The Spirit of Distrust
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2020-09-08 · 0:31:27 · 3,745 words
hegel-dialecticsphilosophy-generalideologyhistoryliberalism-political-correctnesspsychoanalysisrevolution-violenceecology-climate
Žižek argues that Hegel is the philosopher most open to the future precisely because he forbids projecting any positive vision of future society, against all 'we are not yet there' Hegelians (Butler, Lukács, Fukuyama, singularity thinkers). He then critiques Robert Brandom's reading of Hegel centred on 'forgiving recollection', arguing that Brandom's trust in future reconciliation is un-Hegelian; the true Hegelian spirit is one of distrust, retroactive necessity, and the recognition that every emancipatory project self-undermines. He closes by proposing that Hegel best illuminates COVID, viral ideology, and capital as a virus, framing the 21st century as fundamentally Hegelian.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “will have been (retroactive temporality)”
Žižek's characterisation of the peculiar Hegelian tense in which a past act's meaning is only fixed by future events, truth is decided retroactively, in the future perfect.
as “Owl of Minerva / grey on grey”
Hegel's dictum that philosophy can only grasp a form of life after it has peaked and begun its decline, deployed here to argue that Hegel's own Rechtsphilosophie describes a disintegrating order, not a blueprint for the future.
as “'we are not yet there' Hegelians”
Žižek's ironic label for readers (Marx, Lukács, Fukuyama, Butler, singularity thinkers) who treat Hegel's dialectic as pointing toward a coming reconciliation that the present still lacks.
Hegel's concept of dialectical reconciliation; Žižek denies it means a happy synthesis, pointing to the Calvary metaphor at the end of the Phänomenologie as evidence that Hegel sees history as unending catastrophe, not resolution.
Hegel's culminating stage of Spirit's self-knowledge; mockingly cited as what Neuralink/singularity thinkers claim to be finally realising through global neural connectivity.
Lukács' formula from Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein: the proletariat is the subject-object of history, i.e., the class whose self-knowledge is identical with knowledge of the historical whole; cited as the paradigm 'we are not yet there' Hegelian move.
as “Der Geist ist ein Knochen (spirit is a bone)”
Hegel's infinite judgment in the phrenology passage, where the most vulgar materialism and the highest speculative truth coincide; used by Žižek to argue that you must pass through the 'wrong' (low) choice to reach the high.
as “Kalvarienberg des Geistes (Calvary of Spirit)”
Hegel's image from the last page of the Phänomenologie: all of history is a succession of horrors, which Žižek invokes against readings that posit a happy ending in Hegel.
The Hegelian-Adornian procedure of criticising a social form by its own immanent normative criteria; Žižek, following Zambrana, argues these criteria must themselves ultimately fall under critique.
Brandom's reading of Hegel's Geist chapter: the gap between acting subject and judging conscience is overcome when both confess their one-sidedness, yielding mutual reconciliation; Žižek accepts its usefulness against political correctness but rejects Brandom's extension to unconditional forgiveness.
Hegel's figure of the moralising consciousness that condemns the world while remaining blind to its own complicity; invoked as the trap that forgiving recollection must avoid.
as “schlechte Unendlichkeit (spurious infinity)”
Hegel's term for a bad, linear infinite regress; used here to criticise Brandom's move of deferring unforgivable acts to ever-future assessors who will achieve broader perspective.
Bernard Williams' concept that the ethical status of an action depends on its outcome, which Žižek uses to illustrate Hegelian retroactive necessity: a revolution is condemned if it fails, justified if it succeeds and institutes a new legal order.
Hegelian development in which a contingent event retroactively creates its own necessary conditions and determines its own meaning, so that things become necessary only after the fact.
Žižek's counter-formula to Brandom's 'spirit of trust': Hegel's actual procedure is a systematic demonstration that every emancipatory project inverts into its opposite, so trust in future synthesis is always misplaced.
The Hegelian structure in which a tendency or movement wins and immediately self-divides, inverting into its opposite; Žižek presents this as the signature Hegelian logic most relevant to the contemporary world.
Žižek's proposed contemporary reformulation of Hegel's infinite judgment: mind/symbolic order is a parasitic viral entity that colonises the human organism, mirroring Lacan's big Other and Dawkins' memes.
Dawkins' concept of cultural replicators that propagate like genes; Žižek uses it to support the claim that the symbolic/mental order operates as a virus parasitising its human host.
Lacanian symbolic order; cited here as Lacan's anticipation of the viral model of mind, the big Other parasitises rather than naturally inhabiting the human subject.
as “capital as virus”
A Marxist metaphor Žižek endorses: capital is a virtual entity that, like a biological virus, reproduces itself without regard for the human cost it exacts.
Stories he reaches for 1
Kant condemns every revolution as overthrowing legal power, yet also says that if a revolution wins and imposes a new legal order, rebellion against it is again prohibited, meaning a revolution's ethical status changes retroactively upon success.
“if the revolution wins and imposes a new legal order then you are again prohibited to rebel against it. If it succeeds its immanent ethical status changes.”
Works invoked 4
A Spirit of Trust book
Brandom's mega-book on Hegel; Žižek credits its reading of retroactive necessity as beautiful but rejects its central notion of forgiving recollection as collapsing into spurious infinity.
Hegel's political philosophy; its preface (Owl of Minerva) and conclusion (necessity of war) are read as evidence that Hegel describes a disintegrating order and ends without reconciliation.
Hegel's text; cited extensively, the phrenology passage, the Calvary metaphor, the account of Terror, as evidence for Žižek's 'distrust' reading.
Lukács' work; cited as the fullest 'we are not yet there' Hegelianism, identifying proletariat as the mystified absolute spirit.
People invoked 22
Bernard Williams positive
Author of a book on moral luck; Žižek uses his concept to illustrate Hegelian retroactive necessity in Kant's political philosophy.
Robert Pippin positive
Described as a 'philosophical opponent but otherwise friend' who is one of the few to notice that the Owl of Minerva passage applies to Hegel's own Rechtsphilosophie.
Robert Brandom negative
Author of The Spirit of Trust; Žižek credits Brandom with a beautiful reading of Hegelian retroactive necessity but rejects his forgiving recollection as collapsing into spurious infinity and potentially vindicating right-wing rehabilitation.
