The Metaphysics of Love
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2015-11-25 · 1:46:18 · 12,013 words
sexuality-genderpsychoanalysisliberalism-political-correctnessideologyphilosophy-generalreligion-theologygeopolitics-warcinema-art-culture
Žižek delivers a lecture in Istanbul on the metaphysics of love, framed as a companion piece to Alain Badiou's talk the previous day. He critiques Western culture's bureaucratic over-regulation of sexuality (consent kits, trigger warnings, self-marrying) as well as its sentimental 'enlightened hedonism', arguing that authentic love requires risk, the fall, and singular commitment rather than managed safety. He closes by connecting singular love to political duty, arguing that the refugee crisis demands cold civic duty rather than sentimental humanist love.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 22
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's formulation that if one looks deeply enough into oneself one finds not authentic riches but filth, envy, sadistic fantasies, disgusting obsessions: 'I am full of shit.'
as “ideal ego”
The idealized self-image one marries in self-marrying, which ignores the id and superego, the question 'which self?' exposes the incoherence of the concept.
Žižek uses the phenomenon of self-marrying as an index of ideology at its worst, revealing that self-identity must be symbolically registered because the subject is never directly one with itself.
as “Consent Conscious Kit”
A commercial product (and broader campus legal movement) requiring written pre-sexual consent, which Žižek treats as the paradigm case of legal-bureaucratic ideology colonizing intimate life.
as “superego as injunction to enjoy”
Žižek notes the reversal of the classical superego: today it does not prohibit enjoyment but commands it, 'you are indifferent but the superego tells you you have to enjoy, it's your duty to enjoy.'
as “surplus enjoyment / jouissance”
Underlying Žižek's account of erotic tension: the detour and indirection in seduction carries an excess enjoyment that direct communication would eliminate.
Lacan's thesis that there is no meta-language, invoked by Žižek to explain why explicit consent declarations inside erotic interplay cannot be neutral, everything said is already part of the erotic game.
as “the fall (tomber amoureux)”
Žižek uses 'falling in love' as a structural concept: a contingent encounter retroactively constituted as destiny, which dating agencies and managed romance seek to eliminate.
as “there is no sexual relationship”
Lacan's thesis, invoked by Žižek to argue that sex is never simply two people, it is always sustained by fantasy, so the true Freudian question is not 'what do you think about instead of sex' but 'what do you think during sex'.
Žižek critiques trigger warnings as the institutional expression of a subject conceived as fragile and in need of protection from experience, the opposite of what university education should provide.
Implied in Žižek's account of love: the beloved has an indeterminate 'treasure' the lover cannot name, which is why love cannot be grounded in enumerable reasons.
as “enlightened consumerist hedonism”
The dominant Western ideology that promotes pleasure while keeping it controlled, healthy, and non-threatening, the real replacement for traditional patriarchy.
as “contingently retroactively created destiny”
Žižek's formula for the structure of falling in love: the encounter is pure contingency that is immediately re-narrated as inevitable fate.
Žižek insists the proper response to the refugee crisis is cold civic duty, not humanitarian sentimentalism, obligation is a different and higher register than feeling.
Implicit in Žižek's discussion of how legal-contract ideology penetrates daily life and sex, the form of the legal relation becomes real in lived practice.
as “alienation (productive / symbolic)”
Žižek defends a positive form of alienation, the externalization into language and symbolic clichés, as necessary, distinct from the exploitative alienation Marx criticized.
as “new original clichés”
Žižek's Goldwyn-derived formula: true creativity is not escaping clichés but inventing new ones, because clichés are the necessary background of communication and thought.
Invoked via Goldwyn's 'new original clichés' anecdote: the symbolic order (language, clichés) is the necessary externalization Žižek defends as productive alienation.
Žižek (ventriloquizing Badiou) uses 'evental' to describe the dimension of immortality in human being, the aspect that exceeds the biological cycle of life and death.
as “neighbor (das Ding / the Real Other)”
Žižek draws on the biblical and Lacanian 'neighbor' as the horrifying, abyssal dimension of the one close to you, not the nice similar, but the monstrous stranger beneath familiarity.
Referenced briefly in Q&A by an interlocutor in the context of the feminist revolution of language; Žižek does not develop it substantively here.
Žižek's polemical label for the feminist proposal that women should develop their own separate language, he regards it as a dead end that only reinforces division.
Stories he reaches for 7
In the film Brassed Off, a woman invites a man up for coffee; he says he doesn't drink coffee; she replies she doesn't have any. The invitation is maximally open yet nothing is stated, eroticization through indirection.
“'Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?' He answers 'yes but there is a problem, I don't drink coffee.' She answers with a smile 'no problem I don't have any.'”
After critics accused his films of using old clichés, producer Samuel Goldwyn sent a memo demanding 'more new original clichés', not accidental stupidity but deliberate wit, which Žižek endorses as his formula for creativity.
“He got a report... that they use too many old clichés. So he immediately wrote a memo to his scenario department 'we need more new original clichés.' He was absolutely right!”
French and American dating agency advertisements promise busy women that they can 'find yourself in love without the fall', for Žižek the very thing these agencies eliminate is what makes love love.
“You are a busy woman so you don't have time to flirt, to look for partners. We will enable you to find yourself in love without the fall.”
At an East German Central Committee meeting in 1989, Stasi chief Erich Mielke, accused of illegal killings, declared 'Aber ich liebe euch alle!' (I love you all!), Žižek's emblem of the hypocrisy of universal political love.
“He went like this 'Aber ich liebe euch alle!' — 'I love you all!' No we shouldn't do it like this.”
Lenin's love affair with Inessa Armand, conducted discreetly alongside his revolutionary work; Krupskaya knew and the women became friends. For Žižek this exemplifies love as singular and absolute without requiring total immersion or abandonment of the cause.
“Lenin attending the funeral of Inessa Armand and he was totally broken... this was his absolute love. But it was done so nicely. There was no public passion in it.”
Early Soviet ideologues (especially Andrei Platonov) imagined the October Revolution's goal as producing a new human being beyond sexuality, relating to the body like a measuring apparatus reading a steam engine. In Platonov's Stalinist-period works sex returns as authentic existence.
“The idea was that the main task of the October Revolution should be... to produce a new man... a man who is clearly described as beyond sexuality.”
Žižek was told Ahmadinejad's actual reply about homosexuality in Iran was not 'we have no homosexuals' but 'we deal with it in a way opposite from yours, people do it discreetly, we don't speak about it publicly.' Žižek uses this to defend discreet social distance against PC transparency.
“He said 'we deal with it in a way which is opposite from yours. People discreetly do it, we don't talk publicly about it.'”
Works invoked 13
The Da Vinci Code book
Cited as an example of commercial blockbuster fiction where sex is absent at the end, evidence of the disappearance of sex from popular culture.
Brassed Off film
The 'coffee' scene is Žižek's central cinematic example for the erotic function of the detour and the impossibility of meta-language in seduction.
Quantum of Solace film
Cited as 'the first James Bond film where no...', sex is absent, as part of the same argument about sex disappearing from popular culture.
The Shining (film) film
Used to illustrate the concept of the neighbor as the monstrous dimension of the familiar; King's complaint about Nicholson is endorsed.
Its brief Scandinavian ban is cited as an example of censoring fiction for protective reasons, a precursor to trigger warnings.
Fifty Shades of Grey book
Dismissed as 'the most depressing thing we know' when raised as a counterexample to the claim that sex is disappearing from popular culture.
We book
Zamyatin's dystopian novel raised by audience member as a predecessor to consent-regulated sex; Žižek acknowledges it but regards it as 'a little bit simplified' compared to Platonov.
Die Walküre opera
Wagner's opera, specifically the Siegmund/Brünnhilde scene in Act II, is Žižek's 'most beautiful declaration of love': choosing singular love over universal Valhalla.
Die Zeit journal
Habermas published a short text there arguing against refugee sentimentalism; Žižek invokes it approvingly.
Metamorphoses book
Ovid's text cited in the Columbia University trigger-warning controversy; Žižek defends it against demands for content warnings.
Rhapsody film
1954 Elizabeth Taylor melodrama used to illustrate the paradox that choosing one's cause over love is the only way to prove love; Žižek dislikes the Rachmaninov score.
Badiou's book is the frame for the entire lecture; Žižek recommends it be distributed like Kim Jong-il speeches and repeatedly invokes its concepts of love as fall, event, and singularity.
The Nazi Conscience book
Described as a 'terrifying book' that documents Nazis' self-justifying narratives; used to illustrate that inner experience is not authentic and beautiful stories can cover terrible crimes.
People invoked 29
Grace Gelder negative
The British photographer who married herself, Žižek's opening case study for ideology of self-love.
Lenin's absolute love; Žižek regards the discretion of their relationship and the coexistence with Krupskaya as a model of love without public drama.
Martin Amis negative
Dismissed as an 'idiot' who sentimentalized the last-minute love SMS messages from 9/11 passengers as authentic revelations, Žižek argues the opposite.
Named as a friend with whom Žižek exchanges vulgar jokes including Holocaust jokes, offered as example of genuine solidarity through transgressive humour.
Marguerite Duras positive
Her novels are Žižek's model for love emerging through shared work on a third object rather than direct mutual gaze.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Used as the exemplary case of singular love coexisting with total revolutionary dedication, his relationship with Inessa Armand conducted without public passion or abandonment of the cause.
Richard Wagner positive
Die Walküre Act II (Siegmund and Brünnhilde) is Žižek's model of 'the most beautiful declaration of love', the choice of singular love over universal eternity.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked for 'il n'y a pas de métalangage' (no meta-language) and for the thesis that 'there is no sexual relationship', both central to Žižek's argument about sexuality and consent.
Directed The Shining; mentioned only as the filmmaker in Žižek's casting critique.
Yevgeny Zamyatin positive
His novel 'We' raised by an audience member; Žižek acknowledges it but says Platonov is more representative of the Soviet vision of humanity beyond sexuality.
Knew about Lenin and Inessa Armand, became friends with Armand, cited as part of Žižek's ideal of civilized handling of love.
Orhan Pamuk negative
Žižek mentions Pamuk's claim that Istanbul is 'totally provincial' and disagrees, preferring his own experience of intellectual life in Istanbul.
Alain Badiou positive
Žižek frames the entire lecture as an extended commentary on Badiou's work on love, especially 'Éloge de l'amour'; calls him his 'good friend'; says his reaction to reading Badiou's talk was 'immediate hatred like it's too good'; credits Badiou with the concepts of singularity, the event, immortality, and love as fall.
Andrei Platonov positive
Cited as the greatest representative of 'communist Gnosticism', his novels show sex as degrading, with sex returning as authentic existence in his Stalinist-period works.
Žižek wrote protest letters over Ahmadinejad's treatment of homosexuals; uses his Columbia visit to make a point about the value of discreet social distance vs. PC transparency.
Stephen King positive
Cited approvingly for his objection to Nicholson's casting in The Shining, the novel's logic requires normality turning monstrous, which Nicholson's face precludes.
Jacques-Alain Miller positive
Žižek participated in Miller's Paris seminar and tells the 'shit against the wind' joke that drew Miller's sharp reply; notes Miller 'supports Sarkozy' and is 'getting quite crazy' politically but uses the incident to illustrate symbolic alienation.
Erich Mielke negative
The Stasi chief's cry 'Aber ich liebe euch alle!' at the 1989 Central Committee meeting is Žižek's emblem of the hypocrisy and obscenity of universal political love.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited for the argument that to understand reasons for belief one must already believe, the same circle Žižek applies to love; also cited on paternal authority.
Samuel Goldwyn positive
'We need more new original clichés' memo, Žižek's hero as proof that true creativity means inventing clichés, not escaping them.
Da Vinci Code cited as evidence that sex is disappearing even from commercial blockbusters, the protagonist gets no sexual payoff.
Jürgen Habermas positive
Žižek says he 'marginally for the first time agrees' with Habermas who argued in Die Zeit that refugee sentimentalism ('do we still have a human heart?') should be replaced by civic duty.
Winston Churchill positive
Žižek quotes Churchill's distinction between doing what is good and doing what is required to support cold civic duty over sentiment on the refugee crisis, noting explicitly 'he is definitely not one of us.'
Augustine of Hippo positive
Cited for the argument that prelapsarian sex in Paradise was non-erotic, used to support the claim that sex must be sexualized through detour.
Joseph Stalin negative
Stalin's mechanistic reading of Marxism ('a scientist studies history, discovers laws, joins the winning side') is cited as the anti-model of genuine Marxist partisanship.
Plato positive
Žižek rehabilitates Plato against the charge of dead metaphysics, Plato's dialogues describe Socrates' traumatic encounter with beauty as a maddening event, not a contemplation of static ideas.
Karl Marx positive
Cited to show that Marxism is not external objective knowledge but requires engaged partisanship, parallel to the circle of love; Stalin's mechanical reading of Marx is explicitly rejected.
Sigmund Freud positive
Žižek identifies as 'a Freudian,' uses Freudian ego/id/superego structure to critique consent rules and to argue the true psychoanalytic question is what one thinks during sex.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Referred to as context for the 'Hegelian greatness' that partisanship and universality imply each other; not developed in detail in this talk.
What it argues
bureaucratic over-regulation of sex and consentthe structure of erotic seduction and meta-languagelove as fall, risk, and traumatic encountersingular love vs. sentimental universalist humanismauthentic inner experience vs. performative actalienation as necessary symbolic externalizationpolitical duty vs. compassion in the refugee crisis
Dialectical moves 12
“I love others to escape myself, and I can only love myself insofar as I'm able to love others — it is precisely the opposite that holds.”
Inverts the self-help maxim that self-love precedes love of others: love of others is the condition for any viable self-relation.
“The much celebrated inner wealth of my personality is inherently excremental. What I really am is I'm full of shit.”
Reverses the Romantic notion of deep inner authenticity: genuine self-knowledge reveals not treasure but filth.
“It is not that you want to have sex but your superego prohibits it — almost as a rule, the opposite situation holds: you are indifferent but the superego tells you that you have to enjoy.”
Inverts the classical Freudian topology of prohibition: the superego now commands enjoyment rather than forbidding it.
“Sex itself has to be sexualized — sex without these rhetorical detours is simple animal copulation.”
Paradoxical reversal: sex is not automatically sexual; it must be made sexual through the indirection of fantasy and language.
“The true Freudian problem is not 'whatever you think of, it's really ultimately about sex.' No — what do you think when you are doing sex?”
Inverts the vulgar psychoanalytic reduction: the question is not what hides beneath other drives but what sustains the sexual act itself.
“An even more monstrous experience than discovering the beloved is a monster is to be loved — it's a terrible pressure.”
Reverses the common fear structure of love: the truly terrifying position is not loving but being the object of another's passion.
“In order to perceive the reasons why I love her I have to be in love — you cannot step out of this circle.”
Inverts the Enlightenment model of rational love: reasons do not precede but are produced by the commitment of love.
“If you say to a woman 'I love you so much I will drop my cause for you' it will be a failure. The true thing is to choose your cause — only in this way will you gain her respect.”
Paradox of love's proof: the direct declaration of love's priority destroys it; choosing the public cause over love is the only way to demonstrate the absoluteness of that love.
