The Parallax of Ontology
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2018-12-01 · 1:52:48 · 11,753 words
philosophy-generalhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisideologyreligion-theologycommunism-socialismconsciousness-mindtechnology-ai-cyberspacesubjectivityscience-physicssexuality-genderliberalism-political-correctnessecology-climate
Žižek delivers a philosophical lecture examining whether humans can access the Absolute, surveying answers from the Upanishads to Spinoza, Sade, and transcendental philosophy before arguing that the transcendental circle (Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Habermas) is exhausted. His central thesis is that reality itself, not merely our cognitive limits, is ontologically incomplete, a 'crack in the texture of reality', and that subjectivity should be understood not as a transcendental constituting power but as this very gap or incompleteness inscribed in nature itself. He draws on Ilyenkov's cosmological communism, de Sade's second death, quantum physics, the LGBTQ+ plus sign, and a Christian theology of divine self-abandonment to illustrate his position, with Q&A on Schelling, Hegel, Pittsburgh neo-Hegelianism, brain-computer interfaces, and normativity.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek surveys multiple versions, substantial unity (Upanishads/Spinoza), pure fleeting appearance, ecstatic destructive negativity (Sade/Bataille), and transcendental social totality, before treating ontological incompleteness of reality as a new candidate.
German philosophical term (cannot be gone behind / unsurpassable) used by Žižek to characterize the transcendental horizon shared by Foucault, Habermas, and Heidegger.
Identified here with the constitutive silence opened by the failure of speech and with the gap or incompleteness that Žižek is trying to think as pre-subjective; Beckett's 'silence' is given as a failed approximation.
as “parallax split”
The radical, irresolvable gap between the ontic view of humanity as part of natural reality and the transcendental view of social totality as the ultimate horizon of meaning, the two cannot be synthesized.
Žižek's characterization of Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology: it preserves the transcendental prohibition of genetic questions (the symbolic totality must already be here) while eliminating the Kantian subject.
Foucault's term for the thick discursive horizon of understanding that is unhintergehbar (cannot be gone behind), used by Žižek as an example of structural transcendentalism without a subject.
as “overdetermined totality”
Althusser's concept of social totality as the transcendental horizon that overdetermines the meaning of every phenomenon, which Žižek treats as a structuralist form of transcendentalism that prohibits genesis.
Ilyenkov's thesis, cited approvingly for its speculative boldness: human thought has a cosmic duty to relaunch the universe by provoking a galaxy-scale thermal catastrophe at the peak of its development.
Borrowed from Sade via Lacan: the imagined absolute crime that would destroy not just individuals but the natural cycle itself; Žižek uses Lacan's counter-argument that the second death (the explosion of subjectivity) always already happens before the first.
as “nature is not natural”
Žižek's compressed thesis that nature itself is not the balanced, self-sustaining totality it appears, destruction and imbalance are always already internal to it, evidenced by events like the ecological catastrophes that produced oil and coal.
The thesis that reality in itself, not merely as an artifact of our cognitive limits, is incomplete, using quantum complementarity (Bohr) and the video-game metaphor as illustrations; Žižek wants to think this without invoking God.
as “the plus as identity”
Reading the '+' in LGBTQ+ not as an empirical remainder but as the universal identity of self-questioning itself, 'I don't know what object I am but I know I am not without object', which Žižek aligns with Lacanian feminine/hysterical subjectivity.
as “subjectivity as feminine/hysterical”
Lacan's (and Žižek's) claim that subjectivity as such has a hysterical structure: the subject cannot identify itself as an object and keeps interrogating the other ('Why do you love me?'), making this structural deadlock constitutive rather than pathological.
Object cause of desire: the surplus that is missing from every empirical object, materializing the constitutive plus of subjectivity, whenever you grab an object you always experience 'but this is not what I really want'.
Žižek's paraphrase of objet a as the perpetually absent surplus that drives desire, deployed to show that empty subjectivity is always grounded in an object.
Žižek's preferred figure for the ontological gap that precedes and enables subjectivity: not a Heideggerian opening of Being by Dasein, but an impersonal fissure in pre-subjective reality itself.
as “Heiliger Geist / Holy Spirit”
For Žižek the only meaningful referent of Christ's resurrection: the community of the faithful is itself the presence of the reconciliation, not a future second coming; the gap of divine abandonment is located inside God.
Hegel's image from the Rechtsphilosophie preface, philosophy arrives only in the evening, used here (via Pippin) to argue that Hegel's own ideal state description is retrospective elegy, not utopian blueprint.
as “transcendental circle”
The self-enclosing structure in which every inquiry into reality already moves within a pre-given horizon (episteme, social totality, practice), making it impossible to gain an external view; Žižek identifies this as the shared limitation of Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, and Habermas.
Ray Kurzweil's concept of a technological threshold after which digital and biological intelligence merge; Žižek invokes it to press the question of whether direct brain-to-brain communication would dissolve the subject.
Žižek's critical label for the Pittsburgh Hegelians' (Brandom, Pippin) view of human cognition as irreducibly normative; he objects that they cannot account for how normativity arises from the order of being.
Stories he reaches for 4
From Lubitsch's Ninotchka: a customer orders coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream, only milk, so he can only offer coffee without milk. Materially coffee without milk = coffee without cream = plain coffee, but symbolically they differ, negativity is inscribed into the object.
“'Sorry sir, we don't have cream we just have milk so I cannot give you coffee without cream, I can only give you coffee without milk.'”
Madeleine points to the cut on a tree and says 'I was born here, I died there.' Žižek uses this as his personal philosophical autobiography: born with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and dying there, with everything else as echo.
“'I was born here, no, Kant Critique of Pure Reason and I died here and before and after are echoes'”
A theologian friend of Darwin, accepting both Darwinism and biblical literalism, resolved the contradiction by arguing God directly created fossils as a 'false opening', just as a stage designer creates a false background. Žižek uses this not to endorse it but as a perfect model of ideology's retroactive creation of its own past.
“God directly created fossils. In the same sense that on a stage you create a false background to give a false opening.”
Two Jewish survivors in Paradise swap jokes about their deaths; God overhears and says he doesn't get it. One of them puts an arm around God and says: 'Don't be sad, you were not there, of course you can't understand our joke.' The joke's point is the incompleteness of God: the very exclusion of God from Auschwitz bonds the victims to God through shared abandonment.
“'Listen, don't be sad. You were not there of course, you cannot understand our joke.'”
Works invoked 15
Vertigo film
Hitchcock's film and specifically the Sequoia scene where Madeleine says 'I was born here, I died there' serves as Žižek's personal philosophical autobiography, the Kantian tradition is his birthplace and death.
Ninotchka film
Lubitsch film whose 'coffee without cream' scene is used to illustrate the role of negativity in symbolic identity, materially identical coffees differ symbolically.
Tristan und Isolde opera
Wagner's opera, premiered in Munich; the 'night' of Tristan is described as representing a deadly passion that is unnatural, sexuality as disruption of nature rather than its expression.
Kant's first Critique is Žižek's declared philosophical birthplace ('I was born here'); the transcendental period from Kant to Hegel is his home territory.
T.S. Eliot's essay is quoted for the thesis that every new work restructures the entire past; used to illustrate retroactive constitution of meaning.
After Finitude book
Meillassoux's book is described as 'very important'; its fossil argument is used approvingly to show that transcendentalists cannot account for pre-human reality.
Disparities book
Žižek refers readers to his own book for a more detailed treatment of the Sade/Lacan argument about the second death.
Freiheitsschrift book
Schelling's essay on human freedom, cited alongside Weltalter as the high point of Schelling's radicalism before he retreated from the deadlock of pre-ontological incompleteness.
Hegel's Philosophy of Right, specifically the preface (Owl of Minerva) and the description of the ideal state, is read via Pippin as retrospective description of a lost possibility, not a utopian blueprint.
Dialectics of Nature book
Engels's posthumous manuscript, described as the 'bête noire for Western Marxists, the lowest you can go'; Ilyenkov drew on it for his cosmological speculation.
L'être et le néant book
Sartre's Being and Nothingness is described as the worst example of the subject/inert-being opposition that Žižek wants to overcome.
The passage from the very last pages where Kant says that gaining access to things-in-themselves would make us marionettes is quoted as a key pessimist insight into the limits of transcendental subjectivity.
Die Weltalter book
Žižek says he wrote a short book on it; praises it as part of Schelling's most radical Stuttgart-era thinking on incompleteness before the symbolic order.
Yurchak's book on the last Soviet generation is cited as a wonderful illustration of how symbolic totality functions as the unsurpassable horizon until it suddenly isn't.
Ilyenkov's short speculative text is described as 'dialectical materialism at its most crazy' and 'wonderful'; Žižek quotes it extensively as the most beautiful but mistaken theory of communism.
People invoked 34
Cited for being influenced by Malthus/political economy in developing the idea of struggle for survival, illustrating that even science's notion of nature is socially mediated.
Cited as an example of how the historical notion of nature reflects contemporary social structures: Linnaeus reproduced the hierarchic structure of absolute monarchy in his image of nature.
Marquis de Sade positive
His concept of the 'second death' is used as a foil: Žižek accepts the Lacanian reading that the second death already happened with the emergence of subjectivity, exposing Sade's error in presupposing a complete natural order.
Robert Pippin positive
His neo-Hegelian observation that the Owl of Minerva passage should apply to Hegel's own Rechtsphilosophie (making it retrospective, not prescriptive) is credited as one good observation, though Žižek otherwise doesn't agree with him.
Claude Lévi-Strauss negative
Described as practicing 'transcendentalism without subject': structural anthropology prohibits genetic questions because the symbolic structure must already be here before any genesis is traced.
Jacques Derrida negative
Criticized for falling back into normativity when he began talking about 'infinite justice' and the 'undeconstructible condition of deconstruction', a retreat from more radical positions.
Robert Brandom negative
Grouped with Pippin as a Pittsburgh Hegelian whose normativist reading treats logic as a normative machine without being able to account for how normativity arises from the order of being.
Evald Ilyenkov positive
Described as 'the only Soviet Marxist who deserves to be taken seriously'; his Cosmology of the Spirit is praised as 'the most beautiful theory of communism' though ultimately mistaken for the same reason as Sade.
His claim 'nature itself is always a social category' is cited as support for the transcendental horizon argument; also invoked for his early Marxist idea that communist historical action, unlike all previous acts, would know what it is doing, which Žižek then rejects.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited approvingly on jealousy being structural not factual; on the second death; on objet a as surplus missing from every object; and on subjectivity as constitutively feminine/hysterical.
Cited as an example of early brain-computer interface: near the end of his life he no longer needed his finger, his brain was directly wired to communicate.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Described as 'my favorite theologian'; his formulation 'for a moment God himself became an atheist' is quoted as the most precise expression of the divine self-abandonment thesis.
Louis Althusser negative
Despite dismissing subjectivity as ideological illusion, he remains transcendental: his overdetermined totality functions exactly as a transcendental horizon that prohibits genesis.
Grouped with Sade as a materialist who finds the Absolute in ecstatic destructive negativity, the view Žižek finds interesting but metaphysically unacceptable.
His concept of the Singularity, a new level of being where digital and biological intelligence merge, is invoked as the end-point of the brain-computer interface trajectory.
Alexei Yurchak positive
His book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More is cited as a wonderful illustration of how symbolic totality functions: it's just here until all of a sudden it isn't.
Alain Badiou negative
His idea of an objectless subject is rejected: there is no subject without object because even empty subjectivity is grounded in an object.
Graham Harman positive
Addressed directly in the lecture; Žižek says he agrees with object-oriented ontology on one point, the era of endlessly reflexive transcendental self-questioning is over; he asks Harman how he now stands toward Heidegger.
His Dialectic of Nature is noted as the 'bête noire of Western Marxists' and as the source tradition Ilyenkov drew on for his cosmological speculation.
His 'intellectual love of God' is cited as aiming at something similar to the Upanishadic unity of Brahman and Atman, though Žižek is non-committal about the comparison.
Samuel Beckett negative
His dictum 'every word is a stain on silence' is rejected: silence is constituted only by the failure of speech, so Beckett misses the constitutive role of failure.
T. S. Eliot positive
His Tradition and the Individual Talent is quoted approvingly: every truly new work of art restructures the entire past. Žižek invokes him as an 'intelligent conservative' to illustrate retroactive constitution of the past.
Michel Foucault negative
Criticized as exemplary transcendentalist who prohibits direct ontological questions by reducing them to epistemic conditions; his episteme is treated as unhintergehbar and as a catastrophe for philosophy.
Martin Heidegger negative
Criticized as 'absolutely transcendental', there is no Being or Ereignis without Dasein; though Žižek acknowledges Heidegger was 'sometimes on the way' to thinking the ontological gap.
Ernst Bloch positive
Praised for trying to break out of the transcendental circle toward a cosmological perspective; his Spirit of Utopia extends hope to the whole development of nature, though Žižek implicitly contrasts this with Ilyenkov's circular cosmology.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Žižek openly admits closeness to Schelling's early period (Freiheitsschrift, Weltalter): the idea of pre-ontological incompleteness before the word is spoken is already in Schelling; but Schelling retreated from the deadlock in his late philosophy.
Walter Benjamin positive
Described as ambiguously following Heidegger's idea of 'mute pain in nature' while trying to move beyond historical experience to a cosmological perspective; not simply dismissed as anthropocentric.
Quentin Meillassoux positive
His After Finitude and the fossil argument are used approvingly: transcendentalists cannot account for the pre-human existence of fossils without circularity, Žižek endorses the realist problem, if not Meillassoux's full solution.
Levi Bryant positive
Mentioned as the OOO philosopher who 'believes in democracy even among objects' and who wants to think objects without subject, Žižek says he agrees that is the task.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Criticized for the hermeneutic argument that discursive procedures are always already presupposed in science, and for the demand for positive normative foundations; his agnosticism about whether our cognitive capacities can be explained naturally is dismissed.
Karl Marx positive
Invoked for the 'anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape' passage; but also criticized as 'too much of a teleological historicist' compared to Hegel.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Repeatedly invoked; described as not a philosopher of historical determinism, more open toward the future than Marx; the Owl of Minerva passage from Rechtsphilosophie used via Pippin to argue Hegel is retrospective, not utopian.
Immanuel Kant positive
The Critique of Pure Reason is Žižek's philosophical birthplace; Kant's marionette passage from Critique of Practical Reason is quoted to show that transcendental limitation is actually the condition of freedom, not its obstacle.
Jean-Paul Sartre negative
His Being and Nothingness is described as the 'worst example' of the opposition between radical negativity of the subject and the inert full order of being, an opposition Žižek wants to dissolve.
What it argues
ontological incompleteness of reality as solution to the transcendental circlethe Absolute: from Brahman-Atman unity to pure appearance to destructive negativitysubject as crack or gap in nature rather than transcendental constituting powerIlyenkov's cosmological communism and the cosmic function of thoughtde Sade's second death and the pre-existence of negativity in natureChristianity as theology of divine self-abandonment and divine incompletenesscritique of white liberal self-humiliation as secret arrogance
Dialectical moves 12
“Antisemitism is wrong not because it is factually false but because of its immanent symbolic economy—the question is not whether the claims about Jews are true but why the Nazi universe needs the figure of the Jew.”
Truth-value of factual claims is irrelevant to the structural lie of ideology; ideology is formally wrong prior to any empirical check.
“Even if all a jealous husband's suspicions are true, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological—what makes it pathological is the constitutive role it plays in his psychic identity, not whether the facts bear it out.”
Pathology (and ideology) is a structural question about the role a belief plays, not a factual question about its correspondence to reality.
