The Year of Dangerous Dreams
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2013-02-25 · 1:21:32 · 9,098 words
hegel-dialecticscapitalismcommunism-socialismideologyrevolution-violencereligion-theologyhistoryphilosophy-generalgeopolitics-warrace-antisemitismpsychoanalysislanguage
Žižek delivers a lecture in Heidelberg that begins with the global economic crisis and the claim that capitalism is thriving outside the West, then pivots to a Hegelian philosophical argument about how the fall precedes and creates what it appears to fall from. He argues that the Left has failed to offer an alternative during the crisis, diagnoses a structural problem he calls the 'Hölderlin paradigm' (the hope that extreme danger will produce a saving reversal), and proposes instead a genuinely Hegelian reconciliation: accepting the wound fully rather than fantasising about a return to an imagined pre-loss wholeness. The talk ranges across the French Revolution, Arab Spring, colonial India, Malcolm X, Malebranche's theology, Wagner's Parsifal, and a rewriting of Antigone to illustrate how dialectical negation works without a guaranteed telos.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 17
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek uses this phrase (which he says has nothing to do with Asian people) to name the contemporary tendency of capitalism to limit or suspend democracy while maintaining economic dynamism.
Realisation or actualisation of a concept; Žižek uses it to argue that the failure of a historical project (communism, capitalism) must be traced to an imperfection in the concept itself, not merely to imperfect implementation.
Žižek's term for the Left's recurring structure of perceiving the present as a moment of extreme danger that will, at a Kairos point, produce a saving reversal, exemplified by the line 'Where danger is, the saving power also grows'.
T.J. Clark's metaphor, cited approvingly by Žižek, for the Left's fantasy that a dormant mass revolutionary subject is buried somewhere, awaiting the moment to rise and complete the authentic revolution.
as “Versöhnung”
Hegelian reconciliation, which Žižek insists is not the healing of the wound but the acceptance of the wound itself, recognising that what allegedly preceded the wound was itself created by the loss.
Marx's Hegelian formulation for the proletariat as pure subjectivity stripped of all substantial content, the zero-point of alienation that can, in Marx's account, reappropriate alienated objective conditions.
Used in two senses: Lacanian mediating symbolic order (woman as Big Other for man in Islamic theology), and the higher power of historical necessity, Žižek argues Hegel denies the Big Other exists, leaving us condemned to contingency.
as “List der Vernunft”
The 'cunning of reason', Žižek explicitly distances Hegel's use of this from the teleological reading (bad events justified by good outcomes); for Hegel, bad events are genuinely bad and only contingently yield good consequences.
Žižek invokes Hegel's idea that spirit is the wound of nature, deployed here to argue that reconciliation does not close the wound but fully accepts it, losing instead the imagined pre-wound wholeness.
Eric Hobsbawm's concept, cited by Žižek as an illustration of the absoluter Gegenstoß: the national tradition to which nineteenth-century nations 'returned' was created by the very act of returning to it.
as “absoluter Gegenstoß”
Hegel's term from the Logic of Essence, translated by Žižek as 'absolute recoil upon itself': the presupposition (what appears as prior) is created only retroactively by the very movement that seems to return to it.
The Lacanian technical term Žižek invokes to name the traumatic gap between the human animal and language, language is always a parasitic foreign incubator, never a natural medium of self-expression.
as “objective possibility (objektive Möglichkeit)”
Lukács's term for historically grounded possibility; Žižek contrasts it with Hegel's stricter prohibition on philosophy thinking ahead, for Hegel, claiming to act as an agent of historical necessity (even as objective possibility) is too idealist.
as “gray on gray”
Hegel's image of the owl of Minerva painting gray on gray at dusk, philosophy can only understand what has already happened, never prescribe the future; Žižek cites Rebecca Comay's book on this tautology.
as “necessity of illusion”
Žižek's formulation of what he calls Hegel's deepest wisdom: you cannot simply drop ideological illusion by exposing it, because ideology functions at the level of what people do, not what they believe.
Implied in Žižek's argument that cynics who think they deal in brutal reality are most blind to the fictions (about money circulation, democracy) that actually govern their behaviour, fictions are more real than cynical realism admits.
The Marxist procedure of unmasking the particular interest hidden behind ideological universals; Žižek argues Marx himself knew this was insufficient, because we are also more universal than we appear to be.
Stories he reaches for 6
The apostles ask Mary Magdalene to give Christ a last night of sex before the crucifixion; she goes in, undresses, and when she shows Christ her genitals, he says 'Oh, what a horrible wound' and places his hand on it. Žižek uses this to show that Hegelian reconciliation does NOT close the wound in this way, the wound remains.
