The Return to Hegel
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009 · 2:08:08 · 15,952 words
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisphilosophy-generalhistorycinema-art-cultureideologylanguagesexuality-genderreligion-theologyconsciousness-mind
A two-part lecture (with Q&A) in which Žižek offers a systematic introduction to Hegel, arguing that the standard post-Hegelian dismissal of Hegel as a naïve historicist or absolute idealist is itself a 'screen memory' concealing what is most radical in him. He develops several core Hegelian moves, retroactive necessity, the vanishing mediator, concrete universality, and the impossibility of return to a pre-break past, and connects them to Freudian death drive, Deleuzian pure difference/repetition, and Bergsonian retroactive possibility. The lecture also explores sexuality, language, cinema (Chaplin, Hitchcock), and voice as objet petit a, all as illustrations of the same dialectical structure.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “universal historicist mobilism”
The false reading of Hegel as asserting that everything is moving and historically conditioned ('nothing is stable'); Žižek rejects this as a crude postmodern anti-essentialism incompatible with genuine Hegelian dialectic.
Events that are contingent before they happen become necessary after the fact, necessity is never given in advance but is constituted backwards once an event occurs.
Used here specifically in its form as voice, the partial object/alien intruder within the subject that is not simply one's own property but potentially destabilizing, as Chaplin's films show.
Badiou's term adopted by Žižek for the post-Hegelian move (Schelling, Kierkegaard, Marx, Schopenhauer) that asserts a more real 'living substance' behind philosophical concepts, thereby dissolving Hegel's thought into a secondary reflection.
Freudian compulsion to repeat: pure repetition without Hegelian elevation to a higher level, which Žižek argues cannot be accommodated within Hegel's system and represents a genuine post-Hegelian challenge.
Hegelian dialectical sublation; mentioned in contrast to Freudian pure repetition (Wiederholungszwang), which does not fit into any Aufhebung but repeats without elevation.
A historical figure that enables a transition between two epochs but is then cancelled/forgotten, often emerging as the illusory return to an origin (e.g. Luther as appearing to return to original Christianity while inaugurating modernity).
as “screen memory (Deckerinnerung)”
Here applied to the received 'ridiculous' image of Hegel as absolute idealist who thought history ended with him, a convenient caricature that represses the truly traumatic excess of what Hegel actually did.
The view, attributed to Hegel himself but criticized by Žižek, that sexuality is a natural substance which culture gradually civilizes and sublimates, without recognizing the intermediate death-drive excess.
as “death drive (Todestrieb)”
Not a will-to-Nirvana or self-destruction but the name for an immortal, compulsive insistence that persists beyond life and death, what Žižek calls 'Freudian name for immortality', illustrated by the figure of the undead vampire.
Kant's category that asserts a non-predicate ('you are undead') rather than negating a predicate ('you are not dead'), thereby opening a third domain, the vampire-space, beyond the simple binary opposition.
as “absolute negativity”
The excess of negativity in Hegel that cannot ever be fully culturalized or sublimated; neither nature nor culture, neither life nor death, the permanent threat of explosive return.
Lacan's English distinction: the 'goal' is the official object the drive aims at, but the true satisfaction lies in the circular movement of the drive itself, the aim is to keep circling, like a boomerang.
Hegel's claim that the universal is not an abstraction from particulars but actively produces its own content; opposed to nominalist views that start from concrete particulars and abstract upward.
Deleuze's concept adopted by Žižek: a repetition of the absolutely same at the level of reality that produces a radical difference at the virtual/spectral level, without any change in actual notes played.
Music 'only for the eye', notes written to be seen but not played, used to illustrate Deleuzian virtuality: the absent melody that a pianist must evoke without actually sounding it.
as “fetishist disavowal (je sais bien mais quand même)”
Structure where one knows very well (abstractly) that something will happen, e.g. a war, but cannot believe it will actually occur; only after the event does it retroactively become real and possible.
as “retroactive possibility”
Bergson's insight (appropriated for Hegel): what was considered impossible before an event happens becomes retroactively possible and even necessary once it occurs, possibility does not precede but follows from reality.
as “virtual past (pure past)”
Deleuze's atemporal structure in which all events are stored as they pass; Žižek aligns this with the Hegelian retroactive restructuring of the past by radical novelty.
Stories he reaches for 6
A patient tells his analyst that while booking a restaurant table to seduce a lady he slipped and said 'a bed for two' to the waiter; Darian Leader interprets this not as straightforward wish-fulfillment but as a defense against enjoying the foreplay too much.
“Instead of saying 'Table for two please,' he said 'A bed for two please' to the waiter.”
Engels in the 1870s-80s predicted a European war at the start of the next century in which Germany, caught between Anglo-French and Russian poles, would lose, and then start a new war a decade or two later.
“Not only will there probably be a big European war, but Germany will find itself caught between two poles, Anglo-Saxon French and Russian; it will lose the war, and then a decade or two later, it will start a new war.”
Bergson describes how in August 1914 the outbreak of war, which everyone had abstractly expected but never truly believed could happen, suddenly became completely real and normal, showing that possibility is constituted retroactively by actuality, not the other way around.
“It is only at a precise moment of its actual emergence that it begins to always already have been.”
Writing in the 1810s, Hegel said it was too early to theorize Russia and the United States, predicting the 20th century would belong to them, cited as evidence that Hegel was far from the caricature of someone who thought history ended with him.
“Next, 20th century, will be the century of these two countries. We cannot develop theory now.”
Nixon's opening to Mao's China seemed impossible beforehand; the moment it happened it immediately looked normal and rationally inevitable, a paradigm case of a Lacanian act creating its own conditions of possibility retroactively.
“When it happened, it immediately looked normal. Of course, no break, of course it's rational politics.”
Schumann's Humoresque is written on three staves, left hand, right hand, and a middle invisible melody that is never played, and then repeats the same notes without the silent line, creating pure Deleuzian difference by changing only the virtual/absent resonance.
“You repeat exactly the same line, but in such a way that what changes is not what you hear but what you don't hear.”
Works invoked 29
Philosophy of Right book
Hegel's introduction with the Owl of Minerva saying is quoted and reinterpreted as the expression of open contingency and retroactive necessity rather than conservative closure.
Grundrisse book
Marx's methodological introduction cited for the 'anatomy of man is key to anatomy of ape' passage, read as anti-teleological and anti-historicist.
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book; mentioned as containing the passage on adaptive irrationality (peacock) in the second part.
Psycho film
Mother's floating voice searching for a body, the paradigm case of the objet petit a as voice, analyzed via Michel Chion.
The Great Dictator film
Called 'one of the absolute movies'; analyzed in depth as an implicit meta-theory of sound, with Hynkel's voice as the objet petit a that controls rather than emanates from the body.
Billy Bathgate book
Doctorow's novel described as not very good; along with its mediocre film adaptation, the two failures together retroactively generate the spectral virtual masterpiece, the central motif for Deleuzian repetition.
Kant's work; the passage on negative versus infinite judgment is described as the best account of death drive Žižek has found anywhere.
T.S. Eliot's essay arguing that every truly new work of art retroactively changes the past, cited as close to Hegel's view of totality and Bergson's retroactive possibility.
Logic of Sense book
The other 'absolute Deleuze' book; companion to Difference and Repetition, distinguished from the 'anti-Oedipal shit'.
Being and Event book
Badiou's book containing the reading of Pascal as a figure who, by insisting on an impossible task, saw more than those who simply accepted modernity.
Called one of the two 'absolute Deleuze' books, miracles; quoted extensively for the coexisting series and virtual object account of repetition.
Lacan's seminar cited for his dismissal of Nietzsche's 'beyond good and evil' as saying no more than 'beyond the good', Žižek thinks Lacan was wrong here.
City Lights film
Chaplin's first formally sound film (music and environmental sounds only, no dialogue), the first stage of his resistant engagement with sound.
Fritz Lang's early sound film in which the arch-criminal is known only as a floating voice; same structure as Psycho and Chaplin's Hynkel.
Stage Fright film
Fredric Jameson's candidate for Hitchcock's best failure; famous for a false flashback, Hitchcock violates the convention that flashbacks must be true.
Topaz film
Žižek's personal candidate for Hitchcock's best failure, considered his worst film, but called 'an extraordinary movie'.
The Barber of Seville opera
Rossini's comic opera used as example of nostalgia: written after the French Revolution, it pretends the Ancien Régime still exists and is therefore already mediated by the break, a fake.
The Shortest Shadow book
Alenka Zupančič's book on Nietzsche, credited with 'practically converting' Žižek to Nietzsche after years of sharing Lacan's dismissal.
The Book of Daniel book
Doctorow's novel about the Rosenbergs, mentioned positively to clarify that Žižek's dislike of Billy Bathgate does not imply a general antipathy toward Doctorow.
Fedora film
Billy Wilder's 'total failure': an actress replaced by her daughter to appear young, discussed as philosophically significant, an example of a failure cinema theorists should take seriously.
The Marriage of Figaro opera
Mozart's Figaro is contrasted with Rossini's Barber: it clearly announces the coming revolution, while Rossini's is pure post-revolutionary nostalgia.
Modern Times film
Second stage of Chaplin's engagement: only mediated speech (radio, disc), no direct dialogue; cited as illustration of voice as alien supplement.
Charles Rosen's musicology book covering Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, source for the Humoresque Augenmusik analysis; called 'maybe even better' than The Classical Style.
The Selfish Gene book
Dawkins's book; the meme concept introduced at the end is criticized as an inconsistent postulate of freedom incompatible with the rest of the framework.
Sunset Boulevard film
Mentioned briefly in response to an audience question as another case of the voice/sound problem.
Bergson's text containing the passage on the declaration of WWI and retroactive possibility, central to Žižek's account of Hegelian temporality (accessed via Jean-Pierre Dupuy).
Under Capricorn film
French critics in the early 1950s nominated this 'embarrassing' Australian melodrama as the true Hitchcock masterpiece, cited as an example of the game of rehabilitating failures.
The text Nietzsche was working on when he collapsed, trying to prove he was always against Wagner, cited as evidence that Wagner remained a profound problem for Nietzsche to the end.
Humoresque artwork
Schumann's piano piece with three staves including an unplayed middle melody (Augenmusik); used as the central example of Deleuzian pure difference, the same notes played twice produce radical difference by changing only the virtual resonance.
People invoked 41
Charles Rosen positive
Described as possibly the greatest musicologist today; his Romantic Generation is the source for the Schumann Humoresque analysis.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as a wonderful rational choice theorist with great dialectical sense; provides the Bergson quotation and has a theory of catastrophe based on retroactive necessity.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as part of Žižek's 'Slovene gang'; her book The Shortest Shadow on Nietzsche is credited with converting him to Nietzsche.
Michel Chion positive
Described as a 'very good theorist'; his account of the floating voice in Psycho is cited in connection with the objet petit a.
Blaise Pascal positive
Cited (via Badiou) as a vanishing mediator who, by insisting on the impossible question of being modern and Orthodox Christian simultaneously, saw far more than those who simply accepted modernity.
Charlie Chaplin positive
His gradual and resistant acceptance of sound in cinema (City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator) is the paradigm case of how trauma and resistance produce deeper insights than simple acceptance.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
His point about Schoenberg's atonal revolution and tonal music's loss of innocence is cited as a paradigm case of the irreversibility of historical breaks.
Thomas Müntzer positive
The revolutionary peasant leader whose theological writing is praised; used as the dialectical counterpart to Luther in the DDR TV series anecdote.
Jacques Lacan positive
Voice as objet petit a, aim vs. goal of the drive, the Lacanian act; also noted for his almost total absence of Nietzsche, which Žižek thinks was wrong.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Žižek sides with Gould against Pinker in the debate about utilitarian vs. non-adaptive evolutionary accounts of mind.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Pure difference, repetition, virtual past used extensively to illuminate Hegel; Žižek claims Deleuze's best books (Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense) are the 'absolute Deleuze' and are actually very Hegelian.
Fritz Lang positive
His Testament of Dr. Mabuse is cited as one of the great early sound films, with the same structure as Chaplin's Great Dictator and Hitchcock's Psycho, voice without/before a body.
Steven Pinker negative
His utilitarian-evolutionary account of mind (we can't understand mind for the same reason a rabbit can't do calculus) is challenged: it fails to explain why humans constantly pursue impossible metaphysical questions.
Mentioned as someone Žižek deliberately annoys by using binary gendered examples ('I want to seduce a woman, or a man') in response to her opposition to binary logic.
Nicolas Malebranche positive
Described as 'a genius' and Žižek's favorite vanishing mediator between medieval theology and modern materialism; his occasionalism (God intervenes in every causal interaction) is read as a brilliant disclosure of Cartesian dualism's gap.
Alain Badiou positive
Introduced as someone who will 'torture you in the afternoon'; his concept of anti-philosophy and his reading of Pascal are cited approvingly.
Charles Taylor negative
His book on Hegel is described as 'one of the worst books on Hegel' and Žižek says it 'should be burned publicly'; it rehabilitates Hegel only in a watered-down historicist sense.
Billy Bathgate is called a lesser novel; Žižek specifies no ill will toward Doctorow generally, citing The Book of Daniel positively.
Bertrand Russell negative
His history of philosophy is described as 'extremely anti-Hegelian' and 'totally ridiculous' for assuming Hegel used thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
Fredric Jameson positive
The concept of vanishing mediator is credited to Jameson; also mentioned as someone Žižek planned to co-write a book with on Hitchcock's failures.
Friedrich Engels positive
Cited for predicting WWI and its aftermath (German defeat, second war) in an 1870s-80s letter; also discussed in relation to Stalinist dialectical materialism.
Described as the last Soviet leader who genuinely believed in competition with the West and a chance of winning; his 'your grandchildren will be communists' remark cited.
T. S. Eliot positive
His essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', that every truly new work of art retroactively changes the past, is cited as the best statement of Hegelian retroactive restructuring, despite Eliot being a conservative.
Arthur Schopenhauer negative
Famously hated Hegel personally; scheduled his Berlin lectures at the same time as Hegel's; represents the anti-Hegelian turn to irrational willing.
Henri Bergson positive
His Two Sources of Morality and Religion passage on the retroactive constitution of possibility when WWI was declared is central to Žižek's account of Hegelian temporality.
Richard Dawkins negative
His selfish gene framework is criticized as inconsistent: the meme concept postulates freedom that his own framework cannot account for; allied inadvertently with the Church on sexuality.
Billy Wilder positive
Sunset Boulevard mentioned briefly as a case of the voice problem; his total failure Fedora, an actress replaced by her daughter, discussed as philosophically significant.
Darian Leader positive
Described as a good British Lacanian and 'not an idiot'; his interpretation of the 'bed for two' slip is used to illustrate the drive's true aim vs. its official goal.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling negative
His critique of Hegel (positive philosophy vs. negative philosophy; Hegel fails to deduce nature) is described as the first anti-Hegelian move, claiming irrational will is more real than concepts.
Søren Kierkegaard negative
For Kierkegaard, authentic subjective decision and leap of faith cannot be covered by Hegel's abstract movement of notions.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Psycho's floating mother's voice is cited as the same structure as Lang's Mabuse; Hitchcock's failures (Topaz, Stage Fright, Under Capricorn) discussed as potentially his true masterpieces.
Joseph Stalin negative
His philosophical writing on dialectical and historical materialism exemplifies the anti-Hegelian idea that one can know the direction of history and align oneself with necessity, called a Leninist Peter the Great, a brutal modernizer.
Karl Marx positive
Invoked positively for the Grundrisse passage on anatomy of ape/man showing retroactive understanding; but also criticized when he adopts the crude anti-Hegelian 'real people vs. abstract ideas' reduction.
Jorge Luis Borges positive
A quote is referenced at the very end of the transcript (cut off) to illuminate Hegelian retroactive restructuring of the past; personally found 'too smart for his own good' sometimes.
René Descartes positive
Defended against new-age critics (like Al Gore) who blame him for ecological mechanicism; the pineal gland solution to mind-body interaction is noted as ridiculous but his dualism as important.
Sigmund Freud positive
Death drive, Wiederholungszwang, and the goal/aim distinction used throughout; Žižek argues Freud is a good Hegelian and German idealism should be read mutually with psychoanalysis.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The central figure of the lecture; Žižek argues the standard caricature (absolute idealist, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, end of history) is a screen memory, and the true Hegel is a radical thinker of retroactive necessity and absolute negativity whom even today we cannot fully think.
Immanuel Kant positive
His distinction between negative and infinite judgments is used to ground the concept of death drive and the undead; his writings on education anticipate the in-between excess of nature and culture.
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
Previously distrusted (sharing Lacan's near-total dismissal), but Alenka Zupančič's The Shortest Shadow 'practically converted' Žižek; Nietzsche-Wagner relationship discussed as unresolved for Nietzsche himself.
Thomas Aquinas negative
Žižek says he is 'totally anti-Aquinas' and considers him the great Aristotelianizer of Christianity who introduced natural-law thinking alien to authentic Christianity.
Used as example of the vanishing mediator: appeared as a return to original Christianity but achieved the most radical revolution; personally criticized for siding with the princes against Thomas Müntzer's peasant rebellion.
What it argues
Retroactive necessity: how events become possible only after they happenVanishing mediator: radical novelty emerges disguised as return to originsThe post-Hegelian break as a defensive screen memory covering Hegel's excessDeath drive as the in-between of nature and culture in sexualityVoice as objet petit a: the uncanny surplus that haunts the bodyConcrete universality versus abstract historicist mobilismHegel's dialectic versus the thesis-antithesis-synthesis caricature
Dialectical moves 9
“The new always emerges as the illusory return to origins: precisely when you pretend to return to the past, you either produce irrelevant nostalgic kitsch or achieve something radically new.”
Genuine historical novelty disguises itself as restoration; what appears as a conservative return is often the most radical revolution (Luther, Pascal).
“The post-Hegelian break is not a correction of Hegel but the opposite: it is the post-Hegelians who missed what Hegel discovered, not Hegel who failed to anticipate them.”
The apparent supersession of Hegel is actually a defensive retreat from what is most radical in his thought.
“The only legitimate criticism of Hegel is to show that Hegel is not Hegelian enough.”
The internal critique is more devastating than any external challenge: Hegel's own dialectical principle, rigorously applied, overturns his conservative moves on sexuality.
“'You are not dead' means you are alive; 'you are undead' opens a third domain beyond the binary — the space of death drive and immortality.”
The infinite judgment (Kant) generates not a simple negation but a spectral third term that escapes the life/death binary.
“Death drive is Freudian name for immortality — not the drive toward death and extinction but the insistence of something that survives beyond life and death.”
The death drive is the very opposite of what its name suggests: it is a deathless compulsion to persist.
“In Hegel, a thing becomes what it always already was — but this 'always already' is not pre-given; it is retroactively constituted once the thing becomes what it becomes.”
Hegelian eternity is not a timeless essence but a retroactive effect of temporal becoming.
“Sound in cinema was not a naturalization but the introduction of an alien, destabilizing supplement — the voice that haunts rather than belongs to the body.”
The apparent gain in realism (sound) is actually the introduction of a spectral dimension: voice as objet petit a.
“It is only at the precise moment of an event's actual emergence that it begins to always already have been possible.”
Retroactive possibility (Bergson-Žižek): possibility does not precede but is constituted by actuality.
“Sticking to the old after a historical break produces not the old thing itself but its negation: Rossini's tonal music after Schoenberg's revolution is no longer what tonal music was before — it is already mediated by the break and thus functions as its own negation.”
After a genuine historical break, returning to the old is not conservatism but a different, degraded thing entirely.
