,' that's where you can be sure they are in.”
The denial of ideology is itself the purest ideological gesture, ideology is most effective when it presents itself as its own absence.
“Neoliberalism doesn't exist—and that is precisely why it is ideology.”
The gap between neoliberal doctrine and actual state practice (state interventionism everywhere) is not a refutation but the very mechanism by which neoliberalism functions ideologically.
“If the state explicitly denies something, then it's true.”
Authoritarian prohibition paradoxically confirms the existence and vitality of what is forbidden, censorship is self-defeating because prohibition preserves desire.
“The List der Vernunft means almost the exact opposite of what it is usually taken to mean: whatever phenomenon you take, you can be absolutely sure that something will go wrong.”
Hegel's Cunning of Reason is not a teleological guarantee of rational outcomes but a diagnosis of constitutive failure in every process.
“A madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king—a madman is also a king who thinks he is a king.”
Symbolic authority functions only when its holder knows it is not grounded in his real qualities; the truly mad king is the one who mistakes symbolic title for personal attribute.
“This man is not treated as a king because he is a king—he is a king because other people treat him as a king.”
Symbolic status is constituted by social recognition, not by inherent qualities; the ground of authority is always retroactively constructed.
“The king for Hegel should be someone who very well knows people bow to me, but it has absolutely nothing to do with me—I am a piece of shit just in a totally contingent way attached to a certain symbolic title.”
Legitimate sovereignty requires full acceptance of the gap between the person and the title, the king's greatness lies in accepting his own insignificance.
“Das Ganze ist das Wahre—but that means das Ganze includes all the bullshit which comes by and you are not allowed to dismiss it.”
Hegelian totality is not a harmonious whole but one that must include its own disturbances and excesses; Adorno's inversion of Hegel actually agrees with Hegel.
“The Black Swan's secret premise: a man can dedicate himself to his mission and still have a normal life, but a woman cannot—if she fully identifies with her mission, the price will be self-destruction.”
The film presents as tragic necessity what is an ideological myth: that female subjective investment in a public role is inherently self-destructive.
“Hitler was not violent radical enough—his violence was reactive, designed to avoid doing the real thing: changing capitalist relations.”
What appears as extreme violence is actually conservative: it targets a scapegoat to preserve the existing order rather than dismantling it.
“Gandhi was more violent than Hitler: he really tried to stop the functioning of the British colonial state, something Hitler never did.”
True political violence is measured not by physical brutality but by the degree to which it dismantles the existing social-political machinery.
“Zionism as the latest form of anti-semitism.”
The state of Israel has adopted toward critical Jewish intellectuals the same rhetoric of foreignness and lack of authentic belonging that 19th-century anti-semites used to define Jews as an alien body.
“Those preachers of soon-to-come apocalypse are secretly caught in a superstitious mechanism: if we talk a lot about it, maybe it will not happen.”
Catastrophism is not taking the threat seriously but is a magical-thinking defence against truly confronting it.
“You marry not to get her, but to lose her—to bring back peace into your life.”
Marriage as a Hegelian-materialist institution is not the consummation of romantic love but its planned dissolution through domestication.
“The Pöbel is the point of universality—precisely that excluded element which has no proper place is what stands for universality as such.”
Universality is not a totality that includes everyone but is represented by the element that cannot find a place, the dispossessed are the true universal subject.
Claims 28
asserts
Neoliberalism as an ideology has enormous material force despite the fact that virtually no state actually practices it—making it ideology in the strictest sense: a fiction that structures reality.neoliberalism
asserts
Ideological censorship today works not by prohibiting speech but by isolating it—information is publicly available but stripped of symbolic efficacy and consequences (Freudian Isolierung).censorship and ideology
asserts
In contemporary society, radical personal and technological possibilities (genetic organs, private astronauts) are deemed feasible while modest redistributive policies (more healthcare spending) are declared impossible.ideology and the possible/impossible couple
asserts
Lifestyle ecology (recycling, personal consumer choices) is pure ideology—a feel-good substitute for confronting systemic ecological crisis at the level of production.ecology and ideology
asserts
Catastrophism about ecological or social collapse is a refined way to avoid confronting the true threat—a superstitious mechanism where talking about catastrophe is meant to ward it off.catastrophism
asserts
Hegel's concept of totality means including everything that disturbs and undermines it, not the harmonious integration of all elements—Adorno's 'das Ganze ist das Unwahre' misreads Hegel.Hegelian totality
reframes
The List der Vernunft (Cunning of Reason) means the opposite of what is usually claimed: not that a rational purpose guides history, but that in whatever phenomenon you take, something will go wrong.Hegel's Cunning of Reason
asserts
A king, in Hegel's definition, must fully accept his own constitutive stupidity—that his authority has nothing to do with his personal qualities—and this is not a defect but a condition of legitimate sovereignty.Hegelian monarchy and symbolic authority
rejects
Marx missed Hegel's point about the king: what Hegel calls being an 'appendix to his penis' is precisely the correct formulation—utter alienation is the price of embodying state sovereignty.Marx's critique of Hegel's monarch
asserts
Stalinist communism repeated in a worse form the error Hegel warned against: Stalin did not accept the stupidity of the top position but fancied himself the genuine genius-strategist, producing totalitarianism.Stalinism and the logic of the top
asserts
Genuine democracy always requires a moment of contingency at the top—those who rule must not be directly legitimized by their real qualities, since expert meritocracy is a path toward totalitarianism.democracy and contingency
reframes
Hegel correctly identified contingency as necessary for legitimate authority but was not Hegelian enough: he limited contingency to the king rather than distributing it throughout the democratic system.Hegel's theory of monarchy vs. democracy
asserts
The Pöbel (rabble) is the 'part of no part'—the inherent excess that stands for universality as such—and Hegel's failure to draw this conclusion is the central weakness in his political philosophy.Hegel's Pöbel and universality
asserts
The right-wing corporatist reading of Hegel (each estate at its proper place, no direct access to universality) directly opens the space for anti-semitism by defining Jews as a foreign body without proper place.corporate Hegelianism and anti-semitism
rejects
The liberal Pittsburgh-Hegelianism of Pippin, Brandom, and McDowell is the true counter-revolution in contemporary Hegel scholarship—a domestication that eliminates the radical negativity in Hegel.Pittsburgh Hegelianism / liberal Hegel of recognition
asserts
The Black Swan is deeply anti-feminist: it perpetuates the reactionary myth that a woman, unlike a man, cannot pursue her public mission without self-destruction.The Black Swan (film) and gender ideology
asserts
The King's Speech is a reactionary film: its real message is how to render the king stupid enough to function as symbolic authority, undoing critical self-awareness.The King's Speech (film) and symbolic authority
asserts
Anti-semitism in left or populist movements is always a symptom of something fundamentally wrong with the emancipatory project itself.anti-semitism and the left
rejects
Justifying anti-Jewish rhetoric by claiming 'they mean Israel, not Jews' is inadmissible: if they meant Israel they would say Israel, and the substitution serves to mystify the real target.historicist excuses for anti-semitic rhetoric
asserts
Hitler was not radically violent enough—his violence was reactive (in Nietzsche's sense): it targeted Jews to avoid confronting and dismantling capitalism.Hitler's violence as reactive and conservative
asserts
Gandhi was more truly violent than Hitler in that he actually tried to stop the functioning of the British colonial state, whereas Hitler's activity depoliticized and restored normality.Gandhi vs. Hitler on the nature of violence
asserts
The alliance between Zionists and the American Christian fundamentalist right is an unnatural and revealing marriage that should make us suspicious—it signals Zionism's structural drift toward the anti-semitic logic it claims to oppose.Zionism and the American right
rejects
Claiming that anti-capitalism is today a mask for anti-semitism (Bernard-Henri Lévy) is the reductio ad absurdum of collapsing anti-Zionism into anti-semitism.Bernard-Henri Lévy's equation of anti-capitalism and anti-semitism
reframes
Pascal's advice ('act as if you believe and belief will come') is wrong; the Church's deeper wisdom is the opposite: don't believe too much, let rituals do the work for you.Pascal's wager and the function of ritual
asserts
Hegel's theory of marriage implies marrying to lose the romantic passion—to achieve normal peaceful life—inverting the romantic ideal in a materialist direction.Hegel's theory of marriage
asserts
The dispossessed, colonized, and outcasts—not only the traditional working class—must be the basis of any serious global emancipatory movement today, making Hegel's Pöbel politically more useful than Marx's proletariat.emancipatory politics and the rabble
reframes
Absolutes Wissen is not omniscience but the most radical form of epistemic limitation—the point where no further reflexivity can take you outside your historical horizon.Hegel's Absolute Knowledge
asserts
The possibility of madness is constitutive of being human for Hegel: we become human only by overcoming it, but it always remains as a potential threat, never fully sublated.Hegel's theory of madness and subjectivity
Quotes 16
“When somebody says 'we are finally out of ideology,' that's where you can be sure they are in.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology denies itself at its most effective
“Neoliberalism doesn't exist—not in any mystical sense, but in the sense that if you really look closely at what big capitalist and not-so-big capitalist states are doing, nobody is really practicing neoliberalism.”Slavoj Žižek · neoliberalism as a fiction with real material force
“If the state explicitly denies something, then it's true. When they say there will be no problems with lack of onions on the market, it means there is—run fast and buy them.”Slavoj Žižek · authoritarian censorship confirms the desire it suppresses
“It's possible to have sex with two women, to fly, to live eternally, but it's not possible to give a little bit more money for healthcare.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological foreclosure of modest redistributive politics
“A madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king. A madman is also a king who thinks he is a king.”Slavoj Žižek · symbolic authority requires non-identification with one's title
“The king for Hegel should be someone who very well knows people bow to me, but it has absolutely nothing to do with me. I am a piece of shit just in a totally contingent way attached to a certain symbolic title.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian monarchy and constitutive stupidity of authority
“The moment you give power to those for whom you think they are really qualified, you are one step towards expert knowledge and totalitarianism.”Slavoj Žižek · meritocracy as path to totalitarianism
“A Hegelian example of totality would be: you want to talk about today's capitalism, then don't talk only about Singapore—talk also about Congo.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian totality includes its own disruptions
“Absolutes Wissen is not 'I know everything'—it's the most radical limitation: the historical point where you cannot see outside, you cannot see more with all reflexivity.”Slavoj Žižek · Absolute Knowledge as epistemic limit not omniscience
“I cannot imagine a more anti-Jewish statement than this bargaining: 'We suffered, allow us to do a little bit of dirty work there.'”Slavoj Žižek · historical suffering cannot justify current wrongdoing
“Hitler was basically a coward. He killed millions—why? Not to do the real thing, to change a little bit capitalist relations. Hitler's violence was in Nietzsche's term a reactive violence.”Slavoj Žižek · Hitler's violence as reactive and politically conservative
“If both sides attack you for the same text, then maybe you are on the right way. I wish you the same: to be attacked from all sides. You will be poor and jobless but you will have the deep moral satisfaction.”Slavoj Žižek · being attacked from all sides as sign of intellectual integrity
“Those preachers of soon-to-come apocalypse are caught in a superstitious mechanism: if we talk a lot about it, maybe it will not happen.”Slavoj Žižek · catastrophism as magical thinking that avoids confronting the threat
“You marry not to get her, but to lose her—to bring back peace into your life.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian materialist theory of marriage
“Coffee is never simply coffee, it's coffee with a hole.”Slavoj Žižek · desire structures every object as lacking—objet petit a
“Marx ends up with the wonderful formula: the greatest desire of Napoléon III is probably to steal all France just to give it back as his personal gift—like a proto-Bill Gates.”Slavoj Žižek · Bonapartist populism as circular redistribution that confirms personal power
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
First, let me tell you that I am a little bit surprised there are so many of you here because I tried to be honest today and prepare really a talk about what the book is about, which are basically difficult Hegelian problems. So nonetheless, I would like to begin just by agreeing with you deeply about this, this ever-presence of ideology today, especially when it denies itself. For example, you know, that’s the basic rule of ideology critique: when somebody says we are finally out of ideology, that’s where you can be sure they are in. The model of course today is this neoliberal economy. It presents itself as the end of all those ideological dreams, communist, fascist. Now we finally know, some of them claim even scientifically, what is the only truly functioning social economic order. The problem here is, why is this ideology? Not for the usual dogmatic reasons that it’s not true, but I claim that we should exert a more radical and simpler critique. Neoliberalism doesn’t exist. In what sense? Not in any mystical sense, but in the sense that if you really look closely at what big capitalist and not-so-big capitalist states are doing, nobody is really practicing neoliberalism. They are just preaching this to others to exploit them or what. Take United States. Are you aware how much United States give money, for example, to their farmers or whatever, how strong state interventions are? United States, it’s definitely not a neoliberal state. Okay, if you take a city which should be a kind of a symbol of the successful dynamic capitalism, Los Angeles. You know that not only leftists, even many capitalists refer to Los Angeles as the Socialist Republic of Los Angeles. Because it’s the city which is so deeply connected with state federal state apparatus, especially medical, defense and so on, state agencies. I mean, this is not liberal, this is not neoliberal capitalism. And I think we are even more explicitly moving in this direction. Take, for example, the states which were so successful relatively till now at least in avoiding the consequences of the financial crisis of China and even more, Singapore. I was in Singapore. It almost turned me into soft fascism because it really works as a kind of a small-is-beautiful proto-fascist organized authoritarian capitalist state. But it’s definitely not a neoliberal state. I mean, it’s practically a Staatskapitalismus, you know, the state decides very well, very much in detail, where to open the market, in what direction to push economy. That’s how they succeeded. China is doing the same and so on. And everybody knows that this will get stronger and stronger. The mystery is precisely this sheer material force of neoliberalism which is again and again totally falsified, not by some crazy Marxist critique, but by a very naive, simple look onto reality. Not