“The second death always already happens before the first death—it is simply the explosion of subjectivity as another dimension of being.”
De Sade's fantasy of a future absolute crime that destroys nature is retroactively exposed as something that already occurred with the emergence of the subject.
“Nature itself is not natural—destruction and incompleteness are always already inside nature, not added by human hubris.”
The standard green narrative of pristine nature ruined by humanity is inverted: imbalance is constitutive of nature, not external to it.
“Far from transcendental subjectivity being all-powerful, Kant's own text shows that if we overcame our finitude and gained access to things-in-themselves, we would become marionettes—total subjects of objective causality.”
Transcendental limitation is not a constraint on freedom but its very condition; removing the limit would destroy freedom.
“Your being abandoned by God is the very feature which unites you with God—abandonment is not the opposite of union with God but its form.”
Christian theology's highest insight: the gap between humans and God is relocated inside God himself, so the path through abandonment is the path to reconciliation.
“God himself, for a moment, became an atheist (Chesterton)—crucifixion enacts a radical split inside God, not merely between God and humanity.”
Divine self-abandonment is not a figure of speech but an ontological event that installs incompleteness into God himself.
“Proclaiming yourself nothing may appear a modest gesture, but the position of enunciation from which it is spoken is an extremely arrogant, privileged one.”
Self-humiliation as a rhetorical act conceals a claim to universality; the void announced is a mask for a totalizing subject position.
“Silence is constituted only by the failure of speech—there is no silence proper without speech; the silence is opened by the failure of speech.”
Beckett's privileging of silence as what we aim at is inverted: silence is a derivative, produced effect of language's own failure, not a primary ground.
“The '+' in LGBTQ+ should not be read as an empirical remainder of unlisted identities but as the universal identity of self-questioning itself—one can be directly a plus.”
What appears as a placeholder for missing empirical content is reread as the only authentic universal subject-position.
“Fossils, from a theological creationist standpoint, were directly created by God to give a false opening—and this, for Žižek, is the truth of ideology: every ideology retroactively creates the past itself.”
The creationist fossil fantasy is not dismissed but repurposed as an exact model of how ideology works by retroactive construction of its own prehistory.
“The lack comes first; positive normativity is a reaction to the lack—you do not need an implicit positive measure to experience a lack.”
Against the Habermasian demand for positive normative foundations: disorientation and the out-of-joint precede and generate normativity rather than presupposing it.
Claims 20
asserts
The transcendental approach (the idea that every inquiry already moves within an unsurpassable horizon of understanding) has exhausted its philosophical possibilities and must be broken out of.transcendental philosophy
asserts
Reality itself is ontologically incomplete—not merely as an artifact of our cognitive limitations, but in itself—as quantum complementarity (Bohr) shows.ontology / nature
asserts
The subject should be understood not as a transcendental constituting power but as a 'crack' or gap in the texture of reality itself, which is not identical to humanity.subjectivity
asserts
Antisemitism is wrong not because what it says about Jews is factually false but because of its immanent symbolic economy—its need for the figure of the Jew to maintain its own identity.antisemitism
reframes
Ilyenkov's cosmological communism is the most beautiful—though ultimately mistaken—theory of communism: its mistake is the same as Sade's, presupposing a complete natural order from which destruction must then be imported.communism / cosmological materialism
asserts
De Sade's 'second death' always already happens before the first death: it is simply the explosion of subjectivity as another dimension of being, not a future absolute crime.de Sade / second death / subjectivity
asserts
Nature does not exist as a balanced Big Other or complete causal order; destruction and negativity are always already inside nature, not added by humanity.nature / ecology
rejects
There is no subject without object: against Badiou's objectless subject, every subjectivity—including empty subjectivity—is grounded in an object.Badiou's concept of the subject
asserts
Heidegger remains trapped in a transcendental framework because for him there is no Being or Event without Dasein—he consistently neglected the question of what reality is outside human existence.Heidegger
reframes
The '+' in LGBTQ+ should be read not as an empirical remainder but as the universal identity of self-questioning as such—the only authentic universal identity.gender theory / LGBTQ+ identity
rejects
White liberal self-humiliation is a form of secret arrogance: proclaiming oneself 'nothing' occupies a position of enunciation that claims universality while demanding others remain stuck in their particular identities.white liberal anti-racism / political correctness
asserts
Marx was too teleological a historicist; Hegel is more open toward the future and does not commit to historical determinism—communist revolutions also necessarily go wrong and must be repeated.Marx vs Hegel on historical determinism
reframes
Hegel's description of the ideal state in the Rechtsphilosophie is not a utopian vision but a retrospective description of a possibility that has already passed.Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie
asserts
A gap in pre-normative reality must be posited to explain how normativity is possible; it cannot simply be taken as a brute irreducible fact about human cognition, as the Pittsburgh Hegelians do.normativity / Pittsburgh Hegelianism
asserts
If the world were ontologically complete, humans would be marionettes subject to objective causality—as Kant himself acknowledged—so ontological incompleteness is the condition for any meaningful autonomy.freedom / materialism
rejects
Beckett's equation of 'silence' with the ultimate horizon is wrong: silence is constituted only by the failure of speech; there is no silence proper without speech.Beckett / language and silence
asserts
The message of Christianity—unlike other religions—is that God abandons himself (Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani is genuine, not a performance), locating the gap of abandonment inside God rather than between God and humans.Christian theology / divine abandonment
rejects
Foucault's approach prohibits direct ontological questions by reducing them to their epistemic conditions—a catastrophe for philosophy that caused the repressed ontological questions to return in natural science.Foucault / episteme
asserts
Althusser's concept of overdetermined totality functions as a transcendental horizon because it prohibits genesis—the totality must already be here before you can inquire into how it arose.Althusser / structural Marxism
asserts
Schelling at his most radical (Freiheitsschrift, Weltalter) already confronted the deadlock of pre-ontological incompleteness, but then retreated from it in his late philosophy.Schelling
Quotes 15
“Antisemitism is wrong a priori formally. The question is not is what they are saying about the Jews true or not. The question is why does the Nazi universe need the figure of the Jew to maintain its identity?”Slavoj Žižek · formal wrongness of ideology prior to facts
“The most dangerous lies are lies in the guise of truth, where all that you say factually is true but it's part of a semantic field which is in itself a lie.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as structural lie despite factual truth
“Even if all his suspicions are true, wife is all the time sleeping around with other men, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological.”Slavoj Žižek · pathology is structural not factual
“God directly created fossils. In the same sense that on a stage you create a false background to give a false opening.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology retroactively creates its own past
“God thought, 'Oh, humans are too stupid to penetrate beneath atom.' And we as it were caught God with his pants down.”Slavoj Žižek · ontological incompleteness / quantum reality
“What if nature itself is not natural, to put it simply?”Slavoj Žižek · nature is intrinsically incomplete and imbalanced
“proclaiming yourself nothing may appear a modest gesture but as a rule the position of enunciation from which it is spoken it's an extremely arrogant privileged one”Slavoj Žižek · self-humiliation as arrogance
“your being abandoned by God is the very feature which unites you with God”Slavoj Žižek · Christian dialectic of abandonment and union
“For a moment God himself became an atheist.”Slavoj Žižek · Chesterton on crucifixion / divine self-abandonment
“The silence is opened by the failure of speech. There is no silence proper without speech.”Slavoj Žižek · constitutive role of failure / the Real
“whenever I grab an object, I always sooner or later experience, but this is not what I really want. And the object a is precisely that surplus missing from every object.”Slavoj Žižek · objet petit a / desire's constitutive dissatisfaction
“The anatomy of human being is the key to the anatomy of the ape—you already have to have the concept in order to develop how humans emerged out of apes.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive logic of genesis / Marx on history
“If the world were complete, then we would have been marionettes, as Kant said.”Slavoj Žižek · ontological incompleteness as condition of freedom
“What I admire is those Marxists who tried to break out of this closed circle.”Slavoj Žižek · appreciation for cosmological / post-transcendental Marxism
“Nature is a dirty bitch as a mother. The ruin... there is no easy solution of blaming ourselves humanity and then returning to some balance. We have nowhere to return.”Slavoj Žižek · nature's intrinsic imbalance / critique of ecological nostalgia
Transcript 23 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Okay, we go on, and I hope I will not surprise you by sticking to my title, and I will do something not expected these days. Although I have some polemics with object-oriented ontologists, on one point I agree with them nonetheless. The era of this, how should I put it, endlessly reflexive transcendental self-questioning, that like direct ontological questions are prohibited, that was the era of the 70s, 80s, and so on. You know, like let me give you a simple example: if you were to ask somebody like Michel Foucault, what is this, is this a glass of water? His answer would have been, all I can tell you is to give you the episteme, the discursive structure within which this appears as a glass of water. Like you are not allowed, and this is why this was a catastrophe for philosophy, this repressed of philosophy, the great ontological questions, I mean it in a very naive sense, then returned in natural and biological sciences. As they say today, if you want to learn is the universe finite or infinite, you ask quantum cosmology. If you want to learn do we have a free will, you ask cognitive psychology or brain science, no? I, so I will begin, I hope I will shock you here with a very naive beginning. I want to begin by raising the traditional theologico-philosophical question. Is there, for us humans, caught and embedded in a contingent historical reality, is there any possible contact with the Absolute? Whatever we mean by this term, and mostly we mean a point somehow exempted from the permanent flux of reality. There are many traditional answers to this question. The first classic one was formulated in the Upanishads as the unity of Brahman, the supreme and sole ultimate reality, and Atman, the soul within each human being. When our soul purifies itself of all accidental non-spiritual content, it experiences its identity with the absolute foundation of all reality. And this experience is usually described in terms of ecstatic spiritual unity. Spinoza's intellectual love of God aims at something similar, maybe, in spite of all the differences between his universe and that of ancient pagan thought. Now, at the opposite end of this notion of the Absolute as the ultimate substantial reality, we have, and it's already much more interesting for me, the Absolute as pure appearance. That is to say, what is the Absolute from this standpoint? Something that appears to us in fleeting experiences. Say, I'm sorry for the male chauvinist twist spin of this example, through a gentle smile of a beautiful woman or even through a warm caring smile of a person who otherwise may seem ugly and rude. In such miraculous, extremely fragile moments, another dimension transpires through our reality. As such, the Absolute is easily corroded. It all too easily slips through our fingers, and it must be treated as carefully as a butterfly. And I think even Plato is here very ambiguous. His notion of idea is not some substantial another real reality. Ideas are on the surface, absolutely. Then, a next version of the Absolute, popular among some materialists from Sade, Marquis de Sade, to Bataille, is the ecstatic outburst of destructive negativity. The idea is this one: since reality is a constant flow of generation and corruption of particular forms, the only contact with the Absolute is to ecstatically identify with the unconditional destructive force itself. And a similar case can be made for sexuality. Far from providing the natural foundation of human lives, sexuality is the very terrain where humans detach themselves from nature. The idea of sexual perversion or of a deadly sexual passion is totally foreign to the animal universe. This infinite passion, neither nature nor culture, is our contact with the Absolute. And since it is impossible, self-destructive to dwell in it, we escape into historicized symbolization and so on and so on. Just so the idea, I think it's interesting, although I don't agree with it metaphysically, is that we don't have simply nature and culture. Yes, culture tries to tame, gentrify, civilize some excess, but this excess is not nature. This excess is precisely a radical disruption of nature. Think about, since we are here where there was a premiere here in Munich, no, of Wagner's Tristan. You know, it was such an effort that who was it, Ludwig von Schnorr Carolsfeld, the tenor, died immediately after singing Tristan. You have this realm of night. This night is not natural night. It's obviously some deadly passion which is already in itself unnatural. Then there is yet another version of the Absolute, which arises with transcendental reflection. It is no longer the Absolute in itself, but the Absolute of the, sorry for this confused expression, of the unsurpassable, you Germans have a wonderful word, unhintergehbar, you cannot go behind, self-relating, Selbstbeziehung, of the totality of meaning. Let me take two cases. For a consequent historical materialist, social totality of practice is the ultimate horizon of our understanding, which overdetermines the meaning of every phenomenon, no matter how natural it is. Even when quantum cosmology inquires into the play of particles and waves at the origin of our universe, this scientific activity emerges as part of social totality, which kind of grounds its ultimate meaning. This totality is the concrete Absolute of the situation. Or let me take a different example, which will show you this transcendental dimension in a better light: antisemitismus. Antisemitism is not false because it presents actual Jews in a wrong light. At this level, we can always argue that it is partially true. Don't be afraid, I'm absolutely not, I don't have any tolerance for antisemitism. I'm saying something very precise. Let's say I debate with an antisemite. The moment I accept these terms of the debate, "Okay, let's look at the real Jews, are they like that or not," I've sold my soul to the devil. Let's say I debate with somebody in mid-30s in Germany and he says, "Okay, let's look at the fact." He will say, "Germans are, Jews are seducing German girls." What can I say? Probably they do and it's a good thing they do, also the other, he says, "many Jews, Jews exploit Germans." Well, some of the Jews were rich and in a formal sense, they were exploiting the Germans. He says, "Jews have too much influence in literary criticism, in art." Well, there is something for it in statistics. So should we say, "No, both sides exaggerate, truth is somewhere in the middle"? No. We should say that the whole question is wrong. Okay, we should also debate facts, but antisemitism is wrong a priori formally. The question is not is what they are saying about the Jews true or not. The question is why does the Nazi universe need the figure of the Jew to maintain its identity? I'm here repeating, most of you know it, my old joke taken from Lacan when he says, it's a very simple nice insight, that if we have a pathological husband who is jealous pathologically of his wife's infidelity, suspects her to sleep with other men. And Lacan makes a simple nice point: even if all his suspicions are true, wife is all the time sleeping around with other men, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological. Because you know what makes it pathological is not the fact, it's not that it's not true, but it's what role, constitutive role does jealousy play in his, whatever you call it, psychic identity and so on and so on. So you see, we have here, let's say, a version of the Absolute, this transcendental, in the sense that whatever the facts, and we can play these games, yes, Jews did have too much influence in journalism, whatever, in banking, doesn't ultimately, it doesn't matter. Antisemitism is absolutely formally wrong. Again, not because how you compare it with the facts, but with regard to its, I don't know how should I call it, immanent symbolic economy. It's structured to cover up a lie. And as we know today with the rise of new populism, the most dangerous lies are lies, lies sorry, lies in the guise of truth, where all that you say factually is true but it's part of a semantic field which is in itself a lie. So to make clear what I want to say, I will go back to my first case. Although a historical materialist is a materialist in the ordinary sense of accepting that we humans are just a species on a tiny planet in the vast universe and that we emerged on our earth as the result of a long and contingent evolutionary process, historical materialist rejects the very possibility that we can view ourselves objectively, as we really are, from some standpoint external to our social totality. As Georg Lukács put it, nature itself is always a social category. And there are good arguments for this. For example, just look at the shifts in the notion of nature in the last centuries. Carl Linnaeus, the first biologist, reproduced in his image of nature the hierarchic stable structure of absolute monarchy. Darwin himself, as you probably know, was influenced, he got the idea of struggle for survival from Malthus, from political economy. And today even biology is influenced by new information, digital techniques and so on and so on. But nonetheless, although this is true, it doesn't go the whole way. That is to say, this transcendental Absolute, Absolute in the sense that whatever phenomenon we are approaching, you can always say, but the ultimate meaning of this phenomenon is overdetermined by social totality of practice, doesn't fully square the circle. It has to ignore or denounce as naive every attempt to bring together the two standpoints: ontic view of reality, of the reality of nature part of which we are, and the transcendental dimension, social totality as the ultimate horizon of meaning. And the parallax split is here radical. On the one hand, everything that we experience as reality is, we can always argue, is transcendentally constituted. I don't mean in the sense of an abstract Kantian transcendental subject. I mean more in a Heideggerian way, that this is the big, even Habermas sticks to it repeatedly, transcendental hermeneutic argument against positive sciences. Yes, they may work wonderfully, explain everything, but