Claims 18
asserts
Hegel never used the terms thesis, antithesis, synthesis; this triad is a later invention attributed to a pupil (Karl Rosenkranz) and has no basis in Hegel's actual texts.the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad
rejects
Hegel is not a historicist in the sense of evolutionary mobilism; the zero level of historical experience is the experience of an impossibility — you cannot return to the past as if a break didn't happen.Hegel as historicist
rejects
The post-Hegelian break (Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx) is not a correction of Hegel but a desperate attempt to obliterate what Hegel actually achieved — Hegel went too far and they retreated.the post-Hegelian critique of Hegel
asserts
The standard ridiculous image of Hegel (who thought he knew the mind of God and that history ended with him) is a screen memory — a comfortable caricature concealing the truly traumatic excess of Hegelian thought.received image of Hegel
asserts
Historical necessity is always retroactive: events appear contingent while open, but once they happen they retroactively become necessary ('if Balladur wins, his victory will have been necessary').historical necessity in Hegel
reframes
Marx's statement 'the anatomy of a man is a key to the anatomy of the ape' is not teleological but anti-teleological: it shows that history is radically contingent and new forms emerge ex nihilo, not from seeds pre-existing in earlier forms.teleology and historical development in Marx
reframes
Death drive is not a will to Nirvana but the Freudian name for immortality — the insistence of something beyond life and death, exemplified by figures like vampires and the living dead.the Freudian death drive
asserts
The only legitimate criticism of Hegel is to show that Hegel is not Hegelian enough — specifically in his treatment of sexuality, where he adopts a naive culturalization hypothesis instead of recognizing the death-drive excess.Hegel's treatment of sexuality
asserts
Kant's distinction between negative judgment ('you are not dead' = you are alive) and infinite judgment ('you are undead') opens a third domain beyond simple binary opposition — the space of death drive and absolute negativity.Kantian logic of negation and the undead
rejects
Stalinist dialectical materialism is the exact opposite of authentic Marxism: its idea that one can scientifically know the direction of history and align oneself with it is precisely what Hegel's Owl-of-Minerva formula prohibits.Stalinist historical materialism
asserts
Hegel is a vanishing mediator between traditional metaphysics and post-Hegelian anti-philosophy, but not in the sense of being in-between — rather, something unique and unthinkable happened in Hegel that even today we do not know how to think.Hegel's position in the history of philosophy
asserts
The post-Hegelian turn to 'real life' against speculative philosophy (Schelling's will, Kierkegaard's leap, Marx's real men, Freud's unconscious) is the anti-philosophical move of asserting a more substantial reality behind ideas that Hegel allegedly mystifies.post-Hegelian anti-philosophy
asserts
Sexuality cannot be understood as nature gradually civilized by culture; between nature and culture there is an intermediate excess — the death drive — which is neither natural instinct nor cultural sublimation.sexuality, nature, and culture
asserts
The introduction of sound in cinema was not a naturalization but revealed voice as an alien, destabilizing supplement — the objet petit a — as Chaplin's resistance to sound and Fritz Lang's Mabuse demonstrate.sound in cinema
asserts
A truly radical historical change does not just actualize possibilities already present in the past but retroactively restructures the past itself, changing which possibilities were ever there — as T.S. Eliot argues for new works of art.radical historical change vs. ordinary change
rejects
Dawkins's concept of the meme is an inconsistent postulation of a space of freedom that his own gene-selfish framework cannot account for.Dawkins's meme concept
asserts
Hegel did not believe in eternal peace — not out of militarism but because he understood that the excess of absolute negativity always threatens to explode again despite cultural mediation.Hegel and eternal peace
asserts
Bergson's description of how the declaration of World War I retroactively became possible and necessary once it happened is the best available illustration of what Lacan means by 'an act'.the Lacanian act
Quotes 13
“The only legitimate criticism of Hegel is to show that Hegel is not Hegelian enough.”Slavoj Žižek · immanent critique of Hegel
“Hegel went too far. And I think that it is this post-anti-philosophy which does this by getting rid of Hegel, by way of constructing this ridiculous image of Hegel which for which I think we should use this Freudian term: Deckerinnerung, screen memory.”Slavoj Žižek · post-Hegelian screen memory
“Death drive is Freudian name for immortality. What Freud calls death drive is something that insists as it were beyond life and death. Figures of death drive are like vampires, living dead.”Slavoj Žižek · death drive as immortality
“'You are not dead' means you are alive. But 'you are undead' — this means you are alive as dead, a living dead. A third domain is opened of some obscene life which insists beyond life and death.”Slavoj Žižek · infinite judgment and the undead
“It is only at a precise moment of its actual emergence that it begins to always already have been.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive possibility / Bergson on WWI
“Its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once this reality emerges.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive constitution of possibility
“The zero level of historicity is the basic division, this impossibility. We experience history when we all of a sudden discover that something is no longer possible.”Slavoj Žižek · historical experience as irreversible impossibility
“For Lacan, the true satisfaction of the drive is the circular movement of the drive itself. You don't want to achieve — it's like boomerang. You don't want to hit it. You want it to come back.”Slavoj Žižek · aim vs. goal of the drive
“An act is always blind. You do something, you cannot include into it its own result. You cannot include yourself into the picture. That's why you can only discover a necessity retroactively.”Slavoj Žižek · blindness of the act / retroactive necessity
“The Owl of Minerva only takes off in the dusk — this is precisely the non-necessary, the open, contingent Hegel.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's Owl of Minerva as contingency not closure
“It's not that the situation is too complex out there. You cannot include yourself into the picture. That's the problem of self-reference.”Slavoj Žižek · self-reference and the blindness of historical action
“You repeat exactly the same line, but in such a way that what changes is not what you hear but what you don't hear.”Slavoj Žižek · pure difference / Schumann's Humoresque
“The anatomy of a man is a key to the anatomy of the ape — not teleological but deeply anti-teleological: history is contingent, new always emerges ex nihilo.”Slavoj Žižek · Marx's Grundrisse on retroactive understanding
Transcript 17 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Okay, let's start and you will get what you wanted, but I warn you: it will be more boring, systematic, repetitive, and so on. And I try to be honest, so although I promised to be a poet, to come yesterday evening, I didn't come, but sincerely, because I struggled with this, how to start with Hegel, and it's a problem. So please, maybe you will be a little bit bored. All I can say is that I will try to proceed slowly, systematically, not any kind of general introduction, just to give you an idea of some fundamental Hegelian moves, because the first thing to do, of course, is if your knowledge of Hegel is the general one that you get from textbooks, you know, German idealist, absolute idealism, he believed in a kind of a pan-logical view that you can, out of the self-movement of a notion, you can somehow develop, deduce the entire reality, in the sense of absolute knowing, the end of history, all that stuff: forget about it. Or if you have an idea that somehow the basic, as it were, matrix of the Hegelian movement, of the self-deployment of Hegelian dialectic is this infamous triad—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—forget about it. Incidentally, I hope you know that the ABC, Hegel even never used the terms. It's quite breathtaking how people don't take into account this. Hegel never used the term. It's, I think—I'm not sure—that it's Karl Rosenkranz, one of the pupils of Hegel, who putatively once used these terms. So it's quite breathtaking when you take these extremely anti-Hegelian histories of philosophy like the popular one by Bertrand Russell, where he automatically assumes: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. You find nowhere this, simply nowhere this in Hegel. Also, the idea that Hegel somehow thought that history is over with him, that he comes at the end. It's—how should I put it naively—it's empirically not true. For example, if you read closely his Philosophy of Nature, again and again he emphasizes: it is too early to say, we don't know yet enough about that, and so on. Even in the domain of history, for example, it's very interesting to read the most racist Hegel, although I claim he's much more ambiguous: the introduction to his Philosophy of History, where he deals with so-called geographic presuppositions of history. Okay, here you have Hegel, I admit it, at his worst eurocentric, because he deals with Black Africans only here as "not history proper" but geographic presuppositions of history. That's another story. But nonetheless, what is interesting here is that, for example, when he—and remind you, this was written in 1810s—when he deals with, mentions briefly, Russia, Russian Empire, and United States, he says it's too early today; next, 20th century, will be the century of these two countries. We cannot develop theory now. So at least empirically he wasn't an idiot. When he made predictions, they were usually good predictions. Incidentally, although Marxists are usually dismissed as a kind of, you know, fanatic dogmatics, sometimes they were incredibly—okay, I won't say intelligent, maybe just lucky. For example, as far as I know, I read this in an article of a—how do you call it—futurologists, guys who deal with future in a scientific way more or less, if you can. He confesses that the only guy who already in the 19th century clearly predicted World War II, not One, was Engels, Friedrich Engels. In a letter in already in, I think, late 1870s or early 1880s, when it became clear this tension because of German role, wanted more colonies and so on, and then he said: not only will probably there be somewhere in the beginning of next century a big European war, but probably Germany will find itself joined between two poles, Anglo-Saxon French and Russian; it will lose the war, and then a decade or two later, it will start a new war. Now, that's not so bad. Okay, but let's go on. Please have patience today. You can complain afterwards and we can move back to obscene stories about cinemas and what other obscenities I like to talk about, structure of toilets or whatever. Incidentally, I can be, just to start with an amusement that—I don't know if you know the story—I can really be vulgar here. Once even my Swiss guests didn't know here because once I debated here with some Swiss guys about—I warn you, this is politically incorrect, you can probably—no, but you cannot, I will, okay. Like, you know in Europe, we have each nation—no, not everybody, but most of them—are identified with a certain sexual practice. So, to be vulgar, if you say to your girlfriend "let's do it the Spanish way," it means penis between the breasts. If you say "let's do it"—you didn't know this? And you are Spanish or what? Betrayal to your country, betrayal to patriotism. And at least—is that what we call the French way? Ah, really? Ah, but it's always these paradoxes. I know, this is always like this. It's complex because, for example, it's a wonderful paradox that in my country and in Balkan, we call this mixed vegetable salad, "salad French salad." In France, they call it "Salade Macédoine." You know all these, or for example, what always intrigued me is, you know the whipped cream? In France they call it "Chantilly." Chantilly is a city there, you know. Okay, my point—you know, is this Bertrand Russell problem, does the barber shave—how do they call it in Chantilly itself? And so on and all this. Okay, my point is that, okay, so that's how it's done. I don't know, now you can again protest, but at least in my country and in Germany, I know. If you say to a girlfriend, "let's do it Italian way," it means anal penetration. Now again, am I wrong? In our country that means Greek. Except for Greek. Oh, we have other prejudices, sorry for you about Greek. For us, the main idea is that Greek guys are mostly gay. Okay, but that's typical Slavic anti-Greek prejudice, which is all dirty. What's the Slovenian way? Sorry, what's the Slovenian way? Impotent. You do it half in a sleep and then basically you just touch the girl in a half-dream and then after she awakens in the morning you try to convince her that something happened. Counting on the fact that her memory is not good and so on. No, but what I'm saying is that then of course, I was talking with here in Switzerland—no, but sorry, in Zurich, with some Swiss students and professors. We entered the topic of what would be the Swiss way? Okay, the first idea was the cynical one: if you are a man, of course, you don't even need a body, a woman; you just masturbate with money or whatever. No, but then I came to a very creative idea, which was that, what about—you know what is Swiss army knife? This, you know, ten of them. Now, can you imagine Swiss army wife? Masturbating with one of all the legs. Maybe this would be the Swiss way. This is for me, you see, real tolerant multiculturalism, where you're really open to the other culture. Okay, but okay, we have to do it. Let's start. First, Hegel and history. You know what is the standard problem with Hegel. Probably you know this about Hegel and this is even usually—I warn you, I will consciously move at a very elementary level. If you—Hegel is usually perceived as the one who asserted a kind of a universal historicist dialectical movement: nothing is stable, everything is moving, changing; there is movement not only in the domain of empirical reality but also in the domain of ideas. Ideas develop; you start with being, you go to nothing, becoming, whatever. This kind of idea of, let's call it, universal mobilism. And then some wise guys like to say, one of the most stupid things for me in the history of thought, is that: but there is a contradiction in Hegel. How could he—I mean, it's not only Friedrich Engels, it's already some young Hegelians who started this stupidity—saying: but isn't there a contradiction in Hegel? On the one hand, dialectic, everything moves, genesis, you know, to understand a thing means to understand its role, place in a global development. So to Hegel it's usually imputed, totally wrongly, this developmental evolutionary view that to understand a phenomenon is to understand its genesis. To understand what something is is to understand how this thing came to be. I mean, of course, it's totally the opposite. Marx is a true Hegelian when he says a statement which may appear teleological but it's deeply non-teleological. You know this quite surprising statement in that methodological introduction to *Grundrisse* manuscripts, when Marx says: the anatomy of a man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. That is to say, you have first to—when you are observing or trying to understand the development of a certain form, you first have to know the end result so that then retroactively, backwards, you can recognize, trace the elements which led to it. Now you will say, this is clear teleology: we begin at the end and then only backwards we can analyze it. No, it's the exact contrary. Marx's point is that precisely because history is contingent, because new always re-emerges—emerges, sorry, *ex nihilo*—no matter how you look into the ape, if you accept—okay, we can play this ultra-deep ecological view, why should man be more developed than ape—but if we somehow accept this, no matter how you analyze apes, you will not find there some elementary seed so that, you know, there is no progress. There are radically contingent cuts. So this, so again, Hegel is definitely not a historicist. And this idea of some contradiction, as they usually put it, between dialectical method—that's it's usually put in classical Marxism—as the contradiction between dialectical method and Hegelian system. Like method good, you analyze everything in its dynamics, system bad: Hegel, ho-ho, that idiot who thought with his Prussian monarchy history was at an end, he didn't and so on. So we have to reject this. But how? Easy to say, difficult to do, of course. First, Hegel in a way was a historicist, but the main feature of the authentic historical thought proper is not what we may call mobilism, this motive of fluidification or historical relativization of all forms of life. The idea that, you know, everything is historically conditioned and so on and so on and so on. Which is why, incidentally, I also—for reasons which will become clear later today I hope—totally oppose this so-called postmodern discursive historicism in the sense of, you know, in the sense precisely of anti-essentialism. In the sense of all forms of life are—emerge contingently, symbolic constructs, and so on and so on. I will try to develop later why I disagree with this. But again, so it's not this general idea of evolutionary mobilism: nothing is stable, everything moves, and so on. I think that where our historical experience begins, if I were to be asked: what is historical experience at its zero level? It's, I claim, the experience of a certain impossibility. In the sense of, after a true break, a true historical break, you cannot return to the past. You cannot go back as if nothing happened. If you do, of course you can empirically, but if you do, the same practice acquires a radically changed meaning. For example, this is a nice example from Adorno. He refers to Schoenberg's, Arnold Schoenberg, second Viennese school, atonal revolution in music. And his point, Adorno's, is that of course after this revolution took place, of course we can and we do, we have many of these modern kitsch composers, you can go on composing in the traditional tonal way. Like, who was doing this exemplarily? I don't know, mostly let's say in Russia somebody like Rachmaninoff, who consciously tried to stick to this. But Adorno's point is that the new tone, this new tonal music has lost its innocence. It is already mediated by the atonal break and thus functions already as its negation. It's no longer what it was before. What was before let's say an immediate authenticity of tonal music becomes now a kind of a fake kitsch nostalgic imitation. You get my point? It's no longer the thing itself. It's already mediated by the new thing that emerges. And I'm not saying this is always kitsch. There can be very interesting developments here. Not only this, I'm not saying we shouldn't return to the past. Hegel is much more refined here. Sometimes the other side of this thesis is its paradoxical opposite. It is that for Hegel, basically the new emerges—emerges, sorry, *ex nihilo*—almost always in the guise of an illusion of repetition. All really new things emerge as a kind of an illusory return to the origins. For example, the greatest revolution in Christianity: Martin Luther—not King, but the idiot who was licking the ass of the princes, you know. I never forgive him for, forgive Luther for, you know, when there was Thomas Müntzer, the rebellion, the big peasant rebellion, he took sides of the rich guys and said kill them like dogs, and so on and so on, no. Although there is an anecdote connected with Martin Luther, which also tells you what is wrong with this general historicism. In DDR, East Germany, that's a nice part of the history of ideas. And this here, I hope I will be able to show you what is historicist arrogance, where historicism is false. In DDR, East Germany, maybe if some of you know German culture a little bit, 20th century, you know what happened. Being afraid of losing popularity and legitimacy, starting from, you know, you know that already in the '70s some kind of economic stagnation of communist regime in Eastern Europe started. Basically till somewhere the Khrushchev era. Khrushchev is an—it's easy to make fun of Nikita Khrushchev, but there is some even nice truthful moment about him. If you read history of Soviet Union, you can immediately get it. Khrushchev was basically the last one where you can say that the ruling nomenclature somehow still believed—not that they are truly a democratic country, blah-blah, nobody believed this—but that somehow progress on their, is on their side. They believed that there is a genuine competition between them and the West and that they have a chance of winning. You remember that famous Khrushchev's visit, I think already late '50s, to the United States, where he said "Your, your grandsons will be communists," and so on. You know, like, if Brezhnev were to say this, everybody would just laugh, because it was—the but what I'm saying is that in this gradual process of losing legitimacy, something very interesting as an ideological movement started to happen. They tried to gain supplementary legitimacy by re-interpreting and appropriating their own nationalist past. For example, it's very interesting how the darkest, harshest power in KGB already started to support this Euro-Asian extreme Russian religious Orthodox nationalists, you know, this idea all bad things come from the West. And here again you can see how relative history, how you can manipulate, because I really hate them and here you can see the racism of many Western Marxists. You know, they have this big problem to explain Marxism, which started with such a nice theory, global liberation: how did it got so screwed up that it ended with a total catastrophe of Stalinism? The standard answer—totally false, I think—is Asiatic mode of production, Asiatic despotism. That the mistake was that the first revolution happened in Russia; Russia was too much part of the Asiatic world and so there the new socialist regime got, as it were, infused with a dose of Asiatic despotism because of the leading role of Soviet Union in the communist movement, they infiltrated others, blah-blah, total stupidity, totally, totally wrong. But what is interesting—I experienced this when I visited Russia—is that if you ask Russian nationalists, they will tell you exactly the opposite story, which I think has more, is closer to truth. That no, that if there is a historical model for Stalinism, it's Russian modernizers, it's the West. No wonder Stalin liked Peter the Great and those big czarist modernizers. No, if anything, Stalin was the new Peter the Great. You know what Peter the Great is? Abolish Moscow, Petersburg, extremely brutal, violent global mobilization, imposed modernization. So but let's go on. So after, in this period when they start to lose their legitimacy, especially in German Democratic Republic, they started to invent—sorry, to—so they basically tried to appropriate the entire history of their part of Germany, eastern part, Prussia, to cut a long story short. And it's how very nice, how till late '50s or even mid-'60s, Frederick the Great was dismissed as, you know, feudal bourgeois, Prussian militarism. All of a sudden, even Frederick the Great was rehabilitated as progressive bourgeois modernizer, blah-blah, and so on, no. And of course, the key element in this modernization—in this re-appropriating the past—was Martin Luther. All of a sudden he was big progressive, some of our people, and I remember seeing in the early '80s, I think even also on our TV, they did celebrating his—I don't know, 400th, I don't know what—anniversary, I don't know even of what, of life, death, probably death, I—they did a big, like I think six or ten hours mini-series of Luther's life. Of course as communists they had somehow to justify the fact which I mentioned, no, that Luther turned against the most progressive movement at that point, the peasant [unintelligible]. Incidentally, Luther did the same with the Jews, no. First he was totally pro-Jewish, claiming that Jews were right to stick to their religion because Catholicism was, you know, the horror of Babylon and so on, which I think today Rome is the horror of Babylon embodied, but that's another story. What I want to say is that so he thought Jews were right. But his idea was, but now that I returned Christianity to its origins, Jews should join us, no, should convert. They didn't, so he became even more ferociously anti-Semitic. No. Okay, but let's go on. So they had the problem to account for this. How to rehabilitate him as a truly progressive, but nonetheless taking into account his opposition to this peasant rebellion. So they have, in one installment of this series, they have an encounter of Thomas Müntzer—you know, the main and incidentally he is very interesting if you deal with theology, he's not was not just a great revolutionary leader; some German friends are telling me Thomas Müntzer is well worth reading as a theological writer; he has a wonderful reading of the Bible as an allegory to be