to mention ecology. People talk about pro-capitalists, about how market is still the most effective tool to fight ecological threats, like to be vulgar, you know the theories: you include the price of nature, or at least of negative consequences, the price of pollution into the price of a commodity. You include that cost and so, blah-blah, you regulate it. But the, I, you know, it’s very interesting how censorship is practiced today. It is no longer practiced in this direct way where you directly prohibit something. No, I think that today it works much better. How? In, in our so-called free countries, everything is in the media if you really read it. But it’s presented in such a way that you simply, you basically apply what Freud called Isolierung as a specific strategy of the Unbewussten, of the unconscious, which is not direct oppression, Verdrängung, Verstellung or whatever. You say everything, but you isolate, suspend its symbolic efficiency. It has no consequences. And this phenomena again interest me. Why? Because in China, I find this, this is a wonderful data if you want to make a history of ideology in our times. It should have been reported also in your media, probably because it was, I read it, I forgot where, about two or three weeks ago. The last Chinese madness, I love it. The prior one is my favorite, you must know it, that some three years ago their Ministry for Religious Affairs established the rules of reincarnation, not as a joke, like, you are allowed to reincarnate, but you must inform the ministry where, with, I love this, that like, you said I plan to be reincarnated in that part of China, I don't know, as a saint, and they tell you no, in that part all posts for saints are full, only some dogs and worms are free there or whatever. What they did now, it's really tragicomic, it's that their state, I don't know which state agency, Ministry of Culture or what, introduced a legislation or whatever rule which prohibits on all of their TV stations and movie theaters any, to show any stories which in any way relate to, it’s not a joke, time travel and alternate reality. The official justification is that history is a too serious matter to be left to such trifling games. But it’s clear what’s behind, is that, you know, even dreaming about a possible alternative should be squashed. I claim that with us, it’s easy to make fun of China here, because with us, sorry to repeat some line of thought which may be known to some of you, with us it may appear different. Of course, you can have all the alternate reality that you want, but precisely because it’s isoliert, it doesn't work. What do I mean by this? It’s a very Hegelian point, with this I'm slowly, slowly, slowly, maybe we will arrive at it at the end, approaching the topic of your book. Did you notice how, in what a strange way, the couple possible-impossible works in our media? What is more and more considered possible? What is more and more considered impossible? Many things are possible, more and more, so we are told, especially in economy and private lives. It’s possible to, I don't know, if you have money, to fly soon to be a private astronaut. It is already possible, I think. It’s possible, so they tell us, through genetic manipulations to directly grow your Ersatz organs so that you need a new heart, no problem, they will grow it and so on, maybe this way we will live eternally. In private lives, sorry for repeating this old obscene joke, I cannot resist it, but I really saw it, not the thing itself, but doctor who does it in New York. The latest fashion in some extreme sexual circles in New York is they can operate your penis so that they cut it into two so that then you can have, okay, to be vulgar, two women at the same time if you are man. So all this is possible, more and more. But try to say, maybe we should give a little bit more money for healthcare. Ah, impossible, catastrophe, we violate the market rules, it will bring unemployment, it will cost crime. So, you know, isn't it funny that while, you know, it’s possible to have sex with two women, to fly, to live eternally, but it’s not possible to give a little bit more money for, we just accept it, a little bit more money for, for let us say, healthcare or solidarity or whatever. Here, the material weight of censorship works very well. And it’s, I think again, in a way more terrifying than in China because if the state prohibits something, this is usually at least in authoritarian countries, the best proof that the desire to do precisely that is still alive. Like as a Chinese friend, Wang Hui, told me, they have, when you have some reports in the media about something happening in China, he told me, you never know is it propaganda or true. There is only one way to be sure. If the state explicitly denies something, then it’s true. You know, for example, when they say, when they say there will be no problems with lack of, I don't know, onions on the market, it means there is, run fast buy them and so on. So what is even more interesting, sorry to repeat myself, if you want another proof of ideology, it’s an old motive of mine but I like to repeat it because it touches precisely this "I know very well but." Think about ecology precisely. I mean there you can see clearly the limits of neoliberalism. While they talk about capitalism, blah-blah, and again I don't condemn this a priori, maybe we will have to do it. What? I was shocked to learn that, do you know that big governments, by this I mean, sorry, strong like superpower governments, already have intense meetings, preparing plans for what they call geoengineering. Which is something pretty terrible, although maybe we will have to do it, I don't know. The idea is a very pessimistic one, de facto they admit it, no? The idea is that we already missed the moment to do it in this peaceful way through regulation to lower global warming, so we are lost. If with any systemic regulations we cannot do it. So the idea is, and it’s very seriously considered, why not directly at a global level, we are not talking about one valley where you do whatever you want, intervene into our atmosphere, waters and so on. There are already plans being made, but I'm not those conservative greens who warn against this, I'm here much more skeptical, maybe we will have to do it. But it’s good to know what is being prepared for us. For example, to put into the air gigantic, really gigantic up, up there, lenses so that they will deflect, prevent a large amount of sun rays to heat the earth. Or to spread gigantic amounts of salt water into the atmosphere, which can do the same. Or to, to put millions of tons of iron, iron as powder into the sea, the idea is it will have the same effect and so on. The idea, I mean, financially this is far from impossible, this is relatively very cheap. Of course we know what’s the problem. The problem is that we never know what are the, what are the unintended consequences, no? Like, you do this, okay, but what catastrophes can you cause as a byproduct. But again, I don't think that the option is to play this a certain version of German conservative ecologism: we offended mother nature, let's return to some balance. There is no way back. So this would be one point. The second point is, nonetheless I'm not a catastrophist. You know when you speak with people who claim oh, and this brings us already close to materialist dialectics, you know people who claim oh my god, but it’s already the catastrophe is here, everything will go wrong, whatever. I claim that this catastrophism is another refined way to, to reject confronting the true threat. Because it’s basically an easy way out. The catastrophe is here so why worry, let's enjoy it as far as we can or whatever. I think that secretly I always suspect, now I come close to a certain psychological mechanism again well-described by Freud, I am more and more convinced that those preachers of soon-to-come apocalypse are caught in a certain superstitious mechanism which works like, you know, if we talk a lot about it, maybe it will not happen. So I think when somebody tells you, stupid guy, you think about future having children, don't you know in five, ten years there will be almost no humans on the earth. I think we should treat him as someone who really doesn't believe it and doubts. The only consequent answer to such a person is: don't worry, there will be a catastrophe, don't worry, because they really worry there will not be. The other, even more tricky strategy here is a, a "je sais bien mais quand même," an "I know very well but," which is I think getting more and more popular, which is what many leftist critics correctly described as lifestyle ecology. Instead of confronting problems at a large level, how to change our mode of production, industries whatever, you know, they focus on personal small acts like, you know, recycle bottles, newspapers and so on and so on. I do it, of course we should do it, but we should be aware that this is ultimately not the way. I always compare this to some, to like the mechanism described by my Austrian friend Robert Pfaller where he talks about football fans who sit at home, watch the match and then shout, "Yeah, go ahead," you know, in kind of a magic thinking as if they can influence even if they are at home what goes on the stadium. I think this lifestyle ecology, it’s a little bit of that. I think that the real reason, it’s pure ideology, is not that we really believe that we can make a difference at this level. It’s a feel-good phenomenon. It’s, isn't it nice, I am also doing something for the mother earth. And it’s so beautiful, I'm not alone, I'm part of a large movement, it makes my heart warm when I think about it and so on and so on. So you know, when we criticize ideology, that’s the difficult part. Don't think only about big bad guys, you know, like I don't know, some direct racists and so on and so on. It’s much more difficult to be self-critical. So now, next stop, step towards Hegel, slowly, slowly, patience, you know. I think really what you, Frank, said, and I am not kidding, especially to understand ideology today, for example, let’s be concrete, sexism, racism and so on, I claim since we do live in a predominance of liberal permissive ideology and since I nonetheless think that usually till now, now I am getting more skeptical after what is happening in Scandinavian countries, in Hungary and so on, this new strength of anti-immigrant racism, that racism survives not at the explicit level but mostly at the implicit level of unsaid. If you analyze certain statements, here we must be really good Hegelian dialecticians to get at what is wrong with it. It’s not enough to focus on what is said, but what is not said when you say something, what is implied by what you say. Here again I will steal a joke which was used by, you mentioned her, my Parteigenossin Alenka Zupančič at the conference two months ago, where she interpreted in detail a wonderful, a wonderful one-liner, but we are here I think about no more than two kilometers from the house of Ernst Lubitsch I think, no? So to celebrate Ernst Lubitsch, a great materialist friend of Hegel I would say, no? You know there is a wonderful joke in his Ninotchka which, it's too incidentally, it's too easy to dismiss as simply anti-communist. As many people noticed, with all of course anti-Stalinist jokes, communism is nonetheless treated in a basically half even respectful way. It's absolutely not the same as these violent anti-communist films. But okay, there is a wonderful scene there. If you saw the movie, I'm sure you remember it, where a guy enters a cafeteria and says, a coffee with cream, sorry, a coffee without cream, please. And you know what the waiter answers: Sorry, we run out of cream, we only have milk, so can I get you coffee without milk? Now you will say this is stupid because in any case he will get exactly the same, plain coffee. What does it matter if it's without milk or without cream? Ah, the lesson of dialectics is that it matters a lot. Because the guy, if he were the customer to desire only plain coffee, he would have said a coffee. The reason he felt the need to deny is that I think it's clear that a much more complex structure is at work here. The question to ask is, but why do we add something to coffee? Precisely, this is my old thesis, the underlying structure is that of Kinder Surprise eggs, you know. Like an ideal commodity is never just a commodity. Like Kinder Surprise egg you get a surplus, in this case a plastic toy or whatever in. This is an admission that you must add something to coffee, this would be the Lacanian object cause of desire, what Lacan calls the object small a, objet petit a. And so the root of this without or with milk is that already coffee is never simply coffee, it’s coffee with a hole. And okay, I will not now go into even more refined dialectics where you can nicely demonstrate how even coffee itself can fill in this hole. You can literally get coffee with coffee. When they say for example at, if you have too many bombs drop them on Starbucks, that what they say there like our coffee is not just a coffee but really a coffee. This is the split they refer to. And what I like here is how again negation is not simply negative. And I want now to supplement this example of Alenka Zupančič with one wonderful line to me which is wonderful because nothing happens in this brief story. It's just a double negation but it's an extreme even obscenely verbal erotization achieved in this way. It's from, did you see Brassed Off, some years ago I think, one of these English working-class melodramas with the young Ewan McGregor before he reinvented himself as Jedi and all that big commercial bullshit, when he was still the working-class actor. Okay, I will not go into the story, miners' strike and so on. The point is that he flirts with a more educated girl who works as a some kind of economist preparing the closure of mines and so on. So they go out to eat and she, he, of course, accompanies her home. At the entrance to her house she says, listen carefully, she says, "Would you care to come up to my place for a coffee?" He says, "Yeah, but there's a problem, I don't like coffee." She answers, "No problem, I don't have any." You see like through this she offers something, negates. Can you imagine a more obscene way of saying come and screw my brains out of me, I mean, no? What I like is that it’s totally a, you know, you just offer something and deny it and by denying it basically the message comes through in an even more, in an even more transparent way. This is, this would be I claim how ideology functions. You know like they can deny it as much as they want, you know like in the War on Terror, for example, I have an obscene version translated into that, no? Should we torture the prisoner? No, we will not torture him, it means rather not imagine what and so on, no? So okay, now finally, surprise, surprise, I am coming to your topic. I would like to begin nonetheless with two remarks on Hegel because we are both aware of the madness of advocating Hegel today, like you know, this usual idea, my God, Hegel the absolute idealist, the guy who thought he can read the mind of God and know everything that did, is happening and will happen. Just to clarify two misunderstandings, to give you an idea. The bad thing is usually Hegel's notion of totality, like totalitarian, you know that link, like they say from Plato to NATO, from totality to totalitarianism. But if you read closely Hegel, what Hegel really means with his notion of totality is exactly the opposite. It’s not every disharmonious element can find its place in a large totality, it's precisely that when you want to grasp a totality, you should include into totality all that disturbs it, undermines it and so on. A Hegelian example of totality would have been, you want to talk about today's capitalism, then don't talk only about Singapore or whatever, talk also about Congo. A country in total disarray with no functioning government, with over of child soldiers, you know the idea how they do it, no? If you take a child five, six years old and you put him on heavy drugs, in a couple of years you get a perfect killing machine, no? There are at least, definitely over of them and so on and so on. So the idea of Hegelian totality is here, I think even Adorno was wrong, you know with his big "Das Ganze ist das Unwahre," no? Against Hegel, "Das Ganze ist das Wahre." But that's in a way what Hegel meant, that das Ganze ist nicht einfach das Ganze, das Ganze ist das Ganze and all the bullshit which comes by and you are not allowed to dismiss it. Which is why also, to be very brief, when Hegel speaks about List der Vernunft, usually it’s read in this cheap teleological way: things may appear confused but there is a higher intelligence, reasonable order which guarantees that even if we don't know it, everything serves a purpose, but rational purpose. But if you read Hegel closely, I claim List der Vernunft means almost the exact opposite. It means whatever phenomenon you take, you