in order for them to work, you already have to approach nature in a certain way, with certain implicit conceptual apparatus as a material causal network or whatever and so on and so on. So the hermeneutic horizon is always already here. So my big problem, and I'm obsessed with this in my last books, is precisely can we break out of this circle? On the one hand, what from the post-Kantian view appears as a naive realist vision of humanity, vision of the universe where we developed on a tiny planet, blah blah blah, and of course in some sense this works. You can even explain evolutionarily up to a point our cognitive abilities. And on the other hand, this transcendental reflexive circle, that whatever you do, whatever you try to explain, you already move in a certain horizon of, within a certain horizon of understanding. Or they are different, I know, but what Heidegger would have put it, a certain Lichtung, disclosure of being, what Michel Foucault would have called a certain episteme, or why not, what Western Marxists would have set, would have called the horizon of practice, of social practice in which even our most abstract experience of nature is rooted. Okay, it's my aim to break out of this circle. Now, the first specification I must give is how often we find this transcendental circle also with, without Kantian subject. That's the most interesting thing in the 20th century philosophy. Everybody criticizes the Cartesian Kantian subject as abstract and so on and so on. But I think, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss was quite consequent when he described his structural anthropology as transcendentalism without subject. Where do we have the transcendental dimension? In the fact that Claude Lévi-Strauss strictly prohibits genetic question. He says symbolic structure is now here and then it's all of a sudden it's all of a sudden here. And you cannot break out of this, you cannot break out of this circle. So the ultimate case of a symbolic event, when it emerges, such an event, it in a way creates its own past. Here I want to make another improvisation, take a provocative remark, maybe you know this example but I like to repeat it. You know the big Meillassoux, Quentin Meillassoux, who wrote a book, very important book, After Finitude, against transcendental approach, mentions this example of fossils. Fossils like, again, he makes the realist argument, like that you can be transcendental and but however you play it, you cannot account for this naive realism within the transcendental horizon, which tells you but in some sense fossils had to exist before humanity existed. The transcendentalists always have to add something like, yes, but this nature itself is already socially constructed in a certain way and so on and so on. I agree, that's my point, that the transcendentalists do have a problem here. But wouldn't you agree that at the same time I like tremendously this idea of fossils because the theory is crazy, I hope you know it. A friend of Darwin, a theologian, who clearly saw Darwin's value, scientific, but was nonetheless a devout Christian, had a problem here. On the one hand, Darwinism is obviously true. On the other hand, Bible is the word of God, it cannot be wrong. And if you read the Bible literally, our world was created and something years ago. So how to account for fossils? You know the answer? I love it, my favorite. It's that God, of course God cannot be wrong, He created the world years ago, but to give us a kind of a false opening, God directly created fossils. In the same sense that on a stage you create a false background to give a false opening. Now, don't think that I'm totally crazy, I don't believe, I don't accept this, but I think it's a very good theory of ideology. This is for me the truth of this transcendental circle. Doesn't every ideology precisely retroactively create the past itself? I like to quote here that wonderful passage, I always like intelligent conservatives, from T.S. Eliot in his Tradition and the Individual Talent, where he says that every really new work of art is not simply something new, it changes, restructures the entire past. So where do we find this problem in history of philosophy? And here, Graham, I want to ask you, I announce you now in the evening if we meet in a cafeteria, how do you now stand towards Heidegger? Because for me, I cannot bring together Heidegger, and I'm on your side here with your ontology, whatever you call it, because for me, no no no, no irony, sorry, I will be evil when I will be explicitly evil, no evil meant here. I'm just saying that Heidegger is for me absolutely transcendental. There is no Sein, Ereignis without Dasein. And Heidegger from his youth up to his last dialogue, I think with Eugen Fink apropos Heraclitus, he says, how are with things reality outside human existence? I totally neglected this question, I don't, I was never in it, and so on. Even with his most famous dealing of this problem in his seminar, what is fundamental concepts of metaphysics or what, seminar of I think. You know when Heidegger uses that wonderful, ridiculous but wonderful example of we humans as in-der-Welt, in a world, objects, stones as weltlos, without world, and animals, I think he takes a problem of lizard, and it's always extremely interesting for me which animals philosophers choose, you know, it's never neutral. And he said it's weltarm. Now Heidegger himself oscillates here and there because you know the big question, of course it's elementary philosophical, is this one. If you say that an animal is weltarm, is this a retroactive human determination or is this weltarm dimension is missing, not fully deployed? Is this somehow inscribed into the identity of the animal experience, whatever this means, itself? So that the animal is already in itself thwarted and so on. You know who follows here Heidegger? Frankfurt School people don't like to hear this, Walter Benjamin, who also says that in a way, it's a very the idea which has a long tradition from Schelling to Heidegger, that human language is not just something which changes human existence, but that there is a mute pain in nature itself and that human language gives a word to a pain of animal existence which it wasn't able for the animals to articulate, to express. I don't think we can simply dismiss this as anthropocentrism or whatever. It's very, it's very ambiguous. So let me go on. There is a wonderful book to explain to you this circular structure of a Russian friend of mine, Alexei Yurchak, about the last Soviet generation. Everything was forever, that's the title of the book, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More. That's how symbolic totality functions. It's not here, then all of a sudden it's here, and the entire past appears in a new way. Now it's easy to insist on this as an unsurpassable horizon. And again, let me give you another example, like Michel Foucault. For him what he calls episteme, the precisely thick web of the horizon of understanding, is the, is again to use this beautiful German word, unhintergehbar. Like, for example, if you were to ask Foucault, do we have an eternal soul or not? His answer would have been that this very question can only appear within a certain modern episteme, and then you cannot move behind it. I agree that we have to try to move behind it. Now, it would be also interesting to note that even the one who is the great opponent of subjectivity, who dismisses almost to the end subjectivity as ideological illusion, Louis Althusser, also remains transcendental, I think. Because in him this idea of overdetermined totality plays exactly this role of transcendental horizon. He, you know how you can identify these transcendentalists, structural transcendentalists? They prohibit genesis. They claim the totality must already be here before you inquire into its genesis. And incidentally, it's interesting to note how Marx says the same, where he says, you know, that's the meaning of that Marx's famous phrase, the anatomy of human being is the key to the anatomy of the ape. In order to develop how humans emerged out of apes, you already have to have the concept. Now I want to do a part which will be I hope more shocking, surprising a little bit for you. What interests me so much in Western Marxism is not just this opposition, because again, this opposition between realism and transcendental position is basically the opposition between Soviet-style dialectical materialism which is naively realist and Western Marxism which is in this formal sense transcendental. There is a particular level of subjective engagement, experience, practice which, although it's ontically just part of reality, overdetermines our entire approach to reality. What I admire is those Marxists who tried to break out of this closed circle. And I know, I will just mention two figures. One already with Walter Benjamin, as I hinted, it's ambiguous. He tries to move out beyond historical experience to let's call it cosmology. To understand again human language, you have to understand its role into how it changes, it gives a voice to a deadlock of animal experience. Then of course it's Ernst Bloch, who also moved to cosmological perspective. For him, utopia, the spirit of utopia, hope, does not, he is very clear here, does not concern only human social existence. In a way, the entire development of nature which precedes humanity is already opened towards a utopian future. But, and here I will now dwell a little bit longer in all this, I will give you the example which I consider the ultimate example. It's madness. I will go a little bit more into it because I'm pretty sure that most of you don't know it. Do you know, no, Evald Ilyenkov? It's a, the only Soviet Marxist which deserves to be taken seriously, more or less. That's why he ended appropriately his life, in he killed himself, no. No, he was an impossible figure of a, of a sincere Marxist. But already when he was young, in his first manuscript, which of course it was written in I think it was never published, but it's dialectical materialism at its most crazy. It's a wonderful cosmological spiritual vision. So Ilyenkov formulated in this short book, published only in in Russia and now translated into English, he calls it Cosmology of the Spirit. He relies on the Soviet tradition of dialectical materialism and especially on Friedrich Engels' manuscript posthumously gathered under the title Dialectic of Nature. This is the bete noire for Western Marxists, the lowest you can go. So what does he do? He brings the dialectical materialist idea of the gradual progressive development of reality, from elementary forms of matter through different forms of life to human thought, he brings this to its logical Nietzschean conclusion. If reality is spatially and temporally without limits, then there is overall, with regard to its totality, no progress. Everything that could have happened always already happened. Although full of dynamics in its parts, the universe as a whole is a Spinozean stable substance. What this means is that, in contrast to Bloch, for Ilyenkov every development is circular. Every movement upwards has to be accompanied by a movement downwards. Every progress by a regress. Movement is the cyclical movement from the lowest form of matter to the highest form, the thinking brain, and back to their decomposition into the lowest forms of matter. Ilyenkov supplements this vision of the universe by two further hypotheses. First, the movement in cosmos is limited downwards and upwards. It takes place between the lowest level chaotic matter and the highest level thought. For reasons that I will not go into, Ilyenkov claims we cannot imagine anything lower or anything higher. And now comes this Marxist gnostic mysticism. For Ilyenkov, thought is not just a contingent local occurrence in the development of matter but a reality and, but it has reality and efficiency of its own. It is a necessary part, a culmination of the development of entire reality. And now comes Ilyenkov's most daring speculation. I quote Ilyenkov: "The cyclical development of the universe passes through a phase involving the complete destruction of matter, through a galaxy-scale fire." End of quote. This passage through the zero level which relaunches cosmic development does not happen by itself. It, quote again, "It needs a special intervention to rechannel the energy that was radiated during the cycle of matter's development into a new global fire." The question of what or who sets the universe on fire is crucial. And now I quote a reading of Ilyenkov: "According to Ilyenkov, it is the cosmological function of thought to provide the conditions to relaunch the universe which is collapsing due to thermal death. It is human intelligence which, having achieved the highest potency, has to launch the Big Bang. This is how thought proves in reality that it is a necessary attribute of matter." End of quote. Now to make this his speculative moment clearly, let me quote another passage from Ilyenkov. Quote: "In concrete terms, one can imagine it like this. At some peak point of their development, thinking beings, executing their cosmological duty and sacrificing themselves, produce a conscious cosmic catastrophe, a reverse thermal dying of cosmos matter, that is, they provoke a process leading to the rebirth of dying world by means of a cosmic cloud of incandescent gas and vapors. In simple terms, thought turns out to be a necessary mediating link, thanks only to which the fiery rejuvenation of universal matter becomes possible. It proves to be this direct efficient cause that leads to the instant activities of endless reserves of interconnected motion." So this is already madness. The whole universe develops, but since it's circular, at the top it has to return to total chaos. And this can happen, he is almost a poet of nuclear self-destruction, Ilyenkov, it's incredible. He claims that this is the highest role of human thought, its cosmic meaning, at the end to destroy everything to the zero level. And now, my God, I like this as an old Stalinist. You ain't heard anything yet, now comes the true madness. He claims that therein resides the cosmological necessity of communism. Because what is demanded for human, from human beings is at the end to radically destroy, explode themselves and the entire order for the benefit of the whole universe to renew itself. And he says a capitalist would never have done it, they are too egotist, only a communist can destroy everything risking itself for higher future. A short quote, I love it: "Millions of years will pass, thousands of generations will be born and go to their graves, a genuine human system will be established on earth with the condition for activity, a classless society, spiritual, material culture will abundantly blossom, with the aid of and on the basis of which humankind can only fulfill its great sacrificial duty before nature. For us, for people living at the dawn of human prosperity, the struggle for this future will remain the only real form of service to the highest aim of the thinking spirit." End of quote. So, the ultimate justification of communism is that by way of bringing about a solidary society free of egotist instincts, it will have enough ethical strength to perform the highest self-sacrifice of not only humanity's self-destruction, but of the simultaneous destruction of entire cosmos. Another quote: "If humanity is unable to achieve communism, then collective human intelligence will not achieve its highest state of power either, as it will be undermined by the capitalist system which is as far as one can get from any self-sacrificial motivation." End of quote. Now Ilyenkov was aware that what he is developing is, he calls it phantasmagoria or dream. And there were many I think cheaply metaphorical readings of this text, that it, that behind this bombastic end of a universe, Ilyenkov suspected simply the collapse of communism, Soviet communism, or even his own tragic fate, as I already told you, sorry it was not he killed himself in But I think that things are more complex here, that of course we shouldn't accept this dream, which is again the most beautiful theory of communism that I've heard. That its function is to not only as conservatives fear to destroy human society, civilization, no, to destroy the entire world order consciously. I think what we should ask is where is the mistake of this reasoning. I think that in it, I think his mistake is the same as the one of Marquis de Sade. Marquis de Sade, you know, has also a name for this total destruction. He calls it the second death. To put it very simply, de Sade has a very consistent ontology. His claim is: first he was a simple naturalist, the young Sade. He said if we humans want to be faithful to nature, we should imitate nature in all its aspects, not only generation, construction, positive, but also negative destruction. So torture, rape, killing, destruction is part of natural cycle, we should joyously assume it. But then Sade made a step further and claimed that in this sense we remain slaves of nature, and we should make a step further and imagine an absolute crime, a crime which is not simply inscribed into this circulation of nature as its part, but a crime which destroys radically natural cycle, nature itself. A break with natural causality. And this he calls the second death. And I've developed, I'm sorry if you know this line of thought, I developed this in some of my books, namely how I think Lacan has here a perfect answer: that what de Sade doesn't get is that this second, what he imagines as second death, always already happens even before the first death. This second death of nature is simply the explosion of subjectivity as another dimension in the order of being. And that what de Sade is doing, it's his mistake is where? I am condensing a line of thought which you can find more in detail in my book *Disparities*. It's that his mistake is at the very beginning when he presupposes that there is a full natural cycle of causality, positive order of nature. Here negativity is excluded, so no wonder that it returns in a brutal way as the total destruction of nature. But what if we accept that nature is from the very beginning inexistent? Nature doesn't exist as a balanced Big Other, an order of laws and so on and so on. Destruction is always already here, and I think that the same goes for Ilyenkov. What he project into nature is this necessity of total destruction and so on. He doesn't see that in some sense deeper it already happened. The moment the subject is here. Ah, now things will become more tricky. Yes, the moment the subject is here, what? According to transcendental reading, it's over with nature, another dimension of negativity emerges and so on and so on. But I don't want to follow this line. Because if we follow this line, we remain in this pseudo-Hegelian, because even Hegel sometimes falls into it, even Lacan most of the time, this opposition between homeostatic natural order and then with humanity another dimension negativity emerges and so on and so on. I think we should go a step further here. What if this type of negativity is already in nature itself? What if nature in itself is not natural, to put it simply? So, let me now and okay, this now I come to the concluding part, but things will get more complicated here. So, this is my problem. I'm not sure now my I'm addressing not you, but more your our, I hope I can say, I will be very gentle, not best friend. How is he called, my God, who did that, my God, what's his name, who did that, the who believes in democracy even among objects? Levi Bryant? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Levi Bryant, his idea is to think objects without subject. In some sense, I agree that is the task. Because I of course reject the constitutive role of transcendental subjectivity in the sense that nothing, nothing in some sense, either you say nothing existed before, but it's interesting how ambiguous here are transcendental philosophers and even Western Marxists. Like if you ask a humanist Lukács-style Marxist: okay, social practice is already here, but didn't we nonetheless humans emerge out of nature? They start to squeeze out. They say, yes, but we cannot say how everything every answer is already mediated by social, mediated by social practice or whatever. Even Habermas, when he insists how in all our explanations of nature what he calls discursive procedures, argumentation, ethics is already here. Then asked but can we account for it naturally or not? He squeezes out. His latest position is I'm an agnostic. I don't know. So my point is just this one: that now here comes, if you can answer to it maybe in the evening we can go on. My point would be this one: that a transcendental subject is not simply an object among other objects in the world which is then elevated in an illegitimate way into a central or all-powerful position, or somehow constituting entire the entire reality. Subject is a standpoint, the punctual support of a perspective onto reality from which we cannot abstract. As Kant makes it clear, the transcendental subject's constitutive power basically designates its faithful limitation, its inability to bypass transcendental frame and gain access to nominal reality. You know that's the other pessimist side of Kant. Kant is not simply a philosopher of all-powerful subjectivity. In a passage that I often quote from the very last pages of *Critique of Practical Reason*, Kant says: "Let's imagine that we would be able to overstep the limitation of our finitude and gain access to things in themselves. What would then have happened?" His answer is not, "we would be totally free," but "we would be marionetten, marionettes." Totally submit to subjective to objective causality. So where is here Kant's mistake? Incidentally, Kant's answer is here is here very close to the answer of of today's most of today's cognitive science, no? Who claim, the title of one of the books, that our freedom is a user's illusion. Objectively we can prove that everything happens at the neuronal level. Our freedom is just the way we necessarily perceive ourselves in a wrong way. Now how to get out of it? Here we may disagree, but my solution is this one: that the same as with Ilyenkov, as with de Sade, we have to abandon the very starting point, that there is out there nature as a fully ontologically constituted complete network of causality. If you conceive nature in this way, of course you then create a problem, but how is it with human freedom and so on and so on. The only choice is then to falsely spiritualize human freedom. But there is another spiritual principle. Now I will again repeat one story that in from my books then two jokes and then we are approaching the end. The story, I'm sorry if you know it, but it fits so perfectly here. So I will repeat it to you. In one introduction to philosophy, it's a very popular book written by a guy called Nicholas Fearn. He to explain the quantum vision of the universe, he uses a wonderful metaphor, I think, of video games. You know this so-called uncertainty principle or complementarity. The idea is that ah, Heisenberg was here wrong. Heisenberg Bohr was more up to the point. Heisenberg thought and there was a polemic between the two that uncertainty principle simply means we cannot measure at the same time velocity and position. Bohr was more radical, he said no, it's not that we cannot measure, it's ontological. A particle does not have this property. What does this mean? I will abstract from more the details. It means that in some sense reality itself, in itself, not just due to our cognitive limitations, is ontologically incomplete. And that's for me the big thing. And this guy Nicholas Fearn produces here a wonderful metaphor. He said he says, he writes: imagine a video game, and I am forced to imagine it because my son is playing them all the time. You know, if you are in a video game and it takes place on a field, a battle goes on there, in the background you have a forest, but the programmer didn't use time to program every tree because it's not part of the game that you can enter the forest. So why should he lose time programming every tree? Or it's the same with a house. If it's not part of the game, let's say a battle on a street, the interior of the house is not programmed. So you get the joke. The joke is that God did the same. God thought, "Oh, humans are too stupid to penetrate beneath atom." And we as it were caught God with his pants down, you know? God thought, "Oh, why should I bother programming microparticles? That's the limit." But no, we were a little bit too bright for God, you know? So, but now comes, I will not go into it, I'm trying to do this in my last books, the problem is this one: do we need God for this? Because our spontaneous notion of the universe is that things have to fully exist somehow. The limitations ontological can only be our human limitations. Like if something appears incomplete ontologically, it means we don't know it. No, I think that we can think this incompleteness without God. In my craziest speculation, and here maybe you will counter-attack, I even think that maybe in a more subtle way, God is in a sense one of the names for the ontological incompleteness of reality. But that's another point. What I want to say is that now come my my God I love them, this is two to in so far as God the traditional God is the name for ontoperfect being, ontological completeness and so on. I think the best in our Judeo-Christian tradition is composed precisely of the hints of incompleteness of God. And then I will quote you a joke which is it's very strange for me but no dirty things, no vulgar, very refined theological joke told to me by my Jewish friend from Israel. A joke about Auschwitz. No no, it's not a racist neo-Nazi joke, it's a beautiful Jewish joke. All you have to know to understand this joke is that in modern theology one of the solutions to the problem of how God could have allowed Auschwitz, such horrible things to happen, is that God was not there. God somehow it was beyond God as this is even I think am I wrong the title of one of the books by God died at Auschwitz, so God was not there. Okay, the joke is this one, but it's a sad joke of course but respectably see. In Paradise a couple of guys killed in Auschwitz, but they're in Paradise now, walk around sit on a bench on a wonderful field near a meadow and tell each other jokes funny stories about how they died, you know. And one said, "Do you remember, Simon, that when they were dragging you towards the gas chambers you slipped on some soap there and you broke your skull before even you reached gas?" And they: "Ha ha ha, good joke." Now comes the beauty. Then God comes by taking a rest also from his work and listens to these jokes and says, "Guys, I don't get it, how can you laugh of it? I don't get it." And now comes this is and people claim that I am antisemitic, this is Jewish sublimity for then one of the Jews goes to God, puts his arms around his put his hand around his arm and says, "Listen, don't be sad. You were not there of course, you cannot understand our joke," and so on, you know. That's that's how, you know, this incompleteness even of and this is I think what I'm trying to do again, you see, is not rehabilitate some transcendental subject in the sense of creating everything. My question is even a much more naive one: how reality has to be structured in itself for something like for a for something like subjectivity to be able. Can somebody tell me so that I don't speak too much? No, you you spoke now about minutes. Ah, so I still have as they say some concluding remarks. Okay, no, you know where we the big problem for me today from my standpoint is how, you know, I'm sick and tired of this idea that you find the worst example is Sartre, *L'Être et le Néant*, subject radical negativity confronted to this inert full order of being. How should we think, not by humanizing nature, some kind of antagonism, gap, incompleteness, negativity already in already in nature itself? First, back to subject. Subject for me is precisely something, I will simplify it very much, something whose very existence is incomplete, but not in the simple Sartrean sense. Let me to make this point clear, let me tell you another joke, I hope also respectful. It's a wonderful, and I will use it to criticize the notion that simply the empty void of subjectivity is it. No, I don't share here Alain Badiou's point. I think there is no subject without object because Badiou has this idea of objectless subject. Object is material inertia. I think that every subjectivity is grounded in an object, especially empty subjectivity. Let me give you this joke with my usual stab at political correctness precisely, again, how to think subject but in a realist way, not just transcendental subjectivity. Maybe you know this joke, it circulates around, it's another Jewish story, even Derrida repeats it and others. It's some and no, they do it on Sabbath. Jewish believers gathered, Jewish believers gathered there in a in a in a synagogue and first a rich rabbi, powerful, stands up and says, "Oh my God, I am nothing, I am a nobody, not worthy of your attention." Then a rich merchant stands up and said, "Oh God, I am also nobody, worthless nothing." Then a poor ordinary Jew stands up and said, "Oh God, I am also worthless nothing." And then the rich rabbi kicks the rich merchant: "Who does this guy think this no that he can simply also say that he is nothing, you know." And he was right. That's the trick, proclaiming yourself nothing may appear a modest gesture but as a rule the position of enunciation from which it is spoken it's an extremely it's an extremely arrogant privileged one. And I will give you an example, I hope you will appreciate me appreciate it, not me, f*ck me, appreciate the example, which really, I was so shocked, really happened to me two years ago around at a debate in the United States. I was by mistake, now I boycott them, part of some politically correct b*llshit where the predominant tone was wealthy, white, privileged male liberals engaging in a game of humiliating themselves, self-whipping. "Oh, we are guilty for everything. If there is a war in Africa, it must be an effect of neocolonialism, whatever. We are nothing, Europe ruined the whole world," and so on and so on. And then a black guy, a good friend of mine, very intelligent, called Jeremiah Gley, intervened and said, "Wait a minute, we blacks are not so innocent. We also, you know, had our own history of destruction." And you should have seen the exchange of glances among these wild liberals, like, "Who is this guy that he thinks that he is also guilty for everything and nothing," you know. Like, because but my black friend was so he told me, "You see, this is the secret arrogance of this apparent white self-humiliation. Yes, I'm nobody, but this nobody is a mask for universality." My, for example, my old story, I'm sorry if you know it, I was in Missoula, Montana years ago and I was shocked how there was a round table between some Native Americans, they hate this term Indians, and white liberals, and one of them used for themselves the term Indian. And white liberal immediately interrupted him: "No, you shouldn't use this term, this is humiliating for you, blah blah blah." And my Indian friend exploded. He said, "Sorry, but who are you now? You will even tell us how to call our," you know, this is why I distrust this apparent humiliation of apparent self-humiliation of white anti-racists. Be careful what arrogant position of universality is is hidden in this. So again, this is why, incidentally, white liberals like the the black or other races to assume their particular identity. But, you know, at a distance. If Native Americans return to their ritual tribes: "Excellent, excellent." Blacks: "Okay." Chinese: "Yeah, still." With Italians problems begin. If we West Europeans do it, we are Fascists, no? And I think that this is not true modesty. This is precisely secret arrogance. You may you should become stuck to your shitty particular identity, we are universal. We are universal. So, how should we rethink this universality to make it acceptable? Here, again, to clarify the status of the subject. Here, here I would like to to finish with another story, to maybe some of you know it, I'm sorry, no, it's not even a story, another critical point, although at some level I appreciate them, about LGBT+. Or now it's LGBTQ+. No, no irony here. What I want to say is this: that how, how are we to understand this LGBTQ+? There is one way to understand it, which is the nominalist, empiricist one. The idea is that the official binary sexuality doesn't allow a space for other directions, transgender, whatever. So we should open up the space for sexual or gender, it's always gender, not sex. That's another theory, we don't have time to go into it now. I think what is missing in gender theory is simply sexuality, if you ask me. But it's another, so they say I can be bigender, trigender, asexual, butch, whatever you want. But they as empiricists, they worry, no? They say, "But wait a minute, what if there is some identity that we left out?" So let's leave it plus, in the sense, and all the others. But we should be here good Hegelians and say, what if we can be directly a plus? What if plus in the sense of self-questioning as such can be a form of identity which is the only authentic universal identity? Precisely in the sense of I don't know what for an object I am, but I know that I am, I am not without object. And this I think is, I'm now proceeding very fast, this is why for Lacan subjectivity is as such feminine, hysterical. Lacan is here a good Freudian. Beware of praising perversion. Perversion always perfectly fits discourse of power, it's the hidden, so well, the hysterical subject, my God I will use now this very low everyday level what men held against women: what is if you are in love with a woman the eternal feminine question, "Tell me why do you love me?" And it is a very annoying question because it's impossible to answer. The moment you answer it, you are no longer in love. Or to put it in a different way, reasons that you enumerate, whatever because of your smile, your eyes, whatever, appear as reasons only if you already are in love. The same circle. So what I'm saying here is something very precise: it's that what makes us sexual be is that this plus is something which is constitutive of subjectivity as such. Subjectivity, I am subject only in so far as I cannot identify myself as an object. But this impossibility to identify myself as an object is not is not doesn't mean that I belong to some higher dimension or whatever, but it's in a way the deadlock itself, which then gets materialized in our human symbolic practices and so on and so on. This is also why for Jacques Lacan the object cause of desire, object a, is precisely an object which materializes this plus itself. As Lacan put it, object a is precisely: whenever I grab an object, I always sooner or later experience, but this is not what I really want. And the object a is precisely that surplus missing from every object. So what I am to now nonetheless although there are of course many other things to say but I would like to conclude just to make this central point clear. I agree that we should move beyond transcendental circle, but I think the only consistent way to do it is not to, here we may disagree, is not to, and here comes the title, I'm sorry, to break out of this parallax, either naive realism or transcendental circle, but the problem is how to really move out of the transcendental circle. And I think that what we have to think is a certain, maybe Heidegger was sometimes on the way of it when he speaks about ontological difference as Unterschied in the more basic sense of a gap. But I think we should go maybe a step further from Heidegger and think this gap not directly as the opening of being but, it's pretty complex, that's why I prefer now to squeeze out to finish, as some kind of a crack in the texture of reality which is not simply equal to humanity. Again, for me the problem is how reality itself has to be structured to allow for this Big Bang which is human subjectivity. So again, we should move definitely beyond Kant. It's not that there is crack, antinomies just because we are finite subjects, but if we were to gain access to the things in themselves we would have think the complete world order. In itself there is no complete world order. In itself. And I'm not saying that the subject is already in nature. I'm just saying that again, that we have to conceive as the ultimate reality this kind of a cracked inconsistent call it structure, call it imbalance, or whatever. And I don't have time to go into it now, but I would have said that here I even disagree with those big poets or religious figures, for example, I was just re-reading Beckett and I found, I'm a cheap guy, I put into Google "Beckett important quotes sayings to bluff," and one is always appearing there, a quote which says something like, "every word, speech, is just a stain on silence" and so on, as silence is what we are aiming at. No, what Beckett doesn't see is that this silence is constituted only by the failure of speech. There is no silence proper without speech. The silence is opened by the failure of speech. So you see, this is what I'm trying to think as the Lacanian real and so on and so on. My point is that, and in this sense to conclude since we are here mit Jesuiten, no, where I see I always make this example to really conclude I will just mention it the my eternal motive that I return to in Christianity, no? This is for me the ultimate lesson of Christianity. You know, in other religions you have God, and then we pray to God, we try to rejoin God. In Christianity, I'm sorry, something totally different happens. God rejoins us. That is to say, in other religions let's say you feel yourself abandoned by God, and then through some stupid mystical practices, ascesis, "Yeah, I can rejoin God." The message of Christianity is: no, accept your being abandoned by God and then identify with Jesus on the cross. How? Jesus on the cross is the point where God himself is abandoned by God. Where you see the the operation: your being abandoned by God is the very feature which unites you with God. Which is why the way to step out of this abandonment is not, "Oh, God will come back and He will and He will help us." No, it's to see to just to shift the perspective and say, "But being abandoned by God, is this not another name for human freedom?" That's why in Christianity only you have Heiliger Geist, Holy Spirit, which is the only thing in which for me it's meaningful to talk about Christ resurrected. And Holy Spirit, there is no second coming in the sense of, "Oh, Christ will come at some point." No, I think Christ is already here where when you have a Heiliger Geist, precisely it already happens here, the reconciliation. So you see my point, in the same ses sense as in Christianity, what the very form of appeara the very form of the very gap that appears to separate you from God, the solution is to locate this gap into God himself. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani means for a moment God is abandoned by by himself. Because this is a big theological problem. I had some debates, I don't know how you would answer, where I asked my theological friends, even here in Munich years ago at a debate, a very simple question. When Christ cries there and says, "God, Father, why have you abandoned me?" is he bluffing or not? If he is bluffing, then and this was a very important gnostic interpretation, that it's in a way consequent, that crucifixion is just a spectacle to impress human beings, but the real spirit of Christ is up there with his Father just laughing at us men. So no. But if it's meant seriously, then for a moment there was a radical split in God himself. Or as Chesterton, my favorite theologian, put it, for a moment God himself became an atheist. And this is this is for me again the insight and this is what we should do also in ontology: to see the problem, gap, antagonism, not to resolve it, but to see it as belonging to the thing itself. Nature itself is incomplete, that we should abandon all this metaphoric of, you know, we humans are, from Hegel to Kierkegaard you find it, we humans are are animals sick to death and so on. No, animals are already sick to death. Do we really need proofs of this? Look at look at oil and coal. Can we even imagine what kind of