used for ongoing political struggle and so on and so on. So they talk, and it's breathtaking naivety, historicist. Müntzer says: fuck you, but you said original Christianity, return, but that's what it did, no class, blah-blah. And Luther answers him with some kind of a almost a kind of a Marxist *avant la lettre* where he tells Müntzer: you are right, but you want already a further popular workers' revolution, but the forces of production are not yet enough developed for that. We first need a bourgeois revolution with personal freedom, property, and only after a couple of hundreds of years this will develop, it will be po—you know, this is the impossible position. Like, this is what Hegel strictly prohibits. Hegel's absolute knowledge is not this. It's precisely this closure when it's clear that you are totally caught in your time, that you cannot, there is no way, how should I put it, to step on your shoulder and to see yourself objectively as what you are. Which is why I think Hegel is much more materialist and in this sense totally incompatible with the standard later Orthodox Stalinist historical-dialectical materialism, where what's the standard position of dialectical-historical materialism? It's not an engaged position, it's based on objective knowledge. I think if you can really understand what Stalin was about, you should read—you get it everywhere on the internet—his big, ha-ha, philosophical writing on dialectical and historical materialism, where he explains why Marxist-Marxist theorists joined the workers and contributed to workers' struggle. He said like this: he said that at the end of 19th century, the working class was still a minority in Russia. But Marxist scientists saw that although farmers and others were a majority, workers had the great future, they saw the future development, they saw which way the history is running, so they decided to join the winning side, as it were. This is totally anti-authentic Marxist. This idea that first you objectively establish the historical tendency towards end of capitalism, working-class revolution, and then you, knowing the tendency of history, posit yourself—you as a particular historical agent as an instrument of realizing this historical necessity. This is what Hegel totally prohibits. That's what Hegel aims at with his well-known, usually interpreted as conservative saying that, you know, at the end of his introduction to *Philosophy of Right*, that the Owl of Minerva only takes off in the dusk, and so on. That this is precisely the non-necessary, the open, contingent Hegel. For Hegel, an act is always blind. You do something, you cannot include into it, you cannot include into the act as it were its own result. Not—and now we come to the crucial point—not because history is too complex and we don't know what—but it's not out there that the situation is too complex. It's here: you cannot, you know, it's the problem of self-reference, as it were, you cannot include yourself into the picture. That's why, again, you can only discover a necessity retroactively. And this, as I will try to show today, this is also, it's absolutely crucial how to read Hegel's historical necessity. It's always a retroactive necessity. It's not that history is some process which appears to us, participants, as contingent, but there is some kind of a reason in history, absolute hidden subject, who where it is written in advance what is history and pulls the strings. No, it—necessity emerges in a retroactive way. There are—how should I put it—once things happen, they retroactively become necessary. In many of my books, especially in this obscenity that you have there, I think I quote this wonderful passage from my favorite rational choice theoretician, who is a really intelligent guy, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who to establish this kind of a strange link between necessity and contingency quotes a wonderful comment in *Le Monde*—okay, twenty years ago there were elections in France, it looks for some time that Edouard Balladur, who was Prime Minister under Chirac, will maybe, blah-blah. Okay. So *Le Monde* wrote something wonderful. It wrote: if, if Monsieur Balladur will win the next preliminary election, then his victory will be necessary. You know, like, if something happens, but it's contingent if it happens or not, then retroactively the link is established, it becomes necessary. Okay, how does this work? We will go on. Let me just go back to that point. So, again, the zero level of historicity is this basic division, this impossibility. We experience history when we all of a sudden discover that something is no longer possible. The way we were doing things. Of course, it's possible, but it becomes a fake in a way. You know, okay if you like history of music, this would be a wonderful example: Rossini. Rossini is clear regression. Rossini, you know that Giacomo Rossini, the *Barber of Seville*. You know that he was active before and after with boring serious operas, but he is well-known from his comic operas, all written more or less in the era of He was the pure composer of Restoration. The whole ideological point of his operas is: let's pretend that French Revolution didn't happen. Let's pretend that we still live in the *ancien régime*. You can detect this clearly if you compare his *Barber of Seville* with the other figure of peace, Mozart. Mozart's *Figaro* piece is clearly announcing revolution. This one is this pure nostalgia. In this sense, of course—in this sense it's a fake. Which is why we should be very attentive when philosophers pretend to return. Especially in modern European philosophy. Of course, everybody knows the big break is Kant, Kant's transcendental revolution. And again and again, philosophers try to play the game of: let's write as if Kant didn't exist. For example, Deleuze says somewhere this openly. He says: my ultimate goal is to, to return to the age of Leibniz, Spinoza, and so on. To write philosophy, to do philosophy in this pre-Kantian systematic way as if Kant didn't exist. Of course, it is easy to show in a close analysis that this cannot be done. That—that—now I come back to this point of Luther, that precisely when you do this, it can either be kitsch nostalgia or it can announce an even more radical revolution. And this would be the nicest point of Hegelian theory of history: that usually the new emerges precisely because you cannot return to the past. When you pretend to return to the past, you either are simply an irrelevant—historically irrelevant—nostalgic kitsch, or you really do something radically new. For example, again, Luther, as we all know, he didn't perceive himself as a revolutionary but on the contrary, returning to the original blah-blah, and he achieved what is arguably the most radical revolution in the history of Christianity. The same goes, for example—this is a nice example of what is historicity—Pascal. This is why Alain Badiou, Badiou who will torture you in the afternoon, likes Pascal. He wrote, I think somewhere in his *Being and Event*, a very nice analysis of Pascal where he says: there was in Pascal's era already this modernity, Galilean science, and so on, all that. Liberals, early rationalists simply endorsed modernity. Pascal asked a totally different question. His question was: how can one be modern while still remain an Orthodox Christian? And precisely because he insisted on this paradoxical, impossible task, precisely because he didn't simply accept modernity, he is much more read today; he saw much more. Not only in the sense of he had a better understanding of—of modernity, he even saw some limits of modernity and so on and so on. It's the same if you know in the history of cinema. This is historicity. You remember when sound was introduced? It is absolutely clear that it's those who were traumatized by sound, who resisted to it, that got immediately much deeper intuition into what does sound mean in cinema. For example, this is why I love the early sound Charlie Chaplin movies. You know that he was totally traumatized by sound and you know how you can exactly isolate in four stages—three or four—the his gradual acceptance of sound. His first formally sound film—in the sense that it had a soundtrack—was *City Lights*. There, it's only music and environmental sounds, you know, a car driving, pop, a ball falling down, but all the dialogues are mute and so on, he resists sound. Then you get *Modern Times*, a first compromise with speech. You hear speech, but if you saw the movie you remember, all the speech you hear there is a speech from the media within the narrative, like you hear someone talking on the radio, you hear someone singing from a—from a—from a or whatever disc. You don't hear no immediate sounds. The first full sound film, in the sense that actors are talking, is *The Great Dictator*. But it's worth seeing because there you have a kind of an implicit meta-theory of sound, where—you know the movie, I mean it's—my god, it's one of the absolute movies I think. He sings in the end of Modern Times when he dances in the café. Does he sing? Yes, he sings, I've [unintelligible]. Ah really? Ah but it's always these paradoxes. I know. [unintelligible] you know I talk about movies, I don't see them. [unintelligible]. But I was right, I hope that before that he doesn't. But he sings, like he's [unintelligible]. But his voice you hear? Yes, I'm almost positive it was [unintelligible]. Maybe, you got me here. Okay. What happens in—did you notice how the figure of the tramp is split into two, played by two, in—in—in *The Great Dictator*? You have the poor Jewish barber, who is, although he talks, he is basically the old silent figure, the old tramp. And then you have the bad guy played also by Chaplin, Hynkel, the dictator. And it's clear that the opposition here is between the good tramp, the old Chaplin, and the new evil figure, because Hynkel is already introduced as the embodiment of his voice. I think even maybe the first time, I'm not sure, you see Hynkel when the tramp is taking his girlfriend—played by his wife of course, Paulette Goddard—on—on a stroll in—in the ghetto and all of a sudden from loudspeakers you hear this terrible, obscene—voice of Hynkel, Hitler, or the dictator shouting. And it's clear that the sound is precisely—and then you see Hitler's—Hynkel's face, but a kind of a totally distorted face as if a face distorted by sound. It's not, in the case of dictator Hynkel, it's not the sound, the voice, which is emitted by the body; it's in a way the body which is controlled or just materializes the sound. And if you read the film in this way, it's not such a simple film as it is sometimes dismissed; you encounter an incredible amount of wonderful ambiguities. For example—for example how perversely Hynkel relates—Hynkel-Hitler figure relates to speech. You remember there are some wonderful scenes, one is where Hynkel dictates to his secretary and Chaplin plays wonderfully on a total gap, non-correspondence between his dictation and what happens. For example, once he says three-four words and the secretary types for one minute. Then he goes on for two minutes and the secretary does *ta-ta*, two sounds. And then—and then, as if playing with your spectators' deceived expectations, the Hynkel figure said, "Oh, something is wrong," looks at what the girl typed and says, "Oh-oh, okay, you did it right," and so on. Or you remember when Hynkel has a speech—it's a wonderful speech, total obscenity of a speech—you don't understand anything, only from time to time you identify some totally vulgar, common word like Wiener schnitzel, Apfelstrudel, or things like that and so on. So what he was aware—is that something very deep—is that human voice is never simply a property of us as a body; that there is always a kind of a ventriloquist aspect to it. That voice is potentially what Lacan calls—what Lacan calls—the *objet petit a*: that, how should I put it, partial organ within you which controls you, a potentially destabilizing, a foreign, foreign intruder. Who, and this is how he plays with voice. It's a wonderful scene in that beginning when we first hear Hynkel's voice, where—he is walking with the girl and then a Nazi guy starts to chase them, and then how the whole scene is a kind of a ballet dominated by Hitler's voice, you know, when Hitler goes slowly with the voice, they also go—so this idea of a voice not as a spontaneous, realistic expression: that's what Chaplin saw already. And it's interesting how other intelligent directors also saw, like one of the great early sound movies was Fritz Lang's *Testament of Dr. Mabuse*, where the topic is exactly the same: Mabuse the arch-criminal is known as the voice; the problem of the entire film is exactly the same as Hitchcock's *Psycho* decades later. You have a free-floating voice to find a body for this voice. And this is basically as Michel Chion, a very good theorist, elaborated, the problem of Hitchcock's *Psycho*. Is the problem of the voice, mother's voice, floating around. And the problem is whose voice is this, to find the body to this voice. So you see my point—my point is that Chaplin's idea is very Freudian, one naively Freudian: that the sound—sorry, silent movie universe was a kind of an oral-anal pre-sexual pre-superego flat universe of, like cartoons of, undead people where life goes on indefinitely, you know, it's a little bit like in cartoons, in old those Max Sennett comedies, you know, you can be hit, you can be run over, you stand up, it always goes on, there is no death, there is no sexuality basically, although there are and I love them—it's maybe
Okay, let's start and you will get what you wanted, but I warn you: it will be more boring, systematic, repetitive, and so on. And I try to be honest, so although I promised to be a poet, to come yesterday evening, I didn't come, but sincerely, because I struggled with this, how to start with Hegel, and it's a problem. So please, maybe you will be a little bit bored. All I can say is that I will try to proceed slowly, systematically, not any kind of general introduction, just to give you an idea of some fundamental Hegelian moves, because the first thing to do, of course, is if your knowledge of Hegel is the general one that you get from textbooks, you know, German idealist, absolute idealism, he believed in a kind of a pan-logical view that you can, out of the self-movement of a notion, you can somehow develop, deduce the entire reality, in the sense of absolute knowing, the end of history, all that stuff: forget about it. Or if you have an idea that somehow the basic, as it were, matrix of the Hegelian movement, of the self-deployment of Hegelian dialectic is this infamous triad—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—forget about it. Incidentally, I hope you know that the ABC, Hegel even never used the terms. It's quite breathtaking how people don't take into account this. Hegel never used the term. It's, I think—I'm not sure—that it's Karl Rosenkranz, one of the pupils of Hegel, who putatively once used these terms. So it's quite breathtaking when you take these extremely anti-Hegelian histories of philosophy like the popular one by Bertrand Russell, where he automatically assumes: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. You find nowhere this, simply nowhere this in Hegel. Also, the idea that Hegel somehow thought that history is over with him, that he comes at the end. It's—how should I put it naively—it's empirically not true. For example, if you read closely his Philosophy of Nature, again and again he emphasizes: it is too early to say, we don't know yet enough about that, and so on. Even in the domain of history, for example, it's very interesting to read the most racist Hegel, although I claim he's much more ambiguous: the introduction to his Philosophy of History, where he deals with so-called geographic presuppositions of history. Okay, here you have Hegel, I admit it, at his worst eurocentric, because he deals with Black Africans only here as "not history proper" but geographic presuppositions of history. That's another story. But nonetheless, what is interesting here is that, for example, when he—and remind you, this was written in 1810s—when he deals with, mentions briefly, Russia, Russian Empire, and United States, he says it's too early today; next, 20th century, will be the century of these two countries. We cannot develop theory now. So at least empirically he wasn't an idiot. When he made predictions, they were usually good predictions. Incidentally, although Marxists are usually dismissed as a kind of, you know, fanatic dogmatics, sometimes they were incredibly—okay, I won't say intelligent, maybe just lucky. For example, as far as I know, I read this in an article of a—how do you call it—futurologists, guys who deal with future in a scientific way more or less, if you can. He confesses that the only guy who already in the 19th century clearly predicted World War II, not One, was Engels, Friedrich Engels. In a letter in already in, I think, late 1870s or early 1880s, when it became clear this tension because of German role, wanted more colonies and so on, and then he said: not only will probably there be somewhere in the beginning of next century a big European war, but probably Germany will find itself joined between two poles, Anglo-Saxon French and Russian; it will lose the war, and then a decade or two later, it will start a new war. Now, that's not so bad. Okay, but let's go on. Please have patience today. You can complain afterwards and we can move back to obscene stories about cinemas and what other obscenities I like to talk about, structure of toilets or whatever. Incidentally, I can be, just to start with an amusement that—I don't know if you know the story—I can really be vulgar here. Once even my Swiss guests didn't know here because once I debated here with some Swiss guys about—I warn you, this is politically incorrect, you can probably—no, but you cannot, I will, okay. Like, you know in Europe, we have each nation—no, not everybody, but most of them—are identified with a certain sexual practice. So, to be vulgar, if you say to your girlfriend "let's do it the Spanish way," it means penis between the breasts. If you say "let's do it"—you didn't know this? And you are Spanish or what? Betrayal to your country, betrayal to patriotism. And at least—is that what we call the French way? Ah, really? Ah, but it's always these paradoxes. I know, this is always like this. It's complex because, for example, it's a wonderful paradox that in my country and in Balkan, we call this mixed vegetable salad, "salad French salad." In France, they call it "Salade Macédoine." You know all these, or for example, what always intrigued me is, you know the whipped cream? In France they call it "Chantilly." Chantilly is a city there, you know. Okay, my point—you know, is this Bertrand Russell problem, does the barber shave—how do they call it in Chantilly itself? And so on and all this. Okay, my point is that, okay, so that's how it's done. I don't know, now you can again protest, but at least in my country and in Germany, I know. If you say to a girlfriend, "let's do it Italian way," it means anal penetration. Now again, am I wrong? In our country that means Greek. Except for Greek. Oh, we have other prejudices, sorry for you about Greek. For us, the main idea is that Greek guys are mostly gay. Okay, but that's typical Slavic anti-Greek prejudice, which is all dirty. What's the Slovenian way? Sorry, what's the Slovenian way? Impotent. You do it half in a sleep and then basically you just touch the girl in a half-dream and then after she awakens in the morning you try to convince her that something happened. Counting on the fact that her memory is not good and so on. No, but what I'm saying is that then of course, I was talking with here in Switzerland—no, but sorry, in Zurich, with some Swiss students and professors. We entered the topic of what would be the Swiss way? Okay, the first idea was the cynical one: if you are a man, of course, you don't even need a body, a woman; you just masturbate with money or whatever. No, but then I came to a very creative idea, which was that, what about—you know what is Swiss army knife? This, you know, ten of them. Now, can you imagine Swiss army wife? Masturbating with one of all the legs. Maybe this would be the Swiss way. This is for me, you see, real tolerant multiculturalism, where you're really open to the other culture. Okay, but okay, we have to do it. Let's start. First, Hegel and history. You know what is the standard problem with Hegel. Probably you know this about Hegel and this is even usually—I warn you, I will consciously move at a very elementary level. If you—Hegel is usually perceived as the one who asserted a kind of a universal historicist dialectical movement: nothing is stable, everything is moving, changing; there is movement not only in the domain of empirical reality but also in the domain of ideas. Ideas develop; you start with being, you go to nothing, becoming, whatever. This kind of idea of, let's call it, universal mobilism. And then some wise guys like to say, one of the most stupid things for me in the history of thought, is that: but there is a contradiction in Hegel. How could he—I mean, it's not only Friedrich Engels, it's already some young Hegelians who started this stupidity—saying: but isn't there a contradiction in Hegel? On the one hand, dialectic, everything moves, genesis, you know, to understand a thing means to understand its role, place in a global development. So to Hegel it's usually imputed, totally wrongly, this developmental evolutionary view that to understand a phenomenon is to understand its genesis. To understand what something is is to understand how this thing came to be. I mean, of course, it's totally the opposite. Marx is a true Hegelian when he says a statement which may appear teleological but it's deeply non-teleological. You know this quite surprising statement in that methodological introduction to *Grundrisse* manuscripts, when Marx says: the anatomy of a man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. That is to say, you have first to—when you are observing or trying to understand the development of a certain form, you first have to know the end result so that then retroactively, backwards, you can recognize, trace the elements which led to it. Now you will say, this is clear teleology: we begin at the end and then only backwards we can analyze it. No, it's the exact contrary. Marx's point is that precisely because history is contingent, because new always re-emerges—emerges, sorry, *ex nihilo*—no matter how you look into the ape, if you accept—okay, we can play this ultra-deep ecological view, why should man be more developed than ape—but if we somehow accept this, no matter how you analyze apes, you will not find there some elementary seed so that, you know, there is no progress. There are radically contingent cuts. So this, so again, Hegel is definitely not a historicist. And this idea of some contradiction, as they usually put it, between dialectical method—that's it's usually put in classical Marxism—as the contradiction between dialectical method and Hegelian system. Like method good, you analyze everything in its dynamics, system bad: Hegel, ho-ho, that idiot who thought with his Prussian monarchy history was at an end, he didn't and so on. So we have to reject this. But how? Easy to say, difficult to do, of course. First, Hegel in a way was a historicist, but the main feature of the authentic historical thought proper is not what we may call mobilism, this motive of fluidification or historical relativization of all forms of life. The idea that, you know, everything is historically conditioned and so on and so on and so on. Which is why, incidentally, I also—for reasons which will become clear later today I hope—totally oppose this so-called postmodern discursive historicism in the sense of, you know, in the sense precisely of anti-essentialism. In the sense of all forms of life are—emerge contingently, symbolic constructs, and so on and so on. I will try to develop later why I disagree with this. But again, so it's not this general idea of evolutionary mobilism: nothing is stable, everything moves, and so on. I think that where our historical experience begins, if I were to be asked: what is historical experience at its zero level? It's, I claim, the experience of a certain impossibility. In the sense of, after a true break, a true historical break, you cannot return to the past. You cannot go back as if nothing happened. If you do, of course you can empirically, but if you do, the same practice acquires a radically changed meaning. For example, this is a nice example from Adorno. He refers to Schoenberg's, Arnold Schoenberg, second Viennese school, atonal revolution in music. And his point, Adorno's, is that of course after this revolution took place, of course we can and we do, we have many of these modern kitsch composers, you can go on composing in the traditional tonal way. Like, who was doing this exemplarily? I don't know, mostly let's say in Russia somebody like Rachmaninoff, who consciously tried to stick to this. But Adorno's point is that the new tone, this new tonal music has lost its innocence. It is already mediated by the atonal break and thus functions already as its negation. It's no longer what it was before. What was before let's say an immediate authenticity of tonal music becomes now a kind of a fake kitsch nostalgic imitation. You get my point? It's no longer the thing itself. It's already mediated by the new thing that emerges. And I'm not saying this is always kitsch. There can be very interesting