can be absolutely sure that something will go wrong, no? Isn't Hegel's so-called dialectical process a series of failures and even at the end you don't get the final success, you just get the pure form of failure, which as we all know is called Absolutes Wissen, no? And okay, based on all this, now, it's horrible to betray my principles and to really come to the point, no? I will do. But I will begin at the opposite end. Pöbel is for you, for me is König, the king, no? A little bit about democratic elements, no joke intended, of Hegel's deduction of the necessity of monarchy. I want to begin with a strange reference. You mentioned Lenin. You know that, it's an incredibly nice although stupid phenomenon. Do you know that Jack London was one of the most popular authors in Soviet Union? Reprinted in millions. You know why? Because Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote in her memoirs that one evening when Lenin was ill she was reading to Lenin Jack London's short stories and Lenin liked some of them. This decided the fate, you know. Okay, it would be nice because today it's Chávez who tries a little bit to play this role, you know the legend of showing, of showing, of showing Chomsky's book at United Nations and it immediately jumped to number one in Amazon.com. I know some of my ex-friends like Ernesto Laclau who then tried to repeat this, no? Tried through their connections to convince Chávez to show. Chávez did a wonderful thing. He did show Ernesto Laclau's book on populism, but in some shitty province town in the middle of Venezuela, no? So it didn't... okay, seriously. Jack London's Martin Eden is quite an interesting novel, with no pun intended. You know it ends with the hero's suicide. The hero is a poor guy working-class who becomes a successful writer. At the end the hero kills himself. Why? Ah, it's interesting. So after long years of struggle and hard work, Martin Eden finally succeeds, becomes a famous writer. However, while he is floating in wealth and fame, one thing puzzled him: the very mystery of his success. Here is a quote from Martin Eden: "He had not changed. He was the same Martin Eden. What then made the difference? The fact that the stuff he had written had appeared inside the covers of books, but it was work performed. It was not something he had done since becoming famous. Therefore it was not for any real value, but for a purely fictitious value that he is famous." End of quote. So what Martin Eden cannot accept is the radical gap which forever separates his real qualities from his symbolic status in the eyes of the others. All of a sudden, he is no longer a nobody, avoided by respectable public, but a famous author invited by the pillars of society with even the beloved woman who before when he was unknown was rejecting him, now throwing herself at his feet. But he is fully aware that nothing changed in him, in his reality. He is now the same person as before. So what Martin Eden cannot accept is this radical decentering of the very core of his personality. He is nothing in himself, just a concentrated projection of others' dreams. This perception that his, let’s call it Agalma, the treasure deep in him, what makes him desired by others, is something that is outside of him. This not only ruins his narcissism but even kills his desire. Another nice quote from Martin Eden: "Something has gone out of me. I have always been unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being sated with life. Life has so filled me that I am empty of any desire for anything." It is this conclusion that I am nobody, nothing, which drove him to suicide. Now insofar as the psychoanalytic term, Lacanian term symbolic castration, is also one of the names of this gap between my, the immediate stupidity of my being and my symbolic title. Recall the proverbial disappointment of an adolescent: "Is that miserable coward really my father?" And since a symbolic authority can only function insofar in a kind of illegitimate short-circuit this gap is obfuscated and my symbolic authority appears as an immediate property or quality of me as a person, each authority has to protect itself from situations of course in which this gap becomes palpable. The appearance of the king's or master's omnipotence has to be maintained. And here we come to Hegel. For Hegel, the definition of a king is precisely a very tragic one. The king for Hegel should be a subject who doesn't kill himself like Martin Eden, but fully accepts this radical decentering. A king is someone who very well knows people bow to me and so on, but it has absolutely nothing to do with me. The king is practically in reality its opposite. The king has to know I am a piece of shit just in a totally contingent way attached to a certain symbolic title. In this way we should read famous Lacan's statement that, you know, a madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king. A madman is also a king who thinks he is a king. That is to say who thinks that his authority is really engendered by his personality. Or to paraphrase Marx, you know this famous passage in first chapter of Capital where Marx says this man is not a king, this man is not treated as a king because he is a king but he is a king because other people treat him as a king. This is difficult to accept. I'm sorry if you know this anecdote, but there is a very nice military anecdote from German past which makes this constitutive stupidity of the king very clear. It’s from the Prussian-Austrian war in when the Prussian king, formally the supreme commander of the Prussian army, was observing the fight from a nearby hill. He just looked worried at what appeared to him the confusion in the valley in front of him, you know, some Prussian troops seemed to be progressing, others retreating and so on and so on. Then near him General von Moltke was on a horse. He was the brain, the strategist, he planned the battle. And while to the king the situation looks totally confused, he even thought according to some rumors that the Prussians are losing. Moltke at a certain point observing with binoculars the battle, turned to the king and told him: "May I be the first to congratulate Your Majesty for a brilliant victory?" I love this, you know how, it’s a total stupidity of the king, but nonetheless he was, he was the subject of king. And I claim that Hegel, Hegel's definition of the king is again, it's precisely this kind of radical acceptance of your stupidity. A good king knows that he is in for nothing. Here I think Marx missed the point in his early from Critical Remarks on Hegel's Philosophy of Right, where Marx concludes his remarks with the sarcastic note that the Hegelian monarch is nothing more than an appendix to his penis. But that’s precisely what Hegel is saying. Such an utter alienation, such a reversal by mean of which a person becomes an appendix of his biological organ of procreation is the price to be paid for, to be paid for acting like state's sovereignty embodied. And Hegel makes this very clear, a quote from his Rechtsphilosophie: "In a completely organized state, it is only a question of the culminating point of formal decision (the king). He has only to say 'yes' and dot the 'i'. Because the throne should be such that the significant thing in its holder is not his particular make-up. In a well-organized monarchy, the objective aspect belongs to law alone, and the monarch's part is only to set to the law the effective, the subjective 'I will'." And now I cannot restrain myself, I'm sorry if some of you know this example, to note how actual these remarks are with regard the two great Oscar winners of the last year. The King's Speech, which deals precisely with this problem, but with a totally mystifying gesture, and an even more reactionary film, The Black Swan. Why? Step-by-step. For me, The King's Speech is the story of a quite normal, intelligent young man, who is normal and he knows: "If I become a king I will be a piece of shit, you know, automatically alienated." So of course he resists this by stuttering. I don't think there is anything pathological in his stuttering. This is his way of saying, "Uh-uh, I'm not a total idiot, I have minimal of self-awareness." And the whole story of the film is how does effectively that Australian coach, played by Geoffrey Rush, train him? By precisely rendering him stupid. You remember how at the towards the end of the film the big scene when the king, okay, is on the path of recovery in the sense of able to speak fluently, when they, the coach, language trainer, sits on on one of the thrones, on the king's seat. And the king starts to shout: "How dare you sit there, this is my seat!" And the coach ironically asked, "But why not me? Why you?" And the king shouts back: "Because I'm king by God's will, it's my right!" And the coach says, "Now you are. I congratulate you, you..." It’s really rendering the king stupid enough to function as a king. And this is a very reactionary tendency today, it’s really a movie about how to render us stupid enough, how to ungeschehen machen, undo the critical work and render us stupid enough to restore symbolic authority. The other movie is even much better, much worse I claim, Black Swan. Why? It's a very simplistic reading that I will give you now. But I I effectively think that it's deeply anti-feminist, The Black Swan. Why? What is the hypothesis of the film, especially if we do it like coffee without milk, no? What is the milk here is the male position. A man, that's the premise, secret of the film, can dedicate himself to the mission, like do have a, how shall I put it, be a king or whatever, you have a mission in life and still have a normal family, sex life, whatever you can. But a woman, and this is the old reactionary myth which you find from Hoffmann up to Krzysztof Kieślowski and Tarkovsky, that while a man can do this, a woman cannot. If a woman fully identifies her with her public mission, what she wants to be, the price will be her self-destruction. A woman cannot do it, a woman have to choose. Either your public mission, in this case ballet, usually in the history of romanticism and so on it's singing, you know. From Hoffmann's Tales, that story of I think it's the second or the third one. The one who is tempted by the devil even if she is ill to sing and then she sings and dies singing. And if you think that we are today any better, just think about Kieślowski's, Krzysztof Kieślowski's most popular film, The Double Life of Veronique, which tells exactly the same story. You have two Veroniques. The first one chooses mission, singing, pop, drops dead. The second one knows what the woman's limitations are, withdraws to private life, she succeeds and so on. So I think that Hegel was here definitely onto something. The Marxists who mocked Hegel here, did they not pay the price for this negligence in the sense that when they laughed at Hegel, "Ooh, Hegel and the king," but didn't this repressed dimension of the constitutive stupidity of the top figure return with a vengeance in the guise of the Marxist-communist leader who is even worse than a king? Why? Because Stalin certainly did not just add the subjective "I will." Stalin was not the one who said, "You present me with documents, I will just sign them." Stalin thought that, you know, Stalin was as it were his own Moltke, you know. He thought he is the greatest genius and so on and so on. So what Hegel was aware was something very important that in a way even ancient Greeks and people from Venice knew and even intelligent radical democrats from Jacobins onwards knew, that you cannot have a democratic system where the leader is simply chosen according to his/her real abilities. The moment you go on this path, you will end in, I hate the word, in some kind of totalitarianism. Genuine democracy always, ancient Greeks knew this, even in Venice, which was not an ideal democracy, knew this, and so on. You need a moment of chance. There must be a moment of contingency. And I think that here Hegel is simply too short but as you nicely said is not Hegelian enough. Where he is not consequent enough is to limiting this logic of contingency, this gap between effective... Hegel was right in his intuition that the effective qualities should not directly legitimize you to rule. That this short-circuit precisely because we are dealing with society where the point is who regulate social relations, direct qualifications shouldn't be enough. And Hegel was on the right path when he proposed contingency, an element of contingency. The point he didn't see is why should this contingency be limited to just to the top, to the king. You can also introduce contingency into a democratic system. All well-functioning democracies involved a moment of contingency. The moment you give power to those for whom you think they are really qualified, you are one step towards Bologna Reform, expert knowledge and so on and so on. It's rather terrifying, it gets rather terrifying. So again, Hegel was I claim on the path of something very important, even very egalitarian. It's that who is on the top must be left to some kind of contingency. Which is the very democratic principle, that in principle everyone can be up on the top. So let's go a step further here. Hegel saw this I claim because precisely he was in an unique position between traditional order founded on symbolic authority, the king is divine, and modern society founded on real qualifications, let the best rule us and so on and so on. Hegel saw something in-between. And here again we should, precisely because we are in another in-between, return to Hegel. Now finally, betraying all my principles, I come to you. Things get complicated when you combine this top contingency on the top with Pöbel, rabble, with the excess on the bottom. Isn't maybe, and here we should maybe refer to Marx, to Achtzehnte Brumaire, isn't it that this precisely defines modern populist authoritarianism, Bonapartism? As Marx puts it very nicely, although you know when Marx is asked, approached the simple question who is the real social base of Napoléon III. He gives three apparently contradictory answers, but they work together I claim. First there is a famous passage you must know it, when Marx says Bonaparte represents those basically stupid disorganized farmers, those who are not able of actively representing themselves. Then Marx uses another wonderful formula, that Louis Bonaparte, Napoléon III, plays a kind of a game of representing each class for all others, you know. First he takes something from others and give to farmers, lower taxes whatever. Then he takes from farmers and give to the merchants, then he takes from them, you know this kind of a typically proto-fascist you just circular... and Marx ends up of course with the wonderful formula of the greatest desire of Napoléon III is probably to steal all France just to give it back as his personal gift like proto-Bill Gates, no? Who is doing this in some way. Okay, let's go on. But then Marx adds a crucial further element. Where he says that but in the real sense, the true foundation of Napoléon III is the rabble, Pöbel, all those outcasts, bandits and so on and so on. So it would be interesting again to read this modern populism as a direct short-circuit between top and bottom. But of course I'm far to reduce rabble to this. I deeply agree with Frank’s analysis, which is now, I will be a school teacher and or rather a pupil. In the sense that, you know, I love this humiliating gesture you must remember it from elementary school, when a teacher tells you after telling you some story, "Now would you please stand up and tell with your own words what this story..." Now I will tell with my own words, I hope you will give me a good grade Frank, no? What I see. First thing, it's a why the reason I think you are right this example of Pöbel is crucial. It's not only that you can here catch Hegel, if you permit me this obscene metaphor with his pants down, no? When he is cheating, not Hegelian enough, but also the way you resolve this question is the focus of the entire ambiguity of Hegel's dialectics of what does it mean what Hegel calls concrete universality. What Hegel doesn't do to be is something that if you take seriously the elementary dialectical mechanism of reflexive determinations and so on should have done. Because the absolute elementary rule of Hegelian dialectics is that in a certain totality, that a totality always includes an element which is what Jacques Rancière calls "part of no part", Alain Badiou calls the "symptomal point," an element which is formally part of that totality but at the same time has no proper place within this totality, its inherent excess. And the absolute unambiguous conclusion for Hegel, or even axiom is that: it is precisely this excluded element, the element without proper place in the hierarchic order of things that stands for universality as such. This goes from Christianity where when Christ says, "If you don't hate your mother, father, you are not my follower," means exactly doesn't mean you have to hate your mother or