“Falling in love is destiny, but it's a contingently retroactively created destiny.”
Love is not the discovery of a pre-existing necessity but a contingent encounter that is immediately re-narrated as inevitable.
“We do not live in a truly consumerist hedonist society — we live in one where pleasures are extremely controlled.”
Inverts the standard leftist critique: contemporary society is not permissive but hyper-regulated under the guise of permissiveness.
“We should receive refugees not because we have human sympathy for them but precisely out of coldness of doing your duty.”
Inverts the sentimental-humanitarian logic: the correct ethical register is cold obligation, not compassion.
“Political love (love of humanity) always needs a figure of hatred as its exception — the moment of truth of fake universal love is Erich Mielke crying 'I love you all!'”
Universal humanist love is revealed to be its opposite: it requires the scapegoat that concentrates the hatred the universalism disavows.
Claims 25
asserts
Self-marrying is ideology at its worst because it presupposes that the self is harmonized with itself, covering over the irreducible split between ego, id, and superego.self-marrying / ideology of self-love
rejects
One loves others precisely to escape oneself; you can only love yourself insofar as you are able to love others — not the reverse.the maxim 'you must love yourself before you can love others'
asserts
The inner 'wealth' of the personality is inherently excremental — looking deeply into oneself reveals envy, sadism, and disgusting obsessions.the self / inner authenticity
asserts
The bureaucratic consent-kit and affirmative-consent rules impose a legal-contractual model onto sexual life, exemplifying a broader colonization of everyday life by legal ideology.affirmative consent regulation / political correctness
asserts
There is something in the very structure of erotic interplay that resists direct formal declaration of consent or intent — the detour itself plays an erotic role.the structure of seduction / sexuality
asserts
Sex itself must be sexualized through rhetorical detours; without these, it reduces to mere animal copulation.the structure of human sexuality
rejects
The predominant mass ideology in the West is no longer traditional patriarchy but 'enlightened hedonism' — be truly yourself, experiment, just don't get fixated.the standard feminist critique that patriarchy is the dominant ideology
reframes
The true Freudian question is not 'whatever you think of, is it really about sex?' but its inversion: 'what do you think when you are having sex?'psychoanalytic reduction to sexuality
rejects
Universities should be the opposite of safe spaces: places where students are exposed to brutal experiences and taught to confront them, not protected from them.trigger warnings and sensitivity training in universities
asserts
Love is a traumatic, dangerous encounter — 'love can ruin your life' — and if it involves no danger it is not true love.the nature of love / Badiou's account of love
asserts
The most monstrous experience is not discovering that the person you love is a monster but being the object of another's passionate love — because you cannot explain why you are loved.the terror of being loved
asserts
In genuine love you cannot account for it in reasons: to perceive the reasons why you love someone you already have to be in love — the circle cannot be stepped out of.the logic of love and partisanship
asserts
Partisanship and universality not only do not exclude each other but imply each other — true universality is accessible only through a partisan position.universalism vs. partisanship / Badiou
asserts
Inner experience is not necessarily authentic: even in the face of death people lie and manipulate to preserve their self-image.authenticity / inner experience
asserts
Love is an act, not an inner feeling — and it can even be covered up by what one sincerely feels.the nature of love as act
asserts
In a true test of love one must choose one's public cause even over love — this paradoxically proves the love rather than negating it.the paradox of love and commitment / Rhapsody example
rejects
Political or universal love (love of humanity) is always suspect and hypocritical: it invariably needs a figure of hatred as its exception.humanist universalism / political love
asserts
Love is singular in the strict Badiou sense: 'I love you singularly and all the world can go to hell' — it cannot be extended into a universal political programme.the singularity of love
asserts
Europe and the West should accept refugees not out of humanitarian sentiment but out of cold civic duty — duty is a different and higher register than sympathy.refugee crisis / ethics of hospitality
rejects
The sentimental moralization of refugees ('do we still have a human heart?') is precisely the wrong framework; the proper response is Churchill's — not what is good but what is required.sentimental humanitarianism about refugees
rejects
Alienation in the symbolic sense — the externalization into language, clichés, and the big Other — is not pathological but necessary and should not simply be condemned.the standard leftist critique of alienation
asserts
True creativity means inventing new clichés, not escaping them — the great historical change happens at the level of the cliché.creativity / alienation / language
asserts
Authentic immortality is not biological persistence but an 'evental' dimension of human being that exceeds the ordinary cycle of life and death, and this is a condition of authentic love.immortality and love
asserts
Political correctness, in its hypersensitivity to harassment, constructs the neighbor as a potential danger and thereby destroys the space for genuine human encounter.political correctness / neighbor
rejects
The idea that feminist resistance requires a separate feminine language is 'linguistic apartheid' and a dead end for feminism.feminist theories of language
Quotes 18
“The much celebrated inner wealth of my personality is inherently excremental. What I really am is I'm full of shit.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of inner authenticity
“I love others to escape myself and I can only love myself in so far as I'm able to love others.”Slavoj Žižek · inversion of self-love maxim
“What impressed me much more is self-divorce. Can I say today no longer I love myself I want to divorce myself?”Slavoj Žižek · self-divorce as counter-concept to self-marriage
“It is not you want to have sex but your superego prohibits it. It's almost a rule the opposite: you really are indifferent but superego tells you you have to enjoy it, it's your duty to enjoy.”Slavoj Žižek · superego as injunction to enjoy
“Whatever you say during sexual interplay it's a part of sexual interplay. Il n'y a pas de métalangage — there is no meta-language.”Slavoj Žižek · no meta-language in erotic interplay
“Sex itself has to be sexualized. Sex without these rhetorical detours is simple animal copulation. There is none of what we call sexual tension.”Slavoj Žižek · sex must be sexualized
“The true Freudian problem is not whatever you think of it's really ultimately about sex. No — what do you think when you are doing sex?”Slavoj Žižek · inversion of vulgar psychoanalytic reduction
“Love is dangerous. Love can ruin your life. But that's why you should do it. You should take a risk. If love is without danger then it's not love.”Slavoj Žižek · love as risk and traumatic encounter
“An even more monstrous experience is to be loved. It's a terrible pressure... by definition you don't know why the other loves you.”Slavoj Žižek · terror of being loved
“Falling in love is destiny but it's a contingently retroactively created destiny.”Slavoj Žižek · structure of falling in love
“Love is singular in the strictest Alain Badiou sense. Love is violent. Love means 'I love you singularly' and all the world can go to hell.”Slavoj Žižek · singularity and violence of love
“True universality we can gain access to it only through a partisan position.”Slavoj Žižek · partisanship as condition of universality
“I hate them. No I am ready to radically change my life to help them. Not because I love them — because it's simply duty my god.”Slavoj Žižek · cold duty over sentimental love in ethics
“We need more new original clichés. He was absolutely right! The great historical change is precisely to invent new clichés.”Slavoj Žižek · creativity as new clichés / productive alienation
“University should be the opposite: a space where you are NOT protected from brutal experiences. They should even show you scenes of rape precisely so that you feel the horror of it.”Slavoj Žižek · university as space of exposure not protection
“Immortality doesn't mean 'I will biologically never die.' Immortality means there is an evental dimension in our being which is properly metaphysical in the sense of beyond this cycle of life and death.”Slavoj Žižek · evental immortality as condition of love
“I claim that this universal love then you always need a figure like a Jew or a Palestinian — you need a bad guy, hatred should be reserved for an exception.”Slavoj Žižek · universal political love requires a scapegoat
“Even if you are approaching death it's not only not necessary that your insight will be more authentic. It's even a greater temptation to lie at that moment.”Slavoj Žižek · death does not guarantee authenticity
Transcript 33 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I'm always very glad to be back in Istanbul because it’s really an intellectually lively city. A friend of mine told me that he finds this statement absurd. He told me that your writer Orhan Pamuk recently deplored how totally provincial Istanbul is. No, I don't agree with him. Maybe provincial if you want so-called big spectacular cultural events. But I hate them. For example, in art I hate Biennales. Did you notice how they function? Usually they are artistic painting Biennales. Usually they are presented as the ultimate critical thing, you know. All Biennales in Western Europe have usually a long leftist introduction how culture is today commercialized, caught in capital and you have... and they even admit this for themselves: aren’t we manipulated by capital? But nonetheless precisely as such they fit perfectly into capital. It is as if today in order to succeed on the market you have to have some pseudo-Marxist justification of how we are all manipulated and so on by capital. I, my experience is different when I meet with friends here. So don't be caught in that adoration of how there is somewhere else a truly lively intellectual life. There is not. London, Paris, New York can be much more provincial than you are here. So since I have too many things as usual to say I will begin. Just to warn you, I use some parts in a changed way for my... from my past books because you know when people were not just downloading music but still there were CDs or LPs you usually got from popular artists something like you know The Best Of Mick Jagger or whatever, no? So I will try to do here a kind of The Best Of Žižek on Love. But you can also read it in another way which is much closer to me and my good friend Alain Badiou. When I was young I remember in Communist countries like mine they like to publish these small volumes with thoughts of the Great Leader on a certain topic like you know like Marx and Engels on Art or Lenin on Education. Well maybe we should do like Badiou and Žižek on Love, you know like pseudo-Stalinist approach. And I didn't mention Alain by chance because and I don't mean this in a hypocritical way. What I will do here is just a kind of extended comment on some of the topics already covered and developed by Badiou. I through my spies got the English translation of Alain's talk yesterday and my reaction was immediate hatred like it’s too good. It’s good that we don't appear on the same day, no? And I was just sad that like you know Alain often for objective reasons had to cancel a talk. Why didn't he cancel yesterday’s talk, so that you would be with me? So quite seriously I with great pleasure this morning I read his talk and I hope there will be some echoes. There will be maybe some minor differences but to use our Maoist references this will be definitely what Maoism called contradictions within the people, not contradictions between the people and enemies of the people. So okay I will try to begin with an easier more popular way and then don't be afraid we will approach much more serious even metaphysical topics. I would like to begin with some of the confusions about sex, love, passion in today’s at least in the West, Western popular culture. What fascinates me is the inherent tension, contradictions of this culture. They pretend to be permissive you know you can do what you want and so on, but they are so much over-regulated that I can well understand some of my friends who turned to Islam not because they couldn't support free Western freedom and needed a firm authority but they want Western... they found Western haven’t's freedom too regulated, too oppressive. So let me begin. In the spring of this year a couple of months ago, I don't know if it was reported here but in England the media extensively reported on a middle-aged photographer a woman called Grace Gelder who after practicing Indian meditation decided to marry herself. Literally. She organized the full ceremony of self-marrying in front of witnesses, friends. She proclaimed her vows to herself, she put on a wedding ring to herself and she kissed herself in a mirror. Now far from being an idiosyncratic stupid eccentricity the idea of self-dating and self-marrying more and more circulate in Western popular media. You have, I love them I bought them, you have small brochures books which detail how to proceed in self-dating which should precede self-marrying. If you are your own prospective self-love you should first leave all around your apartment loving messages like "Hi Slavoj I love you," "I love myself," and then you discover them when you go to the toilet so glad a message for yourself from yourself. When you decide to date yourself you should put your apartment in order, prepare a nice table with candles, you put on your best dress, you inform your friends that you cannot visit them this evening because you have a more important date with yourself. As they say the goal of self-dating is to gain a deep knowledge of yourself of who you really are and who you want to be so that by way of taking a bath, a commitment to your deeper self you can achieve self-acceptance and self-harmonization. But does this work? Before we explode into laughter at this idea I think we should notice that it does contain a moment of truth. The idea of self-dating and self-marrying presupposes that me, an individual, I am not directly one with myself. I can marry myself only if I am not directly myself so that my self-identity has to be registered, performed in a symbolic ceremony, made official. Here however problems arise. How does this symbolic registration relate to my self-experience? What if the result of probing into myself is that I discover that I don’t like what I find there? That’s my first reaction. I date myself, I talk with myself and I look deep into myself... well at least for myself I’m sure what I will discover. I don’t want to have anything to do with this stupid person. In other words, if you look deeply into yourself what do you usually discover? All the filth of envy, sadistic fantasies, disgusting sexual obsessions and so on. So the much celebrated inner wealth of my personality is I claim inherently excremental. What I really am is I’m full of shit. In short, what if I discover that I am my own neighbor in the strict biblical sense where you know the Bible, neighbor is not just the nice guy, neighbor is precisely the strange horrible dimension of the one who is close to you. They say that in order to love others you have to love yourself. But I think it’s precisely the opposite that holds. I love others to escape myself and I can only love myself in so far as I’m able to love others. Self-marrying presupposes that I have found peace with myself. But what if I precisely cannot reconcile myself with myself? What if and what if I discover this only after I got married to myself? So when I had a debate recently in New York with one of the propagators of this self-marriage I told him what impressed me much more is self-divorce. Can I say today no longer I love myself I want to divorce myself? And I claim that Alain’s, I don’t like the term it’s wrong, Badiou’s, but let’s call it naively, anthropology is this type of anthropology of not self-hatred but self-distance. Alain once wrote wonderfully in one of his texts that as a politically constituted subject I have to be an *impitoyable*, merciless censor of myself. And that’s my first problem. And here resides what is wrong with the well-known motto: be true to yourself, be yourself. Well my first question is which self? In so far as the self whom I marry in self-marrying is my ideal ego, the ideal image of myself, the best in me, what about other parts of my true self? What about let’s say my id, my superego and so on and so on? So my first problem is that to take minimally seriously this idea of self-marrying it should have been a complex contract explaining "I as myself I marry myself but I cannot be fully responsible for the superego and the id, will they agree with me?" and so on and so on. So again I think that this self-marrying is ideology at its worst today. And exactly the same question "which self counts" haunts the latest politically correct madness, the obsession whose commercial expression is the so-called, I’m not kidding it exists in the United States and in England and it’s not a joke, I bought one just to test it, the so-called "Consent Conscious Kit." It’s a small bag for only pound it’s a small bag where you get a condom, a mint, menthol chocolate so you have good breath and then a pen and a simple contract. You put your name, your lover puts another name and you both sign that you are doing it voluntarily. And now you will say this is a joke? No. I couldn't take it seriously till a friend of mine Ed Kadaba from York University informed me, he sent me the files that do you know that in most of the big American universities, I know it is the case in Columbia and in UCLA in Los Angeles and in most of the federal administrative agencies they impose this rule: the two can make love if they are not student-professor adults but their consent before they do it has to be somehow registered. The name they put it is of this campaign is not to say "no" is not enough. They claim for example that if a man seduces a woman and she doesn't protest it still can be pressure. So they want some kind of symbolic registration. Like I flirt with a woman or man or whatever, we decide to do it and then there has to be a registration. They even proposed a selfie where we both hold the paper "Yes we want to do it." The idea is there has to be some explicit registration and the thing is legalized now, madness, legalized. You have to register what they call affirmative conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity. But again I have a problem here as a Freudian. Let’s say that I have an ego which consciously wants it. Then let’s say I have these obscure half-conscious desires and then let’s say that I have an ethical agency which tells me what I should do and sometimes I do it, sometimes I don’t do it. What if there is a conflict between the three? Like "I don’t want to do it but the superego tells me do it." And I’m not here giving you a false example. Today I claim it’s often like this. It’s not you want to have sex but your superego prohibits it. It’s almost a rule is the opposite situation. You really are indifferent but superego tells you you have to enjoy it, it’s your duty to enjoy. Next problem, you say yes to what? And there are, I spoke with some people who advocate this, there are problems. For example you both say yes