developments here. Not only this, I'm not saying we shouldn't return to the past. Hegel is much more refined here. Sometimes the other side of this thesis is its paradoxical opposite. It is that for Hegel, basically the new emerges—emerges, sorry, *ex nihilo*—almost always in the guise of an illusion of repetition. All really new things emerge as a kind of an illusory return to the origins. For example, the greatest revolution in Christianity: Martin Luther—not King, but the idiot who was licking the ass of the princes, you know. I never forgive him for, forgive Luther for, you know, when there was Thomas Müntzer, the rebellion, the big peasant rebellion, he took sides of the rich guys and said kill them like dogs, and so on and so on, no. Although there is an anecdote connected with Martin Luther, which also tells you what is wrong with this general historicism. In DDR, East Germany, that's a nice part of the history of ideas. And this here, I hope I will be able to show you what is historicist arrogance, where historicism is false. In DDR, East Germany, maybe if some of you know German culture a little bit, 20th century, you know what happened. Being afraid of losing popularity and legitimacy, starting from, you know, you know that already in the '70s some kind of economic stagnation of communist regime in Eastern Europe started. Basically till somewhere the Khrushchev era. Khrushchev is an—it's easy to make fun of Nikita Khrushchev, but there is some even nice truthful moment about him. If you read history of Soviet Union, you can immediately get it. Khrushchev was basically the last one where you can say that the ruling nomenclature somehow still believed—not that they are truly a democratic country, blah-blah, nobody believed this—but that somehow progress on their, is on their side. They believed that there is a genuine competition between them and the West and that they have a chance of winning. You remember that famous Khrushchev's visit, I think already late '50s, to the United States, where he said "Your, your grandsons will be communists," and so on. You know, like, if Brezhnev were to say this, everybody would just laugh, because it was—the but what I'm saying is that in this gradual process of losing legitimacy, something very interesting as an ideological movement started to happen. They tried to gain supplementary legitimacy by re-interpreting and appropriating their own nationalist past. For example, it's very interesting how the darkest, harshest power in KGB already started to support this Euro-Asian extreme Russian religious Orthodox nationalists, you know, this idea all bad things come from the West. And here again you can see how relative history, how you can manipulate, because I really hate them and here you can see the racism of many Western Marxists. You know, they have this big problem to explain Marxism, which started with such a nice theory, global liberation: how did it got so screwed up that it ended with a total catastrophe of Stalinism? The standard answer—totally false, I think—is Asiatic mode of production, Asiatic despotism. That the mistake was that the first revolution happened in Russia; Russia was too much part of the Asiatic world and so there the new socialist regime got, as it were, infused with a dose of Asiatic despotism because of the leading role of Soviet Union in the communist movement, they infiltrated others, blah-blah, total stupidity, totally, totally wrong. But what is interesting—I experienced this when I visited Russia—is that if you ask Russian nationalists, they will tell you exactly the opposite story, which I think has more, is closer to truth. That no, that if there is a historical model for Stalinism, it's Russian modernizers, it's the West. No wonder Stalin liked Peter the Great and those big czarist modernizers. No, if anything, Stalin was the new Peter the Great. You know what Peter the Great is? Abolish Moscow, Petersburg, extremely brutal, violent global mobilization, imposed modernization. So but let's go on. So after, in this period when they start to lose their legitimacy, especially in German Democratic Republic, they started to invent—sorry, to—so they basically tried to appropriate the entire history of their part of Germany, eastern part, Prussia, to cut a long story short. And it's how very nice, how till late '50s or even mid-'60s, Frederick the Great was dismissed as, you know, feudal bourgeois, Prussian militarism. All of a sudden, even Frederick the Great was rehabilitated as progressive bourgeois modernizer, blah-blah, and so on, no. And of course, the key element in this modernization—in this re-appropriating the past—was Martin Luther. All of a sudden he was big progressive, some of our people, and I remember seeing in the early '80s, I think even also on our TV, they did celebrating his—I don't know, 400th, I don't know what—anniversary, I don't know even of what, of life, death, probably death, I—they did a big, like I think six or ten hours mini-series of Luther's life. Of course as communists they had somehow to justify the fact which I mentioned, no, that Luther turned against the most progressive movement at that point, the peasant [unintelligible]. Incidentally, Luther did the same with the Jews, no. First he was totally pro-Jewish, claiming that Jews were right to stick to their religion because Catholicism was, you know, the horror of Babylon and so on, which I think today Rome is the horror of Babylon embodied, but that's another story. What I want to say is that so he thought Jews were right. But his idea was, but now that I returned Christianity to its origins, Jews should join us, no, should convert. They didn't, so he became even more ferociously anti-Semitic. No. Okay, but let's go on. So they had the problem to account for this. How to rehabilitate him as a truly progressive, but nonetheless taking into account his opposition to this peasant rebellion. So they have, in one installment of this series, they have an encounter of Thomas Müntzer—you know, the main and incidentally he is very interesting if you deal with theology, he's not was not just a great revolutionary leader; some German friends are telling me Thomas Müntzer is well worth reading as a theological writer; he has a wonderful reading of the Bible as an allegory to be used for ongoing political struggle and so on and so on. So they talk, and it's breathtaking naivety, historicist. Müntzer says: fuck you, but you said original Christianity, return, but that's what it did, no class, blah-blah. And Luther answers him with some kind of a almost a kind of a Marxist *avant la lettre* where he tells Müntzer: you are right, but you want already a further popular workers' revolution, but the forces of production are not yet enough developed for that. We first need a bourgeois revolution with personal freedom, property, and only after a couple of hundreds of years this will develop, it will be po—you know, this is the impossible position. Like, this is what Hegel strictly prohibits. Hegel's absolute knowledge is not this. It's precisely this closure when it's clear that you are totally caught in your time, that you cannot, there is no way, how should I put it, to step on your shoulder and to see yourself objectively as what you are. Which is why I think Hegel is much more materialist and in this sense totally incompatible with the standard later Orthodox Stalinist historical-dialectical materialism, where what's the standard position of dialectical-historical materialism? It's not an engaged position, it's based on objective knowledge. I think if you can really understand what Stalin was about, you should read—you get it everywhere on the internet—his big, ha-ha, philosophical writing on dialectical and historical materialism, where he explains why Marxist-Marxist theorists joined the workers and contributed to workers' struggle. He said like this: he said that at the end of 19th century, the working class was still a minority in Russia. But Marxist scientists saw that although farmers and others were a majority, workers had the great future, they saw the future development, they saw which way the history is running, so they decided to join the winning side, as it were. This is totally anti-authentic Marxist. This idea that first you objectively establish the historical tendency towards end of capitalism, working-class revolution, and then you, knowing the tendency of history, posit yourself—you as a particular historical agent as an instrument of realizing this historical necessity. This is what Hegel totally prohibits. That's what Hegel aims at with his well-known, usually interpreted as conservative saying that, you know, at the end of his introduction to *Philosophy of Right*, that the Owl of Minerva only takes off in the dusk, and so on. That this is precisely the non-necessary, the open, contingent Hegel. For Hegel, an act is always blind. You do something, you cannot include into it, you cannot include into the act as it were its own result. Not—and now we come to the crucial point—not because history is too complex and we don't know what—but it's not out there that the situation is too complex. It's here: you cannot, you know, it's the problem of self-reference, as it were, you cannot include yourself into the picture. That's why, again, you can only discover a necessity retroactively. And this, as I will try to show today, this is also, it's absolutely crucial how to read Hegel's historical necessity. It's always a retroactive necessity. It's not that history is some process which appears to us, participants, as contingent, but there is some kind of a reason in history, absolute hidden subject, who where it is written in advance what is history and pulls the strings. No, it—necessity emerges in a retroactive way. There are—how should I put it—once things happen, they retroactively become necessary. In many of my books, especially in this obscenity that you have there, I think I quote this wonderful passage from my favorite rational choice theoretician, who is a really intelligent guy, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who to establish this kind of a strange link between necessity and contingency quotes a wonderful comment in *Le Monde*—okay, twenty years ago there were elections in France, it looks for some time that Edouard Balladur, who was Prime Minister under Chirac, will maybe, blah-blah. Okay. So *Le Monde* wrote something wonderful. It wrote: if, if Monsieur Balladur will win the next preliminary election, then his victory will be necessary. You know, like, if something happens, but it's contingent if it happens or not, then retroactively the link is established, it becomes necessary. Okay, how does this work? We will go on. Let me just go back to that point. So, again, the zero level of historicity is this basic division, this impossibility. We experience history when we all of a sudden discover that something is no longer possible. The way we were doing things. Of course, it's possible, but it becomes a fake in a way. You know, okay if you like history of music, this would be a wonderful example: Rossini. Rossini is clear regression. Rossini, you know that Giacomo Rossini, the *Barber of Seville*. You know that he was active before and after with boring serious operas, but he is well-known from his comic operas, all written more or less in the era of He was the pure composer of Restoration. The whole ideological point of his operas is: let's pretend that French Revolution didn't happen. Let's pretend that we still live in the *ancien régime*. You can detect this clearly if you compare his *Barber of Seville* with the other figure of peace, Mozart. Mozart's *Figaro* piece is clearly announcing revolution. This one is this pure nostalgia. In this sense, of course—in this sense it's a fake. Which is why we should be very attentive when philosophers pretend to return. Especially in modern European philosophy. Of course, everybody knows the big break is Kant, Kant's transcendental revolution. And again and again, philosophers try to play the game of: let's write as if Kant didn't exist. For example, Deleuze says somewhere this openly. He says: my ultimate goal is to, to return to the age of Leibniz, Spinoza, and so on. To write philosophy, to do philosophy in this pre-Kantian systematic way as if Kant didn't exist. Of course, it is easy to show in a close analysis that this cannot be done. That—that—now I come back to this point of Luther, that precisely when you do this, it can either be kitsch nostalgia or it can announce an even more radical revolution. And this would be the nicest point of Hegelian theory of history: that usually the new emerges precisely because you cannot return to the past. When you pretend to return to the past, you either are simply an irrelevant—historically irrelevant—nostalgic kitsch, or you really do something radically new. For example, again, Luther, as we all know, he didn't perceive himself as a revolutionary but on the contrary, returning to the original blah-blah, and he achieved what is arguably the most radical revolution in the history of Christianity. The same goes, for example—this is a nice example of what is historicity—Pascal. This is why Alain Badiou, Badiou who will torture you in the afternoon, likes Pascal. He wrote, I think somewhere in his *Being and Event*, a very nice analysis of Pascal where he says: there was in Pascal's era already this modernity, Galilean science, and so on, all that. Liberals, early rationalists simply endorsed modernity. Pascal asked a totally different question. His question was: how can one be modern while still remain an Orthodox Christian? And precisely because he insisted on this paradoxical, impossible task, precisely because he didn't simply accept modernity, he is much more read today; he saw much more. Not only in the sense of he had a better understanding of—of modernity, he even saw some limits of modernity and so on and so on. It's the same if you know in the history of cinema. This is historicity. You remember when sound was introduced? It is absolutely clear that it's those who were traumatized by sound, who resisted to it, that got immediately much deeper intuition into what does sound mean in cinema. For example, this is why I love the early sound Charlie Chaplin movies. You know that he was totally traumatized by sound and you know how you can exactly isolate in four stages—three or four—the his gradual acceptance of sound. His first formally sound film—in the sense that it had a soundtrack—was *City Lights*. There, it's only music and environmental sounds, you know, a car driving, pop, a ball falling down, but all the dialogues are mute and so on, he resists sound. Then you get *Modern Times*, a first compromise with speech. You hear speech, but if you saw the movie you remember, all the speech you hear there is a speech from the media within the narrative, like you hear someone talking on the radio, you hear someone singing from a—from a—from a or whatever disc. You don't hear no immediate sounds. The first full sound film, in the sense that actors are talking, is *The Great Dictator*. But it's worth seeing because there you have a kind of an implicit meta-theory of sound, where—you know the movie, I mean it's—my god, it's one of the absolute movies I think. He sings in the end of Modern Times when he dances in the café. Does he sing? Yes, he sings, I've [unintelligible]. Ah really? Ah but it's always these paradoxes. I know. [unintelligible] you know I talk about movies, I don't see them. [unintelligible]. But I was right, I hope that before that he doesn't. But he sings, like he's [unintelligible]. But his voice you hear? Yes, I'm almost positive it was [unintelligible]. Maybe, you got me here. Okay. What happens in—did you notice how the figure of the tramp is split into two, played by two, in—in—in *The Great Dictator*? You have the poor Jewish barber, who is, although he talks, he is basically the old silent figure, the old tramp. And then you have the bad guy played also by Chaplin, Hynkel, the dictator. And it's clear that the opposition here is between the good tramp, the old Chaplin, and the new evil figure, because Hynkel is already introduced as the embodiment of his voice. I think even maybe the first time, I'm not sure, you see Hynkel when the tramp is taking his girlfriend—played by his wife of course, Paulette Goddard—on—on a stroll in—in the ghetto and all of a sudden from loudspeakers you hear this terrible, obscene—voice of Hynkel, Hitler, or the dictator shouting. And it's clear that the sound is precisely—and then you see Hitler's—Hynkel's face, but a kind of a totally distorted face as if a face distorted by sound. It's not, in the case of dictator Hynkel, it's not the sound, the voice, which is emitted by the body; it's in a way the body which is controlled or just materializes the sound. And if you read the film in this way, it's not such a simple film as it is sometimes dismissed; you encounter an incredible amount of wonderful ambiguities. For example—for example how perversely Hynkel relates—Hynkel-Hitler figure relates to speech. You remember there are some wonderful scenes, one is where Hynkel dictates to his secretary and Chaplin plays wonderfully on a total gap, non-correspondence between his dictation and what happens. For example, once he says three-four words and the secretary types for one minute. Then he goes on for two minutes and the secretary does *ta-ta*, two sounds. And then—and then, as if playing with your spectators' deceived expectations, the Hynkel figure said, "Oh, something is wrong," looks at what the girl typed and says, "Oh-oh, okay, you did it right," and so on. Or you remember when Hynkel has a speech—it's a wonderful speech, total obscenity of a speech—you don't understand anything, only from time to time you identify some totally vulgar, common word like Wiener schnitzel, Apfelstrudel, or things like that and so on. So what he was aware—is that something very deep—is that human voice is never simply a property of us as a body; that there is always a kind of a ventriloquist aspect to it. That voice is potentially what Lacan calls—what Lacan calls—the *objet petit a*: that, how should I put it, partial organ within you which controls you, a potentially destabilizing, a foreign, foreign intruder. Who, and this is how he plays with voice. It's a wonderful scene in that beginning when we first hear Hynkel's voice, where—he is walking with the girl and then a Nazi guy starts to chase them, and then how the whole scene is a kind of a ballet dominated by Hitler's voice, you know, when Hitler goes slowly with the voice, they also go—so this idea of a voice not as a spontaneous, realistic expression: that's what Chaplin saw already. And it's interesting how other intelligent directors also saw, like one of the great early sound movies was Fritz Lang's *Testament of Dr. Mabuse*, where the topic is exactly the same: Mabuse the arch-criminal is known as the voice; the problem of the entire film is exactly the same as Hitchcock's *Psycho* decades later. You have a free-floating voice to find a body for this voice. And this is basically as Michel Chion, a very good theorist, elaborated, the problem of Hitchcock's *Psycho*. Is the problem of the voice, mother's voice, floating around. And the problem is whose voice is this, to find the body to this voice. So you see my point—my point is that Chaplin's idea is very Freudian, one naively Freudian: that the sound—sorry, silent movie universe was a kind of an oral-anal pre-sexual pre-superego flat universe of, like cartoons of, undead people where life goes on indefinitely, you know, it's a little bit like in cartoons, in old those Max Sennett comedies, you know, you can be hit, you can be run over, you stand up, it always goes on, there is no death, there is no sexuality basically, although there are and I love them—it's maybe
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racism and so on—but there are such stupid, if there is sexuality, it's usually reduced to some extremely primitive oral level. For example, I remember this when times when this was still possible in Hollywood, a scene where a lady is taking a bath and, of course, the Black guy, the cliché was there horny all the time, who is carrying a big, big, big block of ice, takes it up to an apartment and the door is a little bit open, sees the lady there naked in the bath, and he does "glug-glug-glug" and of course all the ice melts instantly and so on. But you know, this is not sexuality, this is more a primitive oral-anal logic. And again, how then—it's the—so the important message is this one, is that what sound introduces is not more natural. That the basic impact of sound on cinema was not naturalization. It was not before there were just silent images, now we can see real people acting and so on. No, sound, the voice, speech especially, was from the beginning this—sound, talk, searching for a body, something haunting you and so on and so on. And this is basically what Lacan is saying for example when he talks about the—when he talks about voice as the *objet petit a*. Yes? I don't want to drag you even further from Hegel, but is that the issue in *Sunset Boulevard*? In *Sunset Boulevard*? You can say that. Yes, you can say that, although there is another Billy Wilder—we don't have time for that, I would love to go—which goes even much more into this old-young split. Did you see his later movie, total failure, *Fedora*? Ah no, it's a totally strange movie about an actress who has—appears young, to be young, and everybody thinks she's doing nice plastic operations, but at the end you learn that she is really an old, totally disfigured lady and that she simply replaced herself by her daughter. And it's such a totally pessimistic, totally—it's the dark— [unintelligible] failures have any philosophical significance, like the Hollywoodistic [unintelligible]? Not even, no it didn't even arouse great attention at this level, at this level. Just a curiosity. Just—no, but I think it should be, I think it should be. But you know, we cinema theorists, this is our favorite sport: to discover, to focus on a failure and then to claim, "Oh, but this is the true masterpiece." Like, I even once planned with Fred Jameson to do a whole book on Hitchcock's failures, playing the game of: choose a Hitchcock movie which was obviously a failure and pull it "Oh, but this is—" For example, in France there was a whole school in early '50s where the candidate for this failure, which is really the masterpiece, was a rather embarrassing Australian melodrama, did you see it, *Under Capricorn*? You see, you even don't know it from, I think, '52, '53, totally ridiculous story of Ingrid Bergman living with an ex-convict there, sub-melodrama and so on, there was the school in France "This is the true Hitchcock." Fred Jameson's choice is—but I think there it is even a good movie—is the one with Marlene Dietrich, *Stage Fright*. You know, it's a movie which is famous for a false—Hitchcock violates a rule there. You know, the flashback. The rule is that if you show a flashback it should be true. That you cannot lie at the level of flashback. Hitchcock lies, you discover at the end, because at the beginning the hero encounters a girl, tells her what has happened, at the end we discover not just tells her, we see it, no. Okay. My choice would have been, and I still think it's an extraordinary movie, it's the lowest of the low, considered Hitchcock's worst movie, *Topaz*. You know that anti-communist movie, Cuba and so on. Okay, but we are getting lost now, I admit it. So, I just—what I wanted to tell you is this where we experience a historical break at its purest: with this impossibility and how precisely conservatives who want to stick to the old usually see more, see the uncanny. For example, here it was those who thought, "Oh, sound movie is just a chance to do either musicals or more realistic dramas," who are today forgotten. What we are still looking for is precisely those who resisted sound and then tried to use it in different ways and so on and so on. But let me go on. So, okay, we have this situation. Now, the your first obvious association, if you know a little bit of philosophy, would have been that: but is Hegel's speculative absolute idealism not precisely the supreme case of such historical impossibility? The idea is that Hegel is the last big example of radical idealism where you can, as it were, cover the entire reality through the self-deployment, self-mediation of the notion—notion in the sense of concept—and the idea is simply that, and there is a convincing point to this, that after Hegel we have this famous post-Hegelian break. The whole series of figures: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, but also Freud, the rise of mathematical natural sciences, that simply after this post-Hegelian break you can no longer be seriously Hegelian. That, you know, it's simply not possible. It's a fake, an anti-historical illusion if you, you basically if you try to be Hegelian today, you simply act as if the post-Hegelian break didn't happen. What was this—what was this break? It's easy to establish. It was a kind of—it was basically what Badiou likes to refer to as anti-philosophy. The idea is that the scene of philosophy, of philosophical ideas, is perceived as a secondary scene of representation, a screen, and then you assert some real, more substantial life process which makes this movement of ideas, sphere of ideas, just a kind of a passive secondary illusory reflection. The first one to do this was of course, even before Schopenhauer, already the late Schelling, Friedrich Schelling, who claimed there is the living reality, irrational abyss of will, of willing, the life of will, which is more substantial than ideas. And that Hegel is simply cheating. He tries to prove this in detailed analysis. How at the beginning of the logic where Hegel proposes the triad: being, nothing, becoming; that becoming if is to be actual becoming, already presupposes some positive being. This is how then Schelling