Rocío Zambrana positive
Puerto Rican philosopher praised as 'very intelligent'; her Adorno-inflected reading of Hegel rejects immanent critique's normative criteria as themselves implicated in suffering, which Žižek endorses.
Georg Lukács negative
Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein presented as the fullest version of 'we are not yet there' Hegelianism: proletariat as the mystified absolute spirit.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Invoked via Zambrana as the thinker who grounds a Hegelian critique attuned to the persistence of suffering rather than immanent normative criteria.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited as anticipating the viral model of mind: the big Other parasitises the human subject with no harmonic continuity between animal and symbolic order.
Mentioned only via Foucault's prediction that the century would be Deleuzian, which Žižek rejects in favour of Hegel.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Called 'the greatest anti-Hegelian you can imagine' for claiming liberal capitalism is the realisation of Hegel's dialectic; Žižek argues Hegel's logic predicts self-division at the moment of victory, not stable completion.
Daniel Dennett positive
Grouped with Dawkins as a top cognitivist whose explicit theory holds that mind is a viral/parasitic entity rather than an organic extension of the self.
Judith Butler negative
Žižek says he is personally on good terms with her but strongly disagrees with her 2024 Hegel speech, which he classifies as 'we are not yet there' Hegelianism missing the necessary passage through the vulgar/negative.
Žižek says he hates Trump but credits him with a perverse subversive honesty: Trump openly admitted defunding the post office to reduce Democratic votes, telling the truth where liberals expected denial.
Leon Trotsky negative
Žižek says he 'prefers Stalin to Trotskyites'; Trotskyist criteria for judging Stalin are, he argues, themselves unconditionally implicated in the crimes they condemn.
Used as the limiting case to test forgiving recollection; Žižek is emphatic that rehabilitation is wrong but uses the case to expose the logical problems in Brandom's framework.
Bruno Latour positive
Quoted as describing COVID-19 as 'a modest dress rehearsal' for coming ecological catastrophes; Žižek endorses this framing.
Quoted for his remark 'un jour peut-être le siècle sera deleuzien' (one day perhaps the century will be Deleuzian), which Žižek inverts to claim our century is instead Hegelian.
Richard Dawkins positive
Classed as a top cognitivist thinker whose meme theory, symbolic/mental order as viral parasite, Žižek deploys to support his 'Der Geist ist ein Virus' thesis.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Mentioned as the representative of the view that critique requires stable normative criteria distillable from social reality; Zambrana/Žižek argue these criteria are themselves implicated in suffering.
Mentioned as the 'comrade from Georgia' who inverted the October Revolution, deployed as a paradigm case of Hegelian immanent reversal, not endorsed.
Karl Marx negative
Cited as the first 'we are not yet there' Hegelian (proletarian revolution as the missing step) and criticised for a productivist view of nature that renders him unable to think COVID the way Hegel can.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central figure of the lecture; Žižek defends a specific 'distrust' reading of Hegel against reconciliationist and progressivist appropriations.
Immanuel Kant positive
His political philosophy on revolution is deployed as the clearest illustration of moral luck / retroactive ethical status: revolution condemned in advance, retrospectively legitimated by success.
What it argues
Hegel as philosopher of the future without a future visionCritique of 'we are not yet there' HegelianismBrandom's forgiving recollection versus Hegelian distrustRetroactive necessity and moral luckTopsy-turvy world and immanent reversalViral ontology: mind, capital, and COVID as virusesPolitical correctness and the beautiful soul
Dialectical moves 9
“Hegel is the philosopher most open to the future precisely because he prohibits any project of how the future should look.”
Openness to the future requires refusing positive visions of it; the very prohibition is the condition of genuine futurity.
“The only way to the height is to make the wrong choice — you have to begin with urination, not insemination.”
In Hegel's logic, the low/vulgar starting point is not a mistake to be avoided but the necessary passage to the speculative truth.
“You have to go through terror; only the terror opens up the way for later reconciliation.”
The Terror is not a deviation from the French Revolution's emancipatory promise but its internal necessity, the passage through which freedom becomes possible.
“Evil is also the gaze which sees evil everywhere around itself.”
The moralising judge who condemns evil is already implicated in it; evil is reflexively present in the act of absolute condemnation.
“Our castigation of Hitler as evil must be a reflexive determination of the evil that persists in ourselves.”
To avoid the 'beautiful soul' position, condemnation of absolute evil must fold back as self-condemnation, yet this is also the logic that right-wingers exploit to rehabilitate Hitler.
“The spirit of trust must be replaced by the spirit of distrust.”
Against Brandom, the authentic Hegelian lesson is that every emancipatory project self-undermines; trust in future synthesis is anti-Hegelian.
“When a certain movement or tendency wins, it self-divides — that is the end.”
Hegelian dialectic: victory is the moment of self-negation, not completion; there is no stable end-state.
“Der Geist ist ein Virus: mind is a parasitic virus, not an organic part of our identity.”
Today's reformulation of Hegel's infinite judgment, the symbolic/mental order is the highest human achievement and simultaneously an alien parasite destroying us.
“Far from being a positivist or progressivist thinker, Hegel is the thinker of a truth decided retroactively — things become necessary only after the fact.”
Hegelian necessity is not linear teleology but retroactive constitution: contingent events create their own necessity backwards.