but, sorry a vulgar example, what if the woman simply meant yes to some vaginal penetration but you think she also meant yes to anal penetration? So as a good bureaucrat I already see the possibility of turning this simple act into a complex bureaucratic procedure. You get a long contract you know where you say yes but yes to anal intercourse, breasts should not be squeezed too much, the woman should not be scratched too much, you know and then for me if you ask me then you negotiate for three hours and this gives you almost more pleasure than the real sex. The other problem, now I am a little bit more serious, is that what these people also insist on is that not only you say yes you say yes but that both partners should have the right to step out if they feel uncomfortable in the middle of the act. It’s incredible how they don’t notice how ambiguous this condition is. I can well imagine for example from my male perspective a gesture which obeys all these rules but it will be experienced by a woman as an incredibly humiliating brutality. Let’s say I seduces a woman we want to do it she undresses herself. Then to be brute or she can do the same to me but sorry I look from my perspective. I don’t like what I see, her body, and then I tell her "sorry I breach the contract I have the right I step out." Can you imagine anything more humiliating for the woman? So what’s the problem here? The problem I think is a very subtle one. I am totally against any sexual violence in the sense of humiliating, forcing any partner and so on and so on. But what I am saying is that you see the problem is that there is that you when you are in the process of passionate seduction this act presupposes you to do something which precisely you cannot do. Or if you do it it must be in some way part of the process of seduction. You cannot be in the middle of passionate interplay and then you step back and become your own bureaucrat, you know. Let’s... if you do this it can ruin everything but if you are lucky it can even bring an additional sexualization, you erotic... but what I’m just saying is it cannot be neutral. You know it presupposes this weird split of the subject as if you are doing whatever you are doing in passion, at the same time you can step back and objectively look at yourself. So what I would claim is that there is something in the very structure of erotic interplay which resists direct formal declaration of consent or intent. For example again I’m ready here if some women would protest to accept it but for what I’ve heard many women don’t say yes not because they don’t want to do it, I’m not talking about the obvious situations where woman can say yes but it’s really she was forced to say it. What interests me is that you know let’s say you are in an intense interplay but both of you are a little bit shy or whatever. It’s easy that it would appear totally ridiculous if all of a sudden in the middle of embracing all of a sudden she or he stands up "okay now I say yes to vaginal sex" or whatever. You know you... it can ruin it. You cannot as Jacques Lacan would have put it, *il n'y a pas de métalangage*, there is no meta-language. Whatever you say during sexual interplay it’s a part of sexual interplay. Next, you know the mystery of seduction is precisely how there is something in the structure of erotic interplay which resists this direct declaration. The detour, not saying it directly, itself plays an erotic role. For example an example that I use in two of my books, if you know them I’m sorry if I repeat it but I love it. There was some years ago an English working class drama comedy *Brassed Off* with Ewan McGregor. That’s when he was still a working class hero before he became Obi-Wan Kenobi although although in a pseudo-leftist film. He accompanied a young British woman to her flat after their date and there she tells him "would you like to come in for a coffee?" He answers "yes but there is a problem, I don’t drink coffee." She answers with a smile "no problem I don’t have any." Okay, what I like here is that it’s the most open erotic invitation you can imagine but be careful at what happens. Nothing. Just an... you know you make an offer and then you say "oh but it doesn't matter that much." I mean eroticization is resides in this very in this very, in this very empty rejection of explicit demands. I come for a coffee, I don’t like coffee, doesn't matter I don’t have it. I think that the true genius of sexuality would be to apply this even to sex itself. Like wouldn't it be true love if a woman tells you "come up let's fuck" and you say "no sorry I’m not in the mood" and she says "no problem I’m also not in the mood." That would have been true love I claim. Where you know it’s as Lacan knew it well the mystery of human sexuality is that sex itself has to be sexualized. Sex without these rhetorical detours and so on is simple animal copulation. There is none of what we call sexual tension. And I don't know how is it with Islam, I’m well aware of erotics of Islam. I mean that there is, but what I know about Christianity is that many great Christian theologians were aware of it. Saint Augustine openly says in in Paradise before the Fall Adam and Eve of course they were making love all the time. But he says it was not sexual. It was totally they were doing it like his raising penis was in the same way, it’s Augustine’s example, like when a farmer on the field raises his tool or or is plowing the field and so on, you just do it intentionally. And it’s again that’s crucial sex itself through all these detours has to be sexualized has to be sexualized. So I just wanted to make clear to you this dimension of rhetoric of sexualization. Imagine an obscene variation on this scene from following those stupid consent rules. Okay, woman says the girl says to the boy "let's go up and have some coffee." What if the guy answers something like "wait a minute let us make it clear, you invited me for a cup of coffee in your flat without having any coffee. This means you want sex. Yes, okay admit it." It would ruin everything. Or but what would be for me the truly sexually attractive thing would be the opposite thing, like the true vulgarity would have been direct communication. Like the girl says "now we are here let's I would like you to come to my flat and fuck" and the boy says "oh I would also love to fuck you so let's just go up and do it." This is horrible. Then what I would like is this: you say it explicitly but ruining the effect by the way you say like something like the girl says to the boy "I would like you to come to my flat and fuck but I’m embarrassed to ask politely directly so I will be polite and ask you if you want to come up with me for a coffee." It’s ridiculous but then the boy answers "I don’t drink coffee but I would like to do it the first thing so let’s go up and do it." So my favorite version would have been and once unfortunately years ago it happened to me that the woman in an intelligent funny way gives you a literal answer. You know like once I asked a lady "would you like to come up to my flat for a drink?" her answer was "no sorry I’m not thirsty not today," you know like she answered directly to that and that would be okay the true charm of the scene for me. So again the question is why does the direct invitation to sex not work? Again the problem is that in the same way that coffee sometimes is not fully coffee, in this situation when you can say "would you come for a coffee" you mean another thing, the problem is that sex is also never fully sex. What do I mean by this? I will tell you another old story which I used in one of my early books and I hope you don't know it. People usually think that psychoanalysis is about vulgar reduction to sex. Whatever we do we really mean that, you know, we always think about sex. No, this is vulgar psychoanalysis. The true Freudian problem is not whatever you think of it really ultimately about sex. No, it’s but what do you think when you are doing sex? That is to say Lacan's thesis is that since there is no sexual relationship as he puts it you never are alone in sex. It’s never me and my partner. You have to have this sustained by a fantasy, by a dream. And now comes the story which I love. years ago or before when I was young a German weekly I think it was *Stern*, I hope I’m not wrong, published for its summer issue a wonderful series of caricatures. They have like seven, eight men. Each of them is asked what would you like to do this summer? And each of them gives an official answer. One says "I would like to be in nature and walk by a forest." Another guy answers "I would like to walk around in a museum." The third one "I would like to take a long flight." But then you have as in comics you know where you put the dialogue cloud and it shows what they really think. And of course in the cloud for everyone is a naked woman, no? Like this. I think it’s totally wrong. The true answer would be the two caricatures would have been the opposite one. You ask all these men if they are not gay "what would you like to do?" and they are vulgar drunk let’s say they answer "oh a lot of sex." But then in the cloud it should be ancient monuments, it means "I would like to make love in a museum" or "forest" which means "my ideal of love is in nature" or "airplane" because there are people even some of my friends whose point of honor is to do they are called club you know up there. But you see the point of Lacan. Sex is more complex. The true question is by which fantasy it is sustained. So the "yes means yes" sexual rule I think is just an exemplary case of subjectivity which predominates today. The big topic is that subjects are weak humans are precarious, vulnerable, something that has to be protected by a complex set of rules. They should be warned in advance about all possible intrusions that may disturb them. Let me give you a nice example where I am against this. Do you know that do you know the film *E.T.*? Extra-Terrestrial, the old one. You know that when this film was released in Sweden years ago or when it was prohibited to not only to young people for some period it was prohibited in Sweden, Norway and Denmark totally prohibited. You know with what justification? This is a detail that I rather like in this film. They claimed the censors that the non-sympathetic portrayal of adults in this film, you know only the children can establish solidarity with E.T. adults are evil, was considered dangerous for the relation between children and their parents. I mean it’s total madness. But here we are today. Not only real life experiences, even fiction can be censored. Was it reported here in the media what happened a couple of months ago at Columbia University of New York? Student girls in a class where they studied literary classic was given as literature not the only her the entire class Ovid’s *Metamorphoses*. And she went at home she read *Metamorphoses*. There is a scene of violent sex there, practically rape, and she complained that since she was once sexually molested this scene perturbed her too much and she complained against the professor that this was brutal from his side. So then you know what came out of this? Some... it’s called Columbia University’s Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board, something like that, Advisory imposed a rule that in all literature and art classes all texts that are given have to be accompanied by so-called "trigger warnings." Like you are given literature but at the beginning of the book or text it should say "warning if you are sensitive to scenes of sexual violence do not read it" and so on and so on. And second thing they wanted at Columbia University now to have special obligatory classes for professors for so-called "sensitivity training." How do you approach students and so on. Now why am I opposed to this? Let me be clear. I have deep respect when people feel wounded and so on and so on. But this is the worst version how to fight it. I think university should be the opposite: a space where you are NOT protected from brutal experiences. My god they should even show you scenes of rape precisely so that you feel the horror of it. They should not isolate you from it, they should teach you how to confront it my god you know. This is I think the worst of how things are reported even for example all the horrors of others even in Europe refugees now and so on. You know you see in the media but in a very in a very in a very protected way. I think that precisely and here I agree with what I will later refer to it Alain elaborated in his wonderful book *Éloge de l'amour*, "In Praise of Love," that love is in this sense "triggering." Love is triggering. Love is a very traumatic encounter. Love is dangerous. Love can ruin your life. But this okay I’m not saying I’m not a masochist I’m saying that’s why you should do it. But you should take a risk. Absolute. If love is without danger then it’s not love, it’s not a true encounter with another person. What do I mean by this? Two theoretical points. First, as I already said, the the Christian and Jewish, I don’t know how is in Islam I admit it, notion of neighbor it’s not the good guy, it’s not *le semblable*, it’s not the other those who are like us. Already in the Bible if you read it with a refinement, neighbor is the other in comparative distance, abyss, you cannot see deep into him or her. The example maybe already mentioned it here that I like. Did you see Stephen King... Kubrick made the movie *The Shining*? Jack Nicholson is the neighbor there. That’s why Stephen King was right to claim Jack Nicholson was wrong for that role. Why? Because you know in the novel the whole point is this one: the father of the family is a good normal father. Slowly he turns into a monster, from a fellow man he turns into a neighbor. But as Stephen King was right to say the moment Jack Nicholson enters the frame you see he is a monster, no? It doesn't... but so what I want to say is that in this sense I am saying the monster is not only the other. That’s how I read Alain, that the danger of love is not only "how can I be sure that I love you? Is there something monstrous in you?" or whatever. Maybe an even more monstrous experience is to be loved. It’s a terrible pressure. You know how horrible it is if you feel that you are the object of another’s passionate love? Because basically by definition you don’t know why the other loves you. It’s as if you have some treasure in you and you don’t know what this treasure is because the ABC of love, love by definition cannot be accounted for in reasons. Like if you say "I love that woman because of her hair, beautiful smile, legs" and so on, it’s not love. It’s not that it doesn't matter how the woman is, but there is in passionate love a refined reversal which is the similar one as you find with some intelligent Christian theologians like Kierkegaard where he says "it’s an obscenity to say I am a Christian because I read the arguments in the Bible and the arguments convinced me." Kierkegaard uses the same example for paternal authority. He says "it’s an obscenity to say my father is a bright guy, he gave me good reasons so I obey him." No, Kierkegaard says as a theologian "no, it’s the other way around. To understand reasons to believe you have to believe already." Now people will say "this is religious obscurantism." No, this is Marx. Marx says exactly the same thing about Marxist theory. Marxism is not an objective theory. Stalin wrote like this: "a scientist studies history, he discovers the laws of history. Oh my god proletarian class will win, so let’s join the victorious." No, to understand and be a Marxist it’s not abstract knowledge. You have to be engaged in it. And that’s another topic that you find in Alain which is the best answer to the stupid reproach against him that he is an abstract universalist. No, his greatness is, I wonder if you would agree here, for me Hegelian greatness, that partisanship, engaged partisanship and universality not only do not exclude each other but imply each other. True universality we can gain access to it only through a partisan position. Which means back to love. Yes, I love that woman because of her smile, whatever you want. But in order to perceive reasons why I love her I have to be in love. You cannot step out of this circle. Which is why again it’s pretty horrible to be to be not only in love but to be loved. Second brief point I want to make and then I go to further paradoxes. Christianity here commits a terrifying mistake when it opposes carnal sexual love to, I don’t know, spiritual metaphysical sphere. That’s why I like the title here "Metaphysics of Love." Not love, even passionate sex. Look, let’s define metaphysics in what sense. I will not refer here to Badiou but to a philosopher whom he admires, maybe also you agree here, for me Hegelian greatness, the partisanship, engaged partisanship and universality not only do not exclude each other but imply each other. His point if I got it correctly is that Plato is not just a metaphysician with no event in the sense of eternal ideas they are just there. No, you should focus in Plato on the encounter of an idea and in some wonderful wonderful parts of his dialogues Plato even clearly describes Socrates confronting beauty, whatever. My god, it’s an absolute traumatic encounter. Socrates behaves like a madman and so on. So why am I saying this? Because I think that today erotics is precisely disappearing in this sense of being replaced either by bureaucratic over-regulation or by what I call enlightened consumerist hedonism. You know we should have pleasures but pleasures should be healthy, they shouldn't threaten us. For example, did you check? I love to do this. I sometimes buy these stupid magazines for for men or women. They have the same topic usually. For example you check what is sex today, the ideal of sex today in popular media. Usually it’s sex as a healthy exercise. Do you know that I saw once in a very popular Western, no American magazine, "health sex." They explain to you if you are have over sex is good because your heart will be better and your muscles will remain stronger then they even advise you to do a lot of deep French kissing because they say "in this way your muscles will remain stronger so in your old age you will not be saliva will not be..." I mean this is the most horrible text that I have ever read. So what I am saying is that Alain developed this nicely how the verb and I don't think unfortunately you have it in Turkish, we don't have it in Slovenian, they have it in French and in English you know the term is to fall in love, *tomber amoureux*, to fall. And this dimension... is the book translated in your language, Alain, your *Éloge de l'amour*? Is it translated? So read it, read it. It’s like it should be like in Korea Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung speeches, distributed. No, seriously. This idea that the whole strategies that we get today and that’s my point. It’s not that we should deplore in a spiritualist way "oh my god we live in consumerist society of pleasures." No we don’t. We live in an extremely in a society where pleasures are extremely controlled, you know: drink beer but without alcohol, blah-blah and without... and so my point is that as Alain wrote it as if we are now returning to arranged marriages more and more. Okay, we don’t have parents who decide it but we have all these dating agencies and others and the function of them is precisely to erase the dimension of fall. And Alain found an example in France then I found two of them in America, United States. Publicity for dating agencies where they say "you are a busy woman" because they address it mostly to women "so you don’t have time to flirt, to look for partners. We will enable you to find yourself in love without the fall." They... what I’m saying is that without this, for me I’m sorry but I’m here absolutely traditional. For me falling in love is destiny but it’s a contingently retroactively