racism and so on—but there are such stupid, if there is sexuality, it's usually reduced to some extremely primitive oral level. For example, I remember this when times when this was still possible in Hollywood, a scene where a lady is taking a bath and, of course, the Black guy, the cliché was there horny all the time, who is carrying a big, big, big block of ice, takes it up to an apartment and the door is a little bit open, sees the lady there naked in the bath, and he does "glug-glug-glug" and of course all the ice melts instantly and so on. But you know, this is not sexuality, this is more a primitive oral-anal logic. And again, how then—it's the—so the important message is this one, is that what sound introduces is not more natural. That the basic impact of sound on cinema was not naturalization. It was not before there were just silent images, now we can see real people acting and so on. No, sound, the voice, speech especially, was from the beginning this—sound, talk, searching for a body, something haunting you and so on and so on. And this is basically what Lacan is saying for example when he talks about the—when he talks about voice as the *objet petit a*. Yes? I don't want to drag you even further from Hegel, but is that the issue in *Sunset Boulevard*? In *Sunset Boulevard*? You can say that. Yes, you can say that, although there is another Billy Wilder—we don't have time for that, I would love to go—which goes even much more into this old-young split. Did you see his later movie, total failure, *Fedora*? Ah no, it's a totally strange movie about an actress who has—appears young, to be young, and everybody thinks she's doing nice plastic operations, but at the end you learn that she is really an old, totally disfigured lady and that she simply replaced herself by her daughter. And it's such a totally pessimistic, totally—it's the dark— [unintelligible] failures have any philosophical significance, like the Hollywoodistic [unintelligible]? Not even, no it didn't even arouse great attention at this level, at this level. Just a curiosity. Just—no, but I think it should be, I think it should be. But you know, we cinema theorists, this is our favorite sport: to discover, to focus on a failure and then to claim, "Oh, but this is the true masterpiece." Like, I even once planned with Fred Jameson to do a whole book on Hitchcock's failures, playing the game of: choose a Hitchcock movie which was obviously a failure and pull it "Oh, but this is—" For example, in France there was a whole school in early '50s where the candidate for this failure, which is really the masterpiece, was a rather embarrassing Australian melodrama, did you see it, *Under Capricorn*? You see, you even don't know it from, I think, '52, '53, totally ridiculous story of Ingrid Bergman living with an ex-convict there, sub-melodrama and so on, there was the school in France "This is the true Hitchcock." Fred Jameson's choice is—but I think there it is even a good movie—is the one with Marlene Dietrich, *Stage Fright*. You know, it's a movie which is famous for a false—Hitchcock violates a rule there. You know, the flashback. The rule is that if you show a flashback it should be true. That you cannot lie at the level of flashback. Hitchcock lies, you discover at the end, because at the beginning the hero encounters a girl, tells her what has happened, at the end we discover not just tells her, we see it, no. Okay. My choice would have been, and I still think it's an extraordinary movie, it's the lowest of the low, considered Hitchcock's worst movie, *Topaz*. You know that anti-communist movie, Cuba and so on. Okay, but we are getting lost now, I admit it. So, I just—what I wanted to tell you is this where we experience a historical break at its purest: with this impossibility and how precisely conservatives who want to stick to the old usually see more, see the uncanny. For example, here it was those who thought, "Oh, sound movie is just a chance to do either musicals or more realistic dramas," who are today forgotten. What we are still looking for is precisely those who resisted sound and then tried to use it in different ways and so on and so on. But let me go on. So, okay, we have this situation. Now, the your first obvious association, if you know a little bit of philosophy, would have been that: but is Hegel's speculative absolute idealism not precisely the supreme case of such historical impossibility? The idea is that Hegel is the last big example of radical idealism where you can, as it were, cover the entire reality through the self-deployment, self-mediation of the notion—notion in the sense of concept—and the idea is simply that, and there is a convincing point to this, that after Hegel we have this famous post-Hegelian break. The whole series of figures: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, but also Freud, the rise of mathematical natural sciences, that simply after this post-Hegelian break you can no longer be seriously Hegelian. That, you know, it's simply not possible. It's a fake, an anti-historical illusion if you, you basically if you try to be Hegelian today, you simply act as if the post-Hegelian break didn't happen. What was this—what was this break? It's easy to establish. It was a kind of—it was basically what Badiou likes to refer to as anti-philosophy. The idea is that the scene of philosophy, of philosophical ideas, is perceived as a secondary scene of representation, a screen, and then you assert some real, more substantial life process which makes this movement of ideas, sphere of ideas, just a kind of a passive secondary illusory reflection. The first one to do this was of course, even before Schopenhauer, already the late Schelling, Friedrich Schelling, who claimed there is the living reality, irrational abyss of will, of willing, the life of will, which is more substantial than ideas. And that Hegel is simply cheating. He tries to prove this in detailed analysis. How at the beginning of the logic where Hegel proposes the triad: being, nothing, becoming; that becoming if is to be actual becoming, already presupposes some positive being. This is how then Schelling
unknown
distinguishes between positive and negative philosophy. For him, Hegel is a negative philosopher. Not in the bad
distinguishes between positive and negative philosophy. For him, Hegel is a negative philosopher. Not in the bad
Slavoj Žižek
sense just, but in the sense of: Hegel just deploys the conceptual structure of reality. What reality is. All possible forms. But something is missing, the positive being of reality. You know, as it were, the living substance. Hegel provides just in his idealism the gray shadow of reality, which is why Schelling focuses on, as the greatest Hegel's failure, on Hegel's deduction at the end of logic of how idea—sorry, logic when it fully realizes itself in the shape of absolute idea passes into nature, releases itself into nature. For Schelling, this is no deduction at all. Hegel is simply cheating there. He knows all the time that nature exists and he just pretends to deduce nature
sense just, but in the sense of: Hegel just deploys the conceptual structure of reality. What reality is. All possible forms. But something is missing, the positive being of reality. You know, as it were, the living substance. Hegel provides just in his idealism the gray shadow of reality, which is why Schelling focuses on, as the greatest Hegel's failure, on Hegel's deduction at the end of logic of how idea—sorry, logic when it fully realizes itself in the shape of absolute idea passes into nature, releases itself into nature. For Schelling, this is no deduction at all. Hegel is simply cheating there. He knows all the time that nature exists and he just pretends to deduce nature
unknown
from the self-movement of concepts and so on and so on. That's Schelling. Then you know
from the self-movement of concepts and so on and so on. That's Schelling. Then you know
Slavoj Žižek
Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is the great anti-Hegelian. Really, like personally he hated Hegel. When he was young he even did—he was already *privatdozent*, this lower-level private professor at the same Berlin University as Hegel, and I don't know if you know this: he was so competitive that he on purpose did his classes at the same time as Hegel. Of course nobody came but he was so furious and so on and so on. Although there is one good thing about his family. You know that Hegel—Goethe was married with that Christiane Vulpius, the lower-class girl. He loved her and so on, it was a very long love. Finally Hegel married—Goethe married her. And she was totally ignored by all high society. One must admit that Schopenhauer and especially his mother were honest here. It's a famous saying, you know, Schopenhauer's mother invited once Heg—Goethe and his wife and then when some other guests protested she said, "When this lady is good enough for Goethe's bed, she must be good enough for our table." I mean, it's a nice saying and so on. But what I'm saying is that with Schopenhauer, you know, it's the same. It's the irrational willing, the will. Already Schelling uses it. This idea that before all notional movement and so on, there is this positivity of the will, of pure willing, which then of course later develops in *Lebensphilosophie*, in life philosophy. Then in a similar although different way, it's Kierkegaard, of course. With him it's not this stupid irrational willing, it's the individual with the absurd of believing, this absolute decision, leap of faith and so on. For Kierkegaard also, this is the intense actuality of subjective authenticity, which cannot in any way be covered up by this abstract Hegelian movement of notions and so on and so on. And why not? Let's add to this series Marx. Marx, for Marx also you know you have this famous in—what is the worst of Marx, I think—*German Ideology*, that famous phrase that true science of life is with regard to speculative philosophy like real sexual act is to masturbation. Also again, this idea that Hegel is mystifying reality, is describing just some kind of ideal conceptual pseudo-self-movement. And then Marx has all this rather primitive reduction to real life. It's not idea which is developing, moving itself, is it real people who while thinking develop ideas and so on. This old boring idea that Hegel confuses the subject and the predicate. It's not individuals who are predicates or moments in the self-deployment of the idea; it is idea thinking, which is just predicate of a real life asserting individuals and so on and so on. This is what Badiou refers to as anti-philosophy. That is to say, this idea that if at least you construct—and then there are of course other elements here where I think a more convincing critique of Hegel can be made. Like, you know, one problem with Hegel—there you really have Hegel's limitation—is mathematics. Hegel dismisses mathematics as so-called "spurious bad infinity," just repetitive. He cannot see, there is no space for this modern mathematics which includes all the paradoxes of self-reference and so on. There is no space for this in Hegel. There is the problem of natural sciences. You can claim—I think it's more ambiguous—that what Hegel does in his critique of Newton is simply he dismisses Newton as a primitive knowledge of positive natural sciences at the level of—at the level of some kind of a mechanical approach, and in a more or less romantic way, Hegel tries to provide a more organic account of nature and so on and so on. So again, the idea is that all this universe of formalized, mathematized sciences with the incredibly important role in production and so on; also the Freudian universe of pure repetition, what Freud called *Wiederholungszwang*, when things repeat themselves without any Hegelian movement of *Aufhebung* where, you know, by repetition you are elevated to a higher level; just pure compulsion to repeat, there simply is no place for all this in Hegel. So again, that's the post-Hegelian break. And again, one can say that this break, this historical break is a fact. You cannot simply play the game as if this didn't happen and let's return to Hegel. I think you can. Now, why? How? I think—I will first just give you the coordinates then we will return tomorrow to this more in detail—I think that—I will not just now give you the demonstration, explanation, just to provide the coordinates—I think that something different happens here. Namely that what should make you suspicious is how Hegel is this totally ridiculous image of Hegel. Even people who have a certain sympathy for—for example, if they are oriented towards the so-called Anglo-Saxon analytic thought, if they have a certain sympathy for so-called continental philosophy, many of them—it's very fashionable today, even scientists like to refer for example to Spinoza. You know, Damasio wrote a book claiming Spinoza practically proto-brain scientist, so many things and so on. All of them are good. Leibniz, Bertrand Russell liked Leibniz and so on. Kant is usually the limitation. Kant is usually the last that this analytic Anglo-Saxon orientation is ready to swallow. After Kant, for them, it's just obscenity. Although, yeah-yeah-yeah, if your mind is as dirty and as mine, I know you can say, "but wait a minute, is it a philosopher," I know the accent is different, whose name is an obscenity, no? And this is why when I gave a talk—yes I'm, you know, I'm well-known by country that whenever in the line of thought there is just a slight opening towards a tasteless obscenity, I will take that road, you know, like—but once I was surprised, I didn't do it consciously. I gave twenty years ago in—at Berkeley a talk called "Kant and Hitchcock." And then told me, "Oh, you have both of them in that!" This surprised even me, I somehow didn't—wasn't aware of that. Okay, so let's go on. So what I want to say is that what should make you suspicious is when a certain critique paints the enemy as an openly absurd image, you know, this image of Hegel, absolute knowledge, the one who thought he can penetrate the mind of God, because you know somewhere he ironically Hegel characterizes his logic as what went on in the mind of God before the creation of the world and so on. So my hypothesis is the following one: that Hegel is a so-called vanishing mediator between traditional metaphysics and the post-Hegelian this turn to actual reality, anti-philosophy. But I think it's not simply, as people who try partially to rehabilitate Hegel like Charles Taylor—incidentally his Hegel is I think one of the worst books on Hegel; it should be burned publicly—it's not in the sense that Hegel was in-between, you know, still idealist but already moments of historicism, historical description. No, my point is that something unique happened in Hegel—and I will spend the rest of the time today and tomorrow to try to give you at least some indications what—that something unique happened there, unthinkable even today; we don't really know what. So that it is not, if we try to be Hegelians today, that we behave as if the post-Hegelian break didn't happen; it's on the contrary, the entire post-Hegelian this anti-philosophy, which is one desperate attempt to obliterate what Hegel did. Hegel went too far. And I think that it's this post-anti-philosophy which does this by getting rid of Hegel, how, by way of constructing this ridiculous image of Hegel which for which I think we should use this Freudian term, you know, *Deckerinnerung*, screen memory. You know, screen memory as a false, obviously ridiculous figure concealing some truly traumatic excess. I think that Hegel that we know is mostly this kind of *Deckerinnerung*. A very comfortable ridiculous image. It's easy to laugh at him: ho-ho, that idiot, a poor employee of the Prussian Ministry of Education who knows—who thought he knows everything and so on, but was just doing some ridiculous mechanical logical reasoning. And if they concede that from time to time Hegel did have bright insights, the idea is that, yes, from time to time he had a sense of observation, he made good points, but it is all spoiled by his this mechanical application of this dialectical machinery which can swallow—which can swallow everything. So again, what that will be my thesis: to give you some arguments for this opposite reading. That no, it's the post-Hegelian break which misses something in Hegel. And this is also, I think, in accordance with a more general historical theory which I like; I developed it already in one of my early books, that I think for they know not what they do. This idea I took a turn from Fred Jameson of "vanishing mediator" as a crucial figure of historical development. What is vanishing mediator? Vanishing mediator is not simply something which is a little bit here and a little bit there, you know, like you pass, for example, you pass from religious metaphorical universe, divine meaning everywhere, to modern secular gray mechanic universe and then you can nicely show how you have figures which are in-between. Usually it is they already use the new terminology but still deal with the old topic. I'm not saying there are not wonderful things which often happen here. For example, my favorite vanishing mediator between medieval universe and modern mechanical materialism is Malebranche. Read him, oh my god, he's a genius. It's a French theologian, a pupil of Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, who radicalized Descartes in a totally crazy way. But as often, you can find wonderful bright insights in this total madness. The starting point of Malebranche was, you know what was Descartes's idea, this radical dualism: we have two substances, *res cogitans*, the thinking substance, and *res extensa*, the extended material substance. Already you can see what is missing here: life. Descartes has no space for life. For Descartes there are only mechanisms and spirit, which is why all these holists, holistic new-agers hate Descartes. He is the big bad guy for all of them, from Al Gore downwards. This is the worst of Al Gore, when he says Descartes guilty of everything and so on. On the—on the contrary, I think Descartes is one of the big good guys. But okay. What did Malebranche do? Sorry for making these detours, but I'm not losing track, they are crucial. Malebranche did something deep. You know, then Descartes had a problem: how are the two connected? For example in us as human beings, our soul, the thinking substance, and our body. His solution was totally ridiculous. He found, you know he liked to do the anatomy and so on, so he found this, how do you call it, pineal gland or what, no? One gland which—pineal? Pineal gland, sorry, yes yes. And it drew his attention because it's only one. It was the only one which was one. So he thought this is, as it were, the point of passage. It's through that gland that our soul gets impressions from the body and returns orders back to the body. Like, to put it very simply, if you decide to move, to raise your hand, you think about it, you give an order, an order passes through this stupid gland to your nerves and so on. It's ridiculous, obviously. Didn't he call it the seat of the soul? Sorry? Didn't he call it the seat of the soul? The bodily seat of the soul. Yes, but nonetheless for him the soul was substantially totally different. He was a radical dualist. He would never have accepted that, how should I put it, the soul really is there. It's a little bit like—let me tell you another interesting philosophical story. I always had big debates with theologians at a couple of points I don't get—you know that it's very fashionable, especially for Catholics, to oppose biogenetic manipulations, no? Their story is no, we are not just—we are not just neuronal automata, we have an immortal soul, so don't mess with the brain. Now I ask them—and I still didn't find a good answer, maybe you will give it to me from the theological side—a very simple counter-argument. Isn't this way to reason contradictory? If you are convinced that you are not just a neuronal automaton, that you have an immaterial immortal soul, why do you worry then what do I do with your brain? You say "fuck off, do whatever there, I'm not there, I have a soul," you know. So why do they say "we have an immortal soul," but then the conclusion, "so you shouldn't mess"? I think it goes back to natural law. What the Catholics believe in natural law. And what is natural law? That God constructed our bodies, our nature, this way and we shouldn't fuck with it. Yeah but, but okay, but nonetheless, yeah but, okay but this, this is more complex. This already you introduce further hypothesis, how should I put it. You have—yeah, but I think there's a better Aristotelian account. A lot of them will say that the functional dynamic of the body is the condition for you to have the—the immaterial principle of the mind. So if you change the functional dynamics, you're—you run the same possibility as killing somebody in terms of manipulating that principle. That's a tricky—because you know that here again, as if you are truly an Orthodox—in the good sense now—Christian, I think you should reject this. Okay, now this brings us into theological waters, but I think that—I'm totally anti-Aquinas. I think he was the great Aristotelianizer, how should I put it, of—of Christianity. And I simply, I don't—but so that you will not say that I'm only making fun, one priest gave me an intelligent metaphor here. He said: imagine our brain as a radio receiver. Of course our soul is immortal. But in order for our body to receive the message of our soul, we need a finely attuned radio receiver which is our brain. And God created it to receive, to communicate. And then the idea is that if we mess with our brain, it's just ruining the radio and then you no longer receive the message. This is the most intelligent, at least for me, that—but I have another problem, we can talk about it here and it brings us back to Hegel. I think this is another example where we should go further than Hegel, but being good Hegelians. Namely Hegel—another enigma I had, and maybe you can help me here—with—with Christianity is: why do—why does the Church advocate this weird notion, basically, I simplify it but nonetheless it is that if sex is only sex for procreation, it's specifically human. That if you just do it out of pure lust, it's just animal coupling. My totally naive counter-argument: isn't the exact opposite the true? I mean, animals are doing it in this biologically determined rhythm, they don't screw all the time as we, at least try to do. They do it just in the season for mating because it has this function and so on and so on. Isn't it that it's absolutely ridiculous to claim that in a true—I mean, it's even degrading for me—for what is not only physical but if you want truly spiritual about a truly intense out-of-love sexual act? It's clearly not just some mechanical lust copulating, but it's clearly ridiculous to claim that that more, that surplus is somehow—has to do, it may have, it may not have, with procreation. What would be your answer here? It seems like there's a weird alliance between Richard Dawkins's notion of the selfish gene—yeah—like we only exist as genes to reproduce, and the Church's philosophy. And both—Steve Pinker told me this—both do not leave room for choice, for affirming one's self, one's sexuality, one's being beyond that reductive principle. I agree with you and I will tell you something else here. This is why I think Dawkins is inconsistent. You remember that famous passage towards the end, if I remember correctly, of his *Selfish Gene*, where he introduces the famous idea of—how do you pronounce it? Meme. Meme? M-E-M-E. Yeah-yeah, I know, I know, I pronounced it in my primitive Slavic—our writing is much simpler, we write—It's meant to rhyme with "gene." I know of course, that's the point, of course. So when he says "but we are not slaves simply of our genes, because we can think, we can as it were become master—" he doesn't, he simply postulates a space of freedom for which I think he doesn't account enough in his and he was relatively intelligently criticized here by some other evolutionists. And I am not here just playing again—what I'm saying, let me and you will see where this brings us back to Hegel. I'm not just playing here the game of—of who is right. The problem is more complicated. How the properly Hegelian view of sexuality should be, I claim, much closer to a Freudian one. It is not that simply you have—this is how usually—how even Hegel himself, but I claim here, and we should be here fearless and outdo Hegel where it's necessary, show where Hegel—okay as a fanatic I will say: the only legitimate criticism of Hegel is to show that Hegel is not Hegelian enough. Where? Where he talks about sexuality. A little bit towards the end of his Philosophy of Nature and then when he speaks in civil society about marriage and so on, no. He basically adopts this, how should I call it, culturalization hypothesis. His idea is that sexuality is a natural substance, no? Animals screw the way they do, blah-blah, but we gradually civilize it, sublimate it, whatever. No. Like, sorry, I will try to be—like, I want to seduce a woman, or a man, or many women or many men. This I do always to annoy Judith Butler when we talk, because she is opposed to binary logic. So I said, okay, let's be
Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is the great anti-Hegelian. Really, like personally he hated Hegel. When he was young he even did—he was already *privatdozent*, this lower-level private professor at the same Berlin University as Hegel, and I don't know if you know this: he was so competitive that he on purpose did his classes at the same time as Hegel. Of course nobody came but he was so furious and so on and so on. Although there is one good thing about his family. You know that Hegel—Goethe was married with that Christiane Vulpius, the lower-class girl. He loved her and so on, it was a very long love. Finally Hegel married—Goethe married her. And she was totally ignored by all high society. One must admit that Schopenhauer and especially his mother were honest here. It's a famous saying, you know, Schopenhauer's mother invited once Heg—Goethe and his wife and then when some other guests protested she said, "When this lady is good enough for Goethe's bed, she must be good enough for our table." I mean, it's a nice saying and so on. But what I'm saying is that with Schopenhauer, you know, it's the same. It's the irrational willing, the will. Already Schelling uses it. This idea that before all notional movement and so on, there is this positivity of the will, of pure willing, which then of course later develops in *Lebensphilosophie*, in life philosophy. Then in a similar although different way, it's Kierkegaard, of course. With him it's not this stupid irrational willing, it's the individual with the absurd of believing, this absolute decision, leap of faith and so on. For Kierkegaard also, this is the intense actuality of subjective authenticity, which cannot in any way be covered up by this abstract Hegelian movement of notions and so on and so on. And why not? Let's add to this series Marx. Marx, for Marx also you know you have this famous in—what is the worst of Marx, I think—*German Ideology*, that famous phrase that true science of life is with regard to speculative philosophy like real sexual act is to masturbation. Also again, this idea that Hegel is mystifying reality, is describing just some kind of ideal conceptual pseudo-self-movement. And then Marx has all this rather primitive reduction to real life. It's not idea which is developing, moving itself, is it real people who while thinking develop ideas and so on. This old boring idea that Hegel confuses the subject and the predicate. It's not individuals who are predicates or moments in the self-deployment of the idea; it is idea thinking, which is just predicate of a real life asserting individuals and so on and so on. This is what Badiou refers to as anti-philosophy. That is to say, this idea that if at least you construct—and then there are of course other elements here where I think a more convincing critique of Hegel can be made. Like, you know, one problem with Hegel—there you really have Hegel's limitation—is mathematics. Hegel dismisses mathematics as so-called "spurious bad infinity," just repetitive. He cannot see, there is no space for this modern mathematics which includes all the paradoxes of self-reference and so on. There is no space for this in Hegel. There is the problem of natural sciences. You can claim—I think it's more ambiguous—that what Hegel does in his critique of Newton is simply he dismisses Newton as a primitive knowledge of positive natural sciences at the level of—at the level of some kind of a mechanical approach, and in a more or less romantic way, Hegel tries to provide a more organic account of nature and so on and so on. So again, the idea is that all this universe of formalized, mathematized sciences with the incredibly important role in production and so on; also the Freudian universe of pure repetition, what Freud called *Wiederholungszwang*, when things repeat themselves without any Hegelian movement of *Aufhebung* where, you know, by repetition you are elevated to a higher level; just pure compulsion to repeat, there simply is no place for all this in Hegel. So again, that's the post-Hegelian break. And again, one can say that this break, this historical break is a fact. You cannot simply play the game as if this didn't happen and let's return to Hegel. I think you can. Now, why? How? I think—I will first just give you the coordinates then we will return tomorrow to this more in detail—I think that—I will not just now give you the demonstration, explanation, just to provide the coordinates—I think that something different happens here. Namely that what should make you suspicious is how Hegel is this totally ridiculous image of Hegel. Even people who have a certain sympathy for—for example, if they are oriented towards the so-called Anglo-Saxon analytic thought, if they have a certain sympathy for so-called continental philosophy, many of them—it's very fashionable today, even scientists like to refer for example to Spinoza. You know, Damasio wrote a book claiming Spinoza practically proto-brain scientist, so many things and so on. All of them are good. Leibniz, Bertrand Russell liked Leibniz and so on. Kant is usually the limitation. Kant is usually the last that this analytic Anglo-Saxon orientation is ready to swallow. After Kant, for them, it's just obscenity. Although, yeah-yeah-yeah, if your mind is as dirty and as mine, I know you can say, "but wait a minute, is it a philosopher," I know the accent is different, whose name is an obscenity, no? And this is why when I gave a talk—yes I'm, you know, I'm well-known by country that whenever in the line of thought there is just a slight opening towards a tasteless obscenity, I will take that road, you know, like—but once I was surprised, I didn't do it consciously. I gave twenty years ago in—at Berkeley a talk called "Kant and Hitchcock." And then told me, "Oh, you have both of them in that!" This surprised even me, I somehow didn't—wasn't aware of that. Okay, so let's go on. So what I want to say is that what should make you suspicious is when a certain critique paints the enemy as an openly absurd image, you know, this image of Hegel, absolute knowledge, the one who thought he can penetrate the mind of God, because you know somewhere he ironically Hegel characterizes his logic as what went on in the mind of God before the creation of the world and so on. So my hypothesis is the following one: that Hegel is a so-called vanishing mediator between traditional metaphysics and the post-Hegelian this turn to actual reality, anti-philosophy. But I think it's not simply, as people who try partially to rehabilitate Hegel like Charles Taylor—incidentally his Hegel is I think one of the worst books on Hegel; it should be burned publicly—it's not in the sense that Hegel was in-between, you know, still idealist but already moments of historicism, historical description. No, my point is that something unique happened in Hegel—and I will spend the rest of the time today and tomorrow to try to give you at least some indications what—that something unique happened there, unthinkable even today; we don't really know what. So that it is not, if we try to be Hegelians today, that we behave as if the post-Hegelian break didn't happen; it's on the contrary, the entire post-Hegelian this anti-philosophy, which is one desperate attempt to obliterate what Hegel did. Hegel went too far. And I think that it's this post-anti-philosophy which does this by getting rid of Hegel, how, by way of constructing this ridiculous image of Hegel which for which I think we should use this Freudian term, you know, *Deckerinnerung*, screen memory. You know, screen memory as a false, obviously ridiculous figure concealing some truly traumatic excess. I think that Hegel that we know is mostly this kind of *Deckerinnerung*. A very comfortable ridiculous image. It's easy to laugh at him: ho-ho, that idiot, a poor employee of the Prussian Ministry of Education who knows—who thought he knows everything and so on, but was just doing some ridiculous mechanical logical reasoning. And if they concede that from time to time Hegel did have bright insights, the idea is that, yes, from time to time he had a sense of observation, he made good points, but it is all spoiled by his this mechanical application of this dialectical machinery which can swallow—which can swallow everything. So again, what that will be my thesis: to give you some arguments for this opposite reading. That no, it's the post-Hegelian break which misses something in Hegel. And this is also, I think, in accordance with a more general historical theory which I like; I developed it already in one of my early books, that I think for they know not what they do. This idea I took a turn from Fred Jameson of "vanishing mediator" as a crucial figure of historical development. What is vanishing mediator? Vanishing mediator is not simply something which is a little bit here and a little bit there, you know, like you pass, for example, you pass from religious metaphorical universe, divine meaning everywhere, to modern secular gray mechanic universe and then you can nicely show how you have figures which are in-between. Usually it is they already use the new terminology but still deal with the old topic. I'm not saying there are not wonderful things which often happen here. For example, my favorite vanishing mediator between medieval universe and modern mechanical materialism is Malebranche. Read him, oh my god, he's a genius. It's a French theologian, a pupil of Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, who radicalized Descartes in a totally crazy way. But as often, you can find wonderful bright insights in this total madness. The starting point of Malebranche was, you know what was Descartes's idea, this radical dualism: we have two substances, *res cogitans*, the thinking substance, and *res extensa*, the extended material substance. Already you can see what is missing here: life. Descartes has no space for life. For Descartes there are only mechanisms and spirit, which is why all these holists, holistic new-agers hate Descartes. He is the big bad guy for all of them, from Al Gore downwards. This is the worst of Al Gore, when he says Descartes guilty of everything and so on. On the—on the contrary, I think Descartes is one of the big good guys. But okay. What did Malebranche do? Sorry for making these detours, but I'm not losing track, they are crucial. Malebranche did something deep. You know, then Descartes had a problem: how are the two connected? For example in us as human beings, our soul, the thinking substance, and our body. His solution was totally ridiculous. He found, you know he liked to do the anatomy and so on, so he found this, how do you call it, pineal gland or what, no? One gland which—pineal? Pineal gland, sorry, yes yes. And it drew his attention because it's only one. It was the only one which was one. So he thought this is, as it were, the point of passage. It's through that gland that our soul gets impressions from the body and returns orders back to the body. Like, to put it very simply, if you decide to move, to raise your hand, you think about it, you give an order, an order passes through this stupid gland to your nerves and so on. It's ridiculous, obviously. Didn't he call it the seat of the soul? Sorry? Didn't he call it the seat of the soul? The bodily seat of the soul. Yes, but nonetheless for him the soul was substantially totally different. He was a radical dualist. He would never have accepted that, how should I put it, the soul really is there. It's a little bit like—let me tell you another interesting philosophical story. I always had big debates with theologians at a couple of points I don't get—you know that it's very fashionable, especially for Catholics, to oppose biogenetic manipulations, no? Their story is no, we are not just—we are not just neuronal automata, we have an immortal soul, so don't mess with the brain. Now I ask them—and I still didn't find a good answer, maybe you will give it to me from the theological side—a very simple counter-argument. Isn't this way to reason contradictory? If you are convinced that you are not just a neuronal automaton, that you have an immaterial immortal soul, why do you worry then what do I do with your brain? You say "fuck off, do whatever there, I'm not there, I have a soul," you know. So why do they say "we have an immortal soul," but then the conclusion, "so you shouldn't mess"? I think it goes back to natural law. What the Catholics believe in natural law. And what is natural law? That God constructed our bodies, our nature, this way and we shouldn't fuck with it. Yeah but, but okay, but nonetheless, yeah but, okay but this, this is more complex. This already you introduce further hypothesis, how should I put it. You have—yeah, but I think there's a better Aristotelian account. A lot of them will say that the functional dynamic of the body is the condition for you to have the—the immaterial principle of the mind. So if you change the functional dynamics, you're—you run the same possibility as killing somebody in terms of manipulating that principle. That's a tricky—because you know that here again, as if you are truly an Orthodox—in the good sense now—Christian, I think you should reject this. Okay, now this brings us into theological waters, but I think that—I'm totally anti-Aquinas. I think he was the great Aristotelianizer, how should I put it, of—of Christianity. And I simply, I don't—but so that you will not say that I'm only making fun, one priest gave me an intelligent metaphor here. He said: imagine our brain as a radio receiver. Of course our soul is immortal. But in order for our body to receive the message of our soul, we need a finely attuned radio receiver which is our brain. And God created it to receive, to communicate. And then the idea is that if we mess with our brain, it's just ruining the radio and then you no longer receive the message. This is the most intelligent, at least for me, that—but I have another problem, we can talk about it here and it brings us back to Hegel. I think this is another example where we should go further than Hegel, but being good Hegelians. Namely Hegel—another enigma I had, and maybe you can help me here—with—with Christianity is: why do—why does the Church advocate this weird notion, basically, I simplify it but nonetheless it is that if sex is only sex for procreation, it's specifically human. That if you just do it out of pure lust, it's just animal coupling. My totally naive counter-argument: isn't the exact opposite the true? I mean, animals are doing it in this biologically determined rhythm, they don't screw all the time as we, at least try to do. They do it just in the season for mating because it has this function and so on and so on. Isn't it that it's absolutely ridiculous to claim that in a true—I mean, it's even degrading for me—for what is not only physical but if you want truly spiritual about a truly intense out-of-love sexual act? It's clearly not just some mechanical lust copulating, but it's clearly ridiculous to claim that that more, that surplus is somehow—has to do, it may have, it may not have, with procreation. What would be your answer here? It seems like there's a weird alliance between Richard Dawkins's notion of the selfish gene—yeah—like we only exist as genes to reproduce, and the Church's philosophy. And both—Steve Pinker told me this—both do not leave room for choice, for affirming one's self, one's sexuality, one's being beyond that reductive principle. I agree with you and I will tell you something else here. This is why I think Dawkins is inconsistent. You remember that famous passage towards the end, if I remember correctly, of his *Selfish Gene*, where he introduces the famous idea of—how do you pronounce it? Meme. Meme? M-E-M-E. Yeah-yeah, I know, I know, I pronounced it in my primitive Slavic—our writing is much simpler, we write—It's meant to rhyme with "gene." I know of course, that's the point, of course. So when he says "but we are not slaves simply of our genes, because we can think, we can as it were become master—" he doesn't, he simply postulates a space of freedom for which I think he doesn't account enough in his and he was relatively intelligently criticized here by some other evolutionists. And I am not here just playing again—what I'm saying, let me and you will see where this brings us back to Hegel. I'm not just playing here the game of—of who is right. The problem is more complicated. How the properly Hegelian view of sexuality should be, I claim, much closer to a Freudian one. It is not that simply you have—this is how usually—how even Hegel himself, but I claim here, and we should be here fearless and outdo Hegel where it's necessary, show where Hegel—okay as a fanatic I will say: the only legitimate criticism of Hegel is to show that Hegel is not Hegelian enough. Where? Where he talks about sexuality. A little bit towards the end of his Philosophy of Nature and then when he speaks in civil society about marriage and so on, no. He basically adopts this, how should I call it, culturalization hypothesis. His idea is that sexuality is a natural substance, no? Animals screw the way they do, blah-blah, but we gradually civilize it, sublimate it, whatever. No. Like, sorry, I will try to be—like, I want to seduce a woman, or a man, or many women or many men. This I do always to annoy Judith Butler when we talk, because she is opposed to binary logic. So I said, okay, let's be
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against
against
Slavoj Žižek
binary logic. Why not only one partner, more partners, and so on? So that instead of just—I don't know how animals do—smelling your juices there if you are wet and then boom or whatever, no, we write poetry, we do all the shit we do. But basically we are slowly elaborating, how should I put it, reworking, culturalizing natural substance. Instead of smelling the disgusting smell or what, we have perfume. Instead of those "uuh-uuh" animal sounds, we write love letters. The idea is that there is some kind of a natural substance of sexuality which we gradually civilize, culturalize. I claim something is missing here. What is missing is what Freud would have called death drive. And what in entire German idealism—you already find it in Kant, I located it for the first time, where Kant talks about—in a wonderful, they're totally neglected today, writing on education—Kant talks about, mentions some kind of a wilderness
binary logic. Why not only one partner, more partners, and so on? So that instead of just—I don't know how animals do—smelling your juices there if you are wet and then boom or whatever, no, we write poetry, we do all the shit we do. But basically we are slowly elaborating, how should I put it, reworking, culturalizing natural substance. Instead of smelling the disgusting smell or what, we have perfume. Instead of those "uuh-uuh" animal sounds, we write love letters. The idea is that there is some kind of a natural substance of sexuality which we gradually civilize, culturalize. I claim something is missing here. What is missing is what Freud would have called death drive. And what in entire German idealism—you already find it in Kant, I located it for the first time, where Kant talks about—in a wonderful, they're totally neglected today, writing on education—Kant talks about, mentions some kind of a wilderness
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of a human being. Exemplarily it can be discerned in a wild child, the child whom you cannot discipline, whom you cannot
of a human being. Exemplarily it can be discerned in a wild child, the child whom you cannot discipline, whom you cannot
Slavoj Žižek
make obey the orders. And Kant says something absolutely crucial there, which then repeats itself in Schelling, in Hegel, at the
make obey the orders. And Kant says something absolutely crucial there, which then repeats itself in Schelling, in Hegel, at the
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beginning of his Philosophy of Spirit that I already mentioned, anthropology, when he talks about madness. This excess of madness as the zero level of subjectivity. And for Hegel, our culture—which begins at the most elementary level with habit, and Hegel has wonderful developments there where he say that we humans are
beginning of his Philosophy of Spirit that I already mentioned, anthropology, when he talks about madness. This excess of madness as the zero level of subjectivity. And for Hegel, our culture—which begins at the most elementary level with habit, and Hegel has wonderful developments there where he say that we humans are
Slavoj Žižek
totally being of habits, we even die out of habit, we live out of habit and so on. So again, I think this is what we should take into account with regard to sexuality. It's not directly nature-culture. The lesson of psychoanalysis is that there is something in-between. This excess that Freud calls death drive and so on and so on. Because and you find it in all big erotic myths. I mean, for example, *Tristan and Isolde*. What is this? Their love is obviously—it's formulated like this—it's trans-cultural, you know, they want to drown in this excess of absolute drive, absolute enjoyment, violating all social rules, blah-blah. But it's also not nature, it's clearly you don't find this excess in nature. So, the result to arrive at at this level is that—it's not directly that culture breaks with nature. You have in-between some kind of what Freud calls *Todestrieb*, death drive, a kind of—how should I call it—absolute insistence, impossible insistence, which is why it has to repeat itself infinitely. And the problem of culture is again to symbolize, to restabilize that. And this, if you allow me another Hegelian reflection, this brings me back to—you asked me yesterday Stephen Pinker. You know what is the big problem of—this kind of, how should I call them, this is why I am on the side of Stephen Jay Gould, so-called utilitarian accounts of—of mind and language and so on. The problem is to account for this mystery that: why are we doing so many things which do not have any survival, adaptive, utilitarian value? Okay, I know that quite often they are successful, very successful here. For example, in explaining—there is a wonderful book, I quote it I think in my, was it—is it in the second part of *Parallax View* even, at the end—yeah-yeah I think that that—no, don't, don't—the—the behavioral biologist who tries to account for this sexual—for the in adaptive terms why this totally non-functional excess of parade, of displaying in sexual seduction. For example, you know something like, I always forget the English name, who is that stupid animal with big-big-big—peacock? Peacock, yes. Why peacock? I mean, from the adaptive standpoint of view it's stupidity. It's the most irrational thing to do. He cannot even properly move and so on. He provides a nice account for: that that's the message: "I'm so strong that I can afford it." You know, it's in the same way to seduce a girl with a ring for one million dollars, like "I know it has no function, but I can afford—" Okay, but what I'm saying is that Pinker is weak at another level.
totally being of habits, we even die out of habit, we live out of habit and so on. So again, I think this is what we should take into account with regard to sexuality. It's not directly nature-culture. The lesson of psychoanalysis is that there is something in-between. This excess that Freud calls death drive and so on and so on. Because and you find it in all big erotic myths. I mean, for example, *Tristan and Isolde*. What is this? Their love is obviously—it's formulated like this—it's trans-cultural, you know, they want to drown in this excess of absolute drive, absolute enjoyment, violating all social rules, blah-blah. But it's also not nature, it's clearly you don't find this excess in nature. So, the result to arrive at at this level is that—it's not directly that culture breaks with nature. You have in-between some kind of what Freud calls *Todestrieb*, death drive, a kind of—how should I call it—absolute insistence, impossible insistence, which is why it has to repeat itself infinitely. And the problem of culture is again to symbolize, to restabilize that. And this, if you allow me another Hegelian reflection, this brings me back to—you asked me yesterday Stephen Pinker. You know what is the big problem of—this kind of, how should I call them, this is why I am on the side of Stephen Jay Gould, so-called utilitarian accounts of—of mind and language and so on. The problem is to account for this mystery that: why are we doing so many things which do not have any survival, adaptive, utilitarian value? Okay, I know that quite often they are successful, very successful here. For example, in explaining—there is a wonderful book, I quote it I think in my, was it—is it in the second part of *Parallax View* even, at the end—yeah-yeah I think that that—no, don't, don't—the—the behavioral biologist who tries to account for this sexual—for the in adaptive terms why this totally non-functional excess of parade, of displaying in sexual seduction. For example, you know something like, I always forget the English name, who is that stupid animal with big-big-big—peacock? Peacock, yes. Why peacock? I mean, from the adaptive standpoint of view it's stupidity. It's the most irrational thing to do. He cannot even properly move and so on. He provides a nice account for: that that's the message: "I'm so strong that I can afford it." You know, it's in the same way to seduce a girl with a ring for one million dollars, like "I know it has no function, but I can afford—" Okay, but what I'm saying is that Pinker is weak at another level.