father, although I have nothing against it. But what I want to say is that mother and father I claim in the Bible when Christ says that stand simply for the organic hierarchic social order. And his idea of Christ is that precisely in order to participate in true universality you have to step out, sub- to use Badiou's term, subtract yourself from this order. This consequence unfortunately Hegel does not draw, that precisely the rabble, Pöbel, is the point of universality. And you know we know this today, we can put it even Marx then repeats this, you know, when he says that precisely proletarians as a, as a without proper place, as a displaced subject, without proper place, stands for Menschheit, for universality of humankind as such and so on. So again, this is missing in Hegel very to put it in very simple terms. Second point, the entire fate of the entire Hegelian dialectic is decided here. Because if you miss this point which is precisely what Hegel calls again gegensätzliche Bestimmung, oppositional determination, that the universal principle has to find itself within its own particular elements in the guise of the lowest, of the element which has no proper place and so on and so on. If you forget this, you are in basically proto-fascism, corporatism. This is why no wonder that the first big political Hegelian philosophy after the decline of Hegelianism, the British Hegelianism of the late 19th century, Bradley, McTaggart and so on, was deeply corporate proto-fascist. This fascist reading of Hegel, concrete society of estates, which means every social group has its own particular place in social totality, nobody can have a direct access towards universality without mediation of particularity. They read this Hegelian phrase as a kind of a ultimate political wisdom, which means the corporate point, that liberal global egalitarian elections are to be rejected because they don't take into account the organic hierarchy of a social edifice. So the idea is that you should only have influence as a member of an estate or whatever, not directly. But precisely, we don't have time to go into it, if you read it in this way, you lose the whole point of what Hegel calls negativity, which is that you have a conflict which runs within the universality itself. That universality always fights itself in the guise of its oppositional determination. This I think would be the difference of a true leftist reading of Hegel with the difference between first this right-wing proto-fascist reading of Hegel and what I hate even more than this reading, the Pittsburgh Hegelian, Habermas-ized, John McDowell, or especially Pippin and so on, Brandom recognition reading of Hegel. Hegel as the ultimate philosopher... this is the liberal Hegel. And the only true revolution or rather counter-revolution in the last years is the rise of this third liberal Hegel: Hegel of recognition. We don't have time to go into that. What I'm saying is that, and I will return to this at the end, it’s precisely such a reading of Hegel, corporate reading, where you say rational state is organic totality, each at his/her own place. Today in China they call this harmonious society, which opens up the space for anti-semitism of course. Because Jews are then by definition without a proper place in this organic social edifice. So again, although Hegel knew very well that the excess of Pöbel is structurally necessary. Hegel is very honest here. He says there are ways to deal with this problem: colonization, charity and so on, but the problem cannot really be resolved because the society itself, the more it gets rich the more it generates poor. So again, as Frank demonstrates wonderfully, two crucial things: first Hegel is not Hegelian enough here, and second point even more important maybe: don't read his book as another of the traditional Marxist mantras of how Hegel didn't see it because he spoke about Pöbel, not about proletariat, working class. If anything, we should maybe in today's situation where it is clear that if we are to have any serious chance of a global emancipatory movement, we cannot just play the cards of the traditional working class. We have to include the dispossessed, the colonized, those the outcasts and so on and so on. So what I'm tempted to say is that even at the very pragmatic level of emancipatory political activity, we should maybe re- return a little bit from Marx to Hegel, rehabilitate the notion of Pöbel. For example, I noticed how the Somali pirates talk almost like Hegel, you know, because Hegel’s basic critiques of Pöbel although he then corrects himself. Hegel is very radical here. You know that Hegel at one point says that in a way Pöbel, the rabble is right. They don't get any recognition from society so they don't owe anything to society. In other words Hegel says they have full right to to rebel. Then Hegel describes as one of the attitudes of the Pöbel that as if society owes them without them working some kind of subsistence. This is precisely, I remember one, this demand for subsistence without work is one of the self-justifications of the Somali pirates. So okay, to slowly, I didn't say conclude, I said approach the conclusion, no? I think that the underlying apart from political consequences, more general problem here is the status of negativity in Hegel. Without historicizing Hegel. I am not saying that we should do it in this not very productive I think way which was first proposed by Engels, you know, this boring mantra of the contradiction between Hegel's system and Hegel's method. That the method is open, eternal struggle of opposites but the system is closed. I'm not saying this because precisely with Hegel if you read him closely the system is not closed. It's extremely interesting to ask this epistemological question without conceding histor- without regressing into evolutionary historicism. How to interpret within Hegel's horizon serious a series of statements where Hegel constantly self-relativizes his view. No, Hegel is not claiming, quite on the contrary, "I can read the mind of God." For example, read the introduction to his Philosophy of History where apropos United States of America and Russian Empire, Hegel says something not so stupid if you take into account that it was said in 1820s. He said it's too early to develop the philosophy of these two states, next century will be their century. No? Not so stupid, admit it. Then quite often in his Philosophy of Nature, he says about this we don't yet know enough. We cannot say. Not to mention the absolute conclusion of his whole system: the last pages of his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. Okay, Hegel is Hegel, I love this, he ends with aha! himself, that's life of course. But then at the very end, read it, he says something like "this is for the time being till further change der Standpunkt, the..." blah-blah. So he totally takes into account that he is not the end. I mean I mean so those readers of Hegel, intelligent ones like Robert Solomon, I don't always agree with him but here he is right, are right who claim that Absolutes Wissen is not this kind of "Oh, I know everything." It's rather the most radical limitation that you can imagine. It’s the historical point where you cannot see outside. You cannot see more with all with all reflexivity. So from here we should approach this difficult question. We have here the excess of rabble which is an excess. It stands for immediate universality and as Hegel makes it clear it cannot ever be reintegrated into his rational state. Then if we reread Hegel in this way we find a whole series of this, let's call them excesses of negativity. It is for example, I already did this in a book that I co-published with Markus Gabriel in German, his theory of madness in the first chapter, "Anthropologie" of Philosophie des Geistes. It's breathtaking. He is more Foucauldian than Michel Foucault himself. Hegel says there that the possibility of madness is constitutive of being human. We become human only through overcoming the potential of madness, which is not simply sublimated, aufgehoben, always always remains as a potential threat. Up to, then we have a rabble, we have this, then we have oh, I don't have time to talk about it. Sorry guys, no sex today. But nonetheless, read, it's worth reading, Hegel's theory of marriage. Like if you cut the crap and try to get what Hegel is saying, it's something absolutely wonderful. Okay, I will give you just the result, we don't have time to go through. Basically Hegel's theory, you know Hegel was opposed to this romantic love of passion and so on, no? What Hegel is saying is something so brutal. If you really read him closely he says something like this: "Are you passionately in love? So marry the person. Because then living with the person, seeing you know the dirty side, she is dirty or he doesn't wash herself, makes vulgar sounds... in a couple of months the desire will go out of it and you will be able to lead normal peaceful life and so on and so on." So you marry not to get her or him, but to lose him or her. To bring back peace into your life. This here Hegel implicitly turns around in a materialist way what is usually celebrated as the great materialism of Pascal. You know Pascal is usually read Althusser read him in this way: the famous Pascalian advice, you don't believe, act as if you believe, prayer and so on, and belief will come by itself. I think Pascal was wrong. The entire wisdom of the Catholic Church is based on the very deep opposite insight. The problem of the church is that people shouldn't believe too much. If they believe too much they become Gnostics, whatever, they make fun of the church as an institution, and church is a great institution. Church was never bore- was never bothered by how people believe. Church didn't want you to believe too much because then you can question the church and so on, no? So I think we should rephrase we should rephrase Pascal today: "Do you believe too much? Do you have an insanely intense relation to God? That's bad, it disturbs your life. Act as if you believe and you will no longer have to believe, rituals will do it for you." And again, this would have been then Pascalian also theory of marriage: "You love a certain person too much like Hegel. Act, marry her and love will get automatic, you know, love will be already in the very ritualized form, you know." So like if it's already said, you know like it's nice to be married because then the wife or man, okay, I am a man I will say wife, after one year tells you: "But please, darling, you no longer caress me, where is love?" And married means you can tell her: "Fuck you, here is the marriage contract which says I love you, so it's already there so leave me alone, no?" Great theory. Okay, more serious. And then my last royal example: War. Absolutely usually it's read this Hegel's deduction of the necessity of war as you know the darkest militarism and so on. No, it has a certain very deep potential. It's not the question of war, it's the question of Hegel is fully aware that this rational corporate state never function, that it needs from time to time the return of radical negativity. Here, referring to Frank’s formula, I would say what Hegel didn't see and should have seen as a Hegelian is that the true way towards this is not outside struggle, war. It's Thomas Jefferson, you know that wonderful totalitarian statement that the tree of freedom had to be watered by blood from time to time. The necessity of rebellion. If Hegel were to be consequent, here you should have negativity, not outer war but from within. Okay, now if you just allow me to add some problematic political comments. The problem of course today is who is this "part of no part" and so on. I admit in certain constellation like, for example, in Nazism this function was localized into the Jews. And let me begin by the fact that this, I will now try to approach with some concluding Hegelian remarks this very traumatic topic of anti-semitism and the left. First, let me assure you, absolutely no compromises from my side here. I don't buy the bullshit of some people who claim, "You know, the Palestinians suffered so much that we should show some understanding," no? No, because exactly the same thing then you can say for the Jews, "Let them let them terrorize the Palestinians because they suffered so much" and so on and so on. This is absolutely inadmissible and to be clear, absolutely inadmissible especially for an authentic Jew. I mean I cannot imagine more anti-Jewish statement than this bargaining, you know, "We suffered, allow us to do a little bit dirty work there" and so on. It's very sad this almost mirror image. Point two, I also don't buy this historicist justification where people say, "Okay, many Arabs, not only Arabs, may shout 'Death to the Jews,' but what they really mean is not Jews but just the Zionist state of Israel." Well my answer to this is: Are they so stupid? If they really mean it, why don't they say it? Because it can be shown in the most elementary way, for example, that although he wasn't aware of it, but when Hitler said "Jews," this was a kind of a mystifying Ersatz for capitalism, no? But nonetheless unfortunately he didn't say "capitalism," no? He said "Jews" precisely in order to avoid saying "capitalism," in order to save capitalism. This is why, now if you allow me the last minutes for a little bit of pro domo sua, this is why I got in trouble with my last book in German and some others, and of course I don't make any compromises here, I defend my position to the end. When in United States already the publisher got almost a heart attack with that statement of mine "Hitler was not violent radical enough." Like, "Uh-uh, you want him to kill all of us Jews, no?" They didn't get my point, which was exactly the opposite. My point was that, and I think this is on the contrary the most radical anti-fascist point, that it’s wrong to celebrate Hitler as this kind of, Hannah Arendt was very well aware of it, to condemn him as diabolic, but nonetheless elevate him like some kind of a radical diabolic greatness and so on and so on. Like you know, like some right-wingers like to say: "Okay, okay, Hitler did some horrible thing but he had balls to do them." No he didn't have balls. We should insist on it that Hitler was basically a coward. He killed millions why? Not to do the real thing, to change a little bit capitalist relations. Hitler's violence was in Nietzsche's term a reactive violence. We should insist on it. Otherwise again we give way too much to Hitler, my God. Which is why I supplemented my statement with something which cost some problems, caused me some problems in India, unfortunately. When they told me there... no, sorry, when I said there that that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. Then like are you crazy or what? Even you know, a wonderful thing happened, I must tell you I cannot resist it anecdote. Two weeks after my visit to India, a friend whose wife works at Slovene Foreign Ministry, you know we are a small country everybody knows everyone else so it's no problem to learn this, told me that two weeks after my visit, a special dépêche, diplomatic note came from India to Slovene Foreign Ministry asking them: "Your philosopher Slovene citizen claimed that Gandhi is worse than he than Hitler. Is this the official policy of Slovene government?" I tried to convince them to answer: "Not yet but we are just thinking on it, we will let you know what..." They really didn't get it. My point is that Gandhi didn't kill anyone, more or less, but in a way he did what Hitler was afraid to do. He really tried to stop the functioning of the British colonial state. Something that Hitler never did. His whole activity was, you know this is the definition of right-wing violence, to depoliticize the situation to bring things back to normal. So this is the first misunderstanding. So let's go on. No compromise with anti-semitism here. I even think that whenever you do find among in the so-called Left even a minimal trace of anti-semitism, it's always a signal of a something wrong with the revolutionary or whatever project itself. For example, it's true although now he apologized, Castro called him to give him the order I learned from friends of my friends who have connections, Hugo Chávez did make some slightly tasteless at its best ambiguous remarks. But I claim that this is just a clear sign of the faithful limitation of his populist project. This is a sign of something is wrong with his famous socialism for 21st century or whatever, no? So again, no compromise here. Problems start with me and I will tell you exactly why, when you go a little bit not too far in a quantitative sense but hear what I mean. For example, Bernard-Henri Lévy made, brought this line of absolute suspicion of any kind of anti-Zionism as really anti-semitism. He was honest enough to go to the very end and said not only is... he claims that it is suspicious today to be anti-capitalist in contrast to the standard Marxist thesis that anti-semitism is a time-out. Yes, time-out