created destiny. Falling in love means this: I go to the toilet, I fell down there, I am taken to a hospital and there is a nurse there, a stupid example or whatever, and oh my god we fell in love and then immediately we construct a narrative where I can say "my all of my life I was waiting for this moment." And so what I’m saying is that is that precisely and I already when I had another public speech here half a year, no a couple of months ago, I developed another example of how we don’t live in in truly consumerist hedonist societies. Like even from literature, bestseller and Hollywood commercial, sex is disappearing. The example I gave more or less, okay you will tell me now Shades of Grey* which is the most depressing thing we know. But look at for example... how’s he called? Dan Brown, *Da Vinci Code* and so on. No sex at the end. And so on and so on. Or even James Bond, *Quantum of Solace*, the first James Bond film where no... how do we relate today in our everyday ideology to these things? We say "sex is good, healthy, but remain true to yourself, don’t go crazy, remain in control." And this can even be given a kind of a stupid pseudo-Buddhist twist: "don’t become too attached to earthly objects," you know. And this you know we should be aware. I don’t know how it is here with you but for example in United States this is what I found a little bit problematic with these feminist attacks on on on patriarchy. Of course we should fight it but I claim the predominant mass ideology today in the West is no longer traditional patriarchy. It’s what I call enlightened hedonism, sorry hedonism. It’s something like "there are no *a priori* rules or whatever, be truly yourself, experiment with yourself, discover different dimensions of yourself, just don’t get fixed, fixated onto one position." I will immediately approaching the end develop what is wrong with this. I am I just want to make another here before that important point. I think that love is also not a matter of this inner deep inner authentic feeling or experience. Love is an act, an act which can even be covered up by what you sincerely feel. Which is to provoke you a little bit. The most stupid proverb that I know is "an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard." The idea being "when I confront an enemy I do it from my limited imagination but I ignore how he or they also have a story to tell, they have their own side of the story." Well up to a point yes, it’s obviously true in cases of racism and so on. But there are limits to this. Like I don’t know who is for you an image of evil. For us in Europe it’s Hitler of course. Would you also say Hitler was our enemy because we haven’t really listened to his story? I claim we should listen to his story and it can even be a very nice story. But the point is that this inner authenticity is not the authentic moment. It’s a fake. In what sense? You remember now it’s years forgotten September 11th attacks. It’s interesting how when the planes were falling down some of the passengers got it that they will die and they wrote SMSes quickly and some idiots like Martin Amis the writer were so fascinated by the fact that most of these last minute "I know that I am dying" messages were about love. Like a husband tells to her-his wife "remember I will die now but remember I love you" and so on and so on. I claim no. Even if you are approaching death it’s not only not necessary that your insight will be more authentic. It’s even a greater temptation to lie at that moment. It’s so interesting what a friend of mine a journalist told me. He looked closer into some of these cases of dying messages "I love." And he discovered that some of them, he discovered it was so shocking that he was afraid to publish. For example there were two or three men who were on those planes on a on a way to meet their mistress. And when they were dying they sent this SMS to... you know they kept more of their self-image at that moment. They lie, they manipulate. So try to imagine a really authentic message. I would say let’s imagine a wife who phones her husband in the last seconds of her life. She doesn't tell him "remember always I love you," but she tells him "before I die I just wanted to let you know that our marriage was a fake, I cannot stand the sight of you and I was going to meet my lover" and so on. That would be an authentic sincerity, you know. So again what I’m saying here is that terrible crimes can be covered up by beautiful narratives. Inner experience is not necessarily an authentic act. And it’s very interesting to do this. I have a book with a terrible title "The Nazi Conscience," like *Gewissen*, moral conscience. Well it’s a terrifying book because it tells all the beautiful stories the Nazis were telling themselves so that to enable them with good conscience to do all their crimes and so on and so on. Which is why incidentally I am also deeply suspicious of all these horrible or all these terrifying religions of inner inner experience which focus on some authentic inner experience. Okay here comes, we can debate a bit later, my question to you Alain: Love and Universality. I would like to link with the idea I wonder what you will maybe after o’clock answer that for me the model of the most beautiful declaration of love for me is in Richard Wagner and I know we both admire *Walküre* second act. Siegmund the hero to him Brünnhilde the Valkyrie approaches and said "you are now going to a duel, you will die. And I can arrange it so that you will join Valhalla the sacred place of heroes and gods." And Siegmund says "no sorry if I cannot take there my great love Sieglinde I prefer..." you know this idea of Brünnhilde asks him something like "but are you crazy? I offer you eternity and there is that poor ragged girl half dying and that poor object is to you more than eternity." I think what is great in love is this move from the universal to absolute individuality. Ah, I’m not saying there is no dimension of universality. I’m saying the relationship is much more complex. There is a I will I would like to use another example which I hope you don’t know. An old an old melodrama with Elizabeth Taylor, *Rhapsody*, from '54. Where the lesson is wonderful. It’s the story of a beautiful girl who first gets engaged with a violinist and the violinist drops her. I mean wants to have her but the career matters more to him. Then a pianist falls in love with her they marry she doesn't love him and on the very night of his concert just before she tells him "tomorrow I leave you." And he says "but couldn't you wait till tomorrow? Why are you saying this to me now before the concert? Do you want to ruin me?" And she said "no you have to go through this." And of course it’s a melodrama beautiful ending. The only thing I forgot why this film should be burned is the music. She plays Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto and cries while he is playing. But the point is that at the end the concert is a triumph but he is totally devastated and she comes to him. What’s the lesson of this? It’s a very refined paradox. Let’s say you have a choice if you are man or if you are woman. You are passionately in love but you also have a universal cause: political dedication, art, whatever. Now I’m sorry but it can also be turned the other way around as a man I’m telling you this from my masculine perspective. If you say to a woman "listen I love you so much that I cannot survive without you so I will drop my political cause or career I simply want to live with you." It will be a failure. It’s not a true reason that... it’s not a true proof of your love. It will end bad. The true thing you should do in such a situation is to choose your cause even if it ruins you know to to risk losing. Only in this way you will gain the woman’s respect. What the woman wants to hear from you is not "I cannot survive without you so I humiliate myself." No it’s to hear from you "I can survive with you the communist or whatever totally neutral example cause is more but it will ruin me." You know like love is absolute but it’s this refined absolute way where you shouldn't directly elevate it into a cause. If you put it in these terms "what is more to me? Revolution or whatever or love?" It’s a false choice. In this immediate choice if it’s true love you have to choose public cause and your love is no less absolute for this. This is why and you mentioned in your series that where you also were in your series that he has a beard now he is preparing for Erdogan terror no he is doing good films now. Sorry did you also publish Marguerite Duras in your series? Have you Duras here? Sorry? No no that’s what I meant. I like couples in some of Marguerite Duras's novels. How does love emerge there? Not this stupid "they look each other in the eye." No, they usually search for another object. Maybe even the lost husband of her. And they together work for a cause. And then while doing this maybe they hold the hand or whatever. But it’s not a direct as it were it’s not a direct goal. That’s why that’s why I think if you ask me the greatest love story one of the greatest for me is Lenin and Inessa Armand. It was done so beautifully now some archives are open in Moscow and it’s clear they did have an affair. It was even done in a beautiful civilized way. Nadezhda Krupskaya knew it but there was no conflict Nadezhda Krupskaya and Inessa Armand even became friends. And it’s very tragic. This was one of the photos which were censored in Stalinism. You see Lenin attending the funeral of Inessa Armand and he was totally broken they had to... I mean basically this was his absolute love. But it was done so nicely. There was no public passion in it you know that’s how you do it. Lenin was totally dedicated to his work and so on and so on. The love lost nothing. This love of his and Inessa was much more absolute than some decadent self-immersion "let’s fuck day and night and not exit the bedroom" and so on and so on. I think that’s for me the and in this sense I wonder if you Alain would agree that I share totally your suspicion about love as a political category. You know this Freud-Marxist stupidities: "communism will be an era where to be vulgar working will be like fucking and fucking like working." Okay they don’t say this but you know kind of a total interpenetration of sexual pleasure and everyday life. No I think that intense love has to appear as this singularity which in no way in no way blocks your public engagement. Like I’m even ready to go so far and I read one Stalinist story where there are there is a couple and she no he he is a traitor. No the Stalinists invented this. And she kills him. And she tells him while shooting him "she is a true fanatic communist listen I’m doing this out of love." And he accepts it. You know like it they simply move I claim on ontologically different and ontologically different I mean ontologically different levels here. So what I want to resist and that’s why I appreciate your work Alain because you consciously avoid this temptation. Not just sexual personal love what about political love? Love of humanity or all that bullshit? No I’m totally I find so suspicious and hypocritical this humanist universalism. For example I will be very clear here because I claim that this universal love then you always need you always need a figure like a Jew or a Palestinian you need a bad guy, hatred should be then reserved for an exception. For me the moment of truth of this fake universal political love is this is one of the glorious moments of the of the end of communism. When at the end when party was losing there was a big meeting of Central Committee in East Germany and some people accused Erich Mielke, the head of Stasi of State... that he was doing illegal activities of killing and blah and you know what he did at this historical scene? He went like this "*Aber ich liebe euch alle!*" you know like "I love you all!" No we shouldn't do it like this I claim that love is singular in the strictest Alain Badiou sense. Love is violent. That’s where I like I’m a total atheist Christian love. Christian love is not up there, Christian love is not the Buddhist love where you love all the world so you withdraw, okay a simplified version. I like this a particular fanaticism of love. Love means "I love you singularly" and all the world can go to hell. Okay it cannot but that’s why we need the communist cause, no? So what I want to say to conclude now really to leave space to Alain is now that we are facing this refugee crisis and with all problems that I have don’t misunderstand me about your government. I think that let me make a provocation I hope you will not be or me arrested that "love your neighbor as yourself" has a clear meaning today in Turkey. It means "love your Kurdish neighbor as yourself," you know here here. But what I’m saying is that nonetheless it’s beautiful how for Europe it’s a big problem to get refugees but you have one million, two millions of them, no and there is no and this is so horrible there are three types of states facing in totally different ways. Very rich, middle and more poor. We can notice how their readiness to accept refugees is exactly turned around. It’s relatively poor countries, okay you’re getting better like Turkey, Egypt and so on who are ready to accept them. There are Europe, there is Europe, rich so-so, which has problems, and the really rich Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Emirates, they accept none. Although they are directly responsible. My god Saudi Arabia by supporting anti-Assad forces is directly responsible for refugees there. But okay what I want to say is this here. I hate in Europe this sentimental sentimental moralization of refugees like "do we still have a heart? We should accept them by love" and so on. No I said once and I caused a scandal in some place I don’t know where I think somewhere in Scandinavia in a French country and said when they asked me this stupid false question "would you be ready to take a refugee to your house?" I said "no I hate them." But I am ready to radically change my life to help them. Not because I love them I feel sympathy for them but because it’s simply duty my god. Duty is not sentimental goodness and so on, it’s a different dimension. We should receive refugees not because we have human sympathy for them and so on and so on but precisely out of coldness of doing your duty. Here I would like to conclude with someone who is definitely not one of us was but sometimes he said a wonderful thing. Winston Churchill. He once said something like "sometimes doing the good is not enough even if it is the best you can do. Sometimes you must do what is required." And that’s here. We shouldn't ask ourselves how good we are blah-blah-blah. No it’s the level shouldn't be put at this problem "there are poor people they’re coming are we kind enough?" it shouldn't be personalized in this way. That’s why I put it in these brutal terms. I didn't want to be a fake. "Would you like to have some stupid refugees mingling around in your apartment?" No. I don’t even don’t like my friends to be too much in my apartment. But you see my point. The proper emancipatory logic shouldn't even move at this level. Here I even marginally for the first time agree with Jürgen Habermas who in a short text in *Die Zeit* said almost the same thing. He said he is deeply tired of this sentimentalism. "Do we still have a human heart" and so on. No, it’s simply civic duty. People are dying, escaping war, there is nothing to debate there. So you see that’s why I wonder if you would agree. I think we should focus at least when we talk about love on this singular radical experience and avoid this stupid mixture of you know in communism entire life will be sex. Well if this is communism I wouldn't like to live in it you know. Thank you very much. Thank you for tolerating this idiot for so long. Ah, you know what I did once in Italy I’m sorry in Italian to confuse the translator and it was wonderful. I spoke in English, the translator translated into Italian. Then to confuse him because I know it a little bit I made a sentence in Italian and nonsensically he translated it into English. So but sorry to clear up with the nice ladies who are translating. I know what you will do. Let's make a wager immediately after this talk. You will buy a voodoo doll of me and all the evening you will be putting needles into it no? And I agree with you because I must be nightmare as a talker talking too fast and so on. But you know what’s your ethical act? Once it happened to me in Spain. I had a strange experience that you know I talked for five minutes and the translation was like seconds, you know. Then I asked my friend "how was the lady translator?" no. And okay I was asked a difficult question and I was improvising an answer and the translation was "Professor Žižek really doesn't know what to say and he is just bluffing around." That’s how she translated. Okay so they will translate. Okay. I think they made it unnecessarily difficult with this rule. Aren't you the boss? Yes. But you shouldn't pick out. Don’t tell me this is really an open debate. I hope you did it in a proper Stalinist way to distribute questions and so on. Yeah but somebody no I’m serious. Somebody I mean I’m myopic I don't you need me there? Yes. Yes. But I need you as my slave. No no sorry just to pick out. What you told about sex Kit is similar to the sex relationship in Zamyatin's "We" novel. This was written in and still it critiques today. No tell me which novel my god! Evgeniy Ivanovich Zamyatin. "We" one. "We" "We" "We." "We" is the title? Yes "We." Yeah yeah yeah. Sex is defined by society. Love is a revolutionary act that takes us out of society. If we have a communism or another society where we don't have alienation, what would happen with love? Okay, now I will it’s a wonderful question. My only problem is that it’s