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You remember, if you know we are talking about Stephen Pinker, no, the it—this is the guy who sees red, who has a Goebbels's reaction if you mention France, French talk and so on, deconstruction, whatever. Okay, he asks a simple question—which
You remember, if you know we are talking about Stephen Pinker, no, the it—this is the guy who sees red, who has a Goebbels's reaction if you mention France, French talk and so on, deconstruction, whatever. Okay, he asks a simple question—which
Slavoj Žižek
is a rational question—"Why—" he—he—he tries, you know there is a big debate among brain scientists of "Why can't we understand how our mind works?" Why are we—and then you know some of them like, I don't know, McGinn or who, try to claim that in a materialist—they are not idealist, but just to claim that that's how—how our mind is structured. It's *a priori* structured in such a way that it
is a rational question—"Why—" he—he—he tries, you know there is a big debate among brain scientists of "Why can't we understand how our mind works?" Why are we—and then you know some of them like, I don't know, McGinn or who, try to claim that in a materialist—they are not idealist, but just to claim that that's how—how our mind is structured. It's *a priori* structured in such a way that it
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cannot
cannot
Slavoj Žižek
understand itself. And Pinker tries to provide a totally evolutionary account. He says—I quote him almost literally, here I don't simplify—he says that—that it's for the same reason that a rabbit cannot do, I don't know, differential calculus or what. Our mind was created for certain survival adaptive reasons. It wasn't created, it didn't emerge, develop to understand itself. It emerged to—to construct tools, to deal with nature, for mating, for cooperation, dealing with—and that's why it was created. And it can do, of course, things for which it was created. And in the same way that rabbit doesn't need for his survival differential mathematics and so on, we don't need for our survival to understand ultimate reality, God, soul. You know, you just look for what the mind was created. Even if this is true, I have, as I develop in this book, one big naive problem. But there is one big difference between a rabbit and us: rabbit doesn't even bother about differential calculus. Why do we humans always bother with impossible tasks? Why—why are we, as it were, from the very beginning trying to ask metaphysical questions, to put it this way? Why don't we simply say, "Okay, we can't understand it, let's drop it"? And I think that we can go even further. One can show that all great inventions, utilitarian inventions like new machines and so on, that the usual logic of discovery was not: "Oh we have a problem, we should invent it." First it was always that you invented something out of pure metaphysical speculation, useless, and then application always comes secondary. So it's not this primitive Marxist economic reductionism which says "We develop machines for production and then rich people can use them as toys," and so on. You know the history of modern machinery in the 17th century already. You had I don't know how many machineries in the court of Louis XIV and so on. They were used to produce rains, spectacles, dolls, and so on. First they were widely constructed for just for amusement, to fascinate. Application came—came afterwards and so on. So my point is that I would—I am tempted to link this with what I was saying before. The true mystery for me, as it were, is that, again, back to sexuality. That's Hegel. It's not that we have our natural sexuality which is gradually civilized and so on and so on. No, natural sexuality gets denaturalized in some kind of deadly passion, crazy insistence. This is what was the enigma for Freud from the very beginning: how is it that—and incidentally even I know some brain scientists, or rather behavioral scientists who are doing things with apes and told me some interesting even empirical data at this level. A guy whom I know, a Turkish name, Güven Güzeldere in—at Duke University, he is doing experiments—not cruel ones, not the one where you do horror with—with apes. And he told me that it's interesting how is there is a difference between ape and human being when you pose is that apes are generally more rational even. In the sense of if you make with an ape the experiment of simply—the experiment of let's say—very primitive experiment he told me—you propose to a male ape a beautiful, very attractive sexual partner and a B-level sexual partner. First the ape tries to get to the more attractive partner. But after some time, when the ape sees he cannot do it, he says, "Okay, fuck off," he goes to the [unintelligible]. It's very rational calculation. While with men, we are much more—we persist to the end. You never—you know, the more it is impossible, the more you stick to it and so on and so on. This, let's call it internalization of desire, which then produces something which, and that's how I read Freud, brings us to death drive. Death drive has nothing to do whatsoever—that's the ABC, I hope you know it—with that Nirvana shit and so on. Death drive is exactly the opposite. I claim if you read Freud closely, death drive is Freudian name for immortality. What Freud calls death drive is some something that insists as it were beyond life and death. Figures of death drive are like vampires, living dead and so on and so on. And my thesis, which I develop repeatedly in my books, without this you cannot understand not only Hegel but none of the classical philosophy, is that this is what explodes in German idealism. That—and that's what I'm trying to do basically in all my work: reading mutually like German idealism to psychoanalysis. Not in order to reduce German idealism just to psychology, but to elevate Freud to a thinker. For example, sorry if you know this line, but it's wonderful works, I want to repeat it, it works wonderfully. The best account of death drive I found is just in a small, like some little deduction in Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason*, where he mentions—Immanuel Kant—two types of negation. He mentions the—he distinguishes negative judgment and infinite judgment. It's very simple to understand. Kant says: negative judgment negates a predicate; a infinite judgment asserts, affirms a non-predicate. You will say what's the point, it's the same shit. No, it's not. Why not? Let's go to Stephen King territory and you will see why not. Let us negate the predicate "dead". First as a negative judgment. If I say "You are not dead," what does this mean? You are alive. Nothing special, no? We have just the space of life-death; you are not dead, you are alive. Okay, but think about—let us say not "You are not dead," but "You are undead." This means something quite different. This doesn't mean you are simply alive. It means you are alive as dead, you are a living dead. You know, a third domain is opened of some obscene life which insists beyond life and death and so on. And my claim, this vampiric as it were, undead, all the vampires and so on, this space is opened by Kant. And this is the space of this absolute negativity, death drive and so on and so on, which was conceptualized by—by German idealism. And this is the excess with which culture, dialectical formula—dialectical mediation tries to deal. And with Hegel, now you will say, but wait a minute, for Hegel this is only a starting point, but at the end we have this perfect reconciliation, all in peace and so on. No. That's what I will try to prove to you, more tomorrow than today. Just to give you—Hegel was well aware that—that this excess of negativity cannot ever be culturalized. Which is why, for example, just to give you one hint, in contrast to Kant, Hegel didn't believe in eternal peace. Because he thought that—you know, the way Hegel is presented: perfect modern bourgeois society, all the particular interests are harmonized in the common good, you reconcile with society and so on. Hegel thinks that, not because he was a militarist, but he thought that there always is the threat that this radical negativity, this excess will explode again and again. And again, this excess is neither life nor death, or neither nature nor culture. So you see, now we already got the first abstract idea of how the Hegelian progress, let's put it in this way, looks. It's not simply you have a natural substrate and then progressively you develop more and more culture. No, once you are in culture, retroactively you denaturalize nature. You know, culture doesn't only civilize nature, natural instincts. The price we pay to move into culture is that what before was a simple natural instinct—like I want to screw one month a year when smell tells me this is a mating season or what—becomes an absolute eternal suicidal repetitive drive, which is crucial for Freudian notion of death drive, that it's a repetitive drive. Repetitive in the sense that, as Lacan puts it very precisely in this distinction he uses English terms here, Lacan, between "aim" and "goal." Goal is what you officially want, let's say to achieve something. But for Lacan, the true satisfaction of the drive is the circular movement of the drive itself. You don't want to achieve—it's like boomerang. You don't want to hit it. You want it to come back and try again and again and the true satisfaction is provided by this very circular movement and so on and so on. Which is why for Freud, who is here a good Hegelian, which is why for Freud sexual satisfaction, it's always—you know when Freud talks about this foreplay, it's never simply foreplay is a goal to the final goal, big penetration, whatever sexual act. There is always a danger that the foreplay will turn into a self-goal, how should I put it. I want to tell you here a story told to me by nice British Lacanian, very good popularizer of Lacan but also independently of this not an idiot, Darian Leader. In his, I think one of the first books, he—it's a very simple example, I mention it in one of my books—he quotes the example of, very simple one, of how one of his patients—you want to blackmail me or what? You know I mean with like this nasty horrible [unintelligible]. Sorry—the—that told him of a strange—a strange slip of tongue that happened to him. He took a lady to a restaurant with the obvious goal of seducing her later. And while approaching and reserving a table, he made the obvious slip of tongue. Instead of saying "Table for two please," he said "A bed for two please" to the waiter. Now, the primitive pseudo-Freudian interpretation would have been: of course his mind was already up there, blah-blah. Ah, Darian Leader proposed a totally different interpretation: that he was afraid that—how should I put it—that the foreplay would overshadow the official goal itself, as it were. He was afraid that in this hierarchical order "we go to eat, it's just a pretext to go to bed later," that he will enjoy too much what should be, following the official hierarchy of seduction, just the preparatory step. So it was more a defense against enjoying too much the foreplay, the beginning. He wanted to convince himself, "No-no-no, it's not eating, I really want to—it's really about, you know." It's I think a much more intelligent explanation. Which is why, to conclude the first part with lovingly racist joke about—maybe if you the two of you from ex-Yugoslavia, you know those wonderful jokes, some of them are metaphysical: two Bosnians, Mujo and Haso, no? One of them I saw—you know that in Slovenia they are extremely popular, we did a movie series, it's like you get a DVD some hundreds of them, they're—they're wonderfully vulgar, but some of them very metaphysical jokes. And one of them has the same logic. This is what the patient was afraid there, how should I put it, no? Okay, we didn't say a lot about Hegel, we will go on in part two. Okay, now we do the short break. Yeah, although no-no-no, I see it—look, here you got me because as you know, first I shared Lacan's big distrust of Nietzsche. Because you know that this is, there are a couple of mysteries in Jacques Lacan. For example, practically total absence of Nietzsche. He mentions Nietzsche just a couple of times and usually in a dismissive way. Like, I think in the *Ethics of Psychoanalysis* he said that to speak about "beyond good and evil," it's—it's saying too much, you say exactly the same if you just say "beyond the good," and so on. So it's more this kind of a nasty aggressiveness. I think he was wrong, but I somehow I don't know, couldn't—and then okay, I can make propaganda for my friend, my part of my Slovene gang, Alenka Zupančič. She did that book *The Shortest Shadow*, she practically converted me to Nietzsche, no. Although, you know, I'm very interested in this problem Nietzsche and Wagner, because you know it's much more ambiguous, Nietzsche really didn't get rid of Wagner up to the end. You know that when Nietzsche collapsed, got crazy, the text he was working on was this—there are two, not *Der Fall Wagner*, *Nietzsche contra Wagner*, what—where he tried to—sorry? And *The Anti-Christ*. Yeah-yeah-yeah, where he tried to prove that he was always against Wagner and so on. So obviously this was a problem—this was a problem for Nietzsche, but again—I mean, of course I'm still working on that. In the same place with different ones—yeah no, Nietzsche just popped up in the conversation. Yeah I know, I know. Okay, so—you know what, let's do another line where we will reach Hegel only at the end, and then this is an endless task; tomorrow we shall go on and so on and so on. First I want to begin—I did some of this stuff in my books, but I will don't worry I will give a different twist at the end—I will try to account for what Hegel means with concrete universality. This is usually taken as Hegel at his craziest, no? You know this idea that—our usual nominalist view is: we all know there is full concrete reality from which we abstract some features. Like I look at people, I say "I'm a freak, you are nicer," blah-blah, but there are some features we share: two legs, whatever, blah-blah, and that's the—but Hegel, this is how it is usually perceived, that Hegel was a crazy guy who thought that somehow you can develop the entire concrete content out of just abstract self-movement of the universal notion. So was he crazy? What did he mean by this? I want to give you some examples here. Let's hope we will finish it. I want to begin with the great anti-Hegelian. They are often—Hegel is a tricky guy; often you should look for truly Hegelian insights into when you get a guy who is absolutely explicitly anti-Hegel, but then says something which—okay, I would like to go to Deleuze. You know this, that if there is an anti-Hegel, it's Deleuze. I would like to start with Deleuze's notion of pure difference linked with repetition. The idea of pure difference is a repetition which is repetition absolutely of the same. Nothing changes. You repeat the same and there you produce a pure difference, radical difference. This is how Deleuze, I claim, in a very Hegelian view, argues how new emerges out of a repetition. I would like to give you two examples. I use them in some of my books; I will try to give again a different twist at least to them here. I like classical music; I like Robert Schumann. One of the masterpieces by Schumann is *Humoresque*. There he does something wonderful. Do we have here—I even I will play this game, I hate this post-it with the strings and so on, but I—oh but it looks bad, everything will collapse. No, it will not. Okay. You know, this piece of piano is—written, does—does something very strange. It's written on three lines of notes. You have left hand, right hand, and then you have something very mysterious which was popular in German romantic music: so-called *Augenmusik*, music just for the eye. So let's say one note line, the middle one, the lower. Let's say this is what you play with the left hand, what you play with the right hand, and what you play here. Of course his idea, a typically romantic one, was that when you play, it's very Deleuzian idea of virtual, virtuality. And you know the precise nature of what Deleuze calls virtual. Virtual is not just possible, what may be. Virtual is something which as possible, as non-actual, already exerts an efficiency of its own. So his idea was that the true great piano—piano—pianist—not penis, what—because you know that wonderful obscene joke when General de Gaulle retired, an American journalist asked his wife what she is looking for now. And she said "Happiness," but she pronounced it in this French [unintelligible] "A penis," no. General de Gaulle told her "More vulgar as it is, now we will have more." So I have these kind of penis problems. Okay. So yeah, yeah. Of course it's clear what Schumann wanted to say: that the way he wanted to do it is a kind of variations without a melody. That the two lines should be perceived as variations implicitly referring to a melodic line which should remain only for the eyes, which you don't hear. So the point is—again—a truly great pianist—pianist—must know how to play it so that somehow this absent, but precisely the virtual absent point of reference is evoked. But then something more mysterious happens. My source is—it's always good to confess which is the source of your bluffing so that—you know, it's a wonderful book, I really appreciate him; maybe he's the greatest musicologist today, you know Charles Rosen, who did this *Classical Style* and then he did, maybe even better, second volume as it were, *Romantic Generation*, where he covers Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, all those guys. Okay, he does this: first you have the whole part, segment, written in this way: a melody here, a—melody, the line of notes here, the line of notes here, with *Augenmusik*, a third line here. Then something strange happens: he repeats exactly the same notes, up and down, but here it's empty. And this is the true challenge to the piano player. This would be the Deleuzian pure repetition, because nothing changes at the level of reality. By reality I simply mean the actual notes to be played. What changes is just the virtual background, the virtual echoing, no? You should play—I don't know how this works, I listened to some recordings, I imagined that I heard the difference but probably because I wanted to hear it and—but you see the art: you repeat exactly the same line, but in such a way that what changes is not what you hear but what you don't hear. You should play it once so that this somehow—don't ask me how—resonates in it, the other time that it doesn't resonate in it. This I think can be perfectly referred to what Deleuze means by—I have even a quote here by—that there are significant differences in the virtual intensities expressed in our actual sensations; these differences do not correspond to actual recognizable differences. It is that—that the only change is the change of the virtual relations and so on and so on. So my point is that we can maybe apply even the same to ideology. Maybe the true ideological revolution, much more difficult to achieve, is not to change this is what I was talking—I don't know yesterday or—it's not just the change in what you explicitly, in explicit order, but you know like for example as I was talking yesterday if I say "you shouldn't do this," it has this virtual background: do I mean "you really shouldn't do this," "do in blah-blah"? And maybe a much more difficult revolution than to change the explicit rules is the revolution in this background. So that I'm saying the same thing, but the virtual resonance, what Deleuze calls virtuality behind, is a different one. Again, this is how, in this sense, the radical change is this change where nothing happens in reality; in reality the same is repeated, but there you discover the radical, pure difference, which is no longer just a difference, concrete difference that you can pin down, but somehow everything is different. Now let me give you another example which I like even more, maybe you know it, it's such an evil example that I really love. It really happened to me, that's why I repeat it all the time. It's from—my experience with Doctorow's novel *Billy Bathgate*. Maybe you know the novel and the movie. Okay, let me tell you what happened to me. I first saw a movie, which I so-so, didn't like too much, but my impression was: oh my god, you can see how much better the novel must have been and how they failed. You know, sometimes when you do a movie from a masterpiece and it's a bad movie, you can still see the traces of the great point of reference, literary, whatever, masterpiece, and I said, "Oh my god, what a shame, couldn't they recapture, blah-blah." But then something mysterious happened to me. I said, "Okay, let's then read the novel." To cut a long story short, the novel was even worse. So somehow this would be another way to mention the Deleuzian repetition. We have the real repetition: first we have the novel, which—okay, let's agree for the sake of argument, you don't have to—that it's a bad novel, and incidentally I don't have anything against Doctorow, I some of his works I liked tremendously like his Rosenberg children story, did you see it, *The Book of Daniel*, I think, and so on—no, this is a lesser-known novel, so nothing against him. But this novel I don't like. And the movie I don't know if you saw it, it's with Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, and so on, whatever. Okay, so we have a failed novel, not too good novel; we have a failed repetition, a movie. Both are—let's accept it for the sake of the argument—both are failures. But the repetition itself retroactively generates a purely virtual, spectral presence of the true novel as it should have been. And this is what Deleuze is saying. This is how I read a wonderful passage from Deleuze, the absolute Deleuze—forget about all that anti-Oedipal shit—when he—I seriously think the two absolute Deleuze books are, I think, *Difference and Repetition* and *The Logic of Sense*. They are miracles for me. So, look what he writes here, I quote: he speaks about two presents or two series. "While it may seem that the two presents are successive at a variable distance apart in the series of reals, in fact, in fact they form rather two real series which coexist in relation to a virtual object of another kind, one which constantly circulates and is displaced in them. Repetition is not constituted—is constituted not from one present to another, but between the two coexisting series that these presents form in function of the virtual object." So again, back to *Billy Bathgate*, the film does not repeat the novel on which it is based. It is rather that they both repeat the unrepeatable virtual act, the true novel whose spectre is engendered by the passage from the actual novel to the actual—to the actual film. And let's be more precise here: it's not that we should simply conceive the starting point, Doctorow's novel, as—as they put it—an open work, full of possibilities which can be deployed later, actualized in later versions. Or even worse, that we should conceive the original work as a pretext which can later be re-contextualized in different contexts, given a different meaning, and so on and so on. What is missing here is some retroactive movement which—another quote that I repeat all the time, but I think this is again absolutely crucial to understand Hegel—a movement described—again I mention it in—in—in some of my books—what happened in this movement. It is something which was, as far as I know, first conceptualized by Henri Bergson. In his *Two Sources of Morality and Religion*, Bergson describes the strange sensation he experienced when the First World War was declared on August He wrote: "In spite of my turmoil and although a war, even a victorious one, appeared to me as a catastrophe, I experienced what William James spoke about: a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from the abstract to be concrete. Who would have thought that such a formidable event can emerge in reality with so little fuss?" So what he is dealing with is the following: that when the war exploded, what happened? Before, everybody knew or expected it. At the level of abstract knowledge, everybody knew about it, expected it. You know how it looked: for the last years, all Europe was obsessed by the prospect of the war. But nonetheless, nobody believed it can really happen. This is a clear example of this fetishist disavowal, *je sais bien mais quand même*: "I know very well, but nonetheless I don't believe it can really happen." Now, what was such a surprise for Bergson was that first it was probable but impossible—this is how it was subjectively experienced—then when it happened, it suddenly became real and possible. That is to say, once it happened, it retroactively became totally acceptable, possible. And I think the subjective experience described here is quite—quite correct. I remember the same, for example, when I—the first weeks, I admit, were traumatic when I did the military service. I was there, and in advance I knew it would be terrifying and I knew it will be horrible, but I somehow blocked it as a serious possibility. When I went to the army, it's not the shock was not only that I was there, but how all of a sudden it was totally naturalized. Did it happen to you? That I—it was on the contrary already after a week or two that the life in the normal, non-military society became a kind of a vague memory and so on. So what happens here? That's the beautiful formula by Bergson: is that there is—the logic we have here is not the standard linear logic of a possibility, of "we have a situation A here, which has certain possibilities, this can happen, that can happen, and so on; then one of these possibilities is realized and so on and so on." No, is that something that we consider here—of course not logically but in the symbolic space—impossible, happens, and when it happens, it retroactively becomes possible. In the sense that "Oh my god, how couldn't we seen it, it's quite normal." This would be incidentally the best definition you can imagine of what Jacques Lacan means "an act." You do something which appears impossible, but it retroactively as it were creates its own conditions of possibility. I will give—even give you, so that you will not—accuse me again of trying to do some communist propaganda or what—a very common example. You remember the Cold War, China so-so, sorry, Russia so-so in Nixon era, but Mao's China total madness, they want World War. Then Nixon's visit to China. How when it happened, it immediately looked normal. Of course, no break, of course it's rational politics and so on and so on and so on. So here is another beautiful quote from Bergson where he accounts for this mechanism. He says: "I never pretended that one can insert reality into the past and thus work backwards in time. However, one can without any doubt insert there the possible, or rather, at every moment the possible inserts itself there. Insofar as unpredictable and new reality creates itself, its image reflects itself behind itself in the indefinite past; this new reality finds itself all the time having been possible. But it is only at a precise moment of its actual emergence that it begins to always already have been." That's the wonderful formulation. And this is why I say that its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once this reality emerges. You know, it's like—it's like this—sorry, immediately I got—just to finish the line, I'm senile, old, just to finish. It's like, you know, when you are in love. You are in love and then somehow all of a sudden it appears as if all your previous life is structured as if it was waiting for this moment. Please. Where did you quote from? Ah, good idea. It—the quote is—was it here or there? I will give you the precise quote. I quote from—I quote from—I wanted to be precise, from *Oeuvres*, blah-blah-blah, but basically is from his text—it should be translated, one of his big texts—*Two Sources of Morality and Religion*. And if I know it correctly, it's not a mega-thick book so it should be easy to find. All I know is that my official quote is from *Oeuvres*, Works, you know, this Pleiade crazy edition in one volume, page and But that's not realistic, look into—look into that one. But, but to admit, but where I really quote from—I don't bluff with you, I tell you openly as always intellectuals do it—I'm really quoting from that wonderful—I forgot which one—Jean-Pierre Dupuy, whom I mentioned to you yesterday. He is this wonderful—rational choice theorist but with a great dialectical sense. For example, he has a wonderful theory of how you should confront a catastrophe. That it doesn't work if you say, "Okay, there is still a possibility to—" You say you must accept catastrophe as inevitable and then change the very past so that, you know, like you must work in this—in this—in this way. So what I—so what has this to do with—ah, now we go to the crucial point—what has this to do with Hegel? I claim that—the Hegelian temporality, when Hegel speaks about rational totality and so on and so on, is—when Hegel speaks about eternity, it's always done in this way. It's not—for example, you know you have all these formulas in Hegel which may sound like this absolute metaphysical closure where the atemporal structure has priority over temporal development. Hegel does say, for example, "In development, a thing becomes what it always already was." As if, you know, in pre- [unintelligible]. So as if we have a closed circle of potentials, possibilities, and this effectively Hegel may appear to be this kind of a totally closed structure. But I think the way we should read the Hegelian notion of totality is more in this Bergsonian way, and I will give you here—let's proceed a little bit fast so that we don't lose time—you must know, again, the conservatives that I like. There is another Deleuzean notion which is crucial here. It's the strange notion of what Deleuze calls a pure past, an absolute past, a kind of an atemporal eternal texture where—quote from Deleuze—"where all events, including those that have transpired without trace, are stored and remembered as they're passing away," and so on and so on. So again, this idea that whatever goes on just realizes what potentially is always already there in an atemporal structure. But is Hegel really saying this? I think Hegel is effectively saying something much closer to—I will not quote it to you, you must know it—a wonderful passage, I like conservatives again, from T.S. Eliot, you know that "Tradition and the Individual Talent." You know, when he has this idea that every truly new work of art retroactively changes the past itself. Of course, he is not an idiot, like Bergson his point is not that the magic travel in the past, but that for example, I don't know how to put it, after a certain new work of art, classical arts themselves are structured, perceived in a different way. The idea is here what in structuralism it was called "the priority of synchrony over diachrony." In the sense that at every historical moment, we don't have just the present; the present is always also the entire past, the way it forms what Deleuze calls this "virtual pure past," all the traces, the way they are structured. So again, this is how we should distinguish common changes and a true radical change. Common changes just explore possibilities within this structure of the past. A radical change restructures in this sense the past itself. How does this work? Again, let me give you a wonderful quote from Borges. I don't always like Borges; he is sometimes too—what is this—he is sometimes, how should I put it, too—too smart for his own good or whatever in these paradoxes. But he in his—