Claims 17
asserts
Hegel is the philosopher most open to the future precisely because he explicitly prohibits any positive projection of how the future should look.Hegel's political philosophy and openness to the future
asserts
Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie is not a vision of an ideal future state but a grey-on-grey description of a form of life already disintegrating.Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie
rejects
All readings of Hegel that see in him an implicit model of future society reconciled with itself — Marx, Lukács, Fukuyama, Butler, singularity thinkers — should be rejected.'we are not yet there' Hegelians
rejects
Butler's Hegelian reading errs by treating the atomist position as a naive mistake to be transcended, whereas for Hegel you must pass through the lowest vulgar starting point to reach the speculative height.Judith Butler's reading of Hegel
asserts
Terror after the French Revolution was not a deviation from the path of freedom but a necessary passage; only through terror does a later, imperfect reconciliation become possible.Hegel's critique of the Terror / French Revolution
reframes
Brandom's forgiving recollection is useful as a critique of political correctness's absolute moralistic judgment but has clear limits: it cannot coherently extend to cases like Hitler without collapsing into right-wing rehabilitation.Brandom's forgiving recollection / political correctness
rejects
Brandom's attribution of at least equal responsibility to the 'unsuccessful forgiver' who cannot pardon Hitler amounts to a regress into spurious infinity and risks vindicating right-wing rehabilitation of Nazism.Brandom's extension of forgiving recollection to absolute evil
asserts
The normative criteria used to criticise a historical practice are themselves implicated in the modes of suffering they seek to overcome, and must ultimately also be subjected to critique.immanent critique and normative criteria (Zambrana/Adorno reading)
asserts
The genuine Hegelian spirit is a spirit of distrust: every emancipatory project inverts into its opposite, and any trust in future synthesis betrays Hegel.Hegelian dialectic vs. Brandom's spirit of trust
asserts
Retroactive necessity — things becoming necessary only after the fact — is the correct Hegelian frame for evaluating historical acts, not linear narrative progress.Hegelian temporality and retroactive necessity
rejects
History as Hegel presents it is a Calvary — a succession of horrors — and there is no happy ending in the Phänomenologie or the Rechtsphilosophie.reconciliation as happy ending in Hegel
asserts
Hegel is better equipped than Marx to think COVID because Hegel grants full autonomy to nature as spirit in its otherness, whereas Marx presupposes nature as a productive resource.Hegel vs. Marx on nature and contingent catastrophe
asserts
Mind and the symbolic order are in a precise sense viral: a parasitic entity that colonises and often destroys its human host, as Dawkins' meme-theory and Lacan's big Other both recognise.viral ontology of the symbolic/mental order
asserts
The 21st century is Hegelian because we are witnessing again and again the immanent reversal of every dominant tendency into its opposite.contemporary relevance of Hegel
rejects
Fukuyama is the greatest anti-Hegelian imaginable because Hegel's logic is precisely that when a movement wins, it self-divides — there is no end of history.Fukuyama's end-of-history thesis
asserts
Trotskyite criteria for judging Stalin are unconditionally implicated in Stalinist crimes; you cannot step outside the process to apply clean normative criteria.Trotskyist critique of October Revolution / normative criteria
asserts
Kant's political philosophy itself embodies moral luck: a revolution is condemned in advance but retroactively justified if it succeeds and institutes a new legal order.Kant on revolution and moral luck
Quotes 12
“Hegel is the philosopher most open to the future precisely because he explicitly prohibits any project of how our future should look.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's openness to the future via prohibition
“The only way to the height is to make the wrong choice. This is the immanent temporality of Hegel's logic.”Slavoj Žižek · wrong choice as necessary passage
“Evil is also the gaze which sees evil everywhere around itself.”Slavoj Žižek · reflexivity of evil / beautiful soul
“The whole history is Calvary, Kalvarienberg des Geistes. It's just a succession of horrors.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's history as Calvary, no happy ending
“Fukuyama is the greatest anti-Hegelian you can imagine. Hegel's definition is when a certain movement tendency wins it self-divides it splits — it's the end.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian self-division vs. Fukuyama's end of history
“What if today's formula of Der Geist ist ein Knochen is Der Geist ist ein Virus?”Slavoj Žižek · viral reformulation of Hegel's infinite judgment
“Our mind works as a virus and with crazy ideologies false scientific ideology religious fundamentalism it is winning destroying us.”Slavoj Žižek · mind as virus destroying its host
“Capital is a virus in the sense of a virtual entity which like a virus just in an expanded way reproduces itself and doesn't care for the price we pay.”Slavoj Žižek · capital as self-reproducing virus
“I'm so tired of these stupidities that Trump is lying all the time. No, he's true in a horrible sense.”Slavoj Žižek · Trump's perverse truthfulness
“One thing you can be always sure with Hegel is don't trust any ethical project. It's not that we shouldn't do them — we don't have a choice — but the only way to gain something is through the failure.”Slavoj Žižek · spirit of distrust / failure as the only path
“COVID will be as Bruno Latour said a modest dress rehearsal for what is coming.”Slavoj Žižek · COVID as prologue to greater ecological catastrophe
“There is no harmonic continuity between human animal and the symbolic order. It's a parasitic entity.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacanian big Other as parasite
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I only want to begin by quickly noting that I'm just sorry that I cannot react. I liked so much your speech, so my proposal would be f-off. What I have to say and let's debate. We debate later. Yes, later, yeah. Okay, now I have as usual too many things to say so let me begin. It will be very simple, elementary, repeating some stuff but the basic message I hope will come through. The claim I want to defend is that Hegel is the philosopher most open to the future precisely because he explicitly prohibits any project of how our future should look. As he says, we all know it, towards the end of the preface to his Rechtsphilosophie, like the Owl of Minerva which takes off at dusk, philosophy can only paint grey on grey. It can only translate into a grey lifeless conceptual scheme a form of life which already reached its peak and is entering its decline, becoming grey itself. Now, the first thing to note here and it's rarely noted, maybe you know others, I only know my philosophical opponent but otherwise friend Robert Pippin who noticed this that if Hegel was not a complete idiot, and let's hope he wasn't, then he knew that this has to hold also for his Rechtsphilosophie. That what he is presenting there, his let's call it ideal state with three estates, constitutional monarchy, it's not his vision. He is describing, painting grey on grey there, trying to recapture a form of life which is already disintegrating. So to put it very brutally, this is why we should reject all those readings of Hegel, I think, maybe I'm wrong, which see in his thought an implicit model of a future society reconciled with itself, leaving behind the alienations of modernity. I call them ironically the 'we are not yet there' Hegelians. Like Marx was the first and I'm here on Hegel's side. Marx thought Hegel got it right, the scheme of alienation, reconciliation, but he