if you apply the metaphysical linear notion of time. I protest logocentrism and linearity. I agree with critics of this notion of time from Heidegger to Derrida. Who are you to question this great cri-? Now you have to make either Benjamin called this, this you know as opposed to Jetzt-revolutionary this historicist time. To say time-out means to make fun of the suffering... sorry. Sorry. Sorry, I will I will stop very shortly, sorry. No, but really, really shortly. You know he said then, he went one step further and said anti-capitalism is today a mask for anti-semitism. No, this is where you end up. So what is my point here? Let me just really to conclude give you two just two points. First one, and before you start shouting I must tell you I presented this line of thought in Jerusalem, to people who were not just some pro-terrorist Palestinians, to who were Jews with, if you want to be pathetic, with a certain numbers tattooed here and they totally accepted it. That we have to accept... this is a bad things for some maybe... Zionism as the latest form of anti-semitism. Ah, what do I mean by that? You know what made me incredibly suspicious? This totally unnatural marriage, which is a new thing, it lasts now only about years I think, between Zionists in United States and the how are they called? and the American conservative religious right, fundamentalist Baptists and so on. Now I told to myself something doesn't work here. Because if there is a group of people where you don't have to do any complex analysis, it's in their phrenology, in their blood, to be anti-semitic, it's this American conservative Baptist whatever right. All of a sudden they support Zionism, although with limitations. For example Glenn Beck, my fa- you know the crazy right-wing commentator of Fox News. Finally he got crazy and turned directly anti-semitic and was fired. What I want to say is that, you know what gave me this idea? I was once in Israel in a debate and some of my friends like Udi Aloni were brutally attacked by Zionists, Jewish friends all of them. How, in what words? Wonderful. They were approached that they were told, "You only look to be, act as one of us, Jews, but you are really not. You are a foreign body, not really identified with our community, you just freely float..." and so on and so on. To cut a long story short, I told myself, but wait a minute, these are exactly the terms used in the last 19th century to designate the Jews. So I really think I'm not saying that now, to generalize this. What I'm saying is that the state of Israel is something which, it's more of a tragic situation, deeply affects the Jewish identity. You know you cannot have it both ways, that's the tragedy. It's not me who judges this from outside, I don't allow you, who am I to allow them something or not? It’s simply you cannot have it both ways: a full nation state and what Jews historically were. Second point. You know like you know Bernard-Henri Lévy likes to boast, "Oh I visited everything, you know, here and there and all the dangerous places." It’s strange that he didn't yet visit the West Bank. Now I agree with those who claim why focus only on Israel and so on and so on. I agree with this, often the criticism of Israel is extra sensitive, unjustified and so on. But all this said, let's face it. I agree it’s tasteless to make these disgusting comparisons, you know: what Nazis were doing to the Jews they are now doing to the Palestinians. I'm the first to reject it. But much more modestly, their whole strategy on the West Bank, whatever you say, is not fair. That's all I'm saying. And you know whom I'm referring here to convince you of this? They are such a refreshing reading. The first generation state of Israel leaders. My God, read Ben-Gurion and so on. It's they were the authentic fighters, I respect them. And they don't bullshit. Ben-Gurion says openly, look into my... it's not translated into German, book on violence where I gave all the quotes. It's something like, "Let's be clear, we have no right to this land. We are perceived as colonizers and it's simply who will win, his will be the right." No bullshitting there, absolutely no bullshitting. Moshe Dayan in '56 at a funeral of a of a Jewish farmer killed by Palestinians across the border around Gaza, he says: "Let's not condemn them. In their place we would do the same thing" and so on and so on. I'm saying that if you start talking like this it's the beginning of honesty. Then, you know what's the tragedy of the West Bank? That it's not a lot of physical violence but it's really as a book says "occupation by bureaucracy." It's absolutely breathtaking. It's like some kind of Michel [unintelligible] you are cutting my head I know. Okay. So no really to end with a personal. I wanted to approach but you can ask me this also that big stupidity my friends at Suhrkamp told me circulating now in Germany about me an anti-semite who claimed that all the Jews should be killed except those who are critical of the state of Israel. Sorry to tell you, I didn't know that such a brutal manipulation is possible. Of course my best friend in that city journal Merkur reprinted this attack on me, blah-blah. It's absolutely unambiguously clear that I refer there to the argumentation of my enemy. It's absolutely unambiguous. Okay. But to let me stop is with what I consider good activity to bring peace. Peace, maybe not elements of peace to the Middle East. And I'm proud to be part of it but it’s tragic. Was it also in your media that a guy called Juliano or what Giuliani who is a unique person half Jew half Palestinian? He run a so-called Freedom Theatre in Jenin. An extraordinary thing. Young Palestinians totally secular wanting blah-blah and the already mentioned friend of ours Udi Aloni wanted to organize there a summer school on cinema theory. Yeah our friends in Jenin told us, "No bullshit about free Palestine. Just come here and treat us normally as people who want to learn something." And we had this wonderful idea. And sorry, I must say that okay, this guy Juliano who was the head of Jenin Freedom Theatre was shot into the head by Hamas. The idea was that with this neutral approach, let's share the same culture, we are already intervening too much and so on and so on. So again when my friends are killed by Hamas, I find it just a little bit tasteless to be accused of supporting Palestinian terrorism in the same way as that jerk from Die Zeit, my ex-half-friend Thomas Assheuer, accused me of sympathizing with Ahmadinejad. Sorry I find this tasteless because I publicly supported Mousavi. The result is that two of my translators into Farsi are tortured, are in prison now, you know. Like at least I can say this for me. I am at the same time attacked from one side as anti-semitic and from the other side regularly the old Mubarak Akram every couple of months as the most perfidious Zionist propaganda. If both sides attack you for the same text then maybe I am on the right way. So I wish you the same: to be attacked from all sides. You will be poor and jobless but you will have the deep moral satisfaction. Ha-ha! Thanks very much to you.
First, let me tell you that I am a little bit surprised there are so many of you here because I tried to be honest today and prepare really a talk about what the book is about, which are basically difficult Hegelian problems. So nonetheless, I would like to begin just by agreeing with you deeply about this, this ever-presence of ideology today, especially when it denies itself. For example, you know, that’s the basic rule of ideology critique: when somebody says we are finally out of ideology, that’s where you can be sure they are in. The model of course today is this neoliberal economy. It presents itself as the end of all those ideological dreams, communist, fascist. Now we finally know, some of them claim even scientifically, what is the only truly functioning social economic order. The problem here is, why is this ideology? Not for the usual dogmatic reasons that it’s not true, but I claim that we should exert a more radical and simpler critique. Neoliberalism doesn’t exist. In what sense? Not in any mystical sense, but in the sense that if you really look closely at what big capitalist and not-so-big capitalist states are doing, nobody is really practicing neoliberalism. They are just preaching this to others to exploit them or what. Take United States. Are you aware how much United States give money, for example, to their farmers or whatever, how strong state interventions are? United States, it’s definitely not a neoliberal state. Okay, if you take a city which should be a kind of a symbol of the successful dynamic capitalism, Los Angeles. You know that not only leftists, even many capitalists refer to Los Angeles as the Socialist Republic of Los Angeles. Because it’s the city which is so deeply connected with state federal state apparatus, especially medical, defense and so on, state agencies. I mean, this is not liberal, this is not neoliberal capitalism. And I think we are even more explicitly moving in this direction. Take, for example, the states which were so successful relatively till now at least in avoiding the consequences of the financial crisis of China and even more, Singapore. I was in Singapore. It almost turned me into soft fascism because it really works as a kind of a small-is-beautiful proto-fascist organized authoritarian capitalist state. But it’s definitely not a neoliberal state. I mean, it’s practically a Staatskapitalismus, you know, the state decides very well, very much in detail, where to open the market, in what direction to push economy. That’s how they succeeded. China is doing the same and so on. And everybody knows that this will get stronger and stronger. The mystery is precisely this sheer material force of neoliberalism which is again and again totally falsified, not by some crazy Marxist critique, but by a very naive, simple look onto reality. Not to mention ecology. People talk about pro-capitalists, about how market is still the most effective tool to fight ecological threats, like to be vulgar, you know the theories: you include the price of nature, or at least of negative consequences, the price of pollution into the price of a commodity. You include that cost and so, blah-blah, you regulate it. But the, I, you know, it’s very interesting how censorship is practiced today. It is no longer practiced in this direct way where you directly prohibit something. No, I think that today it works much better. How? In, in our so-called free countries, everything is in the media if you really read it. But it’s presented in such a way that you simply, you basically apply what Freud called Isolierung as a specific strategy of the Unbewussten, of the unconscious, which is not direct oppression, Verdrängung, Verstellung or whatever. You say everything, but you isolate, suspend its symbolic efficiency. It has no consequences. And this phenomena again interest me. Why? Because in China, I find this, this is a wonderful data if you want to make a history of ideology in our times. It should have been reported also in your media, probably because it was, I read it, I forgot where, about two or three weeks ago. The last Chinese madness, I love it. The prior one is my favorite, you must know it, that some three years ago their Ministry for Religious Affairs established the rules of reincarnation, not as a joke, like, you are allowed to reincarnate, but you must inform the ministry where, with, I love this, that like, you said I plan to be reincarnated in that part of China, I don't know, as a saint, and they tell you no, in that part all posts for saints are full, only some dogs and worms are free there or whatever. What they did now, it's really tragicomic, it's that their state, I don't know which state agency, Ministry of Culture or what, introduced a legislation or whatever rule which prohibits on all of their TV stations and movie theaters any, to show any stories which in any way relate to, it’s not a joke, time travel and alternate reality. The official justification is that history is a too serious matter to be left to such trifling games. But it’s clear what’s behind, is that, you know, even dreaming about a possible alternative should be squashed. I claim that with us, it’s easy to make fun of China here, because with us, sorry to repeat some line of thought which may be known to some of you, with us it may appear different. Of course, you can have all the alternate reality that you want, but precisely because it’s isoliert, it doesn't work. What do I mean by this? It’s a very Hegelian point, with this I'm slowly, slowly, slowly, maybe we will arrive at it at the end, approaching the topic of your book. Did you notice how, in what a strange way, the couple possible-impossible works in our media? What is more and more considered possible? What is more and more considered impossible? Many things are possible, more and more, so we are told, especially in economy and private lives. It’s possible to, I don't know, if you have money, to fly soon to be a private astronaut. It is already possible, I think. It’s possible, so they tell us, through genetic manipulations to directly grow your Ersatz organs so that you need a new heart, no problem, they will grow it and so on, maybe this way we will live eternally. In private lives, sorry for repeating this old obscene joke, I cannot resist it, but I really saw it, not the thing itself, but doctor who does it in New York. The latest fashion in some extreme sexual circles in New York is they can operate your penis so that they cut it into two so that then you can have, okay, to be vulgar, two women at the same time if you are man. So all this is possible, more and more. But try to say, maybe we should give a little bit more money for healthcare. Ah, impossible, catastrophe, we violate the market rules, it will bring unemployment, it will cost crime. So, you know, isn't it funny that while, you know, it’s possible to have sex with two women, to fly, to live eternally, but it’s not possible to give a little bit more money for, we just accept it, a little bit more money for, for let us say, healthcare or solidarity or whatever. Here, the material weight of censorship works very well. And it’s, I think again, in a way more terrifying than in China because if the state prohibits something, this is usually at least in authoritarian countries, the best proof that the desire to do precisely that is still alive. Like as a Chinese friend, Wang Hui, told me, they have, when you have some reports in the media about something happening in China, he told me, you never know is it propaganda or true. There is only one way to be sure. If the state explicitly denies something, then it’s true. You know, for example, when they say, when they say there will be no problems with lack of, I don't know, onions on the market, it means there is, run fast buy them and so on. So what is even more interesting, sorry to repeat myself, if you want another proof of ideology, it’s an old motive of mine but I like to repeat it because it touches precisely this "I know very well but." Think about ecology precisely. I mean there you can see clearly the limits of neoliberalism. While they talk about capitalism, blah-blah, and again I don't condemn this a priori, maybe we will have to do it. What? I was shocked to learn that, do you know that big governments, by this I mean, sorry, strong like superpower governments, already have intense meetings, preparing plans for what they call geoengineering. Which is something pretty terrible, although maybe we will have to do it, I don't know. The idea is a very pessimistic one, de facto they admit it, no? The idea is that we already missed the moment to do it in this peaceful way through regulation to lower global warming, so we are lost. If with any systemic regulations we cannot do it. So the idea is, and it’s very seriously considered, why not directly at a global level, we are not talking about one valley where you do whatever you want, intervene into our atmosphere, waters and so on. There are already plans being made, but I'm not those conservative greens who warn against this, I'm here much more skeptical, maybe we will have to do it. But it’s good to know what is being prepared for us. For example, to put into the air gigantic, really gigantic up, up there, lenses so that they will deflect, prevent a large amount of sun rays to heat the earth. Or to spread gigantic amounts of salt water into the atmosphere, which can do the same. Or to, to put millions of tons of iron, iron as powder into the sea, the idea is it will have the same effect and so on. The idea, I mean, financially this is far from impossible, this is relatively very cheap. Of course we know what’s the problem. The problem is that we never know what are the, what are the unintended consequences, no? Like, you do this, okay, but what catastrophes can you cause as a byproduct. But again, I don't think that the option is to play this a certain version of German conservative ecologism: we offended