understand itself. And Pinker tries to provide a totally evolutionary account. He says—I quote him almost literally, here I don't simplify—he says that—that it's for the same reason that a rabbit cannot do, I don't know, differential calculus or what. Our mind was created for certain survival adaptive reasons. It wasn't created, it didn't emerge, develop to understand itself. It emerged to—to construct tools, to deal with nature, for mating, for cooperation, dealing with—and that's why it was created. And it can do, of course, things for which it was created. And in the same way that rabbit doesn't need for his survival differential mathematics and so on, we don't need for our survival to understand ultimate reality, God, soul. You know, you just look for what the mind was created. Even if this is true, I have, as I develop in this book, one big naive problem. But there is one big difference between a rabbit and us: rabbit doesn't even bother about differential calculus. Why do we humans always bother with impossible tasks? Why—why are we, as it were, from the very beginning trying to ask metaphysical questions, to put it this way? Why don't we simply say, "Okay, we can't understand it, let's drop it"? And I think that we can go even further. One can show that all great inventions, utilitarian inventions like new machines and so on, that the usual logic of discovery was not: "Oh we have a problem, we should invent it." First it was always that you invented something out of pure metaphysical speculation, useless, and then application always comes secondary. So it's not this primitive Marxist economic reductionism which says "We develop machines for production and then rich people can use them as toys," and so on. You know the history of modern machinery in the 17th century already. You had I don't know how many machineries in the court of Louis XIV and so on. They were used to produce rains, spectacles, dolls, and so on. First they were widely constructed for just for amusement, to fascinate. Application came—came afterwards and so on. So my point is that I would—I am tempted to link this with what I was saying before. The true mystery for me, as it were, is that, again, back to sexuality. That's Hegel. It's not that we have our natural sexuality which is gradually civilized and so on and so on. No, natural sexuality gets denaturalized in some kind of deadly passion, crazy insistence. This is what was the enigma for Freud from the very beginning: how is it that—and incidentally even I know some brain scientists, or rather behavioral scientists who are doing things with apes and told me some interesting even empirical data at this level. A guy whom I know, a Turkish name, Güven Güzeldere in—at Duke University, he is doing experiments—not cruel ones, not the one where you do horror with—with apes. And he told me that it's interesting how is there is a difference between ape and human being when you pose is that apes are generally more rational even. In the sense of if you make with an ape the experiment of simply—the experiment of let's say—very primitive experiment he told me—you propose to a male ape a beautiful, very attractive sexual partner and a B-level sexual partner. First the ape tries to get to the more attractive partner. But after some time, when the ape sees he cannot do it, he says, "Okay, fuck off," he goes to the [unintelligible]. It's very rational calculation. While with men, we are much more—we persist to the end. You never—you know, the more it is impossible, the more you stick to it and so on and so on. This, let's call it internalization of desire, which then produces something which, and that's how I read Freud, brings us to death drive. Death drive has nothing to do whatsoever—that's the ABC, I hope you know it—with that Nirvana shit and so on. Death drive is exactly the opposite. I claim if you read Freud closely, death drive is Freudian name for immortality. What Freud calls death drive is some something that insists as it were beyond life and death. Figures of death drive are like vampires, living dead and so on and so on. And my thesis, which I develop repeatedly in my books, without this you cannot understand not only Hegel but none of the classical philosophy, is that this is what explodes in German idealism. That—and that's what I'm trying to do basically in all my work: reading mutually like German idealism to psychoanalysis. Not in order to reduce German idealism just to psychology, but to elevate Freud to a thinker. For example, sorry if you know this line, but it's wonderful works, I want to repeat it, it works wonderfully. The best account of death drive I found is just in a small, like some little deduction in Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason*, where he mentions—Immanuel Kant—two types of negation. He mentions the—he distinguishes negative judgment and infinite judgment. It's very simple to understand. Kant says: negative judgment negates a predicate; a infinite judgment asserts, affirms a non-predicate. You will say what's the point, it's the same shit. No, it's not. Why not? Let's go to Stephen King territory and you will see why not. Let us negate the predicate "dead". First as a negative judgment. If I say "You are not dead," what does this mean? You are alive. Nothing special, no? We have just the space of life-death; you are not dead, you are alive. Okay, but think about—let us say not "You are not dead," but "You are undead." This means something quite different. This doesn't mean you are simply alive. It means you are alive as dead, you are a living dead. You know, a third domain is opened of some obscene life which insists beyond life and death and so on. And my claim, this vampiric as it were, undead, all the vampires and so on, this space is opened by Kant. And this is the space of this absolute negativity, death drive and so on and so on, which was conceptualized by—by German idealism. And this is the excess with which culture, dialectical formula—dialectical mediation tries to deal. And with Hegel, now you will say, but wait a minute, for Hegel this is only a starting point, but at the end we have this perfect reconciliation, all in peace and so on. No. That's what I will try to prove to you, more tomorrow than today. Just to give you—Hegel was well aware that—that this excess of negativity cannot ever be culturalized. Which is why, for example, just to give you one hint, in contrast to Kant, Hegel didn't believe in eternal peace. Because he thought that—you know, the way Hegel is presented: perfect modern bourgeois society, all the particular interests are harmonized in the common good, you reconcile with society and so on. Hegel thinks that, not because he was a militarist, but he thought that there always is the threat that this radical negativity, this excess will explode again and again. And again, this excess is neither life nor death, or neither nature nor culture. So you see, now we already got the first abstract idea of how the Hegelian progress, let's put it in this way, looks. It's not simply you have a natural substrate and then progressively you develop more and more culture. No, once you are in culture, retroactively you denaturalize nature. You know, culture doesn't only civilize nature, natural instincts. The price we pay to move into culture is that what before was a simple natural instinct—like I want to screw one month a year when smell tells me this is a mating season or what—becomes an absolute eternal suicidal repetitive drive, which is crucial for Freudian notion of death drive, that it's a repetitive drive. Repetitive in the sense that, as Lacan puts it very precisely in this distinction he uses English terms here, Lacan, between "aim" and "goal." Goal is what you officially want, let's say to achieve something. But for Lacan, the true satisfaction of the drive is the circular movement of the drive itself. You don't want to achieve—it's like boomerang. You don't want to hit it. You want it to come back and try again and again and the true satisfaction is provided by this very circular movement and so on and so on. Which is why for Freud, who is here a good Hegelian, which is why for Freud sexual satisfaction, it's always—you know when Freud talks about this foreplay, it's never simply foreplay is a goal to the final goal, big penetration, whatever sexual act. There is always a danger that the foreplay will turn into a self-goal, how should I put it. I want to tell you here a story told to me by nice British Lacanian, very good popularizer of Lacan but also independently of this not an idiot, Darian Leader. In his, I think one of the first books, he—it's a very simple example, I mention it in one of my books—he quotes the example of, very simple one, of how one of his patients—you want to blackmail me or what? You know I mean with like this nasty horrible [unintelligible]. Sorry—the—that told him of a strange—a strange slip of tongue that happened to him. He took a lady to a restaurant with the obvious goal of seducing her later. And while approaching and reserving a table, he made the obvious slip of tongue. Instead of saying "Table for two please," he said "A bed for two please" to the waiter. Now, the primitive pseudo-Freudian interpretation would have been: of course his mind was already up there, blah-blah. Ah, Darian Leader proposed a totally different interpretation: that he was afraid that—how should I put it—that the foreplay would overshadow the official goal itself, as it were. He was afraid that in this hierarchical order "we go to eat, it's just a pretext to go to bed later," that he will enjoy too much what should be, following the official hierarchy of seduction, just the preparatory step. So it was more a defense against enjoying too much the foreplay, the beginning. He wanted to convince himself, "No-no-no, it's not eating, I really want to—it's really about, you know." It's I think a much more intelligent explanation. Which is why, to conclude the first part with lovingly racist joke about—maybe if you the two of you from ex-Yugoslavia, you know those wonderful jokes, some of them are metaphysical: two Bosnians, Mujo and Haso, no? One of them I saw—you know that in Slovenia they are extremely popular, we did a movie series, it's like you get a DVD some hundreds of them, they're—they're wonderfully vulgar, but some of them very metaphysical jokes. And one of them has the same logic. This is what the patient was afraid there, how should I put it, no? Okay, we didn't say a lot about Hegel, we will go on in part two. Okay, now we do the short break. Yeah, although no-no-no, I see it—look, here you got me because as you know, first I shared Lacan's big distrust of Nietzsche. Because you know that this is, there are a couple of mysteries in Jacques Lacan. For example, practically total absence of Nietzsche. He mentions Nietzsche just a couple of times and usually in a dismissive way. Like, I think in the *Ethics of Psychoanalysis* he said that to speak about "beyond good and evil," it's—it's saying too much, you say exactly the same if you just say "beyond the good," and so on. So it's more this kind of a nasty aggressiveness. I think he was wrong, but I somehow I don't know, couldn't—and then okay, I can make propaganda for my friend, my part of my Slovene gang, Alenka Zupančič. She did that book *The Shortest Shadow*, she practically converted me to Nietzsche, no. Although, you know, I'm very interested in this problem Nietzsche and Wagner, because you know it's much more ambiguous, Nietzsche really didn't get rid of Wagner up to the end. You know that when Nietzsche collapsed, got crazy, the text he was working on was this—there are two, not *Der Fall Wagner*, *Nietzsche contra Wagner*, what—where he tried to—sorry? And *The Anti-Christ*. Yeah-yeah-yeah, where he tried to prove that he was always against Wagner and so on. So obviously this was a problem—this was a problem for Nietzsche, but again—I mean, of course I'm still working on that. In the same place with different ones—yeah no, Nietzsche just popped up in the conversation. Yeah I know, I know. Okay, so—you know what, let's do another line where we will reach Hegel only at the end, and then this is an endless task; tomorrow we shall go on and so on and so on. First I want to begin—I did some of this stuff in my books, but I will don't worry I will give a different twist at the end—I will try to account for what Hegel means with concrete universality. This is usually taken as Hegel at his craziest, no? You know this idea that—our usual nominalist view is: we all know there is full concrete reality from which we abstract some features. Like I look at people, I say "I'm a freak, you are nicer," blah-blah, but there are some features we share: two legs, whatever, blah-blah, and that's the—but Hegel, this is how it is usually perceived, that Hegel was a crazy guy who thought that somehow you can develop the entire concrete content out of just abstract self-movement of the universal notion. So was he crazy? What did he mean by this? I want to give you some examples here. Let's hope we will finish it. I want to begin with the great anti-Hegelian. They are often—Hegel is a tricky guy; often you should look for truly Hegelian insights into when you get a guy who is absolutely explicitly anti-Hegel, but then says something which—okay, I would like to go to Deleuze. You know this, that if there is an anti-Hegel, it's Deleuze. I would like to start with Deleuze's notion of pure difference linked with repetition. The idea of pure difference is a repetition which is repetition absolutely of the same. Nothing changes. You repeat the same and there you produce a pure difference, radical difference. This is how Deleuze, I claim, in a very Hegelian view, argues how new emerges out of a repetition. I would like to give you two examples. I use them in some of my books; I will try to give again a different twist at least to them here. I like classical music; I like Robert Schumann. One of the masterpieces by Schumann is *Humoresque*. There he does something wonderful. Do we have here—I even I will play this game, I hate this post-it with the strings and so on, but I—oh but it looks bad, everything will collapse. No, it will not. Okay. You know, this piece of piano is—written, does—does something very strange. It's written on three lines of notes. You have left hand, right hand, and then you have something very mysterious which was popular in German romantic music: so-called *Augenmusik*, music just for the eye. So let's say one note line, the middle one, the lower. Let's say this is what you play with the left hand, what you play with the right hand, and what you play here. Of course his idea, a typically romantic one, was that when you play, it's very Deleuzian idea of virtual, virtuality. And you know the precise nature of what Deleuze calls virtual. Virtual is not just possible, what may be. Virtual is something which as possible, as non-actual, already exerts an efficiency of its own. So his idea was that the true great piano—piano—pianist—not penis, what—because you know that wonderful obscene joke when General de Gaulle retired, an American journalist asked his wife what she is looking for now. And she said "Happiness," but she pronounced it in this French [unintelligible] "A penis," no. General de Gaulle told her "More vulgar as it is, now we will have more." So I have these kind of penis problems. Okay. So yeah, yeah. Of course it's clear what Schumann wanted to say: that the way he wanted to do it is a kind of variations without a melody. That the two lines should be perceived as variations implicitly referring to a melodic line which should remain only for the eyes, which you don't hear. So the point is—again—a truly great pianist—pianist—must know how to play it so that somehow this absent, but precisely the virtual absent point of reference is evoked. But then something more mysterious happens. My source is—it's always good to confess which is the source of your bluffing so that—you know, it's a wonderful book, I really appreciate him; maybe he's the greatest musicologist today, you know Charles Rosen, who did this *Classical Style* and then he did, maybe even better, second volume as it were, *Romantic Generation*, where he covers Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, all those guys. Okay, he does this: first you have the whole part, segment, written in this way: a melody here, a—melody, the line of notes here, the line of notes here, with *Augenmusik*, a third line here. Then something strange happens: he repeats exactly the same notes, up and down, but here it's empty. And this is the true challenge to the piano player. This would be the Deleuzian pure repetition, because nothing changes at the level of reality. By reality I simply mean the actual notes to be played. What changes is just the virtual background, the virtual echoing, no? You should play—I don't know how this works, I listened to some recordings, I imagined that I heard the difference but probably because I wanted to hear it and—but you see the art: you repeat exactly the same line, but in such a way that what changes is not what you hear but what you don't hear. You should play it once so that this somehow—don't ask me how—resonates in it, the other time that it doesn't resonate in it. This I think can be perfectly referred to what Deleuze means by—I have even a quote here by—that there are significant differences in the virtual intensities expressed in our actual sensations; these differences do not correspond to actual recognizable differences. It is that—that the only change is the change of the virtual relations and so on and so on. So my point is that we can maybe apply even the same to ideology. Maybe the true ideological revolution, much more difficult to achieve, is not to change this is what I was talking—I don't know yesterday or—it's not just the change in what you explicitly, in explicit order, but you know like for example as I was talking yesterday if I say "you shouldn't do this," it has this virtual background: do I mean "you really shouldn't do this," "do in blah-blah"? And maybe a much more difficult revolution than to change the explicit rules is the revolution in this background. So that I'm saying the same thing, but the virtual resonance, what Deleuze calls virtuality behind, is a different one. Again, this is how, in this sense, the radical change is this change where nothing happens in reality; in reality the same is repeated, but there you discover the radical, pure difference, which is no longer just a difference, concrete difference that you can pin down, but somehow everything is different. Now let me give you another example which I like even more, maybe you know it, it's such an evil example that I really love. It really happened to me, that's why I repeat it all the time. It's from—my experience with Doctorow's novel *Billy Bathgate*. Maybe you know the novel and the movie. Okay, let me tell you what happened to me. I first saw a movie, which I so-so, didn't like too much, but my impression was: oh my god, you can see how much better the novel must have been and how they failed. You know, sometimes when you do a movie from a masterpiece and it's a bad movie, you can still see the traces of the great point of reference, literary, whatever, masterpiece, and I said, "Oh my god, what a shame, couldn't they recapture, blah-blah." But then something mysterious happened to me. I said, "Okay, let's then read the novel." To cut a long story short, the novel was even worse. So somehow this would be another way to mention the Deleuzian repetition. We have the real repetition: first we have the novel, which—okay, let's agree for the sake of argument, you don't have to—that it's a bad novel, and incidentally I don't have anything against Doctorow, I some of his works I liked tremendously like his Rosenberg children story, did you see it, *The Book of Daniel*, I think, and so on—no, this is a lesser-known novel, so nothing against him. But this novel I don't like. And the movie I don't know if you saw it, it's with Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, and so on, whatever. Okay, so we have a failed novel, not too good novel; we have a failed repetition, a movie. Both are—let's accept it for the sake of the argument—both are failures. But the repetition itself retroactively generates a purely virtual, spectral presence of the true novel as it should have been. And this is what Deleuze is saying. This is how I read a wonderful passage from Deleuze, the absolute Deleuze—forget about all that anti-Oedipal shit—when he—I seriously think the two absolute Deleuze books are, I think, *Difference and Repetition* and *The Logic of Sense*. They are miracles for me. So, look what he writes here, I quote: he speaks about two presents or two series. "While it may seem that the two presents are successive at a variable distance apart in the series of reals, in fact, in fact they form rather two real series which coexist in relation to a virtual object of another kind, one which constantly circulates and is displaced in them. Repetition is not constituted—is constituted not from one present to another, but between the two coexisting series that these presents form in function of the virtual object." So again, back to *Billy Bathgate*, the film does not repeat the novel on which it is based. It is rather that they both repeat the unrepeatable virtual act, the true novel whose spectre is engendered by the passage from the actual novel to the actual—to the actual film. And let's be more precise here: it's not that we should simply conceive the starting point, Doctorow's novel, as—as they put it—an open work, full of possibilities which can be deployed later, actualized in later versions. Or even worse, that we should conceive the original work as a pretext which can later be re-contextualized in different contexts, given a different meaning, and so on and so on. What is missing here is some retroactive movement which—another quote that I repeat all the time, but I think this is again absolutely crucial to understand Hegel—a movement described—again I mention it in—in—in some of my books—what happened in this movement. It is something which was, as far as I know, first conceptualized by Henri Bergson. In his *Two Sources of Morality and Religion*, Bergson describes the strange sensation he experienced when the First World War was declared on August He wrote: "In spite of my turmoil and although a war, even a victorious one, appeared to me as a catastrophe, I experienced what William James spoke about: a feeling of admiration for the facility of the passage from the abstract to be concrete. Who would have thought that such a formidable event can emerge in reality with so little fuss?" So what he is dealing with is the following: that when the war exploded, what happened? Before, everybody knew or expected it. At the level of abstract knowledge, everybody knew about it, expected it. You know how it looked: for the last years, all Europe was obsessed by the prospect of the war. But nonetheless, nobody believed it can really happen. This is a clear example of this fetishist disavowal, *je sais bien mais quand même*: "I know very well, but nonetheless I don't believe it can really happen." Now, what was such a surprise for Bergson was that first it was probable but impossible—this is how it was subjectively experienced—then when it happened, it suddenly became real and possible. That is to say, once it happened, it retroactively became totally acceptable, possible. And I think the subjective experience described here is quite—quite correct. I remember the same, for example, when I—the first weeks, I admit, were traumatic when I did the military service. I was there, and in advance I knew it would be terrifying and I knew it will be horrible, but I somehow blocked it as a serious possibility. When I went to the army, it's not the shock was not only that I was there, but how all of a sudden it was totally naturalized. Did it happen to you? That I—it was on the contrary already after a week or two that the life in the normal, non-military society became a kind of a vague memory and so on. So what happens here? That's the beautiful formula by Bergson: is that there is—the logic we have here is not the standard linear logic of a possibility, of "we have a situation A here, which has certain possibilities, this can happen, that can happen, and so on; then one of these possibilities is realized and so on and so on." No, is that something that we consider here—of course not logically but in the symbolic space—impossible, happens, and when it happens, it retroactively becomes possible. In the sense that "Oh my god, how couldn't we seen it, it's quite normal." This would be incidentally the best definition you can imagine of what Jacques Lacan means "an act." You do something which appears impossible, but it retroactively as it were creates its own conditions of possibility. I will give—even give you, so that you will not—accuse me again of trying to do some communist propaganda or what—a very common example. You remember the Cold War, China so-so, sorry, Russia so-so in Nixon era, but Mao's China total madness, they want World War. Then Nixon's visit to China. How when it happened, it immediately looked normal. Of course, no break, of course it's rational politics and so on and so on and so on. So here is another beautiful quote from Bergson where he accounts for this mechanism. He says: "I never pretended that one can insert reality into the past and thus work backwards in time. However, one can without any doubt insert there the possible, or rather, at every moment the possible inserts itself there. Insofar as unpredictable and new reality creates itself, its image reflects itself behind itself in the indefinite past; this new reality finds itself all the time having been possible. But it is only at a precise moment of its actual emergence that it begins to always already have been." That's the wonderful formulation. And this is why I say that its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once this reality emerges. You know, it's like—it's like this—sorry, immediately I got—just to finish the line, I'm senile, old, just to finish. It's like, you know, when you are in love. You are in love and then somehow all of a sudden it appears as if all your previous life is structured as if it was waiting for this moment. Please. Where did you quote from? Ah, good idea. It—the quote is—was it here or there? I will give you the precise quote. I quote from—I quote from—I wanted to be precise, from *Oeuvres*, blah-blah-blah, but basically is from his text—it should be translated, one of his big texts—*Two Sources of Morality and Religion*. And if I know it correctly, it's not a mega-thick book so it should be easy to find. All I know is that my official quote is from *Oeuvres*, Works, you know, this Pleiade crazy edition in one volume, page and But that's not realistic, look into—look into that one. But, but to admit, but where I really quote from—I don't bluff with you, I tell you openly as always intellectuals do it—I'm really quoting from that wonderful—I forgot which one—Jean-Pierre Dupuy, whom I mentioned to you yesterday. He is this wonderful—rational choice theorist but with a great dialectical sense. For example, he has a wonderful theory of how you should confront a catastrophe. That it doesn't work if you say, "Okay, there is still a possibility to—" You say you must accept catastrophe as inevitable and then change the very past so that, you know, like you must work in this—in this—in this way. So what I—so what has this to do with—ah, now we go to the crucial point—what has this to do with Hegel? I claim that—the Hegelian temporality, when Hegel speaks about rational totality and so on and so on, is—when Hegel speaks about eternity, it's always done in this way. It's not—for example, you know you have all these formulas in Hegel which may sound like this absolute metaphysical closure where the atemporal structure has priority over temporal development. Hegel does say, for example, "In development, a thing becomes what it always already was." As if, you know, in pre- [unintelligible]. So as if we have a closed circle of potentials, possibilities, and this effectively Hegel may appear to be this kind of a totally closed structure. But I think the way we should read the Hegelian notion of totality is more in this Bergsonian way, and I will give you here—let's proceed a little bit fast so that we don't lose time—you must know, again, the conservatives that I like. There is another Deleuzean notion which is crucial here. It's the strange notion of what Deleuze calls a pure past, an absolute past, a kind of an atemporal eternal texture where—quote from Deleuze—"where all events, including those that have transpired without trace, are stored and remembered as they're passing away," and so on and so on. So again, this idea that whatever goes on just realizes what potentially is always already there in an atemporal structure. But is Hegel really saying this? I think Hegel is effectively saying something much closer to—I will not quote it to you, you must know it—a wonderful passage, I like conservatives again, from T.S. Eliot, you know that "Tradition and the Individual Talent." You know, when he has this idea that every truly new work of art retroactively changes the past itself. Of course, he is not an idiot, like Bergson his point is not that the magic travel in the past, but that for example, I don't know how to put it, after a certain new work of art, classical arts themselves are structured, perceived in a different way. The idea is here what in structuralism it was called "the priority of synchrony over diachrony." In the sense that at every historical moment, we don't have just the present; the present is always also the entire past, the way it forms what Deleuze calls this "virtual pure past," all the traces, the way they are structured. So again, this is how we should distinguish common changes and a true radical change. Common changes just explore possibilities within this structure of the past. A radical change restructures in this sense the past itself. How does this work? Again, let me give you a wonderful quote from Borges. I don't always like Borges; he is sometimes too—what is this—he is sometimes, how should I put it, too—too smart for his own good or whatever in these paradoxes. But he in his—