didn't yet see that it's only through the proletarian revolution that this will happen. Then we have of course Fukuyama. Hegel was right but it's only today's liberal capitalism. There are even some, I go to the lowest of the low, these New Age singularity thinkers who think only with this Neuralink global machine where our minds will immediately communicate, what Hegel had in mind as absolute knowing will become will finally become realized. And unfortunately, my first target, I here disagree, although I'm personally in good relations with her, with Judith Butler who this summer I think in a speech on Hegel also provides a vision of this 'we are not yet there' Hegel. Of course the full vision of this is Lukács' Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. Hegel just didn't see that what he in a mystified way called absolute spirit is proletariat as the subject-object of history. So here is a short paragraph from her speech: "In his phenomenology of spirit, Hegel shows us that we are not simply solitary creatures disconnected from one another, although he, Hegel, knows very well that we sometimes see ourselves precisely in that way." And so on and so on. I explode here. I almost have a Goebbels reaction like... Because first one always has to ask these naive questions: who exactly is that idiot who says that we are not simple that we are simply solitary creatures disconnected from one another? The only philosopher I know who says this is Hegel himself. He posits this as a starting point which he then of course undermines through its immanent self-deployment. But what's the problem here? What does Judith Butler miss here? Let me recall the passage from phenomenology in which after analyzing the infinite judgment of phrenology, Der Geist ist ein Knochen, the spirit is a bone, Hegel draws the parallel, I'm sorry, everybody knows this passage, with the double function of penis. As Hegel puts it in the same way that in penis nature ironically put together the highest and the lowest: insemination and urination. In the same way, Der Geist ist ein Knochen is the most vulgar materialism but also the speculative the highest speculative truth. Where does Judith Butler get it wrong? Hegel's point here, it's such a simple point but many people don't get it, it's not that, ah, if we are vulgar materialist atomists we see only urination, a true speculative thinker sees also insemination the higher. No, Hegel point is that you have to begin with urination, with the vulgar point, that the only way to the height is to make the wrong choice. This is the immanent temporality of Hegel's logic. And this has important political consequences. For example, in Hegel's critique of terror in after French Revolution, his point my god is not, oh, French went too far, instead of building an organic community of freedom they have chosen abstract negativity of terror. No, his and his point is not the usual liberal critique of French Revolution: yes '89 but against '93. You have to go through terror. Only the terror opens up the way for later maybe it's not clear reconciliation. And I think that's what Judith Butler doesn't see. She acts as if there are idiots who think we are individualists blah blah but we should be wise and see how we are all together and so on. No. Now you will say but nonetheless at the end Hegel sees a reconciliation. I don't have time I have only limited. No, he doesn't see any reconciliation. At the end what you get it's important the last page of Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hegel said the whole history is Calvary, Kalvarienberg des Geistes. It's just a succession of horrors. And it's totally wrong to read Hegel as if but at the end where? Show me in Hegel that happy picture at the end. At the end of even Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie is the necessity of war to undermine any idea that we will have this happy bürgerliche Gesellschaft reconciled with itself. No, necessity of war. So, let me go very quickly. I found one philosopher, we should have invited her but she's not yet known in Europe, a very intelligent and to be a sexist I'm sorry very nice lady from Puerto Rico who teaches I don't know where, Rocio not Rocco Rocio it's a woman's name, Rocio Zambrana who precisely with reference to Adorno proposed a wonderful reading of Hegel where she rejects this pseudo-Hegelian notion of immanent critique. She contrasts this idea of immanent critique to, I quote her: "a conception of critique that rather than being guided by normative criteria that can be distilled from the socio-historical phenomenon at hand is attuned to following Adorno the undiminished persistence of suffering that remains in a world which could be paradise here and now but can become hell itself tomorrow." So Zambrana sees in Hegel an ongoing critique which remains vigilant of the inversions of any normative criteria immanent to social reality. Her lesson is that when you she knows what Habermas and others is saying you need some normative criteria to criticize something but she thinks that at the end these normative criteria also have to fall. So quote again from her: "the object of critique not only remains the modes of suffering distinctive to a given form of life but also the normative commitments implicated in these forms of suffering." So I think that we should be critical here. For example, I always dismissed I prefer Stalin to them those Trotskyite critiques of October Revolution you know with this dream at the beginning it had emancipatory potential but them and then comes their science-fiction dream in the worst form: if only Lenin were to survive three years more and make the pact with Trotsky we would have gotten what? I don't know. But certainly this very criteria by means of which Trotskyists judge Stalin are for me absolutely unconditionally implicated in it. Now I want to turn to the big target of my critique and to this my title refers: Robert Brandom's mega over pages book called The Spirit of Trust. A reading of Hegel I will not go into details I will just focus on the central notion which is for Brandom that of forgiving recollection deployed in the chapter on Geist spirit in Hegel's phenomenology. The gap that separates the acting subject and its severe judge is there according to Brandom overcome through their reconciliation when not only the agent confesses his sin but the judge also confesses the unilaterality of his own position his participation in what he condemns. Evil is also the gaze which sees evil everywhere around itself. First I think that this notion of forgiving recollection is very useful today to make a politically incorrect mistake. If this is very good critique of today's political correctness. Politically correct critics of where they see racism anti-feminism never see the evil in their own gaze. It's always absolute judgment. You make one mistake you say one wrong word you are out forever. But back to Brandom there are nonetheless I think clear limits to his not Hegel's notion of forgiving recollection. To be brutal in a simplified way: can we also recollectively forgive Hitler? And if the answer is no, is this because Hitler cannot be in this sense forgiven or because we ourselves are not yet at the high enough level of ethical reflection to do it? The only way to avoid regression to a position of beautiful soul is to endorse the second option: that our castigation of Hitler as evil must be a reflexive determination of the evil that persists in ourselves. And this this way to read forgiving recollection is very with regard to Hitler it's very popular today. This is even in as beloved American our president Trump would have put it even in this shithole of a country he used it for other here in Slovenia or all the right-wingers there they say yeah yeah Hitler made mistakes but he should be recollectively recollectively forgiven because he was fighting although in a wrong exaggerated way the true enemy big capital it was just that this enemy was for him embodied in Jews which in a