Okay, we go on, and I hope I will not surprise you by sticking to my title, and I will do something not expected these days. Although I have some polemics with object-oriented ontologists, on one point I agree with them nonetheless. The era of this, how should I put it, endlessly reflexive transcendental self-questioning, that like direct ontological questions are prohibited, that was the era of the 70s, 80s, and so on. You know, like let me give you a simple example: if you were to ask somebody like Michel Foucault, what is this, is this a glass of water? His answer would have been, all I can tell you is to give you the episteme, the discursive structure within which this appears as a glass of water. Like you are not allowed, and this is why this was a catastrophe for philosophy, this repressed of philosophy, the great ontological questions, I mean it in a very naive sense, then returned in natural and biological sciences. As they say today, if you want to learn is the universe finite or infinite, you ask quantum cosmology. If you want to learn do we have a free will, you ask cognitive psychology or brain science, no? I, so I will begin, I hope I will shock you here with a very naive beginning. I want to begin by raising the traditional theologico-philosophical question. Is there, for us humans, caught and embedded in a contingent historical reality, is there any possible contact with the Absolute? Whatever we mean by this term, and mostly we mean a point somehow exempted from the permanent flux of reality. There are many traditional answers to this question. The first classic one was formulated in the Upanishads as the unity of Brahman, the supreme and sole ultimate reality, and Atman, the soul within each human being. When our soul purifies itself of all accidental non-spiritual content, it experiences its identity with the absolute foundation of all reality. And this experience is usually described in terms of ecstatic spiritual unity. Spinoza's intellectual love of God aims at something similar, maybe, in spite of all the differences between his universe and that of ancient pagan thought. Now, at the opposite end of this notion of the Absolute as the ultimate substantial reality, we have, and it's already much more interesting for me, the Absolute as pure appearance. That is to say, what is the Absolute from this standpoint? Something that appears to us in fleeting experiences. Say, I'm sorry for the male chauvinist twist spin of this example, through a gentle smile of a beautiful woman or even through a warm caring smile of a person who otherwise may seem ugly and rude. In such miraculous, extremely fragile moments, another dimension transpires through our reality. As such, the Absolute is easily corroded. It all too easily slips through our fingers, and it must be treated as carefully as a butterfly. And I think even Plato is here very ambiguous. His notion of idea is not some substantial another real reality. Ideas are on the surface, absolutely. Then, a next version of the Absolute, popular among some materialists from Sade, Marquis de Sade, to Bataille, is the ecstatic outburst of destructive negativity. The idea is this one: since reality is a constant flow of generation and corruption of particular forms, the only contact with the Absolute is to ecstatically identify with the unconditional destructive force itself. And a similar case can be made for sexuality. Far from providing the natural foundation of human lives, sexuality is the very terrain where humans detach themselves from nature. The idea of sexual perversion or of a deadly sexual passion is totally foreign to the animal universe. This infinite passion, neither nature nor culture, is our contact with the Absolute. And since it is impossible, self-destructive to dwell in it, we escape into historicized symbolization and so on and so on. Just so the idea, I think it's interesting, although I don't agree with it metaphysically, is that we don't have simply nature and culture. Yes, culture tries to tame, gentrify, civilize some excess, but this excess is not nature. This excess is precisely a radical disruption of nature. Think about, since we are here where there was a premiere here in Munich, no, of Wagner's Tristan. You know, it was such an effort that who was it, Ludwig von Schnorr Carolsfeld, the tenor, died immediately after singing Tristan. You have this realm of night. This night is not natural night. It's obviously some deadly passion which is already in itself unnatural. Then there is yet another version of the Absolute, which arises with transcendental reflection. It is no longer the Absolute in itself, but the Absolute of the, sorry for this confused expression, of the unsurpassable, you Germans have a wonderful word, unhintergehbar, you cannot go behind, self-relating, Selbstbeziehung, of the totality of meaning. Let me take two cases. For a consequent historical materialist, social totality of practice is the ultimate horizon of our understanding, which overdetermines the meaning of every phenomenon, no matter how natural it is. Even when quantum cosmology inquires into the play of particles and waves at the origin of our universe, this scientific activity emerges as part of social totality, which kind of grounds its ultimate meaning. This totality is the concrete Absolute of the situation. Or let me take a different example, which will show you this transcendental dimension in a better light: antisemitismus. Antisemitism is not false because it presents actual Jews in a wrong light. At this level, we can always argue that it is partially true. Don't be afraid, I'm absolutely not, I don't have any tolerance for antisemitism. I'm saying something very precise. Let's say I debate with an antisemite. The moment I accept these terms of the debate, "Okay, let's look at the real Jews, are they like that or not," I've sold my soul to the devil. Let's say I debate with somebody in mid-30s in Germany and he says, "Okay, let's look at the fact." He will say, "Germans are, Jews are seducing German girls." What can I say? Probably they do and it's a good thing they do, also the other, he says, "many Jews, Jews exploit Germans." Well, some of the Jews were rich and in a formal sense, they were exploiting the Germans. He says, "Jews have too much influence in literary criticism, in art." Well, there is something for it in statistics. So should we say, "No, both sides exaggerate, truth is somewhere in the middle"? No. We should say that the whole question is wrong. Okay, we should also debate facts, but antisemitism is wrong a priori formally. The question is not is what they are saying about the Jews true or not. The question is why does the Nazi universe need the figure of the Jew to maintain its identity? I'm here repeating, most of you know it, my old joke taken from Lacan when he says, it's a very simple nice insight, that if we have a pathological husband who is jealous pathologically of his wife's infidelity, suspects her to sleep with other men. And Lacan makes a simple nice point: even if all his suspicions are true, wife is all the time sleeping around with other men, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological. Because you know what makes it pathological is not the fact, it's not that it's not true, but it's what role, constitutive role does jealousy play in his, whatever you call it, psychic identity and so on and so on. So you see, we have here, let's say, a version of the Absolute, this transcendental, in the sense that whatever the facts, and we can play these games, yes, Jews did have too much influence in journalism, whatever, in banking, doesn't ultimately, it doesn't matter. Antisemitism is absolutely formally wrong. Again, not because how you compare it with the facts, but with regard to its, I don't know how should I call it, immanent symbolic economy. It's structured to cover up a lie. And as we know today with the rise of new populism, the most dangerous lies are lies, lies sorry, lies in the guise of truth, where all that you say factually is true but it's part of a semantic field which is in itself a lie. So to make clear what I want to say, I will go back to my first case. Although a historical materialist is a materialist in the ordinary sense of accepting that we humans are just a species on a tiny planet in the vast universe and that we emerged on our earth as the result of a long and contingent evolutionary process, historical materialist rejects the very possibility that we can view ourselves objectively, as we really are, from some standpoint external to our social totality. As Georg Lukács put it, nature itself is always a social category. And there are good arguments for this. For example, just look at the shifts in the notion of nature in the last centuries. Carl Linnaeus, the first biologist, reproduced in his image of nature the hierarchic stable structure of absolute monarchy. Darwin himself, as you probably know, was influenced, he got the idea of struggle for survival from Malthus, from political economy. And today even biology is influenced by new information, digital techniques and so on and so on. But nonetheless, although this is true, it doesn't go the whole way. That is to say, this transcendental Absolute, Absolute in the sense that whatever phenomenon we are approaching, you can always say, but the ultimate meaning of this phenomenon is overdetermined by social totality of practice, doesn't fully square the circle. It has to ignore or denounce as naive every attempt to bring together the two standpoints: ontic view of reality, of the reality of nature part of which we are, and the transcendental dimension, social totality as the ultimate horizon of meaning. And the parallax split is here radical. On the one hand, everything that we experience as reality is, we can always argue, is transcendentally constituted. I don't mean in the sense of an abstract Kantian transcendental subject. I mean more in a Heideggerian way, that this is the big, even Habermas sticks to it repeatedly, transcendental hermeneutic argument against positive sciences. Yes, they may work wonderfully, explain everything, but in order for them to work, you already have to approach nature in a certain way, with certain implicit conceptual apparatus as a material causal network or whatever and so on and so on. So the hermeneutic horizon is always already here. So my big problem, and I'm obsessed with this in my last books, is precisely can we break out of this circle? On the one hand, what from the post-Kantian view appears as a naive realist vision of humanity, vision of the universe where we developed on a tiny planet, blah blah blah, and of course in some sense this works. You can even explain evolutionarily up to a point our cognitive abilities. And on the other hand, this transcendental reflexive circle, that whatever you do, whatever you try to explain, you already move in a certain horizon of, within a certain horizon of understanding. Or they are different, I know, but what Heidegger would have put it, a certain Lichtung, disclosure of being, what Michel Foucault would have called a certain episteme, or why not, what Western Marxists would have set, would have called the horizon of practice, of social practice in which even our most abstract experience of nature is rooted. Okay, it's my aim to break out of this circle. Now, the first specification I must give is how often we find this transcendental circle also with, without Kantian subject. That's the most interesting thing in the 20th century philosophy. Everybody criticizes the Cartesian Kantian subject as abstract and so on and so on. But I think, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss was quite consequent when he described his structural anthropology as transcendentalism without subject. Where do we have the transcendental dimension? In the fact that Claude Lévi-Strauss strictly prohibits genetic question. He says symbolic structure is now here and then it's all of a sudden it's all of a sudden here. And you cannot break out of this, you cannot break out of this circle. So the ultimate case of a symbolic event, when it emerges, such an event, it in a way creates its own past. Here I want to make another improvisation, take a provocative remark, maybe you know this example but I like to repeat it. You know the big Meillassoux, Quentin Meillassoux, who wrote a book, very important book, After Finitude, against transcendental approach, mentions this example of fossils. Fossils like, again, he makes the realist argument, like that you can be transcendental and but however you play it, you cannot account for this naive realism within the transcendental horizon, which tells you but in some sense fossils had to exist before humanity existed. The transcendentalists always have to add something like, yes, but this nature itself is already socially constructed in a certain way and so on and so on. I agree, that's my point, that the transcendentalists do have a problem here. But wouldn't you agree that at the same time I like tremendously this idea of fossils because the theory is crazy, I hope you know it. A friend of Darwin, a theologian, who clearly saw Darwin's value, scientific, but was nonetheless a devout Christian, had a problem here. On the one hand, Darwinism is obviously true. On the other hand, Bible is the word of God, it cannot be wrong. And if you read the Bible literally, our world was created and something years ago. So how to account for fossils? You know the answer? I love it, my favorite. It's that God, of course God cannot be wrong, He created the world years ago, but to give us a kind of a false opening, God directly created fossils. In the same sense that on a stage you create a false background to give a false opening. Now, don't think that I'm totally crazy, I don't believe, I don't accept this, but I think it's a very good theory of ideology. This is for me the truth of this transcendental circle. Doesn't every ideology precisely retroactively create the past itself? I like to quote here that wonderful passage, I always like intelligent conservatives, from T.S. Eliot in his Tradition and the Individual Talent, where he says that every really new work of art is not simply something new, it changes, restructures the entire past. So where do we find this problem in history of philosophy? And here, Graham, I want to ask you, I announce you now in the evening if we meet in a cafeteria, how do you now stand towards Heidegger? Because for me, I cannot bring together Heidegger, and I'm on your side here with your ontology, whatever you call it, because for me, no no no, no irony, sorry, I will be evil when I will be explicitly evil, no evil meant here. I'm just saying that Heidegger is for me absolutely transcendental. There is no Sein, Ereignis without Dasein. And Heidegger from his youth up to his last dialogue, I think with Eugen Fink apropos Heraclitus, he says, how are with things reality outside human existence? I totally neglected this question, I don't, I was never in it, and so on. Even with his most famous dealing of this problem in his seminar, what is fundamental concepts of metaphysics or what, seminar of I think. You know when Heidegger uses that wonderful, ridiculous but wonderful example of we humans as in-der-Welt, in a world, objects, stones as weltlos, without world, and animals, I think he takes a problem of lizard, and it's always extremely interesting for me which animals philosophers choose, you know, it's never neutral. And he said it's weltarm. Now Heidegger himself oscillates here and there because you know the big question, of course it's elementary philosophical, is this one. If you say that an animal is weltarm, is this a retroactive human determination or is this weltarm dimension is missing, not fully deployed? Is this somehow inscribed into the identity of the animal experience, whatever this means, itself? So that the animal is already in itself thwarted and so on. You know who follows here Heidegger? Frankfurt School people don't like to hear this, Walter Benjamin, who also says that in a way, it's a very the idea which has a long tradition from Schelling to Heidegger, that human language is not just something which changes human existence, but that there is a mute pain in nature itself and that human language gives a word to a pain of animal existence which it wasn't able for the animals to articulate, to express. I don't think we can simply dismiss this as anthropocentrism or whatever. It's very, it's very ambiguous. So let me go on. There is a wonderful book to explain to you this circular structure of a Russian friend of mine, Alexei Yurchak, about the last Soviet generation. Everything was forever, that's the title of the book, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More. That's how symbolic totality functions. It's not here, then all of a sudden it's here, and the entire past appears in a new way. Now it's easy to insist on this as an unsurpassable horizon. And again, let me give you another example, like Michel Foucault. For him what he calls episteme, the precisely thick web of the horizon of understanding, is the, is again to use this beautiful German word, unhintergehbar. Like, for example, if you were to ask Foucault, do we have an eternal soul or not? His answer would have been that this very question can only appear within a certain modern episteme, and then you cannot move behind it. I agree that we have to try to move behind it. Now, it would be also interesting to note that even the one who is the great opponent of subjectivity, who dismisses almost to the end subjectivity as ideological illusion, Louis Althusser, also remains transcendental, I think. Because in him this idea of overdetermined totality plays exactly this role of transcendental horizon. He, you know how you can identify these transcendentalists, structural transcendentalists? They prohibit genesis. They claim the totality must already be here before you inquire into its genesis. And incidentally, it's interesting to note how Marx says the same, where he says, you know, that's the meaning of that Marx's famous phrase, the anatomy of human being is the key to the anatomy of the ape. In order to develop how humans emerged out of apes, you already have to have the concept. Now I want to do a part which will be I hope more shocking, surprising a little bit for you. What interests me so much in Western Marxism is not just this opposition, because again, this opposition between realism and transcendental position is basically the opposition between Soviet-style dialectical materialism which is naively realist and Western Marxism which is in this formal sense transcendental. There is a particular level of subjective engagement, experience, practice which, although it's ontically just part of reality, overdetermines our entire approach to reality. What I admire is those Marxists who tried to break out of this closed circle. And I know, I will just mention two figures. One already with Walter Benjamin, as I hinted, it's ambiguous. He tries to move out beyond historical experience to let's call it cosmology. To understand again human language, you have to understand its role into how it changes, it gives a voice to a deadlock of animal experience. Then of course it's Ernst Bloch, who also moved to cosmological perspective. For him, utopia, the spirit of utopia, hope, does not, he is very clear here, does not concern only human social existence. In a way, the entire development of nature which precedes humanity is already opened towards a utopian future. But, and here I will now dwell a little bit longer in all this, I will give you the example which I consider the ultimate example. It's madness. I will go a little bit more into it because I'm pretty sure that most of you don't know it. Do you know, no, Evald Ilyenkov? It's a, the only Soviet Marxist which deserves to be taken seriously, more or less. That's why he ended appropriately his life, in he killed himself, no. No, he was an impossible figure of a, of a sincere Marxist. But already when he was young, in his first manuscript, which of course it was written in I think it was never published, but it's dialectical materialism at its most crazy. It's a wonderful cosmological spiritual vision. So Ilyenkov formulated in this short book, published only in in Russia and now translated into English, he calls it Cosmology of the Spirit. He relies on the Soviet tradition of dialectical materialism and especially on Friedrich Engels' manuscript posthumously gathered under the title Dialectic of Nature. This is the bete noire for Western Marxists, the lowest you can go. So what does he do? He brings the dialectical materialist idea of the gradual progressive development of reality, from elementary forms of matter through different forms of life to human thought, he