I'm always very glad to be back in Istanbul because it’s really an intellectually lively city. A friend of mine told me that he finds this statement absurd. He told me that your writer Orhan Pamuk recently deplored how totally provincial Istanbul is. No, I don't agree with him. Maybe provincial if you want so-called big spectacular cultural events. But I hate them. For example, in art I hate Biennales. Did you notice how they function? Usually they are artistic painting Biennales. Usually they are presented as the ultimate critical thing, you know. All Biennales in Western Europe have usually a long leftist introduction how culture is today commercialized, caught in capital and you have... and they even admit this for themselves: aren’t we manipulated by capital? But nonetheless precisely as such they fit perfectly into capital. It is as if today in order to succeed on the market you have to have some pseudo-Marxist justification of how we are all manipulated and so on by capital. I, my experience is different when I meet with friends here. So don't be caught in that adoration of how there is somewhere else a truly lively intellectual life. There is not. London, Paris, New York can be much more provincial than you are here. So since I have too many things as usual to say I will begin. Just to warn you, I use some parts in a changed way for my... from my past books because you know when people were not just downloading music but still there were CDs or LPs you usually got from popular artists something like you know The Best Of Mick Jagger or whatever, no? So I will try to do here a kind of The Best Of Žižek on Love. But you can also read it in another way which is much closer to me and my good friend Alain Badiou. When I was young I remember in Communist countries like mine they like to publish these small volumes with thoughts of the Great Leader on a certain topic like you know like Marx and Engels on Art or Lenin on Education. Well maybe we should do like Badiou and Žižek on Love, you know like pseudo-Stalinist approach. And I didn't mention Alain by chance because and I don't mean this in a hypocritical way. What I will do here is just a kind of extended comment on some of the topics already covered and developed by Badiou. I through my spies got the English translation of Alain's talk yesterday and my reaction was immediate hatred like it’s too good. It’s good that we don't appear on the same day, no? And I was just sad that like you know Alain often for objective reasons had to cancel a talk. Why didn't he cancel yesterday’s talk, so that you would be with me? So quite seriously I with great pleasure this morning I read his talk and I hope there will be some echoes. There will be maybe some minor differences but to use our Maoist references this will be definitely what Maoism called contradictions within the people, not contradictions between the people and enemies of the people. So okay I will try to begin with an easier more popular way and then don't be afraid we will approach much more serious even metaphysical topics. I would like to begin with some of the confusions about sex, love, passion in today’s at least in the West, Western popular culture. What fascinates me is the inherent tension, contradictions of this culture. They pretend to be permissive you know you can do what you want and so on, but they are so much over-regulated that I can well understand some of my friends who turned to Islam not because they couldn't support free Western freedom and needed a firm authority but they want Western... they found Western haven’t's freedom too regulated, too oppressive. So let me begin. In the spring of this year a couple of months ago, I don't know if it was reported here but in England the media extensively reported on a middle-aged photographer a woman called Grace Gelder who after practicing Indian meditation decided to marry herself. Literally. She organized the full ceremony of self-marrying in front of witnesses, friends. She proclaimed her vows to herself, she put on a wedding ring to herself and she kissed herself in a mirror. Now far from being an idiosyncratic stupid eccentricity the idea of self-dating and self-marrying more and more circulate in Western popular media. You have, I love them I bought them, you have small brochures books which detail how to proceed in self-dating which should precede self-marrying. If you are your own prospective self-love you should first leave all around your apartment loving messages like "Hi Slavoj I love you," "I love myself," and then you discover them when you go to the toilet so glad a message for yourself from yourself. When you decide to date yourself you should put your apartment in order, prepare a nice table with candles, you put on your best dress, you inform your friends that you cannot visit them this evening because you have a more important date with yourself. As they say the goal of self-dating is to gain a deep knowledge of yourself of who you really are and who you want to be so that by way of taking a bath, a commitment to your deeper self you can achieve self-acceptance and self-harmonization. But does this work? Before we explode into laughter at this idea I think we should notice that it does contain a moment of truth. The idea of self-dating and self-marrying presupposes that me, an individual, I am not directly one with myself. I can marry myself only if I am not directly myself so that my self-identity has to be registered, performed in a symbolic ceremony, made official. Here however problems arise. How does this symbolic registration relate to my self-experience? What if the result of probing into myself is that I discover that I don’t like what I find there? That’s my first reaction. I date myself, I talk with myself and I look deep into myself... well at least for myself I’m sure what I will discover. I don’t want to have anything to do with this stupid person. In other words, if you look deeply into yourself what do you usually discover? All the filth of envy, sadistic fantasies, disgusting sexual obsessions and so on. So the much celebrated inner wealth of my personality is I claim inherently excremental. What I really am is I’m full of shit. In short, what if I discover that I am my own neighbor in the strict biblical sense where you know the Bible, neighbor is not just the nice guy, neighbor is precisely the strange horrible dimension of the one who is close to you. They say that in order to love others you have to love yourself. But I think it’s precisely the opposite that holds. I love others to escape myself and I can only love myself in so far as I’m able to love others. Self-marrying presupposes that I have found peace with myself. But what if I precisely cannot reconcile myself with myself? What if and what if I discover this only after I got married to myself? So when I had a debate recently in New York with one of the propagators of this self-marriage I told him what impressed me much more is self-divorce. Can I say today no longer I love myself I want to divorce myself? And I claim that Alain’s, I don’t like the term it’s wrong, Badiou’s, but let’s call it naively, anthropology is this type of anthropology of not self-hatred but self-distance. Alain once wrote wonderfully in one of his texts that as a politically constituted subject I have to be an *impitoyable*, merciless censor of myself. And that’s my first problem. And here resides what is wrong with the well-known motto: be true to yourself, be yourself. Well my first question is which self? In so far as the self whom I marry in self-marrying is my ideal ego, the ideal image of myself, the best in me, what about other parts of my true self? What about let’s say my id, my superego and so on and so on? So my first problem is that to take minimally seriously this idea of self-marrying it should have been a complex contract explaining "I as myself I marry myself but I cannot be fully responsible for the superego and the id, will they agree with me?" and so on and so on. So again I think that this self-marrying is ideology at its worst today. And exactly the same question "which self counts" haunts the latest politically correct madness, the obsession whose commercial expression is the so-called, I’m not kidding it exists in the United States and in England and it’s not a joke, I bought one just to test it, the so-called "Consent Conscious Kit." It’s a small bag for only pound it’s a small bag where you get a condom, a mint, menthol chocolate so you have good breath and then a pen and a simple contract. You put your name, your lover puts another name and you both sign that you are doing it voluntarily. And now you will say this is a joke? No. I couldn't take it seriously till a friend of mine Ed Kadaba from York University informed me, he sent me the files that do you know that in most of the big American universities, I know it is the case in Columbia and in UCLA in Los Angeles and in most of the federal administrative agencies they impose this rule: the two can make love if they are not student-professor adults but their consent before they do it has to be somehow registered. The name they put it is of this campaign is not to say "no" is not enough. They claim for example that if a man seduces a woman and she doesn't protest it still can be pressure. So they want some kind of symbolic registration. Like I flirt with a woman or man or whatever, we decide to do it and then there has to be a registration. They even proposed a selfie where we both hold the paper "Yes we want to do it." The idea is there has to be some explicit registration and the thing is legalized now, madness, legalized. You have to register what they call affirmative conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity. But again I have a problem here as a Freudian. Let’s say that I have an ego which consciously wants it. Then let’s say I have these obscure half-conscious desires and then let’s say that I have an ethical agency which tells me what I should do and sometimes I do it, sometimes I don’t do it. What if there is a conflict between the three? Like "I don’t want to do it but the superego tells me do it." And I’m not here giving you a false example. Today I claim it’s often like this. It’s not you want to have sex but your superego prohibits it. It’s almost a rule is the opposite situation. You really are indifferent but superego tells you you have to enjoy it, it’s your duty to enjoy. Next problem, you say yes to what? And there are, I spoke with some people who advocate this, there are problems. For example you both say yes but, sorry a vulgar example, what if the woman simply meant yes to some vaginal penetration but you think she also meant yes to anal penetration? So as a good bureaucrat I already see the possibility of turning this simple act into a complex bureaucratic procedure. You get a long contract you know where you say yes but yes to anal intercourse, breasts should not be squeezed too much, the woman should not be scratched too much, you know and then for me if you ask me then you negotiate for three hours and this gives you almost more pleasure than the real sex. The other problem, now I am a little bit more serious, is that what these people also insist on is that not only you say yes you say yes but that both partners should have the right to step out if they feel uncomfortable in the middle of the act. It’s incredible how they don’t notice how ambiguous this condition is. I can well imagine for example from my male perspective a gesture which obeys all these rules but it will be experienced by a woman as an incredibly humiliating brutality. Let’s say I seduces a woman we want to do it she undresses herself. Then to be brute or she can do the same to me but sorry I look from my perspective. I don’t like what I see, her body, and then I tell her "sorry I breach the contract I have the right I step out." Can you imagine anything more humiliating for the woman? So what’s the problem here? The problem I think is a very subtle one. I am totally against any sexual violence in the sense of humiliating, forcing any partner and so on and so on. But what I am saying is that you see the problem is that there is that you when you are in the process of passionate seduction this act presupposes you to do something which precisely you cannot do. Or if you do it it must be in some way part of the process of seduction. You cannot be in the middle of passionate interplay and then you step back and become your own bureaucrat, you know. Let’s... if you do this it can ruin everything but if you are lucky it can even bring an additional sexualization, you erotic... but what I’m just saying is it cannot be neutral. You know it presupposes this weird split of the subject as if you are doing whatever you are doing in passion, at the same time you can step back and objectively look at yourself. So what I would claim is that there is something in the very structure of erotic interplay which resists direct formal declaration of consent or intent. For example again I’m ready here if some women would protest to accept it but for what I’ve heard many women don’t say yes not because they don’t want to do it, I’m not talking about the obvious situations where woman can say yes but it’s really she was forced to say it. What interests me is that you know let’s say you are in an intense interplay but both of you are a little bit shy or whatever. It’s easy that it would appear totally ridiculous if all of a sudden in the middle of embracing all of a sudden she or he stands up "okay now I say yes to vaginal sex" or whatever. You know you... it can ruin it. You cannot as Jacques Lacan would have put it, *il n'y a pas de métalangage*, there is no meta-language. Whatever you say during sexual interplay it’s a part of sexual interplay. Next, you know the mystery of seduction is precisely how there is something in the structure of erotic interplay which resists this direct declaration. The detour, not saying it directly, itself plays an erotic role. For example an example that I use in two of my books, if you know them I’m sorry if I repeat it but I love it. There was some years ago an English working class drama comedy *Brassed Off* with Ewan McGregor. That’s when he was still a working class hero before he became Obi-Wan Kenobi although although in a pseudo-leftist film. He accompanied a young British woman to her flat after their date and there she tells him "would you like to come in for a coffee?" He answers "yes but there is a problem, I don’t drink coffee." She answers with a smile "no problem I don’t have any." Okay, what I like here is that it’s the most open erotic invitation you can imagine but be careful at what happens. Nothing. Just an... you know you make an offer and then you say "oh but it doesn't matter that much." I mean eroticization is resides in this very in this very, in this very empty rejection of explicit demands. I come for a coffee, I don’t like coffee, doesn't matter I don’t have it. I think that the true genius of sexuality would be to apply this even to sex itself. Like wouldn't it be true love if a woman tells you "come up let's fuck" and you say "no sorry I’m not in the mood" and she says "no problem I’m also not in the mood." That would have been true love I claim. Where you know it’s as Lacan knew it well the mystery of human sexuality is that sex itself has to be sexualized. Sex without these rhetorical detours and so on is simple animal copulation. There is none of what we call sexual tension. And I don't know how is it with Islam, I’m well aware of erotics of Islam. I mean that there is, but what I know about Christianity is that many great Christian theologians were aware of it. Saint Augustine openly says in in Paradise before the Fall Adam and Eve of course they were making love all the time. But he says it was not sexual. It was totally they were doing it like his raising penis was in the same way, it’s Augustine’s example, like when a farmer on the field raises his tool or or is plowing the field and so on, you just do it intentionally. And it’s again that’s crucial sex itself through all these detours has to be sexualized has to be sexualized. So I just wanted to make clear to you this dimension of rhetoric of sexualization. Imagine an obscene variation on this scene from following those stupid consent rules. Okay, woman says the girl says to the boy "let's go up and have some coffee." What if the guy answers something like "wait a minute let us make it clear, you invited me for a cup of coffee in your flat without having any coffee. This means you want sex. Yes, okay admit it." It would ruin everything. Or but what would be for me the truly sexually attractive thing would be the opposite thing, like the true vulgarity would have been direct communication. Like the girl says "now we are here let's I would like you to come to my flat and fuck" and the boy says "oh I would also love to fuck you so let's just go up and do it." This is horrible. Then what I would like is this: you say it explicitly but ruining the effect by the way you say like something like the girl says to the boy "I would like you to come to my flat and fuck but I’m embarrassed to ask politely directly so I will be polite and ask you if you want to come up with me for a coffee." It’s ridiculous but then the boy answers "I don’t drink coffee but I would like to do it the first thing so let’s go up and do it." So my favorite version would have been and once unfortunately years ago it happened to me that the woman in an intelligent funny way gives you a literal answer. You know like once I asked a lady "would you like to come up to my flat for a drink?" her answer was "no sorry I’m not thirsty not today," you know like she answered directly to that and that would be okay the true charm of the scene for me. So again the question is why does the direct invitation to sex not work? Again the problem is that in the same way that coffee sometimes is not fully coffee, in this situation when you can say "would you come for a coffee" you mean another thing, the problem is that sex is also never fully sex. What do I mean by this? I will tell you another old story which I used in one of my early books and I hope you don't know it. People usually think that psychoanalysis is about vulgar reduction to sex. Whatever we do we really mean that, you know, we always think about sex. No, this is vulgar psychoanalysis. The true Freudian problem is not whatever you think of it really ultimately about sex. No, it’s but what do you think when you are doing sex? That is to say Lacan's thesis is that since there is no sexual relationship as he puts it you never are alone in sex. It’s never me and my partner. You have to have this sustained by a fantasy, by a dream. And now comes the story which I love. years ago or before when I was young a German weekly I think it was *Stern*, I hope I’m not wrong, published for its summer issue a wonderful series of caricatures. They have like seven, eight men. Each of them is asked what would you like to do this summer? And each of them gives an official answer. One says "I would like to be in nature and walk by a forest." Another guy answers "I would like to walk around in a museum." The third one "I would like to take a long flight." But then you have as in comics you know where you put the dialogue cloud and it shows what they really think. And of course in the cloud for everyone is a naked woman, no? Like this. I think it’s totally wrong. The true answer would be the two caricatures would have been the opposite one. You ask all these men if they are not gay "what would you like to do?" and they are vulgar drunk let’s say they answer "oh a lot of sex." But then in the cloud it should be ancient monuments, it means "I would like to make love in a museum" or "forest" which means "my ideal of love is in nature" or "airplane" because there are people even some of my friends whose point of honor is to do they are called club you know up there. But you see the point of Lacan. Sex is more complex. The true question is by which fantasy it is sustained. So the "yes means yes" sexual rule I think is just an exemplary case of subjectivity which predominates today. The big topic is that subjects are weak humans are precarious, vulnerable, something that has to be protected by a complex set of rules. They should be warned in advance about all possible intrusions that may disturb them. Let me give you a nice example where I am against this. Do you know that do you know the film *E.T.