way was wrong. But even there they say but Jews did control many finances and so on and so on and so on. So the problem here is this one. It is what would be totally non-Hegelian would be to draw a distinction between how should I put it crimes that can be recollectively forgiven you did a mistake but you if we look at it from your context you meant it good you were and like real evil where something like this is not possible. Brandom is aware of this and here is his answer quote: "Whose fault is it that the doing or some aspect of it is unforgivable? The doer or the forgiver? Is the failure that of the bad agent or that of the bad recollector?" So if we cannot pardon somebody in this recollective way who is to blame? And he's quite consequent Brandom here and says that I quote: "we should also acknowledge at least equal responsibility on the part of the unsuccessful forgiver." I ask a totally naive question: does this mean that when we condemn Hitler we should also say yes but we didn't reflect enough our stance is our or to quote Brandom: "one must trust that this recollective cognitive failure too like the failure of the original sin will be successfully forgiven by future assessors." So again without mentioning these hard cases his idea is that if we cannot forgive some historical event it means that we are implicated in it. And then he does something horrible Brandom: he moves into this schlechte Unendlichkeit spurious infinite. He said this means that our judgment is also relative in the future there will be a broader perspective where they will know how to recollectively forgive it and so on and so on. There for true Hegelian against Brandom there are other problems here. For example what about recollection which is not forgiving but even harsher? What if in a certain society it's normal I use the traditional examples to do clitoridectomy to have slaves and even the victims more or less agree with it? But now we come and not only don't forgive it to them but make a harsh make a harsh judgment. Now what would have been the Hegelian solution to this deadlock? I think that again we have to introduce logical temporality the temporality of will have been. That Hegel is the great thinker of a truth which is decided retroactively. And here is a nice quote here I agree with him from Brandom: "Concrete practical forgiveness involves doing things to change what the consequences of the act turn out to be. One might trust one's successors to make it the case that one's inadvertent revelation one's sacrifice or the decision to go to war was worthwhile." So his idea is that you do something bad but the meaning of your act is decided retroactively it can be redeemed. First why doesn't Brandom here mention the opposite case which is the truly Hegelian one which I like? The problem is not a bad guy does something bad but without knowing he leads to a it leads to a good result. And I met in Israel some radical Zionists who rehabilitate Hitler in this way. They said he was bad but objectively without Holocaust there wouldn't have been a state of Israel so recollective recognition their way. Hegel enjoys much more the opposite case: somebody does something with the highest intentions and so on and everything goes wrong. I think that what we need to introduce here is a notion which you don't find it literally in Hegel but I think is Hegelian in spirit. Bernard Williams wrote a book on it he called it moral luck. You do something and it depends on the outcome of how it will be judged. The most beautiful example I found of this is Kant's political philosophy where he says every revolution is to be condemned because you overthrow a legal power. But he says if the revolution wins and imposes a new legal order then you are again prohibited to rebel against it. If it if it succeeds its immanent ethical status status changed changes. Kant says this openly. I will not bore you with it I will just say that the problem with Brandom I see here is that although he admits this retrospective necessity Brandom reads Hegel beautifully here: Hegelian development is not linear but it's things take a certain turn and retroactively an event which is in itself contingent creates the its own necessary conditions. Things retroactively become necessary. But where I don't trust Trump oh sorry Trump Trump I trust. No no I have a another five ten minutes just. Ten. Perfect. Okay, very quickly. You know where Trump is almost a Hegelian. He did something lately which I really admire. I'm so tired of these stupidities that Trump is lying all the time. No, he's true in a horrible sense. I hate him. Subversive character is that he also tells the truth where you don't expect it. A week ago he was criticized for defunding post office and you know these intelligent liberal critics wanted to catch him that he is really doing this to have less and they ask him why are you doing this? You know what Trump said? It's obvious I want less Democrats to vote. You like he says the truth precisely when you would have expected it would hurt him. But let me go on. So back to Brandom. Brandom has this and I don't think this is immanent to Hegel Brandom has this trust in future in the sense that okay I'm now reading Hegel the way Hegel was reading past philosophy trying to introduce meaning into totality retrospectively totalizing it and so on. I'm doing this to Hegel to make it actual for our time but somebody else undoubtedly will be doing this for me and so on and so on. But why I think that what Hegel means with Versöhnung is something much more radical. It's not that even if we don't find peace now we have to have trust that with further progress there will be a total synthesis and so on and so on. No, it's the Hegelian motto is rather what I would have called again against Brandom the spirit of distrust. Hegel's basic procedure and just look at his philosophy of history or whatever it's always the same story: something begins well with the best intentions and then everything goes wrong. You have a revolution you have terror then. You have in Phänomenologie des Geistes when he speaks of medieval times you have serving the king honor it turns into flattery. One thing you can be always sure with Hegel is don't trust any ethical project. It's not that we shouldn't do them we don't have a choice but the only way to gain something is through the failure and then in a in a reaction to the failure. So for me the true forgiveness is not Hegelian is not this trust into the future but it is precisely this trust that if some future things will turn out better and so on and so on. No, Hegel that's why Hegel I think you know that I quote this all the time I think Michel Foucault wrote about Deleuze un jour peut-être le siècle sera deleuzien. One day maybe the century will be Deleuzian. Our century now is Hegelian why? Because we are again and again witnessing these reversals. Not only is the 20th century out of scope for Hegel, Hegel would have loved it. He would have analyzed how remember second part of 19th century in Europe not elsewhere time of progress gradually women got the voting right retirement funds health it got better then you get World War One total catastrophe. Hegel would have I can see him also in an orgasmic intellectual effort demonstr- or October Revolution it began nice global emancipation ah a certain comrade from Georgia Stalin comes and gives another turn to it. And even today Hegel is never a guy of happy ending. He would have been immedi- Fukuyama is the greatest anti-Hegelian you can imagine. Hegel's definition is when a certain movement tendency like global capitalism wins it self-divides it splits it's the end. So I think that this is where we should look and now if you where should look for at a Hegelian how we should look at our contemporary times. This immanent reversals of things it's really what the Englishmen have this wonderful term for verkehrte Welt topsy-turvy world. This reversal and then how only in a repetition later as a as a collateral damage as we say today