mother nature, let's return to some balance. There is no way back. So this would be one point. The second point is, nonetheless I'm not a catastrophist. You know when you speak with people who claim oh, and this brings us already close to materialist dialectics, you know people who claim oh my god, but it’s already the catastrophe is here, everything will go wrong, whatever. I claim that this catastrophism is another refined way to, to reject confronting the true threat. Because it’s basically an easy way out. The catastrophe is here so why worry, let's enjoy it as far as we can or whatever. I think that secretly I always suspect, now I come close to a certain psychological mechanism again well-described by Freud, I am more and more convinced that those preachers of soon-to-come apocalypse are caught in a certain superstitious mechanism which works like, you know, if we talk a lot about it, maybe it will not happen. So I think when somebody tells you, stupid guy, you think about future having children, don't you know in five, ten years there will be almost no humans on the earth. I think we should treat him as someone who really doesn't believe it and doubts. The only consequent answer to such a person is: don't worry, there will be a catastrophe, don't worry, because they really worry there will not be. The other, even more tricky strategy here is a, a "je sais bien mais quand même," an "I know very well but," which is I think getting more and more popular, which is what many leftist critics correctly described as lifestyle ecology. Instead of confronting problems at a large level, how to change our mode of production, industries whatever, you know, they focus on personal small acts like, you know, recycle bottles, newspapers and so on and so on. I do it, of course we should do it, but we should be aware that this is ultimately not the way. I always compare this to some, to like the mechanism described by my Austrian friend Robert Pfaller where he talks about football fans who sit at home, watch the match and then shout, "Yeah, go ahead," you know, in kind of a magic thinking as if they can influence even if they are at home what goes on the stadium. I think this lifestyle ecology, it’s a little bit of that. I think that the real reason, it’s pure ideology, is not that we really believe that we can make a difference at this level. It’s a feel-good phenomenon. It’s, isn't it nice, I am also doing something for the mother earth. And it’s so beautiful, I'm not alone, I'm part of a large movement, it makes my heart warm when I think about it and so on and so on. So you know, when we criticize ideology, that’s the difficult part. Don't think only about big bad guys, you know, like I don't know, some direct racists and so on and so on. It’s much more difficult to be self-critical. So now, next stop, step towards Hegel, slowly, slowly, patience, you know. I think really what you, Frank, said, and I am not kidding, especially to understand ideology today, for example, let’s be concrete, sexism, racism and so on, I claim since we do live in a predominance of liberal permissive ideology and since I nonetheless think that usually till now, now I am getting more skeptical after what is happening in Scandinavian countries, in Hungary and so on, this new strength of anti-immigrant racism, that racism survives not at the explicit level but mostly at the implicit level of unsaid. If you analyze certain statements, here we must be really good Hegelian dialecticians to get at what is wrong with it. It’s not enough to focus on what is said, but what is not said when you say something, what is implied by what you say. Here again I will steal a joke which was used by, you mentioned her, my Parteigenossin Alenka Zupančič at the conference two months ago, where she interpreted in detail a wonderful, a wonderful one-liner, but we are here I think about no more than two kilometers from the house of Ernst Lubitsch I think, no? So to celebrate Ernst Lubitsch, a great materialist friend of Hegel I would say, no? You know there is a wonderful joke in his Ninotchka which, it's too incidentally, it's too easy to dismiss as simply anti-communist. As many people noticed, with all of course anti-Stalinist jokes, communism is nonetheless treated in a basically half even respectful way. It's absolutely not the same as these violent anti-communist films. But okay, there is a wonderful scene there. If you saw the movie, I'm sure you remember it, where a guy enters a cafeteria and says, a coffee with cream, sorry, a coffee without cream, please. And you know what the waiter answers: Sorry, we run out of cream, we only have milk, so can I get you coffee without milk? Now you will say this is stupid because in any case he will get exactly the same, plain coffee. What does it matter if it's without milk or without cream? Ah, the lesson of dialectics is that it matters a lot. Because the guy, if he were the customer to desire only plain coffee, he would have said a coffee. The reason he felt the need to deny is that I think it's clear that a much more complex structure is at work here. The question to ask is, but why do we add something to coffee? Precisely, this is my old thesis, the underlying structure is that of Kinder Surprise eggs, you know. Like an ideal commodity is never just a commodity. Like Kinder Surprise egg you get a surplus, in this case a plastic toy or whatever in. This is an admission that you must add something to coffee, this would be the Lacanian object cause of desire, what Lacan calls the object small a, objet petit a. And so the root of this without or with milk is that already coffee is never simply coffee, it’s coffee with a hole. And okay, I will not now go into even more refined dialectics where you can nicely demonstrate how even coffee itself can fill in this hole. You can literally get coffee with coffee. When they say for example at, if you have too many bombs drop them on Starbucks, that what they say there like our coffee is not just a coffee but really a coffee. This is the split they refer to. And what I like here is how again negation is not simply negative. And I want now to supplement this example of Alenka Zupančič with one wonderful line to me which is wonderful because nothing happens in this brief story. It's just a double negation but it's an extreme even obscenely verbal erotization achieved in this way. It's from, did you see Brassed Off, some years ago I think, one of these English working-class melodramas with the young Ewan McGregor before he reinvented himself as Jedi and all that big commercial bullshit, when he was still the working-class actor. Okay, I will not go into the story, miners' strike and so on. The point is that he flirts with a more educated girl who works as a some kind of economist preparing the closure of mines and so on. So they go out to eat and she, he, of course, accompanies her home. At the entrance to her house she says, listen carefully, she says, "Would you care to come up to my place for a coffee?" He says, "Yeah, but there's a problem, I don't like coffee." She answers, "No problem, I don't have any." You see like through this she offers something, negates. Can you imagine a more obscene way of saying come and screw my brains out of me, I mean, no? What I like is that it’s totally a, you know, you just offer something and deny it and by denying it basically the message comes through in an even more, in an even more transparent way. This is, this would be I claim how ideology functions. You know like they can deny it as much as they want, you know like in the War on Terror, for example, I have an obscene version translated into that, no? Should we torture the prisoner? No, we will not torture him, it means rather not imagine what and so on, no? So okay, now finally, surprise, surprise, I am coming to your topic. I would like to begin nonetheless with two remarks on Hegel because we are both aware of the madness of advocating Hegel today, like you know, this usual idea, my God, Hegel the absolute idealist, the guy who thought he can read the mind of God and know everything that did, is happening and will happen. Just to clarify two misunderstandings, to give you an idea. The bad thing is usually Hegel's notion of totality, like totalitarian, you know that link, like they say from Plato to NATO, from totality to totalitarianism. But if you read closely Hegel, what Hegel really means with his notion of totality is exactly the opposite. It’s not every disharmonious element can find its place in a large totality, it's precisely that when you want to grasp a totality, you should include into totality all that disturbs it, undermines it and so on. A Hegelian example of totality would have been, you want to talk about today's capitalism, then don't talk only about Singapore or whatever, talk also about Congo. A country in total disarray with no functioning government, with over of child soldiers, you know the idea how they do it, no? If you take a child five, six years old and you put him on heavy drugs, in a couple of years you get a perfect killing machine, no? There are at least, definitely over of them and so on and so on. So the idea of Hegelian totality is here, I think even Adorno was wrong, you know with his big "Das Ganze ist das Unwahre," no? Against Hegel, "Das Ganze ist das Wahre." But that's in a way what Hegel meant, that das Ganze ist nicht einfach das Ganze, das Ganze ist das Ganze and all the bullshit which comes by and you are not allowed to dismiss it. Which is why also, to be very brief, when Hegel speaks about List der Vernunft, usually it’s read in this cheap teleological way: things may appear confused but there is a higher intelligence, reasonable order which guarantees that even if we don't know it, everything serves a purpose, but rational purpose. But if you read Hegel closely, I claim List der Vernunft means almost the exact opposite. It means whatever phenomenon you take, you can be absolutely sure that something will go wrong, no? Isn't Hegel's so-called dialectical process a series of failures and even at the end you don't get the final success, you just get the pure form of failure, which as we all know is called Absolutes Wissen, no? And okay, based on all this, now, it's horrible to betray my principles and to really come to the point, no? I will do. But I will begin at the opposite end. Pöbel is for you, for me is König, the king, no? A little bit about democratic elements, no joke intended, of Hegel's deduction of the necessity of monarchy. I want to begin with a strange reference. You mentioned Lenin. You know that, it's an incredibly nice although stupid phenomenon. Do you know that Jack London was one of the most popular authors in Soviet Union? Reprinted in millions. You know why? Because Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote in her memoirs that one evening when Lenin was ill she was reading to Lenin Jack London's short stories and Lenin liked some of them. This decided the fate, you know. Okay, it would be nice because today it's Chávez who tries a little bit to play this role, you know the legend of showing, of showing, of showing Chomsky's book at United Nations and it immediately jumped to number one in Amazon.com. I know some of my ex-friends like Ernesto Laclau who then tried to repeat this, no? Tried through their connections to convince Chávez to show. Chávez did a wonderful thing. He did show Ernesto Laclau's book on populism, but in some shitty province town in the middle of Venezuela, no? So it didn't... okay, seriously. Jack London's Martin Eden is quite an interesting novel, with no pun intended. You know it ends with the hero's suicide. The hero is a poor guy working-class who becomes a successful writer. At the end the hero kills himself. Why? Ah, it's interesting. So after long years of struggle and hard work, Martin Eden finally succeeds, becomes a famous writer. However, while he is floating in wealth and fame, one thing puzzled him: the very mystery of his success. Here is a quote from Martin Eden: "He had not changed. He was the same Martin Eden. What then made the difference? The fact that the stuff he had written had appeared inside the covers of books, but it was work performed. It was not something he had done since becoming famous. Therefore it was not for any real value, but for a purely fictitious value that he is famous." End of quote. So what Martin Eden cannot accept is the radical gap which forever separates his real qualities from his symbolic status in the eyes of the others. All of a sudden, he is no longer a nobody, avoided by respectable public, but a famous author invited by the pillars of society with even the beloved woman who before when he was unknown was rejecting him, now throwing herself at his feet. But he is fully aware that nothing changed in him, in his reality. He is now the same person as before. So what Martin Eden cannot accept is this radical decentering of the very core of his personality. He is nothing in himself, just a concentrated projection of others' dreams. This perception that his, let’s call it Agalma, the treasure deep in him, what makes him desired by others, is something that is outside of him. This not only ruins his narcissism but even kills his desire. Another nice quote from Martin Eden: "Something has gone out of me. I have always been unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being sated with life. Life has so filled me that I am empty of any desire for anything." It is this conclusion that I am nobody, nothing, which drove him to suicide. Now insofar as the psychoanalytic term, Lacanian term symbolic castration, is also one of the names of this gap between my, the immediate stupidity of my being and my symbolic title. Recall the proverbial disappointment of an adolescent: "Is that miserable coward really my father?" And since a symbolic authority can only function insofar in a kind of illegitimate short-circuit this gap is obfuscated and my symbolic authority appears as an immediate property or quality of me as a person, each authority has to protect itself from situations of course in which this gap becomes palpable. The appearance of the king's or master's omnipotence has to be maintained. And here we come to Hegel. For Hegel, the definition of a king is precisely a very tragic one. The king for Hegel should be a subject who doesn't kill himself like Martin Eden, but fully accepts this radical decentering. A king is someone who very well knows people bow to me and so on, but it has absolutely nothing to do with me. The king is practically in reality its opposite. The king has to know I am a piece of shit just in a totally contingent way attached to a certain symbolic title. In this way we should read famous Lacan's statement that, you know, a madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king. A madman is also a king who thinks he is a king. That is to say who thinks that his authority is really engendered by his personality. Or to paraphrase Marx, you know this famous passage in first chapter of Capital where Marx says this man is not a king, this man is not treated as a king because he is a king but he is a king because other people treat him as a king. This is difficult to accept. I'm sorry if you know this anecdote, but there is a very nice military anecdote from German past which makes this constitutive stupidity of the king very clear. It’s from the Prussian-Austrian war in when the Prussian king, formally the supreme commander of the Prussian army, was observing the fight from a nearby hill. He just looked worried at what appeared to him the confusion in the valley in front of him, you know, some Prussian troops seemed to be progressing, others retreating and so on and so on. Then near him General von Moltke was on a horse. He was the brain, the strategist, he planned the battle. And while to the king the situation looks totally confused, he even thought according to some rumors that the Prussians are losing. Moltke at a certain point observing with binoculars the battle, turned to the king and told him: "May I be the first to congratulate Your Majesty for a brilliant victory?" I love this, you know how, it’s a total stupidity of the king, but nonetheless he was, he was the subject of king. And I claim that Hegel, Hegel's definition of the king is again, it's precisely this kind of radical acceptance of your stupidity. A good king knows that he is in for nothing. Here I think Marx missed the point in his early from Critical Remarks on Hegel's Philosophy of Right, where Marx concludes his remarks with the sarcastic note that the Hegelian monarch is nothing more than an appendix to his penis. But that’s precisely what Hegel is saying. Such an utter alienation, such a reversal by mean of which a person becomes an appendix of his biological organ of procreation is the price to be paid for, to be paid for acting like state's sovereignty embodied. And Hegel makes this very clear, a quote from his Rechtsphilosophie: "In a completely organized state, it is only a question of the culminating point of