“I started to dance in front of Christ... then I showed him my vagina intimate parts and then Christ looked at my vagina and said, 'Oh, what a horrible wound' and put his palm on it.”
T.J. Clark argues David's painting is the first modernist painting because its upper half is pure darkness rather than a vision of the bright future, Žižek uses this to argue the Jacobins were not totalitarians, since they did not cover over the abyss with utopian fantasy.
“the lower half, you know, a bathtub, the dying Marat, blah blah, and you know what's the upper half? Nothing, just darkness.”
Two rabbis debate a theological point; one invokes God himself as judge; God appears but is shouted down and told to leave theological thinking to the educated, God concedes ('my pupils beat me but they are right') and runs away. Illustrates Jewish tradition's refusal of divine authority in interpretation.
“Listen old man... fuck off, you did your job, you created the universe... now you leave to us educated people to do some theological thinking, go away.”
Žižek sketches three versions of Antigone: (1) the original, Creon wins; (2) Antigone wins but causes civil war and is told 'fuck you, your love destroyed the city'; (3) the Chorus stages a Jacobin coup, arrests both Antigone and Creon, and establishes a people's democracy, this last is what Žižek calls the genuinely Hegelian Versöhnung.
“the Chorus... steps forward... arrests them both. Like you are ruining our country for your feudal conflicts, both Antigone and Creon are arrested and revolutionary committee... establishes people's democracy.”
After the Mexican Revolution, Pancho Villa (from the north) and Zapata (from the south) occupied Mexico City for two months, debated what to do, and simply withdrew home, not defeated by counter-revolution but by their own lack of a positive programme.
“for two months they were there in Mexico City debating what to do, and then they left home... they simply didn't know what to do”
According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad initially thought the angel Gabriel's messages were the voice of the devil; it was his wife Khadija who convinced him of their truth, Žižek uses this to show that in Islam, man cannot access truth without woman as mediating Big Other.
“Muhammad first thought this is the voice of the devil and then it's his wife Khadija who convinced him that this is the truth”
Works invoked 11
Capital book
Late Marx's Capital is grouped (with Adorno and Reichelt) as representing the more interesting reading of Hegel as idealist reproduction of capitalist alienation rather than a logic of liberation.
Antigone play
Sophocles' play is the subject of Žižek's concluding thought-experiment: three versions of Antigone illustrating dialectical negation, bad infinity, and genuinely Hegelian Versöhnung (the Chorus as Jacobin committee arresting both protagonists).
Grundrisse book
Marx's manuscript on pre-capitalist modes of production; described as the 'most pseudo-Hegelian Marx', its account of alienation reaching zero-point and then reappropriation retains an eschatological structure Hegel had already surpassed.
Parsifal opera
Wagner's opera; the line 'Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur der sie schlug' is read as a Hegelian formula for reconciliation as radical acceptance of the wound.
Mein Kampf book
Read by Žižek to answer whether Hitler believed his own lies; used to argue that cynical manipulation and genuine ideological belief are not mutually exclusive, illustrating the necessity of illusion.
Annie Hall film
Woody Allen film mentioned in passing as the real-life equivalent of the Talmudic scene where God is shouted down by the rabbis.
The Death of Marat artwork
Jacques-Louis David's painting is cited (via T.J. Clark) as the first modernist painting because its upper half is pure darkness rather than utopian fantasy, taken as proof that the Jacobins were not totalitarians.
Eric Hobsbawm's edited volume on invented traditions; used as empirical evidence for the absoluter Gegenstoß, what nations 'returned to' was constituted by the act of returning.
Brecht's pair of plays offering two opposing versions of the same situation is cited alongside Lola rennt as a formal model for a dialectical multi-version narrative.
Hegel's Logic of Essence, from which Žižek quotes the passage on absoluter Gegenstoß, central to the philosophical argument of the lecture.
Lola rennt film
Tom Tykwer's film with three parallel versions of events is cited as a formal model for Žižek's proposed three-version rewriting of Antigone.
People invoked 29
Mahatma Gandhi negative
Called 'proto-fascist' for defending the dignity of caste members while accepting the caste hierarchy itself, a typical pseudo-reconciliation that preserves oppression while humanising its victims. Žižek says he was converted against Gandhi by Ambedkar and Naxalite activists.
Helmut Reichelt positive
Author of 'Hegel, Kapital, Jude' (described as important in the 1960s); cited alongside Adorno for the reading of Hegel's logic as an idealist reproduction of the logic of capitalist alienation.