maybe something good will maybe something good will emerge. So three minutes I want just to make a point three minutes yes but in a dialectical sense not linear time and so on yeah. I what I already published maybe even in Slovene I am confused I think that Hegel also offers the best way to think COVID. No idiots if you suspect that some of your friends are idiots tell them: I think that Hegel is a rational thinker where everything is systematized all history leads to human progress and so Hegel cannot think something like COVID. He can. Because first Hegel has Hegel is much more autonomous in the sense of admitting the autonomy of nature than Marx. Marx is too much productivist. For Marx silently always presupposes nature is out there to be exploited productively by us. For Hegel nature is absolutely spirit in its otherness absolute externality. An asteroid can hit Earth and it's a wonderful dialectical synthesis of necessity and contingency. From the standpoint of nature it would be necessary we can even probably measure when it will hit Earth but from the standpoint of human history it's contingent in the sense of it has no deeper meaning punishment or whatever. And I think it's the same with COVID. What would have been Hegel's reaction to COVID? Not just this pessimism oh we just we see how helpless we are and so on. As I already developed somewhere I think that Hegel would be intrigued by something else. What if today's formula of Der Geist ist ein Knochen is Der Geist ist ein Virus? That is to say it shocked me when I read this it's not a joke look at the top top measured by the wrong standards cognitivist I wouldn't call them philosophers thinkers today Daniel Dennett Richard Dawkins. Their explicit theory and I'm not reading between the lines is that mind our thinking our symbolic order is a virus. It's not an organic part of our identity it's a parasitic entity which makes us do crazy thing act against our interest an idea obsesses you it makes you ruin yourself and so on that in this strict sense of a parasitic entity that's the whole point of Dawkins' notion of meme like genes memes that our mind works as a virus and now I'm getting closer to my terrain Jacques Lacan knew this when he says the big other is parasitizing of us there is no harmonic continuity between human animal and the symbolic order. It's a parasitic entity. So I think that in this sense our future will be very interesting because all the big struggles that we have today are viral struggles. Our mind is a virus and with crazy ideologies false scientific ideology religious fundamentalism it is winning destroying us. The biological virus not just COVID-19 wait a little bit there will be others in five years I predict at least ten from now COVID will be as Bruno Latour said a modest dress rehearsal for what is coming. And of course an old Marxist metaphor: capital is a virus. Is a virus in the sense of a virtual entity which like a virus just in an expanded way reproduces itself and doesn't care for the price we pay. So yes our century will be Hegelian. Thank you very much.
I only want to begin by quickly noting that I'm just sorry that I cannot react. I liked so much your speech, so my proposal would be f-off. What I have to say and let's debate. We debate later. Yes, later, yeah. Okay, now I have as usual too many things to say so let me begin. It will be very simple, elementary, repeating some stuff but the basic message I hope will come through. The claim I want to defend is that Hegel is the philosopher most open to the future precisely because he explicitly prohibits any project of how our future should look. As he says, we all know it, towards the end of the preface to his Rechtsphilosophie, like the Owl of Minerva which takes off at dusk, philosophy can only paint grey on grey. It can only translate into a grey lifeless conceptual scheme a form of life which already reached its peak and is entering its decline, becoming grey itself. Now, the first thing to note here and it's rarely noted, maybe you know others, I only know my philosophical opponent but otherwise friend Robert Pippin who noticed this that if Hegel was not a complete idiot, and let's hope he wasn't, then he knew that this has to hold also for his Rechtsphilosophie. That what he is presenting there, his let's call it ideal state with three estates, constitutional monarchy, it's not his vision. He is describing, painting grey on grey there, trying to recapture a form of life which is already disintegrating. So to put it very brutally, this is why we should reject all those readings of Hegel, I think, maybe I'm wrong, which see in his thought an implicit model of a future society reconciled with itself, leaving behind the alienations of modernity. I call them ironically the 'we are not yet there' Hegelians. Like Marx was the first and I'm here on Hegel's side. Marx thought Hegel got it right, the scheme of alienation, reconciliation, but he didn't yet see that it's only through the proletarian revolution that this will happen. Then we have of course Fukuyama. Hegel was right but it's only today's liberal capitalism. There are even some, I go to the lowest of the low, these New Age singularity thinkers who think only with this Neuralink global machine where our minds will immediately communicate, what Hegel had in mind as absolute knowing will become will finally become realized. And unfortunately, my first target, I here disagree, although I'm personally in good relations with her, with Judith Butler who this summer I think in a speech on Hegel also provides a vision of this 'we are not yet there' Hegel. Of course the full vision of this is Lukács' Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. Hegel just didn't see that what he in a mystified way called absolute spirit is proletariat as the subject-object of history. So here is a short paragraph from her speech: "In his phenomenology of spirit, Hegel shows us that we are not simply solitary creatures disconnected from one another, although he, Hegel, knows very well that we sometimes see ourselves precisely in that way." And so on and so on. I explode here. I almost have a Goebbels reaction like... Because first one always has to ask these naive questions: who exactly is that idiot who says that we are not simple that we are simply solitary creatures disconnected from one another? The only philosopher I know who says this is Hegel himself. He posits this as a starting point which he then of course undermines through its immanent self-deployment. But what's the problem here? What does Judith Butler miss here? Let me recall the passage from phenomenology in which after analyzing the infinite judgment of phrenology, Der Geist ist ein Knochen, the spirit is a bone, Hegel draws the parallel, I'm sorry, everybody knows this passage, with the double function of penis. As Hegel puts it in the same way that in penis nature ironically put together the highest and the lowest: insemination and urination. In the same way, Der Geist ist ein Knochen is the most vulgar materialism but also the speculative the highest speculative truth. Where does Judith Butler get it wrong? Hegel's point here, it's such a simple point but many people don't get it, it's not that, ah, if we are vulgar materialist atomists we see only urination, a true speculative thinker sees also insemination the higher. No, Hegel point is that you have to begin with urination, with the vulgar point, that the only way to the height is to make the wrong choice. This is the immanent temporality of Hegel's logic. And this has important political consequences. For example, in Hegel's critique of terror in after French Revolution, his point my god is not, oh, French went too far, instead of building an organic community of freedom they have chosen abstract negativity of terror. No, his and his point is not the usual liberal critique of French Revolution: yes '89 but against '93. You have to go through terror. Only the terror opens up the way for later maybe it's not clear reconciliation. And