brings this to its logical Nietzschean conclusion. If reality is spatially and temporally without limits, then there is overall, with regard to its totality, no progress. Everything that could have happened always already happened. Although full of dynamics in its parts, the universe as a whole is a Spinozean stable substance. What this means is that, in contrast to Bloch, for Ilyenkov every development is circular. Every movement upwards has to be accompanied by a movement downwards. Every progress by a regress. Movement is the cyclical movement from the lowest form of matter to the highest form, the thinking brain, and back to their decomposition into the lowest forms of matter. Ilyenkov supplements this vision of the universe by two further hypotheses. First, the movement in cosmos is limited downwards and upwards. It takes place between the lowest level chaotic matter and the highest level thought. For reasons that I will not go into, Ilyenkov claims we cannot imagine anything lower or anything higher. And now comes this Marxist gnostic mysticism. For Ilyenkov, thought is not just a contingent local occurrence in the development of matter but a reality and, but it has reality and efficiency of its own. It is a necessary part, a culmination of the development of entire reality. And now comes Ilyenkov's most daring speculation. I quote Ilyenkov: "The cyclical development of the universe passes through a phase involving the complete destruction of matter, through a galaxy-scale fire." End of quote. This passage through the zero level which relaunches cosmic development does not happen by itself. It, quote again, "It needs a special intervention to rechannel the energy that was radiated during the cycle of matter's development into a new global fire." The question of what or who sets the universe on fire is crucial. And now I quote a reading of Ilyenkov: "According to Ilyenkov, it is the cosmological function of thought to provide the conditions to relaunch the universe which is collapsing due to thermal death. It is human intelligence which, having achieved the highest potency, has to launch the Big Bang. This is how thought proves in reality that it is a necessary attribute of matter." End of quote. Now to make this his speculative moment clearly, let me quote another passage from Ilyenkov. Quote: "In concrete terms, one can imagine it like this. At some peak point of their development, thinking beings, executing their cosmological duty and sacrificing themselves, produce a conscious cosmic catastrophe, a reverse thermal dying of cosmos matter, that is, they provoke a process leading to the rebirth of dying world by means of a cosmic cloud of incandescent gas and vapors. In simple terms, thought turns out to be a necessary mediating link, thanks only to which the fiery rejuvenation of universal matter becomes possible. It proves to be this direct efficient cause that leads to the instant activities of endless reserves of interconnected motion." So this is already madness. The whole universe develops, but since it's circular, at the top it has to return to total chaos. And this can happen, he is almost a poet of nuclear self-destruction, Ilyenkov, it's incredible. He claims that this is the highest role of human thought, its cosmic meaning, at the end to destroy everything to the zero level. And now, my God, I like this as an old Stalinist. You ain't heard anything yet, now comes the true madness. He claims that therein resides the cosmological necessity of communism. Because what is demanded for human, from human beings is at the end to radically destroy, explode themselves and the entire order for the benefit of the whole universe to renew itself. And he says a capitalist would never have done it, they are too egotist, only a communist can destroy everything risking itself for higher future. A short quote, I love it: "Millions of years will pass, thousands of generations will be born and go to their graves, a genuine human system will be established on earth with the condition for activity, a classless society, spiritual, material culture will abundantly blossom, with the aid of and on the basis of which humankind can only fulfill its great sacrificial duty before nature. For us, for people living at the dawn of human prosperity, the struggle for this future will remain the only real form of service to the highest aim of the thinking spirit." End of quote. So, the ultimate justification of communism is that by way of bringing about a solidary society free of egotist instincts, it will have enough ethical strength to perform the highest self-sacrifice of not only humanity's self-destruction, but of the simultaneous destruction of entire cosmos. Another quote: "If humanity is unable to achieve communism, then collective human intelligence will not achieve its highest state of power either, as it will be undermined by the capitalist system which is as far as one can get from any self-sacrificial motivation." End of quote. Now Ilyenkov was aware that what he is developing is, he calls it phantasmagoria or dream. And there were many I think cheaply metaphorical readings of this text, that it, that behind this bombastic end of a universe, Ilyenkov suspected simply the collapse of communism, Soviet communism, or even his own tragic fate, as I already told you, sorry it was not he killed himself in But I think that things are more complex here, that of course we shouldn't accept this dream, which is again the most beautiful theory of communism that I've heard. That its function is to not only as conservatives fear to destroy human society, civilization, no, to destroy the entire world order consciously. I think what we should ask is where is the mistake of this reasoning. I think that in it, I think his mistake is the same as the one of Marquis de Sade. Marquis de Sade, you know, has also a name for this total destruction. He calls it the second death. To put it very simply, de Sade has a very consistent ontology. His claim is: first he was a simple naturalist, the young Sade. He said if we humans want to be faithful to nature, we should imitate nature in all its aspects, not only generation, construction, positive, but also negative destruction. So torture, rape, killing, destruction is part of natural cycle, we should joyously assume it. But then Sade made a step further and claimed that in this sense we remain slaves of nature, and we should make a step further and imagine an absolute crime, a crime which is not simply inscribed into this circulation of nature as its part, but a crime which destroys radically natural cycle, nature itself. A break with natural causality. And this he calls the second death. And I've developed, I'm sorry if you know this line of thought, I developed this in some of my books, namely how I think Lacan has here a perfect answer: that what de Sade doesn't get is that this second, what he imagines as second death, always already happens even before the first death. This second death of nature is simply the explosion of subjectivity as another dimension in the order of being. And that what de Sade is doing, it's his mistake is where? I am condensing a line of thought which you can find more in detail in my book *Disparities*. It's that his mistake is at the very beginning when he presupposes that there is a full natural cycle of causality, positive order of nature. Here negativity is excluded, so no wonder that it returns in a brutal way as the total destruction of nature. But what if we accept that nature is from the very beginning inexistent? Nature doesn't exist as a balanced Big Other, an order of laws and so on and so on. Destruction is always already here, and I think that the same goes for Ilyenkov. What he project into nature is this necessity of total destruction and so on. He doesn't see that in some sense deeper it already happened. The moment the subject is here. Ah, now things will become more tricky. Yes, the moment the subject is here, what? According to transcendental reading, it's over with nature, another dimension of negativity emerges and so on and so on. But I don't want to follow this line. Because if we follow this line, we remain in this pseudo-Hegelian, because even Hegel sometimes falls into it, even Lacan most of the time, this opposition between homeostatic natural order and then with humanity another dimension negativity emerges and so on and so on. I think we should go a step further here. What if this type of negativity is already in nature itself? What if nature in itself is not natural, to put it simply? So, let me now and okay, this now I come to the concluding part, but things will get more complicated here. So, this is my problem. I'm not sure now my I'm addressing not you, but more your our, I hope I can say, I will be very gentle, not best friend. How is he called, my God, who did that, my God, what's his name, who did that, the who believes in democracy even among objects? Levi Bryant? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Levi Bryant, his idea is to think objects without subject. In some sense, I agree that is the task. Because I of course reject the constitutive role of transcendental subjectivity in the sense that nothing, nothing in some sense, either you say nothing existed before, but it's interesting how ambiguous here are transcendental philosophers and even Western Marxists. Like if you ask a humanist Lukács-style Marxist: okay, social practice is already here, but didn't we nonetheless humans emerge out of nature? They start to squeeze out. They say, yes, but we cannot say how everything every answer is already mediated by social, mediated by social practice or whatever. Even Habermas, when he insists how in all our explanations of nature what he calls discursive procedures, argumentation, ethics is already here. Then asked but can we account for it naturally or not? He squeezes out. His latest position is I'm an agnostic. I don't know. So my point is just this one: that now here comes, if you can answer to it maybe in the evening we can go on. My point would be this one: that a transcendental subject is not simply an object among other objects in the world which is then elevated in an illegitimate way into a central or all-powerful position, or somehow constituting entire the entire reality. Subject is a standpoint, the punctual support of a perspective onto reality from which we cannot abstract. As Kant makes it clear, the transcendental subject's constitutive power basically designates its faithful limitation, its inability to bypass transcendental frame and gain access to nominal reality. You know that's the other pessimist side of Kant. Kant is not simply a philosopher of all-powerful subjectivity. In a passage that I often quote from the very last pages of *Critique of Practical Reason*, Kant says: "Let's imagine that we would be able to overstep the limitation of our finitude and gain access to things in themselves. What would then have happened?" His answer is not, "we would be totally free," but "we would be marionetten, marionettes." Totally submit to subjective to objective causality. So where is here Kant's mistake? Incidentally, Kant's answer is here is here very close to the answer of of today's most of today's cognitive science, no? Who claim, the title of one of the books, that our freedom is a user's illusion. Objectively we can prove that everything happens at the neuronal level. Our freedom is just the way we necessarily perceive ourselves in a wrong way. Now how to get out of it? Here we may disagree, but my solution is this one: that the same as with Ilyenkov, as with de Sade, we have to abandon the very starting point, that there is out there nature as a fully ontologically constituted complete network of causality. If you conceive nature in this way, of course you then create a problem, but how is it with human freedom and so on and so on. The only choice is then to falsely spiritualize human freedom. But there is another spiritual principle. Now I will again repeat one story that in from my books then two jokes and then we are approaching the end. The story, I'm sorry if you know it, but it fits so perfectly here. So I will repeat it to you. In one introduction to philosophy, it's a very popular book written by a guy called Nicholas Fearn. He to explain the quantum vision of the universe, he uses a wonderful metaphor, I think, of video games. You know this so-called uncertainty principle or complementarity. The idea is that ah, Heisenberg was here wrong. Heisenberg Bohr was more up to the point. Heisenberg thought and there was a polemic between the two that uncertainty principle simply means we cannot measure at the same time velocity and position. Bohr was more radical, he said no, it's not that we cannot measure, it's ontological. A particle does not have this property. What does this mean? I will abstract from more the details. It means that in some sense reality itself, in itself, not just due to our cognitive limitations, is ontologically incomplete. And that's for me the big thing. And this guy Nicholas Fearn produces here a wonderful metaphor. He said he says, he writes: imagine a video game, and I am forced to imagine it because my son is playing them all the time. You know, if you are in a video game and it takes place on a field, a battle goes on there, in the background you have a forest, but the programmer didn't use time to program every tree because it's not part of the game that you can enter the forest. So why should he lose time programming every tree? Or it's the same with a house. If it's not part of the game, let's say a battle on a street, the interior of the house is not programmed. So you get the joke. The joke is that God did the same. God thought, "Oh, humans are too stupid to penetrate beneath atom." And we as it were caught God with his pants down, you know? God thought, "Oh, why should I bother programming microparticles? That's the limit." But no, we were a little bit too bright for God, you know? So, but now comes, I will not go into it, I'm trying to do this in my last books, the problem is this one: do we need God for this? Because our spontaneous notion of the universe is that things have to fully exist somehow. The limitations ontological can only be our human limitations. Like if something appears incomplete ontologically, it means we don't know it. No, I think that we can think this incompleteness without God. In my craziest speculation, and here maybe you will counter-attack, I even think that maybe in a more subtle way, God is in a sense one of the names for the ontological incompleteness of reality. But that's another point. What I want to say is that now come my my God I love them, this is two to in so far as God the traditional God is the name for ontoperfect being, ontological completeness and so on. I think the best in our Judeo-Christian tradition is composed precisely of the hints of incompleteness of God. And then I will quote you a joke which is it's very strange for me but no dirty things, no vulgar, very refined theological joke told to me by my Jewish friend from Israel. A joke about Auschwitz. No no, it's not a racist neo-Nazi joke, it's a beautiful Jewish joke. All you have to know to understand this joke is that in modern theology one of the solutions to the problem of how God could have allowed Auschwitz, such horrible things to happen, is that God was not there. God somehow it was beyond God as this is even I think am I wrong the title of one of the books by God died at Auschwitz, so God was not there. Okay, the joke is this one, but it's a sad joke of course but respectably see. In Paradise a couple of guys killed in Auschwitz, but they're in Paradise now, walk around sit on a bench on a wonderful field near a meadow and tell each other jokes funny stories about how they died, you know. And one said, "Do you remember, Simon, that when they were dragging you towards the gas chambers you slipped on some soap there and you broke your skull before even you reached gas?" And they: "Ha ha ha, good joke." Now comes the beauty. Then God comes by taking a rest also from his work and listens to these jokes and says, "Guys, I don't get it, how can you laugh of it? I don't get it." And now comes this is and people claim that I am antisemitic, this is Jewish sublimity for then one of the Jews goes to God, puts his arms around his put his hand around his arm and says, "Listen, don't be sad. You were not there of course, you cannot understand our joke," and so on, you know. That's that's how, you know, this incompleteness even of and this is I think what I'm trying to do again, you see, is not rehabilitate some transcendental subject in the sense of creating everything. My question is even a much more naive one: how reality has to be structured in itself for something like for a for something like subjectivity to be able. Can somebody tell me so that I don't speak too much? No, you you spoke now about minutes. Ah, so I still have as they say some concluding remarks. Okay, no, you know where we the big problem for me today from my standpoint is how, you know, I'm sick and tired of this idea that you find the worst example is Sartre, *L'Être et le Néant*, subject radical negativity confronted to this inert full order of being. How should we think, not by humanizing nature, some kind of antagonism, gap, incompleteness, negativity already in already in nature itself? First, back to subject. Subject for me is precisely something, I will simplify it very much, something whose very existence is incomplete, but not in the simple Sartrean sense. Let me to make this point clear, let me tell you another joke, I hope also respectful. It's a wonderful, and I will use it to criticize the notion that simply the empty void of subjectivity is it. No, I don't share here Alain Badiou's point. I think there is no subject without object because Badiou has this idea of objectless subject. Object is material inertia. I think that every subjectivity is grounded in an object, especially empty subjectivity. Let me give you this joke with my usual stab at political correctness precisely, again, how to think subject but in a realist way, not just transcendental subjectivity. Maybe you know this joke, it circulates around, it's another Jewish story, even Derrida repeats it and others. It's some and no, they do it on Sabbath. Jewish believers gathered, Jewish believers gathered there in a in a in a synagogue and first a rich rabbi, powerful, stands up and says, "Oh my God, I am nothing, I am a nobody, not worthy of your attention." Then a rich merchant stands up and said, "Oh God, I am also nobody, worthless nothing." Then a poor ordinary Jew stands up and said, "Oh God, I am also worthless nothing." And then the rich rabbi kicks the rich merchant: "Who does this guy think this no that he can simply also say that he is nothing, you know." And he was right. That's the trick, proclaiming yourself nothing may appear a modest gesture but as a rule the position of enunciation from which it is spoken it's an extremely it's an extremely arrogant privileged one. And I will give you an example, I hope you will appreciate me appreciate it, not me, f*ck me, appreciate the example, which really, I was so shocked, really happened to me two years ago around at a debate in the United States. I was by mistake, now I boycott them, part of some politically correct b*llshit where the predominant tone was wealthy, white, privileged male liberals engaging in a game of humiliating themselves, self-whipping. "Oh, we are guilty for everything. If there is a war in Africa, it must be an effect of neocolonialism, whatever. We are nothing, Europe ruined the whole world," and so on and so on. And then a black guy, a good friend of mine, very intelligent, called Jeremiah Gley, intervened and said, "Wait a minute, we blacks are not so innocent. We also, you know, had our own history of destruction." And you should have seen the exchange of glances among these wild liberals, like, "Who is this guy that he thinks that he is also guilty for everything and nothing," you know. Like, because but my black friend was so he told me, "You see, this is the secret arrogance of this apparent white self-humiliation. Yes, I'm nobody, but this nobody is a mask for universality." My, for example, my old story, I'm sorry if you know it, I was in Missoula, Montana years ago and I was shocked how there was a round table between some Native Americans, they hate this term Indians, and white