*? Extra-Terrestrial, the old one. You know that when this film was released in Sweden years ago or when it was prohibited to not only to young people for some period it was prohibited in Sweden, Norway and Denmark totally prohibited. You know with what justification? This is a detail that I rather like in this film. They claimed the censors that the non-sympathetic portrayal of adults in this film, you know only the children can establish solidarity with E.T. adults are evil, was considered dangerous for the relation between children and their parents. I mean it’s total madness. But here we are today. Not only real life experiences, even fiction can be censored. Was it reported here in the media what happened a couple of months ago at Columbia University of New York? Student girls in a class where they studied literary classic was given as literature not the only her the entire class Ovid’s *Metamorphoses*. And she went at home she read *Metamorphoses*. There is a scene of violent sex there, practically rape, and she complained that since she was once sexually molested this scene perturbed her too much and she complained against the professor that this was brutal from his side. So then you know what came out of this? Some... it’s called Columbia University’s Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board, something like that, Advisory imposed a rule that in all literature and art classes all texts that are given have to be accompanied by so-called "trigger warnings." Like you are given literature but at the beginning of the book or text it should say "warning if you are sensitive to scenes of sexual violence do not read it" and so on and so on. And second thing they wanted at Columbia University now to have special obligatory classes for professors for so-called "sensitivity training." How do you approach students and so on. Now why am I opposed to this? Let me be clear. I have deep respect when people feel wounded and so on and so on. But this is the worst version how to fight it. I think university should be the opposite: a space where you are NOT protected from brutal experiences. My god they should even show you scenes of rape precisely so that you feel the horror of it. They should not isolate you from it, they should teach you how to confront it my god you know. This is I think the worst of how things are reported even for example all the horrors of others even in Europe refugees now and so on. You know you see in the media but in a very in a very in a very protected way. I think that precisely and here I agree with what I will later refer to it Alain elaborated in his wonderful book *Éloge de l'amour*, "In Praise of Love," that love is in this sense "triggering." Love is triggering. Love is a very traumatic encounter. Love is dangerous. Love can ruin your life. But this okay I’m not saying I’m not a masochist I’m saying that’s why you should do it. But you should take a risk. Absolute. If love is without danger then it’s not love, it’s not a true encounter with another person. What do I mean by this? Two theoretical points. First, as I already said, the the Christian and Jewish, I don’t know how is in Islam I admit it, notion of neighbor it’s not the good guy, it’s not *le semblable*, it’s not the other those who are like us. Already in the Bible if you read it with a refinement, neighbor is the other in comparative distance, abyss, you cannot see deep into him or her. The example maybe already mentioned it here that I like. Did you see Stephen King... Kubrick made the movie *The Shining*? Jack Nicholson is the neighbor there. That’s why Stephen King was right to claim Jack Nicholson was wrong for that role. Why? Because you know in the novel the whole point is this one: the father of the family is a good normal father. Slowly he turns into a monster, from a fellow man he turns into a neighbor. But as Stephen King was right to say the moment Jack Nicholson enters the frame you see he is a monster, no? It doesn't... but so what I want to say is that in this sense I am saying the monster is not only the other. That’s how I read Alain, that the danger of love is not only "how can I be sure that I love you? Is there something monstrous in you?" or whatever. Maybe an even more monstrous experience is to be loved. It’s a terrible pressure. You know how horrible it is if you feel that you are the object of another’s passionate love? Because basically by definition you don’t know why the other loves you. It’s as if you have some treasure in you and you don’t know what this treasure is because the ABC of love, love by definition cannot be accounted for in reasons. Like if you say "I love that woman because of her hair, beautiful smile, legs" and so on, it’s not love. It’s not that it doesn't matter how the woman is, but there is in passionate love a refined reversal which is the similar one as you find with some intelligent Christian theologians like Kierkegaard where he says "it’s an obscenity to say I am a Christian because I read the arguments in the Bible and the arguments convinced me." Kierkegaard uses the same example for paternal authority. He says "it’s an obscenity to say my father is a bright guy, he gave me good reasons so I obey him." No, Kierkegaard says as a theologian "no, it’s the other way around. To understand reasons to believe you have to believe already." Now people will say "this is religious obscurantism." No, this is Marx. Marx says exactly the same thing about Marxist theory. Marxism is not an objective theory. Stalin wrote like this: "a scientist studies history, he discovers the laws of history. Oh my god proletarian class will win, so let’s join the victorious." No, to understand and be a Marxist it’s not abstract knowledge. You have to be engaged in it. And that’s another topic that you find in Alain which is the best answer to the stupid reproach against him that he is an abstract universalist. No, his greatness is, I wonder if you would agree here, for me Hegelian greatness, that partisanship, engaged partisanship and universality not only do not exclude each other but imply each other. True universality we can gain access to it only through a partisan position. Which means back to love. Yes, I love that woman because of her smile, whatever you want. But in order to perceive reasons why I love her I have to be in love. You cannot step out of this circle. Which is why again it’s pretty horrible to be to be not only in love but to be loved. Second brief point I want to make and then I go to further paradoxes. Christianity here commits a terrifying mistake when it opposes carnal sexual love to, I don’t know, spiritual metaphysical sphere. That’s why I like the title here "Metaphysics of Love." Not love, even passionate sex. Look, let’s define metaphysics in what sense. I will not refer here to Badiou but to a philosopher whom he admires, maybe also you agree here, for me Hegelian greatness, the partisanship, engaged partisanship and universality not only do not exclude each other but imply each other. His point if I got it correctly is that Plato is not just a metaphysician with no event in the sense of eternal ideas they are just there. No, you should focus in Plato on the encounter of an idea and in some wonderful wonderful parts of his dialogues Plato even clearly describes Socrates confronting beauty, whatever. My god, it’s an absolute traumatic encounter. Socrates behaves like a madman and so on. So why am I saying this? Because I think that today erotics is precisely disappearing in this sense of being replaced either by bureaucratic over-regulation or by what I call enlightened consumerist hedonism. You know we should have pleasures but pleasures should be healthy, they shouldn't threaten us. For example, did you check? I love to do this. I sometimes buy these stupid magazines for for men or women. They have the same topic usually. For example you check what is sex today, the ideal of sex today in popular media. Usually it’s sex as a healthy exercise. Do you know that I saw once in a very popular Western, no American magazine, "health sex." They explain to you if you are have over sex is good because your heart will be better and your muscles will remain stronger then they even advise you to do a lot of deep French kissing because they say "in this way your muscles will remain stronger so in your old age you will not be saliva will not be..." I mean this is the most horrible text that I have ever read. So what I am saying is that Alain developed this nicely how the verb and I don't think unfortunately you have it in Turkish, we don't have it in Slovenian, they have it in French and in English you know the term is to fall in love, *tomber amoureux*, to fall. And this dimension... is the book translated in your language, Alain, your *Éloge de l'amour*? Is it translated? So read it, read it. It’s like it should be like in Korea Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung speeches, distributed. No, seriously. This idea that the whole strategies that we get today and that’s my point. It’s not that we should deplore in a spiritualist way "oh my god we live in consumerist society of pleasures." No we don’t. We live in an extremely in a society where pleasures are extremely controlled, you know: drink beer but without alcohol, blah-blah and without... and so my point is that as Alain wrote it as if we are now returning to arranged marriages more and more. Okay, we don’t have parents who decide it but we have all these dating agencies and others and the function of them is precisely to erase the dimension of fall. And Alain found an example in France then I found two of them in America, United States. Publicity for dating agencies where they say "you are a busy woman" because they address it mostly to women "so you don’t have time to flirt, to look for partners. We will enable you to find yourself in love without the fall." They... what I’m saying is that without this, for me I’m sorry but I’m here absolutely traditional. For me falling in love is destiny but it’s a contingently retroactively created destiny. Falling in love means this: I go to the toilet, I fell down there, I am taken to a hospital and there is a nurse there, a stupid example or whatever, and oh my god we fell in love and then immediately we construct a narrative where I can say "my all of my life I was waiting for this moment." And so what I’m saying is that is that precisely and I already when I had another public speech here half a year, no a couple of months ago, I developed another example of how we don’t live in in truly consumerist hedonist societies. Like even from literature, bestseller and Hollywood commercial, sex is disappearing. The example I gave more or less, okay you will tell me now Shades of Grey* which is the most depressing thing we know. But look at for example... how’s he called? Dan Brown, *Da Vinci Code* and so on. No sex at the end. And so on and so on. Or even James Bond, *Quantum of Solace*, the first James Bond film where no... how do we relate today in our everyday ideology to these things? We say "sex is good, healthy, but remain true to yourself, don’t go crazy, remain in control." And this can even be given a kind of a stupid pseudo-Buddhist twist: "don’t become too attached to earthly objects," you know. And this you know we should be aware. I don’t know how it is here with you but for example in United States this is what I found a little bit problematic with these feminist attacks on on on patriarchy. Of course we should fight it but I claim the predominant mass ideology today in the West is no longer traditional patriarchy. It’s what I call enlightened hedonism, sorry hedonism. It’s something like "there are no *a priori* rules or whatever, be truly yourself, experiment with yourself, discover different dimensions of yourself, just don’t get fixed, fixated onto one position." I will immediately approaching the end develop what is wrong with this. I am I just want to make another here before that important point. I think that love is also not a matter of this inner deep inner authentic feeling or experience. Love is an act, an act which can even be covered up by what you sincerely feel. Which is to provoke you a little bit. The most stupid proverb that I know is "an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard." The idea being "when I confront an enemy I do it from my limited imagination but I ignore how he or they also have a story to tell, they have their own side of the story." Well up to a point yes, it’s obviously true in cases of racism and so on. But there are limits to this. Like I don’t know who is for you an image of evil. For us in Europe it’s Hitler of course. Would you also say Hitler was our enemy because we haven’t really listened to his story? I claim we should listen to his story and it can even be a very nice story. But the point is that this inner authenticity is not the authentic moment. It’s a fake. In what sense? You remember now it’s years forgotten September 11th attacks. It’s interesting how when the planes were falling down some of the passengers got it that they will die and they wrote SMSes quickly and some idiots like Martin Amis the writer were so fascinated by the fact that most of these last minute "I know that I am dying" messages were about love. Like a husband tells to her-his wife "remember I will die now but remember I love you" and so on and so on. I claim no. Even if you are approaching death it’s not only not necessary that your insight will be more authentic. It’s even a greater temptation to lie at that moment. It’s so interesting what a friend of mine a journalist told me. He looked closer into some of these cases of dying messages "I love." And he discovered that some of them, he discovered it was so shocking that he was afraid to publish. For example there were two or three men who were on those planes on a on a way to meet their mistress. And when they were dying they sent this SMS to... you know they kept more of their self-image at that moment. They lie, they manipulate. So try to imagine a really authentic message. I would say let’s imagine a wife who phones her husband in the last seconds of her life. She doesn't tell him "remember always I love you," but she tells him "before I die I just wanted to let you know that our marriage was a fake, I cannot stand the sight of you and I was going to meet my lover" and so on. That would be an authentic sincerity, you know. So again what I’m saying here is that terrible crimes can be covered up by beautiful narratives. Inner experience is not necessarily an authentic act. And it’s very interesting to do this. I have a book with a terrible title "The Nazi Conscience," like *Gewissen*, moral conscience. Well it’s a terrifying book because it tells all the beautiful stories the Nazis were telling themselves so that to enable them with good conscience to do all their crimes and so on and so on. Which is why incidentally I am also deeply suspicious of all these horrible or all these terrifying religions of inner inner experience which focus on some authentic inner experience. Okay here comes, we can debate a bit later, my question to you Alain: Love and Universality. I would like to link with the idea I wonder what you will maybe after o’clock answer that for me the model of the most beautiful declaration of love for me is in Richard Wagner and I know we both admire *Walküre* second act. Siegmund the hero to him Brünnhilde the Valkyrie approaches and said "you are now going to a duel, you will die. And I can arrange it so that you will join Valhalla the sacred place of heroes and gods." And Siegmund says "no sorry if I cannot take there my great love Sieglinde I prefer..." you know this idea of Brünnhilde asks him something like "but are you crazy? I offer you eternity and there is that poor ragged girl half dying and that poor object is to you more than eternity." I think what is great in love is this move from the universal to absolute individuality. Ah, I’m not saying there is no dimension of universality. I’m saying the relationship is much more complex. There is a I will I would like to use another example which I hope you don’t know. An old an old melodrama with Elizabeth Taylor, *Rhapsody*, from '54. Where the lesson is wonderful. It’s the story of a beautiful girl who first gets engaged with a violinist and the violinist drops her. I mean wants to have her but the career matters more to him. Then a pianist falls in love with her they marry she doesn't love him and on the very night of his concert just before she tells him "tomorrow I leave you." And he says "but couldn't you wait till tomorrow? Why are you saying this to me now before the concert? Do you want to ruin me?" And she said "no you have to go through this." And of course it’s a melodrama beautiful ending. The only thing I forgot why this film should be burned is the music. She plays Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto and cries while he is playing. But the point is that at the end the concert is a triumph but he is totally devastated and she comes to him. What’s the lesson of this? It’s a very refined paradox. Let’s say you have a choice if you are man or if you are woman. You are passionately in love but you also have a universal cause: political dedication, art, whatever. Now I’m sorry but it can also be turned the other way around as a man I’m telling you this from my masculine perspective. If you say to a woman "listen I love you so much that I cannot survive without you so I will drop my political cause or career I simply want to live with you." It will be a failure. It’s not a true reason that... it’s not a true proof of your love. It will end bad. The true thing you should do in such a situation is to choose your cause even if it ruins you know to to risk losing. Only in this way you will gain the woman’s respect. What the woman wants to hear from you is not "I cannot survive without you so I humiliate myself." No it’s to hear from you "I can survive with you the communist or whatever totally neutral example cause is more but it will ruin me." You know like love is absolute but it’s this refined absolute way where you shouldn't directly elevate it into a cause. If you put it in these terms "what is more to me? Revolution or whatever or love?" It’s a false choice. In this immediate choice if it’s true love you have to choose public cause and your love is no less absolute for this. This is why and you mentioned in your series that where you also were in your series that he has a beard now he is preparing for Erdogan terror no he is doing good films now. Sorry did you also publish Marguerite Duras in your series? Have you Duras here? Sorry? No no that’s what I meant. I like couples in some of Marguerite Duras's novels. How does love emerge there? Not this stupid "they look each other in the eye." No, they usually search for another object. Maybe even the lost husband of her. And they together work for a cause. And then while doing this maybe they hold the hand or whatever. But it’s not a direct as it were it’s not a direct goal. That’s why that’s why I think if you ask me the greatest love story one of the greatest for me is Lenin and Inessa Armand. It was done so beautifully now some archives are open in Moscow and it’s clear they did have an affair. It was even done in a beautiful civilized way. Nadezhda Krupskaya knew it but there was no conflict Nadezhda Krupskaya and Inessa Armand even became friends. And it’s very tragic. This was one of the photos which were censored in Stalinism. You see Lenin attending the funeral of Inessa Armand and he was totally broken they had to... I mean basically this was his absolute love. But it was done so nicely. There was no public passion in it you know that’s how you do it. Lenin was totally dedicated to his work and so on and so on. The love lost nothing. This love of his and Inessa was much more absolute than some decadent self-immersion "let’s fuck day and night and not exit the bedroom" and so on and so on. I think that’s for me the and in this sense I wonder if you Alain would agree that I share totally your suspicion about love as a political category. You know this Freud-Marxist stupidities: "communism will be an era where to be vulgar working will be like fucking and fucking like working." Okay they don’t say this but you know kind of a total interpenetration of sexual pleasure and everyday life. No I think that intense love has to appear as this singularity which in no way in no way blocks your public engagement. Like I’m even ready to go so far and I read one Stalinist story where there are there is a couple and she no he he is a traitor. No the Stalinists invented this. And she kills him. And she tells him while shooting him "she is a true fanatic communist listen I’m doing this out of love." And he accepts it. You know like it they simply move I claim on ontologically different and ontologically different I mean ontologically different levels here. So what I want to resist and that’s why I appreciate your work Alain because you consciously avoid this temptation. Not just sexual personal love what about political love? Love of humanity or all that bullshit? No I’m totally I find so suspicious and hypocritical this humanist universalism. For example I will be very clear here because I claim that this universal love then you always need you always need a figure like a Jew or a Palestinian you need a bad guy, hatred should be then reserved for an exception. For me the moment of truth of this fake universal political love is this is one of the glorious moments of the of the end of communism. When at the end when party was losing there was a big meeting of Central Committee in East Germany and some people accused Erich Mielke, the head of Stasi of State... that he was doing illegal activities of killing and blah and you know what he did at this historical scene? He went like this "*Aber ich liebe euch alle!