I think that's what Judith Butler doesn't see. She acts as if there are idiots who think we are individualists blah blah but we should be wise and see how we are all together and so on. No. Now you will say but nonetheless at the end Hegel sees a reconciliation. I don't have time I have only limited. No, he doesn't see any reconciliation. At the end what you get it's important the last page of Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hegel said the whole history is Calvary, Kalvarienberg des Geistes. It's just a succession of horrors. And it's totally wrong to read Hegel as if but at the end where? Show me in Hegel that happy picture at the end. At the end of even Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie is the necessity of war to undermine any idea that we will have this happy bürgerliche Gesellschaft reconciled with itself. No, necessity of war. So, let me go very quickly. I found one philosopher, we should have invited her but she's not yet known in Europe, a very intelligent and to be a sexist I'm sorry very nice lady from Puerto Rico who teaches I don't know where, Rocio not Rocco Rocio it's a woman's name, Rocio Zambrana who precisely with reference to Adorno proposed a wonderful reading of Hegel where she rejects this pseudo-Hegelian notion of immanent critique. She contrasts this idea of immanent critique to, I quote her: "a conception of critique that rather than being guided by normative criteria that can be distilled from the socio-historical phenomenon at hand is attuned to following Adorno the undiminished persistence of suffering that remains in a world which could be paradise here and now but can become hell itself tomorrow." So Zambrana sees in Hegel an ongoing critique which remains vigilant of the inversions of any normative criteria immanent to social reality. Her lesson is that when you she knows what Habermas and others is saying you need some normative criteria to criticize something but she thinks that at the end these normative criteria also have to fall. So quote again from her: "the object of critique not only remains the modes of suffering distinctive to a given form of life but also the normative commitments implicated in these forms of suffering." So I think that we should be critical here. For example, I always dismissed I prefer Stalin to them those Trotskyite critiques of October Revolution you know with this dream at the beginning it had emancipatory potential but them and then comes their science-fiction dream in the worst form: if only Lenin were to survive three years more and make the pact with Trotsky we would have gotten what? I don't know. But certainly this very criteria by means of which Trotskyists judge Stalin are for me absolutely unconditionally implicated in it. Now I want to turn to the big target of my critique and to this my title refers: Robert Brandom's mega over pages book called The Spirit of Trust. A reading of Hegel I will not go into details I will just focus on the central notion which is for Brandom that of forgiving recollection deployed in the chapter on Geist spirit in Hegel's phenomenology. The gap that separates the acting subject and its severe judge is there according to Brandom overcome through their reconciliation when not only the agent confesses his sin but the judge also confesses the unilaterality of his own position his participation in what he condemns. Evil is also the gaze which sees evil everywhere around itself. First I think that this notion of forgiving recollection is very useful today to make a politically incorrect mistake. If this is very good critique of today's political correctness. Politically correct critics of where they see racism anti-feminism never see the evil in their own gaze. It's always absolute judgment. You make one mistake you say one wrong word you are out forever. But back to Brandom there are nonetheless I think clear limits to his not Hegel's notion of forgiving recollection. To be brutal in a simplified way: can we also recollectively forgive Hitler? And if the answer is no, is this because Hitler cannot be in this sense forgiven or because we ourselves are not yet at the high enough level of ethical reflection to do it? The only way to avoid regression to a position of beautiful soul is to endorse the second option: that our castigation of Hitler as evil must be a reflexive determination of the evil that persists in ourselves. And this this way to read forgiving recollection is very with regard to Hitler it's very popular today. This is even in as beloved American our president Trump would have put it even in this shithole of a country he used it for other here in Slovenia or all the right-wingers there they say yeah yeah Hitler made mistakes but he should be recollectively recollectively forgiven because he was fighting although in a wrong exaggerated way the true enemy big capital it was just that this enemy was for him embodied in Jews which in a way was wrong. But even there they say but Jews did control many finances and so on and so on and so on. So the problem here is this one. It is what would be totally non-Hegelian would be to draw a distinction between how should I put it crimes that can be recollectively forgiven you did a mistake but you if we look at it from your context you meant it good you were and like real evil where something like this is not possible. Brandom is aware of this and here is his answer quote: "Whose fault is it that the doing or some aspect of it is unforgivable? The doer or the forgiver? Is the failure that of the bad agent or that of the bad recollector?" So if we cannot pardon somebody in this recollective way who is to blame? And he's quite consequent Brandom here and says that I quote: "we should also acknowledge at least equal responsibility on the part of the unsuccessful forgiver." I ask a totally naive question: does this mean that when we condemn Hitler we should also say yes but we didn't reflect enough our stance is our or to quote Brandom: "one must trust that this recollective cognitive failure too like the failure of the original sin will be successfully forgiven by future assessors." So again without mentioning these hard cases his idea is that if we cannot forgive some historical event it means that we are implicated in it. And then he does something horrible Brandom: he moves into this schlechte Unendlichkeit spurious infinite. He said this means that our judgment is also relative in the future there will be a broader perspective where they will know how to recollectively forgive it and so on and so on. There for true Hegelian against Brandom there are other problems here. For example what about recollection which is not forgiving but even harsher? What if in a certain society it's normal I use the traditional examples to do clitoridectomy to have slaves and even the victims more or less agree with it? But now we come and not only don't forgive it to them but make a harsh make a harsh judgment. Now what would have been the Hegelian solution to this deadlock? I think that again we have to introduce logical temporality the temporality of will have been. That Hegel is the great thinker of a truth which is decided retroactively. And here is a nice quote here I agree with him from Brandom: "Concrete practical forgiveness involves doing things to change what the consequences of the act turn out to be. One might trust one's successors to make it the case that one's inadvertent revelation one's sacrifice or the decision to go to war was worthwhile." So his idea is that you do something bad but the meaning of your act is decided retroactively it can be redeemed. First why doesn't Brandom here mention the opposite case which is the truly Hegelian one which I like? The problem is not a bad guy does something bad but without knowing he leads to a it leads to a good result. And I met in Israel some radical Zionists who rehabilitate Hitler in this way. They said he was bad but objectively without Holocaust there wouldn't have been a state of Israel so