formal decision (the king). He has only to say 'yes' and dot the 'i'. Because the throne should be such that the significant thing in its holder is not his particular make-up. In a well-organized monarchy, the objective aspect belongs to law alone, and the monarch's part is only to set to the law the effective, the subjective 'I will'." And now I cannot restrain myself, I'm sorry if some of you know this example, to note how actual these remarks are with regard the two great Oscar winners of the last year. The King's Speech, which deals precisely with this problem, but with a totally mystifying gesture, and an even more reactionary film, The Black Swan. Why? Step-by-step. For me, The King's Speech is the story of a quite normal, intelligent young man, who is normal and he knows: "If I become a king I will be a piece of shit, you know, automatically alienated." So of course he resists this by stuttering. I don't think there is anything pathological in his stuttering. This is his way of saying, "Uh-uh, I'm not a total idiot, I have minimal of self-awareness." And the whole story of the film is how does effectively that Australian coach, played by Geoffrey Rush, train him? By precisely rendering him stupid. You remember how at the towards the end of the film the big scene when the king, okay, is on the path of recovery in the sense of able to speak fluently, when they, the coach, language trainer, sits on on one of the thrones, on the king's seat. And the king starts to shout: "How dare you sit there, this is my seat!" And the coach ironically asked, "But why not me? Why you?" And the king shouts back: "Because I'm king by God's will, it's my right!" And the coach says, "Now you are. I congratulate you, you..." It’s really rendering the king stupid enough to function as a king. And this is a very reactionary tendency today, it’s really a movie about how to render us stupid enough, how to ungeschehen machen, undo the critical work and render us stupid enough to restore symbolic authority. The other movie is even much better, much worse I claim, Black Swan. Why? It's a very simplistic reading that I will give you now. But I I effectively think that it's deeply anti-feminist, The Black Swan. Why? What is the hypothesis of the film, especially if we do it like coffee without milk, no? What is the milk here is the male position. A man, that's the premise, secret of the film, can dedicate himself to the mission, like do have a, how shall I put it, be a king or whatever, you have a mission in life and still have a normal family, sex life, whatever you can. But a woman, and this is the old reactionary myth which you find from Hoffmann up to Krzysztof Kieślowski and Tarkovsky, that while a man can do this, a woman cannot. If a woman fully identifies her with her public mission, what she wants to be, the price will be her self-destruction. A woman cannot do it, a woman have to choose. Either your public mission, in this case ballet, usually in the history of romanticism and so on it's singing, you know. From Hoffmann's Tales, that story of I think it's the second or the third one. The one who is tempted by the devil even if she is ill to sing and then she sings and dies singing. And if you think that we are today any better, just think about Kieślowski's, Krzysztof Kieślowski's most popular film, The Double Life of Veronique, which tells exactly the same story. You have two Veroniques. The first one chooses mission, singing, pop, drops dead. The second one knows what the woman's limitations are, withdraws to private life, she succeeds and so on. So I think that Hegel was here definitely onto something. The Marxists who mocked Hegel here, did they not pay the price for this negligence in the sense that when they laughed at Hegel, "Ooh, Hegel and the king," but didn't this repressed dimension of the constitutive stupidity of the top figure return with a vengeance in the guise of the Marxist-communist leader who is even worse than a king? Why? Because Stalin certainly did not just add the subjective "I will." Stalin was not the one who said, "You present me with documents, I will just sign them." Stalin thought that, you know, Stalin was as it were his own Moltke, you know. He thought he is the greatest genius and so on and so on. So what Hegel was aware was something very important that in a way even ancient Greeks and people from Venice knew and even intelligent radical democrats from Jacobins onwards knew, that you cannot have a democratic system where the leader is simply chosen according to his/her real abilities. The moment you go on this path, you will end in, I hate the word, in some kind of totalitarianism. Genuine democracy always, ancient Greeks knew this, even in Venice, which was not an ideal democracy, knew this, and so on. You need a moment of chance. There must be a moment of contingency. And I think that here Hegel is simply too short but as you nicely said is not Hegelian enough. Where he is not consequent enough is to limiting this logic of contingency, this gap between effective... Hegel was right in his intuition that the effective qualities should not directly legitimize you to rule. That this short-circuit precisely because we are dealing with society where the point is who regulate social relations, direct qualifications shouldn't be enough. And Hegel was on the right path when he proposed contingency, an element of contingency. The point he didn't see is why should this contingency be limited to just to the top, to the king. You can also introduce contingency into a democratic system. All well-functioning democracies involved a moment of contingency. The moment you give power to those for whom you think they are really qualified, you are one step towards Bologna Reform, expert knowledge and so on and so on. It's rather terrifying, it gets rather terrifying. So again, Hegel was I claim on the path of something very important, even very egalitarian. It's that who is on the top must be left to some kind of contingency. Which is the very democratic principle, that in principle everyone can be up on the top. So let's go a step further here. Hegel saw this I claim because precisely he was in an unique position between traditional order founded on symbolic authority, the king is divine, and modern society founded on real qualifications, let the best rule us and so on and so on. Hegel saw something in-between. And here again we should, precisely because we are in another in-between, return to Hegel. Now finally, betraying all my principles, I come to you. Things get complicated when you combine this top contingency on the top with Pöbel, rabble, with the excess on the bottom. Isn't maybe, and here we should maybe refer to Marx, to Achtzehnte Brumaire, isn't it that this precisely defines modern populist authoritarianism, Bonapartism? As Marx puts it very nicely, although you know when Marx is asked, approached the simple question who is the real social base of Napoléon III. He gives three apparently contradictory answers, but they work together I claim. First there is a famous passage you must know it, when Marx says Bonaparte represents those basically stupid disorganized farmers, those who are not able of actively representing themselves. Then Marx uses another wonderful formula, that Louis Bonaparte, Napoléon III, plays a kind of a game of representing each class for all others, you know. First he takes something from others and give to farmers, lower taxes whatever. Then he takes from farmers and give to the merchants, then he takes from them, you know this kind of a typically proto-fascist you just circular... and Marx ends up of course with the wonderful formula of the greatest desire of Napoléon III is probably to steal all France just to give it back as his personal gift like proto-Bill Gates, no? Who is doing this in some way. Okay, let's go on. But then Marx adds a crucial further element. Where he says that but in the real sense, the true foundation of Napoléon III is the rabble, Pöbel, all those outcasts, bandits and so on and so on. So it would be interesting again to read this modern populism as a direct short-circuit between top and bottom. But of course I'm far to reduce rabble to this. I deeply agree with Frank’s analysis, which is now, I will be a school teacher and or rather a pupil. In the sense that, you know, I love this humiliating gesture you must remember it from elementary school, when a teacher tells you after telling you some story, "Now would you please stand up and tell with your own words what this story..." Now I will tell with my own words, I hope you will give me a good grade Frank, no? What I see. First thing, it's a why the reason I think you are right this example of Pöbel is crucial. It's not only that you can here catch Hegel, if you permit me this obscene metaphor with his pants down, no? When he is cheating, not Hegelian enough, but also the way you resolve this question is the focus of the entire ambiguity of Hegel's dialectics of what does it mean what Hegel calls concrete universality. What Hegel doesn't do to be is something that if you take seriously the elementary dialectical mechanism of reflexive determinations and so on should have done. Because the absolute elementary rule of Hegelian dialectics is that in a certain totality, that a totality always includes an element which is what Jacques Rancière calls "part of no part", Alain Badiou calls the "symptomal point," an element which is formally part of that totality but at the same time has no proper place within this totality, its inherent excess. And the absolute unambiguous conclusion for Hegel, or even axiom is that: it is precisely this excluded element, the element without proper place in the hierarchic order of things that stands for universality as such. This goes from Christianity where when Christ says, "If you don't hate your mother, father, you are not my follower," means exactly doesn't mean you have to hate your mother or father, although I have nothing against it. But what I want to say is that mother and father I claim in the Bible when Christ says that stand simply for the organic hierarchic social order. And his idea of Christ is that precisely in order to participate in true universality you have to step out, sub- to use Badiou's term, subtract yourself from this order. This consequence unfortunately Hegel does not draw, that precisely the rabble, Pöbel, is the point of universality. And you know we know this today, we can put it even Marx then repeats this, you know, when he says that precisely proletarians as a, as a without proper place, as a displaced subject, without proper place, stands for Menschheit, for universality of humankind as such and so on. So again, this is missing in Hegel very to put it in very simple terms. Second point, the entire fate of the entire Hegelian dialectic is decided here. Because if you miss this point which is precisely what Hegel calls again gegensätzliche Bestimmung, oppositional determination, that the universal principle has to find itself within its own particular elements in the guise of the lowest, of the element which has no proper place and so on and so on. If you forget this, you are in basically proto-fascism, corporatism. This is why no wonder that the first big political Hegelian philosophy after the decline of Hegelianism, the British Hegelianism of the late 19th century, Bradley, McTaggart and so on, was deeply corporate proto-fascist. This fascist reading of Hegel, concrete society of estates, which means every social group has its own particular place in social totality, nobody can have a direct access towards universality without mediation of particularity. They read this Hegelian phrase as a kind of a ultimate political wisdom, which means the corporate point, that liberal global egalitarian elections are to be rejected because they don't take into account the organic hierarchy of a social edifice. So the idea is that you should only have influence as a member of an estate or whatever, not directly. But precisely, we don't have time to go into it, if you read it in this way, you lose the whole point of what Hegel calls negativity, which is that you have a conflict which runs within the universality itself. That universality always fights itself in the guise of its oppositional determination. This I think would be the difference of a true leftist reading of Hegel with the difference between first this right-wing proto-fascist reading of Hegel and what I hate even more than this reading, the Pittsburgh Hegelian, Habermas-ized, John McDowell, or especially Pippin and so on, Brandom recognition reading of Hegel. Hegel as the ultimate philosopher... this is the liberal Hegel. And the only true revolution or rather counter-revolution in the last years is the rise of this third liberal Hegel: Hegel of recognition. We don't have time to go into that. What I'm saying is that, and I will return to this at the end, it’s precisely such a reading of Hegel, corporate reading, where you say rational state is organic totality, each at his/her own place. Today in China they call this harmonious society, which opens up the space for anti-semitism of course. Because Jews are then by definition without a proper place in this organic social edifice. So again, although Hegel knew very well that the excess of Pöbel is structurally necessary. Hegel is very honest here. He says there are ways to deal with this problem: colonization, charity and so on, but the problem cannot really be resolved because the society itself, the more it gets rich the more it generates poor. So again, as Frank demonstrates wonderfully, two crucial things: first Hegel is not Hegelian enough here, and second point even more important maybe: don't read his book as another of the traditional Marxist mantras of how Hegel didn't see it because he spoke about Pöbel, not about proletariat, working class. If anything, we should maybe in today's situation where it is clear that if we are to have any serious chance of a global emancipatory movement, we cannot just play the cards of the traditional working class. We have to include the dispossessed, the colonized, those the outcasts and so on and so on. So what I'm tempted to say is that even at the very pragmatic level of emancipatory political activity, we should maybe re- return a little bit from Marx to Hegel, rehabilitate the notion of Pöbel. For example, I noticed how the Somali pirates talk almost like Hegel, you know, because Hegel’s basic critiques of Pöbel although he then corrects himself. Hegel is very radical here. You know that Hegel at one point says that in a way Pöbel, the rabble is right. They don't get any recognition from society so they don't owe anything to society. In other words Hegel says they have full right to to rebel. Then Hegel describes as one of the attitudes of the Pöbel that as if society owes them without them working some kind of subsistence. This is precisely, I remember one, this demand for subsistence without work is one of the self-justifications of the Somali pirates. So okay, to slowly, I didn't say conclude, I said approach the conclusion, no? I think that the underlying apart from political consequences, more general problem here is the status of negativity in Hegel. Without historicizing Hegel. I am not saying that we should do it in this not very productive I think way which was first proposed by Engels, you know, this boring mantra of the contradiction between Hegel's system and Hegel's method. That the method is open, eternal struggle of opposites but the system is closed. I'm not saying this because precisely with Hegel if you read him closely the system is not closed. It's extremely interesting to ask this epistemological question without conceding histor- without regressing into evolutionary historicism. How to interpret within Hegel's horizon serious a series of statements where Hegel constantly self-relativizes his view. No, Hegel is not claiming, quite on the contrary, "I can read the mind of God." For example, read the introduction to his Philosophy of History where apropos United States of America and Russian Empire, Hegel says something not so stupid if you take into account that it was said in 1820s. He said it's too early to develop the philosophy of these two states, next century will be their century. No? Not so stupid, admit it. Then quite often in his Philosophy of Nature, he says about this we don't yet know enough. We cannot say. Not to mention the absolute conclusion of his whole system: the last pages of his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. Okay, Hegel is Hegel, I love this, he ends with aha! himself, that's life of course. But then at the very end, read it, he says something like "this is for the time being till further change der Standpunkt, the..." blah-blah. So he totally takes into account that he is not the end. I mean I mean so those readers of Hegel, intelligent ones like Robert Solomon, I don't always agree with him but here he is right, are right who claim that Absolutes Wissen is not this kind of "Oh, I know everything." It's