*" you know like "I love you all!" No we shouldn't do it like this I claim that love is singular in the strictest Alain Badiou sense. Love is violent. That’s where I like I’m a total atheist Christian love. Christian love is not up there, Christian love is not the Buddhist love where you love all the world so you withdraw, okay a simplified version. I like this a particular fanaticism of love. Love means "I love you singularly" and all the world can go to hell. Okay it cannot but that’s why we need the communist cause, no? So what I want to say to conclude now really to leave space to Alain is now that we are facing this refugee crisis and with all problems that I have don’t misunderstand me about your government. I think that let me make a provocation I hope you will not be or me arrested that "love your neighbor as yourself" has a clear meaning today in Turkey. It means "love your Kurdish neighbor as yourself," you know here here. But what I’m saying is that nonetheless it’s beautiful how for Europe it’s a big problem to get refugees but you have one million, two millions of them, no and there is no and this is so horrible there are three types of states facing in totally different ways. Very rich, middle and more poor. We can notice how their readiness to accept refugees is exactly turned around. It’s relatively poor countries, okay you’re getting better like Turkey, Egypt and so on who are ready to accept them. There are Europe, there is Europe, rich so-so, which has problems, and the really rich Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Emirates, they accept none. Although they are directly responsible. My god Saudi Arabia by supporting anti-Assad forces is directly responsible for refugees there. But okay what I want to say is this here. I hate in Europe this sentimental sentimental moralization of refugees like "do we still have a heart? We should accept them by love" and so on. No I said once and I caused a scandal in some place I don’t know where I think somewhere in Scandinavia in a French country and said when they asked me this stupid false question "would you be ready to take a refugee to your house?" I said "no I hate them." But I am ready to radically change my life to help them. Not because I love them I feel sympathy for them but because it’s simply duty my god. Duty is not sentimental goodness and so on, it’s a different dimension. We should receive refugees not because we have human sympathy for them and so on and so on but precisely out of coldness of doing your duty. Here I would like to conclude with someone who is definitely not one of us was but sometimes he said a wonderful thing. Winston Churchill. He once said something like "sometimes doing the good is not enough even if it is the best you can do. Sometimes you must do what is required." And that’s here. We shouldn't ask ourselves how good we are blah-blah-blah. No it’s the level shouldn't be put at this problem "there are poor people they’re coming are we kind enough?" it shouldn't be personalized in this way. That’s why I put it in these brutal terms. I didn't want to be a fake. "Would you like to have some stupid refugees mingling around in your apartment?" No. I don’t even don’t like my friends to be too much in my apartment. But you see my point. The proper emancipatory logic shouldn't even move at this level. Here I even marginally for the first time agree with Jürgen Habermas who in a short text in *Die Zeit* said almost the same thing. He said he is deeply tired of this sentimentalism. "Do we still have a human heart" and so on. No, it’s simply civic duty. People are dying, escaping war, there is nothing to debate there. So you see that’s why I wonder if you would agree. I think we should focus at least when we talk about love on this singular radical experience and avoid this stupid mixture of you know in communism entire life will be sex. Well if this is communism I wouldn't like to live in it you know. Thank you very much. Thank you for tolerating this idiot for so long. Ah, you know what I did once in Italy I’m sorry in Italian to confuse the translator and it was wonderful. I spoke in English, the translator translated into Italian. Then to confuse him because I know it a little bit I made a sentence in Italian and nonsensically he translated it into English. So but sorry to clear up with the nice ladies who are translating. I know what you will do. Let's make a wager immediately after this talk. You will buy a voodoo doll of me and all the evening you will be putting needles into it no? And I agree with you because I must be nightmare as a talker talking too fast and so on. But you know what’s your ethical act? Once it happened to me in Spain. I had a strange experience that you know I talked for five minutes and the translation was like seconds, you know. Then I asked my friend "how was the lady translator?" no. And okay I was asked a difficult question and I was improvising an answer and the translation was "Professor Žižek really doesn't know what to say and he is just bluffing around." That’s how she translated. Okay so they will translate. Okay. I think they made it unnecessarily difficult with this rule. Aren't you the boss? Yes. But you shouldn't pick out. Don’t tell me this is really an open debate. I hope you did it in a proper Stalinist way to distribute questions and so on. Yeah but somebody no I’m serious. Somebody I mean I’m myopic I don't you need me there? Yes. Yes. But I need you as my slave. No no sorry just to pick out. What you told about sex Kit is similar to the sex relationship in Zamyatin's "We" novel. This was written in and still it critiques today. No tell me which novel my god! Evgeniy Ivanovich Zamyatin. "We" one. "We" "We" "We." "We" is the title? Yes "We." Yeah yeah yeah. Sex is defined by society. Love is a revolutionary act that takes us out of society. If we have a communism or another society where we don't have alienation, what would happen with love? Okay, now I will it’s a wonderful question. My only problem is that it’s
unknown
a half an hour question you know. So to answer it properly I should have taken a bit more time but I try to be as brief as possible. First about contract. I read with some leftist critics in United States of this contract kit signing and so on that that’s the irony if you look at radical critics of bourgeois oppression sentimentality then you all of a sudden can discover that the secret model of this politically correct where no one is harassed sex is a legal contract. You know we negotiate everything we make it clear. So there is a certain I claim that that politically correct obsession is one aspect of this legal ideology penetrating our daily life. What you said about Zamyatin. I think that his vision there is a little bit simplified. We should look into the ideology that surrounds it which is I think very fascinating. A greater representative for me is Andrei Platonov. It’s what one cannot but call the communist Gnosticism. The idea was that the main task of the October Revolution should be and they meant it quite literal to produce a new man. Through genetic changes and so on and a man who is clearly described as beyond sexuality. As they say, this is a metaphor beautiful one they use, in the same way that if you look at a steam machine and it gets too hot you don’t feel the heat you just look it on some side on a measuring apparatus. That we should learn to relate in the same way to our bodies. You don’t feel pain in an abstract way you just register it. And the biggest representative of this was Platonov who you can feel how in his big novels sex is mostly a degrading experience. And it’s an extremely interesting topic that how in his later so-called Stalinist works sex returns in a more positive mood as the mode of authentic existence. I mean things are much more complex there. But now the really interesting aspect of what you said. No problem for me. I am for alienation. I’m sick
a half an hour question you know. So to answer it properly I should have taken a bit more time but I try to be as brief as possible. First about contract. I read with some leftist critics in United States of this contract kit signing and so on that that’s the irony if you look at radical critics of bourgeois oppression sentimentality then you all of a sudden can discover that the secret model of this politically correct where no one is harassed sex is a legal contract. You know we negotiate everything we make it clear. So there is a certain I claim that that politically correct obsession is one aspect of this legal ideology penetrating our daily life. What you said about Zamyatin. I think that his vision there is a little bit simplified. We should look into the ideology that surrounds it which is I think very fascinating. A greater representative for me is Andrei Platonov. It’s what one cannot but call the communist Gnosticism. The idea was that the main task of the October Revolution should be and they meant it quite literal to produce a new man. Through genetic changes and so on and a man who is clearly described as beyond sexuality. As they say, this is a metaphor beautiful one they use, in the same way that if you look at a steam machine and it gets too hot you don’t feel the heat you just look it on some side on a measuring apparatus. That we should learn to relate in the same way to our bodies. You don’t feel pain in an abstract way you just register it. And the biggest representative of this was Platonov who you can feel how in his big novels sex is mostly a degrading experience. And it’s an extremely interesting topic that how in his later so-called Stalinist works sex returns in a more positive mood as the mode of authentic existence. I mean things are much more complex there. But now the really interesting aspect of what you said. No problem for me. I am for alienation. I’m sick
Slavoj Žižek
entirely of this bourgeois ideology that you know we don’t need alienation everything should be self-organized, directly transparent and so on and so on. Alienation even at the symbolic level. Alienation in the sense of we use clichés there is a certain externality of language. My hero here is American producer Samuel Goldwyn. There is a legendary story because he produced many Goldwynisms, nonsenses but we now know he planned them well he wasn't an idiot. He got a report from some newspapers attack films produced by him that they use too many old clichés. So he immediately wrote a memo to his scenario department "we need more new original clichés." He was absolutely right! The great historical change is not "I’m just an exception I don’t follow clichés." No, the great change is precisely to invent new clichés. With all this minimal alienation, cliché means precisely you don’t have to think too creatively we absolutely need this as a background. Even at a different level that’s a deep paradox even Marx lately suspected it that one thing is alienation the way Marx described it you know capital all that. Another thing is maybe we shouldn't call it alienation, a certain externalization in the big other symbolic system and so on which is much more primordial. What we should only insist is that no, we are not the masters. There is an other. But the point is that this other is also not the master, that’s Badiou. So what I’m claiming is that we should maybe problematize this topic of simply condemning alienation. We should be much more precise there. I have no I have no problems with that. Look even the same problem that you described it works with even jokes. You need a background for jokes. For example in Paris years ago I participated in a seminar by Jacques-Alain Miller. It was when Jacques-Alain Miller was still at least pretended to be normal politically wasn't like now when he is getting quite crazy he supports Sarkozy and so on. But what happened is that I wanted to make a joke against proverbs which are another form of clichés and I used the term to give an example of a compromise proverb which justifies anything. In Slovenia maybe you have it also: if you do something and you risk too much and you fail there will always be a wise guy who will tell you our Slovene vulgar proverb is "you cannot urinate against the wind" like don’t risk too much, no? But I made a mistake because the Slovene verb for "urinate" sounds very close to French word for "to defecate," *chier*. So what I said was "you cannot shit against the wind," *on ne peut pas chier contre le vent*. And Miller gave a wonderful answer. He just looked coldly at me and said "well the wind must be really strong in Slovenia." But you see what I mean? We can do this only against the background of all these proper clichés which is why I claim true creativity is to create new clichés. If we were immortal beings and we were aware of it would love exist? Immortality love and so on. Immortality yes but in Badiou’s sense not in the sense... it all depends on what exactly do you mean if we were immortal.
entirely of this bourgeois ideology that you know we don’t need alienation everything should be self-organized, directly transparent and so on and so on. Alienation even at the symbolic level. Alienation in the sense of we use clichés there is a certain externality of language. My hero here is American producer Samuel Goldwyn. There is a legendary story because he produced many Goldwynisms, nonsenses but we now know he planned them well he wasn't an idiot. He got a report from some newspapers attack films produced by him that they use too many old clichés. So he immediately wrote a memo to his scenario department "we need more new original clichés." He was absolutely right! The great historical change is not "I’m just an exception I don’t follow clichés." No, the great change is precisely to invent new clichés. With all this minimal alienation, cliché means precisely you don’t have to think too creatively we absolutely need this as a background. Even at a different level that’s a deep paradox even Marx lately suspected it that one thing is alienation the way Marx described it you know capital all that. Another thing is maybe we shouldn't call it alienation, a certain externalization in the big other symbolic system and so on which is much more primordial. What we should only insist is that no, we are not the masters. There is an other. But the point is that this other is also not the master, that’s Badiou. So what I’m claiming is that we should maybe problematize this topic of simply condemning alienation. We should be much more precise there. I have no I have no problems with that. Look even the same problem that you described it works with even jokes. You need a background for jokes. For example in Paris years ago I participated in a seminar by Jacques-Alain Miller. It was when Jacques-Alain Miller was still at least pretended to be normal politically wasn't like now when he is getting quite crazy he supports Sarkozy and so on. But what happened is that I wanted to make a joke against proverbs which are another form of clichés and I used the term to give an example of a compromise proverb which justifies anything. In Slovenia maybe you have it also: if you do something and you risk too much and you fail there will always be a wise guy who will tell you our Slovene vulgar proverb is "you cannot urinate against the wind" like don’t risk too much, no? But I made a mistake because the Slovene verb for "urinate" sounds very close to French word for "to defecate," *chier*. So what I said was "you cannot shit against the wind," *on ne peut pas chier contre le vent*. And Miller gave a wonderful answer. He just looked coldly at me and said "well the wind must be really strong in Slovenia." But you see what I mean? We can do this only against the background of all these proper clichés which is why I claim true creativity is to create new clichés. If we were immortal beings and we were aware of it would love exist? Immortality love and so on. Immortality yes but in Badiou’s sense not in the sense... it all depends on what exactly do you mean if we were immortal.
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I hope I understand you correctly
I hope I understand you correctly
Slavoj Žižek
but I said "what’s the problem? We are immortal in some dimension of our being." Immortality doesn't mean "I will biologically never die." Immortality means there is an as you call it "evental" dimension in our being which is properly and you can be a materialist for it metaphysical in the sense of in the sense of beyond this cycle of life death and so on whatever ordinary. So I would say that yes without immortality there is no authentic love. But this immortality has nothing to do with vulgar biological immortality. If anything to imagine vulgar biological immortality is something extremely brutal and vulgar. Where do you find immortality in popular culture? Living dead, Stephen King and so on and so on. That’s absolutely not... this is you know that’s the only way I would supplement a little bit Alain there. Of course living dead don’t exist but there is a certain imaginary of immortality which is precisely a bad obscene immortality. I’m going to ask my question in English for simplicity. In the beginning of your speech you mentioned about political correctness and its effect to our sexual habits. So if you think that political correctness is an
but I said "what’s the problem? We are immortal in some dimension of our being." Immortality doesn't mean "I will biologically never die." Immortality means there is an as you call it "evental" dimension in our being which is properly and you can be a materialist for it metaphysical in the sense of in the sense of beyond this cycle of life death and so on whatever ordinary. So I would say that yes without immortality there is no authentic love. But this immortality has nothing to do with vulgar biological immortality. If anything to imagine vulgar biological immortality is something extremely brutal and vulgar. Where do you find immortality in popular culture? Living dead, Stephen King and so on and so on. That’s absolutely not... this is you know that’s the only way I would supplement a little bit Alain there. Of course living dead don’t exist but there is a certain imaginary of immortality which is precisely a bad obscene immortality. I’m going to ask my question in English for simplicity. In the beginning of your speech you mentioned about political correctness and its effect to our sexual habits. So if you think that political correctness is an
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obstacle for changing our sexual habits, if you think so could you please explain that? And if you think so do you think it's an obstacle for changing other problematic aspects of our life such as like racism, discrimination and in your case even revolutionary Marxism? Is the idea of political correctness, the dichotomy between being politically correct and incorrect, an obstacle for us when changing our life in a revolutionary way? As always the answer is never a simple one. Look let’s be realistic. There were many good results of political...
obstacle for changing our sexual habits, if you think so could you please explain that? And if you think so do you think it's an obstacle for changing other problematic aspects of our life such as like racism, discrimination and in your case even revolutionary Marxism? Is the idea of political correctness, the dichotomy between being politically correct and incorrect, an obstacle for us when changing our life in a revolutionary way? As always the answer is never a simple one. Look let’s be realistic. There were many good results of political...