recollective recognition their way. Hegel enjoys much more the opposite case: somebody does something with the highest intentions and so on and everything goes wrong. I think that what we need to introduce here is a notion which you don't find it literally in Hegel but I think is Hegelian in spirit. Bernard Williams wrote a book on it he called it moral luck. You do something and it depends on the outcome of how it will be judged. The most beautiful example I found of this is Kant's political philosophy where he says every revolution is to be condemned because you overthrow a legal power. But he says if the revolution wins and imposes a new legal order then you are again prohibited to rebel against it. If it if it succeeds its immanent ethical status status changed changes. Kant says this openly. I will not bore you with it I will just say that the problem with Brandom I see here is that although he admits this retrospective necessity Brandom reads Hegel beautifully here: Hegelian development is not linear but it's things take a certain turn and retroactively an event which is in itself contingent creates the its own necessary conditions. Things retroactively become necessary. But where I don't trust Trump oh sorry Trump Trump I trust. No no I have a another five ten minutes just. Ten. Perfect. Okay, very quickly. You know where Trump is almost a Hegelian. He did something lately which I really admire. I'm so tired of these stupidities that Trump is lying all the time. No, he's true in a horrible sense. I hate him. Subversive character is that he also tells the truth where you don't expect it. A week ago he was criticized for defunding post office and you know these intelligent liberal critics wanted to catch him that he is really doing this to have less and they ask him why are you doing this? You know what Trump said? It's obvious I want less Democrats to vote. You like he says the truth precisely when you would have expected it would hurt him. But let me go on. So back to Brandom. Brandom has this and I don't think this is immanent to Hegel Brandom has this trust in future in the sense that okay I'm now reading Hegel the way Hegel was reading past philosophy trying to introduce meaning into totality retrospectively totalizing it and so on. I'm doing this to Hegel to make it actual for our time but somebody else undoubtedly will be doing this for me and so on and so on. But why I think that what Hegel means with Versöhnung is something much more radical. It's not that even if we don't find peace now we have to have trust that with further progress there will be a total synthesis and so on and so on. No, it's the Hegelian motto is rather what I would have called again against Brandom the spirit of distrust. Hegel's basic procedure and just look at his philosophy of history or whatever it's always the same story: something begins well with the best intentions and then everything goes wrong. You have a revolution you have terror then. You have in Phänomenologie des Geistes when he speaks of medieval times you have serving the king honor it turns into flattery. One thing you can be always sure with Hegel is don't trust any ethical project. It's not that we shouldn't do them we don't have a choice but the only way to gain something is through the failure and then in a in a reaction to the failure. So for me the true forgiveness is not Hegelian is not this trust into the future but it is precisely this trust that if some future things will turn out better and so on and so on. No, Hegel that's why Hegel I think you know that I quote this all the time I think Michel Foucault wrote about Deleuze un jour peut-être le siècle sera deleuzien. One day maybe the century will be Deleuzian. Our century now is Hegelian why? Because we are again and again witnessing these reversals. Not only is the 20th century out of scope for Hegel, Hegel would have loved it. He would have analyzed how remember second part of 19th century in Europe not elsewhere time of progress gradually women got the voting right retirement funds health it got better then you get World War One total catastrophe. Hegel would have I can see him also in an orgasmic intellectual effort demonstr- or October Revolution it began nice global emancipation ah a certain comrade from Georgia Stalin comes and gives another turn to it. And even today Hegel is never a guy of happy ending. He would have been immedi- Fukuyama is the greatest anti-Hegelian you can imagine. Hegel's definition is when a certain movement tendency like global capitalism wins it self-divides it splits it's the end. So I think that this is where we should look and now if you where should look for at a Hegelian how we should look at our contemporary times. This immanent reversals of things it's really what the Englishmen have this wonderful term for verkehrte Welt topsy-turvy world. This reversal and then how only in a repetition later as a as a collateral damage as we say today maybe something good will maybe something good will emerge. So three minutes I want just to make a point three minutes yes but in a dialectical sense not linear time and so on yeah. I what I already published maybe even in Slovene I am confused I think that Hegel also offers the best way to think COVID. No idiots if you suspect that some of your friends are idiots tell them: I think that Hegel is a rational thinker where everything is systematized all history leads to human progress and so Hegel cannot think something like COVID. He can. Because first Hegel has Hegel is much more autonomous in the sense of admitting the autonomy of nature than Marx. Marx is too much productivist. For Marx silently always presupposes nature is out there to be exploited productively by us. For Hegel nature is absolutely spirit in its otherness absolute externality. An asteroid can hit Earth and it's a wonderful dialectical synthesis of necessity and contingency. From the standpoint of nature it would be necessary we can even probably measure when it will hit Earth but from the standpoint of human history it's contingent in the sense of it has no deeper meaning punishment or whatever. And I think it's the same with COVID. What would have been Hegel's reaction to COVID? Not just this pessimism oh we just we see how helpless we are and so on. As I already developed somewhere I think that Hegel would be intrigued by something else. What if today's formula of Der Geist ist ein Knochen is Der Geist ist ein Virus? That is to say it shocked me when I read this it's not a joke look at the top top measured by the wrong standards cognitivist I wouldn't call them philosophers thinkers today Daniel Dennett Richard Dawkins. Their explicit theory and I'm not reading between the lines is that mind our thinking our symbolic order is a virus. It's not an organic part of our identity it's a parasitic entity which makes us do crazy thing act against our interest an idea obsesses you it makes you ruin yourself and so on that in this strict sense of a parasitic entity that's the whole point of Dawkins' notion of meme like genes memes that our mind works as a virus and now I'm getting closer to my terrain Jacques Lacan knew this when he says the big other is parasitizing of us there is no harmonic continuity between human animal and the symbolic order. It's a parasitic entity. So I think that in this sense our future will be very interesting because all the big struggles that we have today are viral struggles. Our mind is a virus and with crazy ideologies false scientific ideology religious fundamentalism it is winning destroying us. The biological virus not just COVID-19 wait a little bit there will be others in five years I predict at least ten from now COVID will be as Bruno Latour said a modest dress rehearsal for what is coming. And of course an old Marxist metaphor: capital is a virus. Is a virus in the sense of a virtual entity which like a virus just in an expanded way reproduces itself and doesn't care for the price we pay. So yes our century will be Hegelian. Thank you very much.