rather the most radical limitation that you can imagine. It’s the historical point where you cannot see outside. You cannot see more with all with all reflexivity. So from here we should approach this difficult question. We have here the excess of rabble which is an excess. It stands for immediate universality and as Hegel makes it clear it cannot ever be reintegrated into his rational state. Then if we reread Hegel in this way we find a whole series of this, let's call them excesses of negativity. It is for example, I already did this in a book that I co-published with Markus Gabriel in German, his theory of madness in the first chapter, "Anthropologie" of Philosophie des Geistes. It's breathtaking. He is more Foucauldian than Michel Foucault himself. Hegel says there that the possibility of madness is constitutive of being human. We become human only through overcoming the potential of madness, which is not simply sublimated, aufgehoben, always always remains as a potential threat. Up to, then we have a rabble, we have this, then we have oh, I don't have time to talk about it. Sorry guys, no sex today. But nonetheless, read, it's worth reading, Hegel's theory of marriage. Like if you cut the crap and try to get what Hegel is saying, it's something absolutely wonderful. Okay, I will give you just the result, we don't have time to go through. Basically Hegel's theory, you know Hegel was opposed to this romantic love of passion and so on, no? What Hegel is saying is something so brutal. If you really read him closely he says something like this: "Are you passionately in love? So marry the person. Because then living with the person, seeing you know the dirty side, she is dirty or he doesn't wash herself, makes vulgar sounds... in a couple of months the desire will go out of it and you will be able to lead normal peaceful life and so on and so on." So you marry not to get her or him, but to lose him or her. To bring back peace into your life. This here Hegel implicitly turns around in a materialist way what is usually celebrated as the great materialism of Pascal. You know Pascal is usually read Althusser read him in this way: the famous Pascalian advice, you don't believe, act as if you believe, prayer and so on, and belief will come by itself. I think Pascal was wrong. The entire wisdom of the Catholic Church is based on the very deep opposite insight. The problem of the church is that people shouldn't believe too much. If they believe too much they become Gnostics, whatever, they make fun of the church as an institution, and church is a great institution. Church was never bore- was never bothered by how people believe. Church didn't want you to believe too much because then you can question the church and so on, no? So I think we should rephrase we should rephrase Pascal today: "Do you believe too much? Do you have an insanely intense relation to God? That's bad, it disturbs your life. Act as if you believe and you will no longer have to believe, rituals will do it for you." And again, this would have been then Pascalian also theory of marriage: "You love a certain person too much like Hegel. Act, marry her and love will get automatic, you know, love will be already in the very ritualized form, you know." So like if it's already said, you know like it's nice to be married because then the wife or man, okay, I am a man I will say wife, after one year tells you: "But please, darling, you no longer caress me, where is love?" And married means you can tell her: "Fuck you, here is the marriage contract which says I love you, so it's already there so leave me alone, no?" Great theory. Okay, more serious. And then my last royal example: War. Absolutely usually it's read this Hegel's deduction of the necessity of war as you know the darkest militarism and so on. No, it has a certain very deep potential. It's not the question of war, it's the question of Hegel is fully aware that this rational corporate state never function, that it needs from time to time the return of radical negativity. Here, referring to Frank’s formula, I would say what Hegel didn't see and should have seen as a Hegelian is that the true way towards this is not outside struggle, war. It's Thomas Jefferson, you know that wonderful totalitarian statement that the tree of freedom had to be watered by blood from time to time. The necessity of rebellion. If Hegel were to be consequent, here you should have negativity, not outer war but from within. Okay, now if you just allow me to add some problematic political comments. The problem of course today is who is this "part of no part" and so on. I admit in certain constellation like, for example, in Nazism this function was localized into the Jews. And let me begin by the fact that this, I will now try to approach with some concluding Hegelian remarks this very traumatic topic of anti-semitism and the left. First, let me assure you, absolutely no compromises from my side here. I don't buy the bullshit of some people who claim, "You know, the Palestinians suffered so much that we should show some understanding," no? No, because exactly the same thing then you can say for the Jews, "Let them let them terrorize the Palestinians because they suffered so much" and so on and so on. This is absolutely inadmissible and to be clear, absolutely inadmissible especially for an authentic Jew. I mean I cannot imagine more anti-Jewish statement than this bargaining, you know, "We suffered, allow us to do a little bit dirty work there" and so on. It's very sad this almost mirror image. Point two, I also don't buy this historicist justification where people say, "Okay, many Arabs, not only Arabs, may shout 'Death to the Jews,' but what they really mean is not Jews but just the Zionist state of Israel." Well my answer to this is: Are they so stupid? If they really mean it, why don't they say it? Because it can be shown in the most elementary way, for example, that although he wasn't aware of it, but when Hitler said "Jews," this was a kind of a mystifying Ersatz for capitalism, no? But nonetheless unfortunately he didn't say "capitalism," no? He said "Jews" precisely in order to avoid saying "capitalism," in order to save capitalism. This is why, now if you allow me the last minutes for a little bit of pro domo sua, this is why I got in trouble with my last book in German and some others, and of course I don't make any compromises here, I defend my position to the end. When in United States already the publisher got almost a heart attack with that statement of mine "Hitler was not violent radical enough." Like, "Uh-uh, you want him to kill all of us Jews, no?" They didn't get my point, which was exactly the opposite. My point was that, and I think this is on the contrary the most radical anti-fascist point, that it’s wrong to celebrate Hitler as this kind of, Hannah Arendt was very well aware of it, to condemn him as diabolic, but nonetheless elevate him like some kind of a radical diabolic greatness and so on and so on. Like you know, like some right-wingers like to say: "Okay, okay, Hitler did some horrible thing but he had balls to do them." No he didn't have balls. We should insist on it that Hitler was basically a coward. He killed millions why? Not to do the real thing, to change a little bit capitalist relations. Hitler's violence was in Nietzsche's term a reactive violence. We should insist on it. Otherwise again we give way too much to Hitler, my God. Which is why I supplemented my statement with something which cost some problems, caused me some problems in India, unfortunately. When they told me there... no, sorry, when I said there that that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. Then like are you crazy or what? Even you know, a wonderful thing happened, I must tell you I cannot resist it anecdote. Two weeks after my visit to India, a friend whose wife works at Slovene Foreign Ministry, you know we are a small country everybody knows everyone else so it's no problem to learn this, told me that two weeks after my visit, a special dépêche, diplomatic note came from India to Slovene Foreign Ministry asking them: "Your philosopher Slovene citizen claimed that Gandhi is worse than he than Hitler. Is this the official policy of Slovene government?" I tried to convince them to answer: "Not yet but we are just thinking on it, we will let you know what..." They really didn't get it. My point is that Gandhi didn't kill anyone, more or less, but in a way he did what Hitler was afraid to do. He really tried to stop the functioning of the British colonial state. Something that Hitler never did. His whole activity was, you know this is the definition of right-wing violence, to depoliticize the situation to bring things back to normal. So this is the first misunderstanding. So let's go on. No compromise with anti-semitism here. I even think that whenever you do find among in the so-called Left even a minimal trace of anti-semitism, it's always a signal of a something wrong with the revolutionary or whatever project itself. For example, it's true although now he apologized, Castro called him to give him the order I learned from friends of my friends who have connections, Hugo Chávez did make some slightly tasteless at its best ambiguous remarks. But I claim that this is just a clear sign of the faithful limitation of his populist project. This is a sign of something is wrong with his famous socialism for 21st century or whatever, no? So again, no compromise here. Problems start with me and I will tell you exactly why, when you go a little bit not too far in a quantitative sense but hear what I mean. For example, Bernard-Henri Lévy made, brought this line of absolute suspicion of any kind of anti-Zionism as really anti-semitism. He was honest enough to go to the very end and said not only is... he claims that it is suspicious today to be anti-capitalist in contrast to the standard Marxist thesis that anti-semitism is a time-out. Yes, time-out if you apply the metaphysical linear notion of time. I protest logocentrism and linearity. I agree with critics of this notion of time from Heidegger to Derrida. Who are you to question this great cri-? Now you have to make either Benjamin called this, this you know as opposed to Jetzt-revolutionary this historicist time. To say time-out means to make fun of the suffering... sorry. Sorry. Sorry, I will I will stop very shortly, sorry. No, but really, really shortly. You know he said then, he went one step further and said anti-capitalism is today a mask for anti-semitism. No, this is where you end up. So what is my point here? Let me just really to conclude give you two just two points. First one, and before you start shouting I must tell you I presented this line of thought in Jerusalem, to people who were not just some pro-terrorist Palestinians, to who were Jews with, if you want to be pathetic, with a certain numbers tattooed here and they totally accepted it. That we have to accept... this is a bad things for some maybe... Zionism as the latest form of anti-semitism. Ah, what do I mean by that? You know what made me incredibly suspicious? This totally unnatural marriage, which is a new thing, it lasts now only about years I think, between Zionists in United States and the how are they called? and the American conservative religious right, fundamentalist Baptists and so on. Now I told to myself something doesn't work here. Because if there is a group of people where you don't have to do any complex analysis, it's in their phrenology, in their blood, to be anti-semitic, it's this American conservative Baptist whatever right. All of a sudden they support Zionism, although with limitations. For example Glenn Beck, my fa- you know the crazy right-wing commentator of Fox News. Finally he got crazy and turned directly anti-semitic and was fired. What I want to say is that, you know what gave me this idea? I was once in Israel in a debate and some of my friends like Udi Aloni were brutally attacked by Zionists, Jewish friends all of them. How, in what words? Wonderful. They were approached that they were told, "You only look to be, act as one of us, Jews, but you are really not. You are a foreign body, not really identified with our community, you just freely float..." and so on and so on. To cut a long story short, I told myself, but wait a minute, these are exactly the terms used in the last 19th century to designate the Jews. So I really think I'm not saying that now, to generalize this. What I'm saying is that the state of Israel is something which, it's more of a tragic situation, deeply affects the Jewish identity. You know you cannot have it both ways, that's the tragedy. It's not me who judges this from outside, I don't allow you, who am I to allow them something or not? It’s simply you cannot have it both ways: a full nation state and what Jews historically were. Second point. You know like you know Bernard-Henri Lévy likes to boast, "Oh I visited everything, you know, here and there and all the dangerous places." It’s strange that he didn't yet visit the West Bank. Now I agree with those who claim why focus only on Israel and so on and so on. I agree with this, often the criticism of Israel is extra sensitive, unjustified and so on. But all this said, let's face it. I agree it’s tasteless to make these disgusting comparisons, you know: what Nazis were doing to the Jews they are now doing to the Palestinians. I'm the first to reject it. But much more modestly, their whole strategy on the West Bank, whatever you say, is not fair. That's all I'm saying. And you know whom I'm referring here to convince you of this? They are such a refreshing reading. The first generation state of Israel leaders. My God, read Ben-Gurion and so on. It's they were the authentic fighters, I respect them. And they don't bullshit. Ben-Gurion says openly, look into my... it's not translated into German, book on violence where I gave all the quotes. It's something like, "Let's be clear, we have no right to this land. We are perceived as colonizers and it's simply who will win, his will be the right." No bullshitting there, absolutely no bullshitting. Moshe Dayan in '56 at a funeral of a of a Jewish farmer killed by Palestinians across the border around Gaza, he says: "Let's not condemn them. In their place we would do the same thing" and so on and so on. I'm saying that if you start talking like this it's the beginning of honesty. Then, you know what's the tragedy of the West Bank? That it's not a lot of physical violence but it's really as a book says "occupation by bureaucracy." It's absolutely breathtaking. It's like some kind of Michel [unintelligible] you are cutting my head I know. Okay. So no really to end with a personal. I wanted to approach but you can ask me this also that big stupidity my friends at Suhrkamp told me circulating now in Germany about me an anti-semite who claimed that all the Jews should be killed except those who are critical of the state of Israel. Sorry to tell you, I didn't know that such a brutal manipulation is possible. Of course my best friend in that city journal Merkur reprinted this attack on me, blah-blah. It's absolutely unambiguously clear that I refer there to the argumentation of my enemy. It's absolutely unambiguous. Okay. But to let me stop is with what I consider good activity to bring peace. Peace, maybe not elements of peace to the Middle East. And I'm proud to be part of it but it’s tragic. Was it also in your media that a guy called Juliano or what Giuliani who is a unique person half Jew half Palestinian? He run a so-called Freedom Theatre in Jenin. An extraordinary thing. Young Palestinians totally secular wanting blah-blah and the already mentioned friend of ours Udi Aloni wanted to organize there a summer school on cinema theory. Yeah our friends in Jenin told us, "No bullshit about free Palestine. Just come here and treat us normally as people who want to learn something." And we had this wonderful idea. And sorry, I must say that okay, this guy Juliano who was the head of Jenin Freedom Theatre was shot into the head by Hamas. The idea was that with this neutral approach, let's share the same culture, we are already intervening too much and so on and so on. So again when my friends are killed by Hamas, I find it just a little bit tasteless to be accused of supporting Palestinian terrorism in the same way as that jerk from Die Zeit, my ex-half-friend Thomas Assheuer, accused me of sympathizing with Ahmadinejad. Sorry I find this tasteless because I publicly supported Mousavi. The result is that two of my translators into Farsi are tortured, are in prison now, you know. Like at least I can say this for me. I am at the same time attacked from one side as anti-semitic and from the other side regularly the old Mubarak Akram every couple of months as the most perfidious Zionist propaganda. If both sides attack you for the same text then maybe I am on the right way. So I wish you the same: to be attacked from all sides. You will be poor and jobless but you will have the deep moral satisfaction. Ha-ha! Thanks very much to you.