Slavoj Žižek
my god of course the good
my god of course the good
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result is that nonetheless you cannot any longer deal or talk with women in a certain openly brutal male chauvinist way. Sorry I am for that. Of course. So I’m not simply saying that we
result is that nonetheless you cannot any longer deal or talk with women in a certain openly brutal male chauvinist way. Sorry I am for that. Of course. So I’m not simply saying that we
Slavoj Žižek
should go back
should go back
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to call women "bitches" and "I fuck you" or whatever. No it did but nonetheless it’s not enough. It’s ambiguous. That’s what I’m claiming and I will give you an example even with racism. For example I talked about here about this the last time that I was here with Mehmet I think. That for example take racism. I’m absolutely against racism. But this politically correct regulation "which words you should use" and so on I claim is extremely non-productive, it’s just oppressive racism. And I will defy you as I already did the last time and tell you: I can well imagine a certain crazy as it may sound non-racist use of racist jokes which can incredibly enlighten the situation, create true solidarity and so on. I don’t know how it is with you but look my friends who are here: Şazi, Buket, Udi Aloni... when we meet my god if somebody were to record how we talk it would go beyond and so on. I make vulgar jokes of Holocaust about him, he does. And we are friends not in spite of this but through this. There is a certain way to be vulgar which the meaning of it the way it socially functions is "we are real friends, this proves it." So you know what I don't like in political correctness first is this attempt to... what do I mean by this? Okay I will give you another example which I didn't yet publish so that’s good that I don’t repeat myself. Ahmadinejad visited New York some years ago and he was invited to a round table, no some debate at Columbia University. And there, and to avoid
to call women "bitches" and "I fuck you" or whatever. No it did but nonetheless it’s not enough. It’s ambiguous. That’s what I’m claiming and I will give you an example even with racism. For example I talked about here about this the last time that I was here with Mehmet I think. That for example take racism. I’m absolutely against racism. But this politically correct regulation "which words you should use" and so on I claim is extremely non-productive, it’s just oppressive racism. And I will defy you as I already did the last time and tell you: I can well imagine a certain crazy as it may sound non-racist use of racist jokes which can incredibly enlighten the situation, create true solidarity and so on. I don’t know how it is with you but look my friends who are here: Şazi, Buket, Udi Aloni... when we meet my god if somebody were to record how we talk it would go beyond and so on. I make vulgar jokes of Holocaust about him, he does. And we are friends not in spite of this but through this. There is a certain way to be vulgar which the meaning of it the way it socially functions is "we are real friends, this proves it." So you know what I don't like in political correctness first is this attempt to... what do I mean by this? Okay I will give you another example which I didn't yet publish so that’s good that I don’t repeat myself. Ahmadinejad visited New York some years ago and he was invited to a round table, no some debate at Columbia University. And there, and to avoid
Slavoj Žižek
misunderstanding no friendship towards Ahmadinejad, I was shocked and I
misunderstanding no friendship towards Ahmadinejad, I was shocked and I
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wrote some protest
wrote some protest
Slavoj Žižek
letters when he he cheated that battle with homosexuals and so on. But you know what happened there? Friends told me, friends who understand Iranians, that when somebody from the public asked him "what about homosexuality in Iran?" The official translation of his reply was "we don’t have this problem because we don’t have homosexuals." And of course everyone laughed there. No, I was told he said something much more refined. If I explain his answer, so I was told, I don’t know if it’s true, he said "we deal with it in a way which is opposite from yours. People discreetly do it, we don’t talk publicly about it." And of course this is the standard half-oppressive attitude. But he pointed out something that precisely I think is endangered by political correctness. In our daily lives it’s absolutely crucial to have this refined distance. You don’t speak publicly about everything that you say and so on. But in political correctness there is this tendency to regulate all the distances, you know like we have even I think in some colleges some politically correct guidelines for sex where they said you know how you open the girl’s button. First you should have to ask her "can I open your button?" "Yes." "Can I go to the next button?" "Yes" and so on and so on. Again it may work in a sex way but what I’m saying is that again for a the second problem I have and that’s off them with political correctness is this focus on harassment. The other person is perceived as a potential danger. And I claim that you know this fear of, it happened to me with my vulgarity you can have, I was accused of "I looked once a lady a little bit too long into her eyes oh visual rape!" I used a dirty joke "oh verbal rape!" and so on no. I mean I claim there is something absolutely fake, false, in this hypersensitivity. It’s the same problem as with those trigger warnings. Basically the true enemy of political correctness is the neighbor. The neighbor as the other being. You don’t agree with me big time? I don’t agree with you big time. There is a huge difference between political correct and consent kit for sex. They are not in the same side. Because like when the coffee, let's speak about the coffee. So the coffee that you read Lacan, he read Lacan and he thinks "come for a coffee" it means "let's have sex." She reads it too and she said "come for a coffee" it means "let's speak about my language, my feminine language." So the way I agree with you about political correct is totally different issue of the fight for consent. The fight for consent for sex is to take the language of thousands of women that have been raped by men to take mastery
letters when he he cheated that battle with homosexuals and so on. But you know what happened there? Friends told me, friends who understand Iranians, that when somebody from the public asked him "what about homosexuality in Iran?" The official translation of his reply was "we don’t have this problem because we don’t have homosexuals." And of course everyone laughed there. No, I was told he said something much more refined. If I explain his answer, so I was told, I don’t know if it’s true, he said "we deal with it in a way which is opposite from yours. People discreetly do it, we don’t talk publicly about it." And of course this is the standard half-oppressive attitude. But he pointed out something that precisely I think is endangered by political correctness. In our daily lives it’s absolutely crucial to have this refined distance. You don’t speak publicly about everything that you say and so on. But in political correctness there is this tendency to regulate all the distances, you know like we have even I think in some colleges some politically correct guidelines for sex where they said you know how you open the girl’s button. First you should have to ask her "can I open your button?" "Yes." "Can I go to the next button?" "Yes" and so on and so on. Again it may work in a sex way but what I’m saying is that again for a the second problem I have and that’s off them with political correctness is this focus on harassment. The other person is perceived as a potential danger. And I claim that you know this fear of, it happened to me with my vulgarity you can have, I was accused of "I looked once a lady a little bit too long into her eyes oh visual rape!" I used a dirty joke "oh verbal rape!" and so on no. I mean I claim there is something absolutely fake, false, in this hypersensitivity. It’s the same problem as with those trigger warnings. Basically the true enemy of political correctness is the neighbor. The neighbor as the other being. You don’t agree with me big time? I don’t agree with you big time. There is a huge difference between political correct and consent kit for sex. They are not in the same side. Because like when the coffee, let's speak about the coffee. So the coffee that you read Lacan, he read Lacan and he thinks "come for a coffee" it means "let's have sex." She reads it too and she said "come for a coffee" it means "let's speak about my language, my feminine language." So the way I agree with you about political correct is totally different issue of the fight for consent. The fight for consent for sex is to take the language of thousands of women that have been raped by men to take mastery
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of their language.
of their language.
Slavoj Žižek
They created new eroticism by giving a different meaning for the coffee. It's not either coffee is a coffee or coffee is sex or let's read the Lacan. The minute you start to speak of Lacan you really killed him because we understand it now we know coffee is sex. So now when he said coffee I mean coffee. I’m not saying coffee is one way. But what they try to say that divine violence the fact that in this revolution of the women to take mastery of their language some white men get castrated in the gray area it's not such a big deal. It's like Robespierre killing some innocent people. But the issue is to create a new language, a new feminine language that the men cannot even give the meaning to her language. So coffee can mean many other things. And that's very important abstract and it's just not one of the we all make jokes about the you know of the the ridiculous of political correct of the perversion where they get it in Columbia University. But the issue is that the big fight of women changing
They created new eroticism by giving a different meaning for the coffee. It's not either coffee is a coffee or coffee is sex or let's read the Lacan. The minute you start to speak of Lacan you really killed him because we understand it now we know coffee is sex. So now when he said coffee I mean coffee. I’m not saying coffee is one way. But what they try to say that divine violence the fact that in this revolution of the women to take mastery of their language some white men get castrated in the gray area it's not such a big deal. It's like Robespierre killing some innocent people. But the issue is to create a new language, a new feminine language that the men cannot even give the meaning to her language. So coffee can mean many other things. And that's very important abstract and it's just not one of the we all make jokes about the you know of the the ridiculous of political correct of the perversion where they get it in Columbia University. But the issue is that the big fight of women changing
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the language of the master of the men, it's a big
the language of the master of the men, it's a big
Slavoj Žižek
revolution, it is
revolution, it is
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almost
almost
Slavoj Žižek
an event. And the fact that
an event. And the fact that
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some people take it to ridiculous place doesn't mean that we should not speak about this
some people take it to ridiculous place doesn't mean that we should not speak about this
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position of protecting the women from thousands of years of. Okay. Now we have to have a bit difference. Because first and I agree with you about political correct. Yeah first about this feminine language and so on and so on. I radically disagree with you. This is for me linguistic apartheid. It’s total dead end for feminism to claim "we women have to have our own language" or
position of protecting the women from thousands of years of. Okay. Now we have to have a bit difference. Because first and I agree with you about political correct. Yeah first about this feminine language and so on and so on. I radically disagree with you. This is for me linguistic apartheid. It’s total dead end for feminism to claim "we women have to have our own language" or
Slavoj Žižek
whatever. And what you said about coffee, but my point was not "whenever I say coffee" remember that in that scene from from the film the woman says "come for a coffee." The man doesn't read it in a sexual way. The man reads it literally. He says "sorry I don’t drink coffee." And it’s she herself who sexualizes it. So it’s not what you imputed to poor Ewan McGregor like the poor woman had that background that every man do sexualize it. It’s become a joke by the fact that he takes it concrete. But you said it's exactly true what they said on the background okay but it becomes at the same time and taking literally sexualized. But my point is that the way to fight it is not through this bullshit of different languages and so on and so on, but to ironically make fun of this very presupposition. That’s why I like Bosnians for example in ex-Yugoslavia. They don’t fight racism by creating another language. They fight racism by exploiting to the end all racist clichés and in with great pleasure assuming them. I agree with you about this. The issue that saying consent it's not anymore language, it's a speech act where I say "I agree" between I having sex, "I don't agree" between I don't accept. It's not a joke. But my point is precisely in sex you cannot do it like this. You can be still compelled to say "fuck you" you presuppose too much. Let us after dinner. I think that first even saying "yes" doesn't guarantee anything. There are so many, like I can well imagine a woman saying "yes" under terror, which may be even worse terror. And I think there are situations where the woman doesn't say "yes" and sorry to say this she means "yes." I mean this is simply the subtlety of the situation you cannot resolve it through this abstract legal rules. And to avoid a misunderstanding if anything I’m even more sensitive, sensitive in the sense that what worries me is that even if you obey all politically correct rules and so on there can still be a terrible pressure and so on. Can I just very briefly answer briefly the sorry what was... divine violence, alienation, the other thing was race... immortality!
whatever. And what you said about coffee, but my point was not "whenever I say coffee" remember that in that scene from from the film the woman says "come for a coffee." The man doesn't read it in a sexual way. The man reads it literally. He says "sorry I don’t drink coffee." And it’s she herself who sexualizes it. So it’s not what you imputed to poor Ewan McGregor like the poor woman had that background that every man do sexualize it. It’s become a joke by the fact that he takes it concrete. But you said it's exactly true what they said on the background okay but it becomes at the same time and taking literally sexualized. But my point is that the way to fight it is not through this bullshit of different languages and so on and so on, but to ironically make fun of this very presupposition. That’s why I like Bosnians for example in ex-Yugoslavia. They don’t fight racism by creating another language. They fight racism by exploiting to the end all racist clichés and in with great pleasure assuming them. I agree with you about this. The issue that saying consent it's not anymore language, it's a speech act where I say "I agree" between I having sex, "I don't agree" between I don't accept. It's not a joke. But my point is precisely in sex you cannot do it like this. You can be still compelled to say "fuck you" you presuppose too much. Let us after dinner. I think that first even saying "yes" doesn't guarantee anything. There are so many, like I can well imagine a woman saying "yes" under terror, which may be even worse terror. And I think there are situations where the woman doesn't say "yes" and sorry to say this she means "yes." I mean this is simply the subtlety of the situation you cannot resolve it through this abstract legal rules. And to avoid a misunderstanding if anything I’m even more sensitive, sensitive in the sense that what worries me is that even if you obey all politically correct rules and so on there can still be a terrible pressure and so on. Can I just very briefly answer briefly the sorry what was... divine violence, alienation, the other thing was race... immortality!
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The immortality
The immortality
Slavoj Žižek
love and so on. Immortality yes, but in Badiou’s sense, not in the... it all depends on what exactly do you mean if we
love and so on. Immortality yes, but in Badiou’s sense, not in the... it all depends on what exactly do you mean if we
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were immortal. I hope I understand you correctly what I said "what’s the problem? We are immortal in some dimension of our being." Immortality doesn't mean "I will biologically never die." Immortality means there is an as you call it "evental" dimension in our being which is properly and you can be a materialist for it metaphysical in the sense of beyond this cycle of life death and so on whatever
were immortal. I hope I understand you correctly what I said "what’s the problem? We are immortal in some dimension of our being." Immortality doesn't mean "I will biologically never die." Immortality means there is an as you call it "evental" dimension in our being which is properly and you can be a materialist for it metaphysical in the sense of beyond this cycle of life death and so on whatever
Slavoj Žižek
ordinary.
ordinary.
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So I would say that yes without immortality there is no authentic love. But this immortality has nothing to do with vulgar biological immortality. If anything to imagine vulgar biological immortality is something extremely brutal and vulgar. Where do you find immortality in popular culture? Living dead, Stephen King and so on and so on.
So I would say that yes without immortality there is no authentic love. But this immortality has nothing to do with vulgar biological immortality. If anything to imagine vulgar biological immortality is something extremely brutal and vulgar. Where do you find immortality in popular culture? Living dead, Stephen King and so on and so on.
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That’s
That’s
Slavoj Žižek
absolutely not... this is you know that’s the only way I would supplement a
absolutely not... this is you know that’s the only way I would supplement a
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little
little
Slavoj Žižek
bit Alain there. Of course living dead don’t exist
bit Alain there. Of course living dead don’t exist
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but there
but there
Slavoj Žižek
is a certain imaginary of immortality which is precisely a bad obscene immortality. Thank you.
is a certain imaginary of immortality which is precisely a bad obscene immortality. Thank you.