liberals, and one of them used for themselves the term Indian. And white liberal immediately interrupted him: "No, you shouldn't use this term, this is humiliating for you, blah blah blah." And my Indian friend exploded. He said, "Sorry, but who are you now? You will even tell us how to call our," you know, this is why I distrust this apparent humiliation of apparent self-humiliation of white anti-racists. Be careful what arrogant position of universality is is hidden in this. So again, this is why, incidentally, white liberals like the the black or other races to assume their particular identity. But, you know, at a distance. If Native Americans return to their ritual tribes: "Excellent, excellent." Blacks: "Okay." Chinese: "Yeah, still." With Italians problems begin. If we West Europeans do it, we are Fascists, no? And I think that this is not true modesty. This is precisely secret arrogance. You may you should become stuck to your shitty particular identity, we are universal. We are universal. So, how should we rethink this universality to make it acceptable? Here, again, to clarify the status of the subject. Here, here I would like to to finish with another story, to maybe some of you know it, I'm sorry, no, it's not even a story, another critical point, although at some level I appreciate them, about LGBT+. Or now it's LGBTQ+. No, no irony here. What I want to say is this: that how, how are we to understand this LGBTQ+? There is one way to understand it, which is the nominalist, empiricist one. The idea is that the official binary sexuality doesn't allow a space for other directions, transgender, whatever. So we should open up the space for sexual or gender, it's always gender, not sex. That's another theory, we don't have time to go into it now. I think what is missing in gender theory is simply sexuality, if you ask me. But it's another, so they say I can be bigender, trigender, asexual, butch, whatever you want. But they as empiricists, they worry, no? They say, "But wait a minute, what if there is some identity that we left out?" So let's leave it plus, in the sense, and all the others. But we should be here good Hegelians and say, what if we can be directly a plus? What if plus in the sense of self-questioning as such can be a form of identity which is the only authentic universal identity? Precisely in the sense of I don't know what for an object I am, but I know that I am, I am not without object. And this I think is, I'm now proceeding very fast, this is why for Lacan subjectivity is as such feminine, hysterical. Lacan is here a good Freudian. Beware of praising perversion. Perversion always perfectly fits discourse of power, it's the hidden, so well, the hysterical subject, my God I will use now this very low everyday level what men held against women: what is if you are in love with a woman the eternal feminine question, "Tell me why do you love me?" And it is a very annoying question because it's impossible to answer. The moment you answer it, you are no longer in love. Or to put it in a different way, reasons that you enumerate, whatever because of your smile, your eyes, whatever, appear as reasons only if you already are in love. The same circle. So what I'm saying here is something very precise: it's that what makes us sexual be is that this plus is something which is constitutive of subjectivity as such. Subjectivity, I am subject only in so far as I cannot identify myself as an object. But this impossibility to identify myself as an object is not is not doesn't mean that I belong to some higher dimension or whatever, but it's in a way the deadlock itself, which then gets materialized in our human symbolic practices and so on and so on. This is also why for Jacques Lacan the object cause of desire, object a, is precisely an object which materializes this plus itself. As Lacan put it, object a is precisely: whenever I grab an object, I always sooner or later experience, but this is not what I really want. And the object a is precisely that surplus missing from every object. So what I am to now nonetheless although there are of course many other things to say but I would like to conclude just to make this central point clear. I agree that we should move beyond transcendental circle, but I think the only consistent way to do it is not to, here we may disagree, is not to, and here comes the title, I'm sorry, to break out of this parallax, either naive realism or transcendental circle, but the problem is how to really move out of the transcendental circle. And I think that what we have to think is a certain, maybe Heidegger was sometimes on the way of it when he speaks about ontological difference as Unterschied in the more basic sense of a gap. But I think we should go maybe a step further from Heidegger and think this gap not directly as the opening of being but, it's pretty complex, that's why I prefer now to squeeze out to finish, as some kind of a crack in the texture of reality which is not simply equal to humanity. Again, for me the problem is how reality itself has to be structured to allow for this Big Bang which is human subjectivity. So again, we should move definitely beyond Kant. It's not that there is crack, antinomies just because we are finite subjects, but if we were to gain access to the things in themselves we would have think the complete world order. In itself there is no complete world order. In itself. And I'm not saying that the subject is already in nature. I'm just saying that again, that we have to conceive as the ultimate reality this kind of a cracked inconsistent call it structure, call it imbalance, or whatever. And I don't have time to go into it now, but I would have said that here I even disagree with those big poets or religious figures, for example, I was just re-reading Beckett and I found, I'm a cheap guy, I put into Google "Beckett important quotes sayings to bluff," and one is always appearing there, a quote which says something like, "every word, speech, is just a stain on silence" and so on, as silence is what we are aiming at. No, what Beckett doesn't see is that this silence is constituted only by the failure of speech. There is no silence proper without speech. The silence is opened by the failure of speech. So you see, this is what I'm trying to think as the Lacanian real and so on and so on. My point is that, and in this sense to conclude since we are here mit Jesuiten, no, where I see I always make this example to really conclude I will just mention it the my eternal motive that I return to in Christianity, no? This is for me the ultimate lesson of Christianity. You know, in other religions you have God, and then we pray to God, we try to rejoin God. In Christianity, I'm sorry, something totally different happens. God rejoins us. That is to say, in other religions let's say you feel yourself abandoned by God, and then through some stupid mystical practices, ascesis, "Yeah, I can rejoin God." The message of Christianity is: no, accept your being abandoned by God and then identify with Jesus on the cross. How? Jesus on the cross is the point where God himself is abandoned by God. Where you see the the operation: your being abandoned by God is the very feature which unites you with God. Which is why the way to step out of this abandonment is not, "Oh, God will come back and He will and He will help us." No, it's to see to just to shift the perspective and say, "But being abandoned by God, is this not another name for human freedom?" That's why in Christianity only you have Heiliger Geist, Holy Spirit, which is the only thing in which for me it's meaningful to talk about Christ resurrected. And Holy Spirit, there is no second coming in the sense of, "Oh, Christ will come at some point." No, I think Christ is already here where when you have a Heiliger Geist, precisely it already happens here, the reconciliation. So you see my point, in the same ses sense as in Christianity, what the very form of appeara the very form of the very gap that appears to separate you from God, the solution is to locate this gap into God himself. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani means for a moment God is abandoned by by himself. Because this is a big theological problem. I had some debates, I don't know how you would answer, where I asked my theological friends, even here in Munich years ago at a debate, a very simple question. When Christ cries there and says, "God, Father, why have you abandoned me?" is he bluffing or not? If he is bluffing, then and this was a very important gnostic interpretation, that it's in a way consequent, that crucifixion is just a spectacle to impress human beings, but the real spirit of Christ is up there with his Father just laughing at us men. So no. But if it's meant seriously, then for a moment there was a radical split in God himself. Or as Chesterton, my favorite theologian, put it, for a moment God himself became an atheist. And this is this is for me again the insight and this is what we should do also in ontology: to see the problem, gap, antagonism, not to resolve it, but to see it as belonging to the thing itself. Nature itself is incomplete, that we should abandon all this metaphoric of, you know, we humans are, from Hegel to Kierkegaard you find it, we humans are are animals sick to death and so on. No, animals are already sick to death. Do we really need proofs of this? Look at look at oil and coal. Can we even imagine what kind of
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imbalance
imbalance
Slavoj Žižek
ecological catastrophe there must have been happened on earth for us to have oil and coal? There is no
ecological catastrophe there must have been happened on earth for us to have oil and coal? There is no
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nature in the sense of good mother and we evil humans with our hubris we destroyed it. Nature is a dirty bitch as a
nature in the sense of good mother and we evil humans with our hubris we destroyed it. Nature is a dirty bitch as a
Slavoj Žižek
mother. The ruin and this is a very serious point. This means that there is no easy solution of blaming ourselves humanity and then returning to some balance. We have nowhere to return. Okay, as they say were you when you were young still reading when I was young we were still reading him now he is out, Karl May, Winnetou, you know. And at the end the Indian says, "Ich habe gesprochen," no? So I've spoken. Thank you very much for your patience. No, no. Stop. To tell you something else. I had here a Lacanian experience of divided subject because I'm here and my name in the void is there. Horrible. Yeah, I think we have we have time for questions. But you can also if there is any problem, probably with not ask questions auf Deutsch, no? I can manage it, you know. Yeah, Sebastian Gardner. Very quick question. Your solution to the the transcendental circle, the breaking out, nature's incompleteness, it put me is it not very similar to late Schelling? Oh, I have a very ambiguous love-hate relationship. But okay, not to lose time, I will tell you what's my solution. It's close to Heidegger's, Heidegger I think, we may disagree, I'm a great lover of Schelling. I wrote a short book on *Die Weltalter*. I just think that Schelling at his most radical were those Stuttgart years and before, *Freiheitsschrift*, *Weltalter*, all that, and that he confronted there a certain deadlock and then in his last phase he in a way escaped from it, withdrew from it. But yes, I openly admit, because in Schelling you already have this basic idea that what he calls this order pre-ontological order before the world the word is spoken and so on. This is already his idea of incompleteness and so on. No no, Schelling is a Schelling is an extremely interesting thinker I think. And I also think that between him and Hegel, it's a very difficult question. Obviously, I claim it's the usual story, Schelling didn't understand Hegel, Hegel didn't understand Schelling. Because Hegel has in his *Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie* one paragraph or two about *Freiheitsschrift*, and it's like pretty close to stupidity what he what he says there, you know. No no, this is I think I think this is the key debate. But where probably maybe not with you with others I would you would disagree with me, maybe this is my mistake. I'm still convinced and all of you would disagree here that okay, I will give you a cinematic example I wonder if you would agree. Did you see, we all did, Hitchcock Vertigo? You know when Madeleine goes to that whatever Sequoia Park and points there on a tree cut and says, "I was born here, I died there," you know no? For me if the Muse of philosophy were to come, it's that I was born here, no, Kant *Critique of Pure Reason* and I died here and before and after are echoes and so on, no? Maybe this is my limitation mistake. I know, but I'm still in love with that period. So many times we thought that Hegel is passé but he is returning and sorry, just one maybe this will. You know Hegel is usually dismissed as philosopher of this Prussian authoritarian state, half
mother. The ruin and this is a very serious point. This means that there is no easy solution of blaming ourselves humanity and then returning to some balance. We have nowhere to return. Okay, as they say were you when you were young still reading when I was young we were still reading him now he is out, Karl May, Winnetou, you know. And at the end the Indian says, "Ich habe gesprochen," no? So I've spoken. Thank you very much for your patience. No, no. Stop. To tell you something else. I had here a Lacanian experience of divided subject because I'm here and my name in the void is there. Horrible. Yeah, I think we have we have time for questions. But you can also if there is any problem, probably with not ask questions auf Deutsch, no? I can manage it, you know. Yeah, Sebastian Gardner. Very quick question. Your solution to the the transcendental circle, the breaking out, nature's incompleteness, it put me is it not very similar to late Schelling? Oh, I have a very ambiguous love-hate relationship. But okay, not to lose time, I will tell you what's my solution. It's close to Heidegger's, Heidegger I think, we may disagree, I'm a great lover of Schelling. I wrote a short book on *Die Weltalter*. I just think that Schelling at his most radical were those Stuttgart years and before, *Freiheitsschrift*, *Weltalter*, all that, and that he confronted there a certain deadlock and then in his last phase he in a way escaped from it, withdrew from it. But yes, I openly admit, because in Schelling you already have this basic idea that what he calls this order pre-ontological order before the world the word is spoken and so on. This is already his idea of incompleteness and so on. No no, Schelling is a Schelling is an extremely interesting thinker I think. And I also think that between him and Hegel, it's a very difficult question. Obviously, I claim it's the usual story, Schelling didn't understand Hegel, Hegel didn't understand Schelling. Because Hegel has in his *Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie* one paragraph or two about *Freiheitsschrift*, and it's like pretty close to stupidity what he what he says there, you know. No no, this is I think I think this is the key debate. But where probably maybe not with you with others I would you would disagree with me, maybe this is my mistake. I'm still convinced and all of you would disagree here that okay, I will give you a cinematic example I wonder if you would agree. Did you see, we all did, Hitchcock Vertigo? You know when Madeleine goes to that whatever Sequoia Park and points there on a tree cut and says, "I was born here, I died there," you know no? For me if the Muse of philosophy were to come, it's that I was born here, no, Kant *Critique of Pure Reason* and I died here and before and after are echoes and so on, no? Maybe this is my limitation mistake. I know, but I'm still in love with that period. So many times we thought that Hegel is passé but he is returning and sorry, just one maybe this will. You know Hegel is usually dismissed as philosopher of this Prussian authoritarian state, half
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fascist, stände and but the American philosopher, I basically don't agree with him but he made one good observation, Robert Pippin, this neo-Hegelian. He said, "Wait a minute, Hegel says in the one of the most famous passages introduction to forward for a to *Rechtsphilosophie* that you know the Owl of Minerva takes off only in the evening, philosophy comes too late." Okay, but if Hegel was not a complete idiot, shouldn't we accept the fact that this should hold also for Hegel's own description of this ideal
fascist, stände and but the American philosopher, I basically don't agree with him but he made one good observation, Robert Pippin, this neo-Hegelian. He said, "Wait a minute, Hegel says in the one of the most famous passages introduction to forward for a to *Rechtsphilosophie* that you know the Owl of Minerva takes off only in the evening, philosophy comes too late." Okay, but if Hegel was not a complete idiot, shouldn't we accept the fact that this should hold also for Hegel's own description of this ideal
Slavoj Žižek
state in *Rechtsphilosophie*? He is not describing as people automatically assume a vision of a future rational state. Its time has passed. He is describing a certain possibility which was already lost. And that's why he is describing it. Here, that's why I plea for a return from Marx to Hegel. Marx was too much of a teleological historicist. He thought at a certain historical moment today proletarian position, we can see at least a possibility of rational emancipated future and so on. Hegel would have never allowed this. Hegel is much more open towards the future. Hegel is absolutely not any philosopher of historical determinism in for Hegel future is prohibited, which practically means, and if anything the whole history of communism of the 20th century confirms it, the Marxist idea was that in contrast to other historical acts which were alienated, produced another effect than planned and so on, with communism as young Lukács describes it we have an act historical act which you do something and you know what you are doing. No. If there is a lesson it is that communist revolutions also necessarily go wrong and have to be repeated and so on, and that's a very Hegelian view. I talk too much, sorry. Thank you. They don't want you to speak freely, you must be recorded. No no. Very disciplined. Thanks. So two questions, both about the transcendental circle. So the first question is why exactly do you want to break out of the transcendental circle? So it has been gone on for a while, so we are all tired of it in a sense. But so what what is the main reason, or what frustrates you most about it? Why do we need to get out? What is the reason? That's the first question. Second question, the way you were describing your solution you were saying the the operative question that leads to your solution is the question "how must reality or nature be structured such that subjectivity is possible?" So it is a transcendental question. So I mean the form of the question is transcendental. It's not about the transcendental subject but a question about a condition of possibility of subjectivity. So I'm just wondering whether that's actually the the completion of the transcendental project, right? Or whether you whether you agree that it somehow
state in *Rechtsphilosophie*? He is not describing as people automatically assume a vision of a future rational state. Its time has passed. He is describing a certain possibility which was already lost. And that's why he is describing it. Here, that's why I plea for a return from Marx to Hegel. Marx was too much of a teleological historicist. He thought at a certain historical moment today proletarian position, we can see at least a possibility of rational emancipated future and so on. Hegel would have never allowed this. Hegel is much more open towards the future. Hegel is absolutely not any philosopher of historical determinism in for Hegel future is prohibited, which practically means, and if anything the whole history of communism of the 20th century confirms it, the Marxist idea was that in contrast to other historical acts which were alienated, produced another effect than planned and so on, with communism as young Lukács describes it we have an act historical act which you do something and you know what you are doing. No. If there is a lesson it is that communist revolutions also necessarily go wrong and have to be repeated and so on, and that's a very Hegelian view. I talk too much, sorry. Thank you. They don't want you to speak freely, you must be recorded. No no. Very disciplined. Thanks. So two questions, both about the transcendental circle. So the first question is why exactly do you want to break out of the transcendental circle? So it has been gone on for a while, so we are all tired of it in a sense. But so what what is the main reason, or what frustrates you most about it? Why do we need to get out? What is the reason? That's the first question. Second question, the way you were describing your solution you were saying the the operative question that leads to your solution is the question "how must reality or nature be structured such that subjectivity is possible?" So it is a transcendental question. So I mean the form of the question is transcendental. It's not about the transcendental subject but a question about a condition of possibility of subjectivity. So I'm just wondering whether that's actually the the completion of the transcendental project, right? Or whether you whether you agree that it somehow
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continues with the type of question that a transcendental project asks or whether you meant it differently. Ah, this was very good. First, why out? I will say something very naive. I I will not just give you the historicist reason, which is that obviously
continues with the type of question that a transcendental project asks or whether you meant it differently. Ah, this was very good. First, why out? I will say something very naive. I I will not just give you the historicist reason, which is that obviously
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at the historical moment
at the historical moment
Slavoj Žižek
where we have today it's somehow to use this bombastic terms I think that the transcendental approach exhausted its possibilities. Because I think that it's very naive what I will say, but I was never satisfied with how in this broader sense transcendental thinkers try to reply or react to the this what many people
where we have today it's somehow to use this bombastic terms I think that the transcendental approach exhausted its possibilities. Because I think that it's very naive what I will say, but I was never satisfied with how in this broader sense transcendental thinkers try to reply or react to the this what many people
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are afraid of this breakthrough cognitivism, brain sciences and so on and so on. I think that this is a very naive, but I think that something this would be my ultimate reason isn't something happening today which maybe will change what we usually understand as human nature. In the sense of being human. And as I even repeat myself too much in my books, the it's not this what everybody is afraid this we are digitally controlled blah blah blah. I don't care. Although I want to challenge you here with another idea. When people say computers can think and so on already maybe all this idea. You know what I always ask them and maybe there is here among you some and I would like to hear it. You know human thought in its specificity it's not just complexity, but it's a certain play with virtual dimension of absence. What do I mean by this? I'm sorry to repeat a joke here which I according to my vague memory I must have used it around times in the last years in my books so we go for another one. That scene from *Ninotchka*, Lubitsch, you know when a guy goes to a cafeteria and says coffee coffee coffee without cream and the waiter says, "Sorry sir, we don't have cream we just have milk so I cannot give you coffee without cream, I can only give you coffee without milk." Okay, so that's nice dialectical insight. We have three coffees: plain coffee,
are afraid of this breakthrough cognitivism, brain sciences and so on and so on. I think that this is a very naive, but I think that something this would be my ultimate reason isn't something happening today which maybe will change what we usually understand as human nature. In the sense of being human. And as I even repeat myself too much in my books, the it's not this what everybody is afraid this we are digitally controlled blah blah blah. I don't care. Although I want to challenge you here with another idea. When people say computers can think and so on already maybe all this idea. You know what I always ask them and maybe there is here among you some and I would like to hear it. You know human thought in its specificity it's not just complexity, but it's a certain play with virtual dimension of absence. What do I mean by this? I'm sorry to repeat a joke here which I according to my vague memory I must have used it around times in the last years in my books so we go for another one. That scene from *Ninotchka*, Lubitsch, you know when a guy goes to a cafeteria and says coffee coffee coffee without cream and the waiter says, "Sorry sir, we don't have cream we just have milk so I cannot give you coffee without cream, I can only give you coffee without milk." Okay, so that's nice dialectical insight. We have three coffees: plain coffee,
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coffee without milk, coffee
coffee without milk, coffee
Slavoj Žižek
without cream. Materially they are the same but
without cream. Materially they are the same but
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symbo but they are not the same. Negativity is inscribed into the other two. Okay, can a computer catch can artificial intelligence catch this difference? This purely that you know you have a coffee and you say this can it clearly see why
symbo but they are not the same. Negativity is inscribed into the other two. Okay, can a computer catch can artificial intelligence catch this difference? This purely that you know you have a coffee and you say this can it clearly see why
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coffee without cream is not the same as plain coffee even if they are materially the same thing? Here here go much more complex. But again what worries me more is this: listen I'm following it closely and I was shown some even video clips which horrified me a little bit. The big thing today is as we all know the direct digitalization of our brain. Direct link between brain and computer. It's at the beginning but it's progressing very fast. This means that not only the computer digital machine whatever can already scan and identify some basic things happening in my brain. For example, I was told that just before he died, Stephen Hawking already no longer had to use this little finger, no? His brain was wired and it was enough for him just to think potentially. I don't know how far will it go, I'm too stupid potentially. But what if this happens? Then not only our brain will be wired into digital field, directly into internet and so on. But you can start communicating with people through directly directly brain brain link. I saw experiments where, say, I I look at a picture in my brain of I don't know whatever, an airplane, and then you directly in your brain without seeing an image can catch this in your brain. Now let's follow this to its potential end. We move in the direction of what Ray Kurzweil calls Singularity. A totally new level of being. A digital a space direct space of digital
coffee without cream is not the same as plain coffee even if they are materially the same thing? Here here go much more complex. But again what worries me more is this: listen I'm following it closely and I was shown some even video clips which horrified me a little bit. The big thing today is as we all know the direct digitalization of our brain. Direct link between brain and computer. It's at the beginning but it's progressing very fast. This means that not only the computer digital machine whatever can already scan and identify some basic things happening in my brain. For example, I was told that just before he died, Stephen Hawking already no longer had to use this little finger, no? His brain was wired and it was enough for him just to think potentially. I don't know how far will it go, I'm too stupid potentially. But what if this happens? Then not only our brain will be wired into digital field, directly into internet and so on. But you can start communicating with people through directly directly brain brain link. I saw experiments where, say, I I look at a picture in my brain of I don't know whatever, an airplane, and then you directly in your brain without seeing an image can catch this in your brain. Now let's follow this to its potential end. We move in the direction of what Ray Kurzweil calls Singularity. A totally new level of being. A digital a space direct space of digital
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communication where my thought is directly your thought and so on and so on. What happens then to subjectivity? Subjectivity is, again, linked to the fact that I am in myself isolated, I communicate with you through signifiers, symbolic structures which are already alienated and so on. But if communication is direct, it's me meddling with your
communication where my thought is directly your thought and so on and so on. What happens then to subjectivity? Subjectivity is, again, linked to the fact that I am in myself isolated, I communicate with you through signifiers, symbolic structures which are already alienated and so on. But if communication is direct, it's me meddling with your
Slavoj Žižek
brain. Here I there is one so that you will not say that I'm a complete idiot. There is one good counterargument that I got intelligent, but I don't think it works, is the radio transmitter theory. It is that yes we have an eternal soul but our brain is like a radio receiver which is properly structured to receive immaterial signals from the other world and so on. If you destroy brain, you just destroy the receiver. But the thought is still out there. I don't buy this. But again, you see my problem. Isn't this the ultimate limit? And what if this is where the old transcendental approach simply doesn't work? So so again, I agree it is this project. And this was already Schelling's project. Hegel's project. How something so crazy as subjectivity can emerge. And again, my idea is simply to move the obstacle negativity from being our limit, external limit into an into an internal feature of reality itself. And that's what interests me. And that's also why I remain nonetheless a materialist. I think that we simply move in this direction, and that only if we accept this incompleteness of the world as such can we maintain some level of can we maintain some level of autonomy. If the world were complete, then we would have been marionettes, as Kant said. I don't know if this is an answer, but let's go. I think I've also a question to the gap. So you talked clearly about the gap internal to nature and not on the border between nature and the normative. But is it not like this that you talked about two gaps namely when you talked about the plus and the silence you talked about the gap internal to our normative practice and linguistic discursive practice? Because so when when Beckett talks about silence, this silence is an effect of our discursive practices and then this negativity would be internal to our normativity. So and how you relate these two gaps? How you relate the gap within nature you focused in your talk to the different gap within our normative practices? It's an excellent question. But first I would have said that one way to formulate my the problem that's bothering it is simply that I find non-satisfactory this neo-Kantian, Habermasian idea that we simply cannot deduce "ought" from "is," *Sollen* from *Sein*, that the normative dimension is irreducible. I think that precisely the gap that I'm mentioning is not simply the gap between normative and factual, but it's a gap in the factual order itself which opens up the space for the space for normativity. And I think that I don't know if you follow him, even Derrida made here a compromise. Because at a certain point he fell back I think into normativity. When he started to talk about infinite justice, undeconstructible condition of deconstruction and so on and so on. So I would say that that my idea is precisely the question that normativists don't want to raise. And this is also my reproach to people who now produce very elaborate readings of Hegel and so on, the Pittsburgh Hegelians and also Pippin. Pippin, Brandom and so on. They their again transcendental horizon is that our logic, our human mind is a normative machine. That it's never simply facts, you have to argue argue for facts and so on and so on. But how I never saw how would they pass from the order of being, how would they combine the two? Simply for me as a philosopher you cannot this cannot be the ultimate fact. That you know what something must be like a gap in reality, in pre-normative reality, some gap must be here to open up the space for normativity. If not, if not then the only conclusion is the conclusion which is of majority of cognitive sciences today, that normativity is our subjective illusion. You know that in nature there are no norms, it's simply you react in a certain way and so on. It's all habits and so on and that no, I think that normativity or okay, I will just to finish produce another paradox. Transcendental philosopher likes to point out and that is Habermas's eternal reproach against deconstructionists and so on that against even Adorno and Horkheimer that they do a good critique of our alienated blah blah blah *verwaltete Welt* societies but they lack a positive normative foundation. I think that precisely lack can come first. It's not that when you experience a lack you must already have an implicit positive measure. No, I think that the disorientation, out of joint, lack comes first and positive normativity is in a way a reaction to this lack and so on and so on. But I know I didn't answer you but it's a crucial question. Well, thanks for coming. Thanks for your talk. I think we stop here. No no. Stop. To tell you something else. I had here a Lacanian experience of divided subject because I'm here and my name in the void is there. Horrible. Is it translated into German? With all our animosity but I still love immensely your is it immaterialism? Translated into German
brain. Here I there is one so that you will not say that I'm a complete idiot. There is one good counterargument that I got intelligent, but I don't think it works, is the radio transmitter theory. It is that yes we have an eternal soul but our brain is like a radio receiver which is properly structured to receive immaterial signals from the other world and so on. If you destroy brain, you just destroy the receiver. But the thought is still out there. I don't buy this. But again, you see my problem. Isn't this the ultimate limit? And what if this is where the old transcendental approach simply doesn't work? So so again, I agree it is this project. And this was already Schelling's project. Hegel's project. How something so crazy as subjectivity can emerge. And again, my idea is simply to move the obstacle negativity from being our limit, external limit into an into an internal feature of reality itself. And that's what interests me. And that's also why I remain nonetheless a materialist. I think that we simply move in this direction, and that only if we accept this incompleteness of the world as such can we maintain some level of can we maintain some level of autonomy. If the world were complete, then we would have been marionettes, as Kant said. I don't know if this is an answer, but let's go. I think I've also a question to the gap. So you talked clearly about the gap internal to nature and not on the border between nature and the normative. But is it not like this that you talked about two gaps namely when you talked about the plus and the silence you talked about the gap internal to our normative practice and linguistic discursive practice? Because so when when Beckett talks about silence, this silence is an effect of our discursive practices and then this negativity would be internal to our normativity. So and how you relate these two gaps? How you relate the gap within nature you focused in your talk to the different gap within our normative practices? It's an excellent question. But first I would have said that one way to formulate my the problem that's bothering it is simply that I find non-satisfactory this neo-Kantian, Habermasian idea that we simply cannot deduce "ought" from "is," *Sollen* from *Sein*, that the normative dimension is irreducible. I think that precisely the gap that I'm mentioning is not simply the gap between normative and factual, but it's a gap in the factual order itself which opens up the space for the space for normativity. And I think that I don't know if you follow him, even Derrida made here a compromise. Because at a certain point he fell back I think into normativity. When he started to talk about infinite justice, undeconstructible condition of deconstruction and so on and so on. So I would say that that my idea is precisely the question that normativists don't want to raise. And this is also my reproach to people who now produce very elaborate readings of Hegel and so on, the Pittsburgh Hegelians and also Pippin. Pippin, Brandom and so on. They their again transcendental horizon is that our logic, our human mind is a normative machine. That it's never simply facts, you have to argue argue for facts and so on and so on. But how I never saw how would they pass from the order of being, how would they combine the two? Simply for me as a philosopher you cannot this cannot be the ultimate fact. That you know what something must be like a gap in reality, in pre-normative reality, some gap must be here to open up the space for normativity. If not, if not then the only conclusion is the conclusion which is of majority of cognitive sciences today, that normativity is our subjective illusion. You know that in nature there are no norms, it's simply you react in a certain way and so on. It's all habits and so on and that no, I think that normativity or okay, I will just to finish produce another paradox. Transcendental philosopher likes to point out and that is Habermas's eternal reproach against deconstructionists and so on that against even Adorno and Horkheimer that they do a good critique of our alienated blah blah blah *verwaltete Welt* societies but they lack a positive normative foundation. I think that precisely lack can come first. It's not that when you experience a lack you must already have an implicit positive measure. No, I think that the disorientation, out of joint, lack comes first and positive normativity is in a way a reaction to this lack and so on and so on. But I know I didn't answer you but it's a crucial question. Well, thanks for coming. Thanks for your talk. I think we stop here. No no. Stop. To tell you something else. I had here a Lacanian experience of divided subject because I'm here and my name in the void is there. Horrible. Is it translated into German? With all our animosity but I still love immensely your is it immaterialism? Translated into German
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now?
now?
Slavoj Žižek
This must be some neo-Nazi plot. That's all I can No no, it's really if you want to understand him it's an excellent social example that is Dutch company no and it's simply it's the best self-introduction to you you get into the topic. Is there a better
This must be some neo-Nazi plot. That's all I can No no, it's really if you want to understand him it's an excellent social example that is Dutch company no and it's simply it's the best self-introduction to you you get into the topic. Is there a better
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one?
one?
Slavoj Žižek
No, I had the most fun writing
No, I had the most fun writing
unknown
that one too. Yeah yeah yeah. And it but did they at least buy the copyrights? Not in German I don't think. They will they will. Yeah, when AfD
that one too. Yeah yeah yeah. And it but did they at least buy the copyrights? Not in German I don't think. They will they will. Yeah, when AfD
Slavoj Žižek
will be in power okay. Sorry, please.
will be in power okay. Sorry, please.