Blaise Pascal positive
Invoked via the 'Pascalian tradition' to characterise Malebranche's extreme, unsentimental Christianity.
Jacques Derrida negative
Placed within the Hölderlin paradigm: his late-metaphysics-exhausted-but-turning-around argument follows the same eschatological structure as Heidegger and Marx.
Rebecca Comay positive
Described as 'a very intelligent Canadian young Hegelian'; her book on Hegel's 'gray on gray' tautology is cited approvingly.
Richard Wagner positive
Described as 'very Hegelian' in the closing lines of Parsifal; the line 'Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur der sie schlug' is used as a formula for Hegelian Versöhnung.
Georg Lukács negative
The early Lukács's concept of 'objective possibility' (objektive Möglichkeit) and his reading of Hegel as expressing the proletariat's reappropriation of substance are cited as pseudo-Hegelian, retaining an idealist eschatological structure Hegel himself had overcome.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited alongside Helmut Reichelt as representing the reading of Hegel's logic as an idealist reproduction of the logic of capitalist alienation (rather than a logic of liberation), Žižek presents this as the more interesting Marxist reading of Hegel.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked for the 'fiancée' example attributed to Lacan, for the concept of symbolic castration and language as parasitic incubator, and for the notion of woman as Big Other/mediator in Islamic tradition.
Cited as evidence that the 1956 Budapest uprising occurred not at the height of Stalinist oppression but after two years of gradual opening under Nagy as Prime Minister.
Left-Keynesian economist; appears only as the interlocutor in the Hook anecdote about visiting the Soviet Union.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Encountered in a debate; Žižek tells him that if Fukuyama's 'triumph of worldwide capitalism' thesis is right, ex-communists have their revenge as the best managers of the new capitalism, particularly in China.
Franco Berardi positive
Italian autonomist described as 'more intelligent than Toni Negri'; quoted on the rage exploding across Europe being 'impotent and inconsequential' because coordinated action is beyond reach, used to support Žižek's diagnosis of the Left's crisis.
B. R. Ambedkar positive
Described as a 'great guy', Dalit leader who opposed Gandhi's acceptance of the caste system and advocated genuine egalitarianism; Žižek's 'hero' after being converted by Naxalite and Dalit activists in India.
Nicolas Malebranche positive
Described as 'Christianity at its craziest' in the best Pascalian tradition; his theology (God created the world out of vanity, Adam fell to enable Christ, God was happiest watching his Son die) is used as the clearest illustration of the logic that the fall creates its own presupposition.
Mentioned only as a comparative benchmark, Berardi is described as more intelligent than Negri.
Guy Sorman negative
Described as a 'total fanatic, like worse than Ayn Rand fanatic of capitalism' and 'otherwise a friend'; appeared in a French TV debate where he claimed capitalism and democracy necessarily go together, and denied China had capitalism when pressed.
Fredric Jameson negative
Listed among 'old leftist Marxist friends' who mistakenly embrace the thesis of complete contemporary cynicism, the view that ideology critique is now superfluous because those in power no longer believe their own proclamations.
Eric Hobsbawm positive
Recently deceased British Marxist historian; his work on 'invented traditions' is cited as the empirical illustration of the absoluter Gegenstoß, national traditions were created by the very revival that claimed to return to them.
Malcolm X positive
Appreciated for adopting 'X' as a name to designate not lost African roots but a universal subject constituted by the rupture of slavery, used as a model for the Hegelian point that loss creates something more precious than what was lost.
T. J. Clark positive
British art theorist whose reading of David's Death of Marat (as first modernist painting for its empty upper half) and his diagnosis of the Left's Hölderlin paradigm and 'proletarian terracotta army' fantasy are central to Žižek's argument.
Elfriede Jelinek positive
Described as 'too dirty for me, I'm a moralist', Žižek dislikes her as a writer but cites her formulation 'language in itself lies, you have to torture language to make it tell the truth' approvingly.
Martin Heidegger negative
Cited as a member of the Hölderlin paradigm; Hegel is said to have pre-criticised Heidegger's valorisation of authentic Greek language by praising Latin's cold inauthenticity as historically wiser.
Karl Löwith positive
Described as 'not a complete idiot' and worthy of more attention; traced the eschatological 'greatest danger / reversal' structure from Christianity through Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Friedrich Hölderlin negative
The line 'Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch' is used to name the 'Hölderlin paradigm', the eschatological structure Žižek diagnoses as a pathology of the Left and as the thing Hegel properly overcomes.
Noam Chomsky negative
Listed alongside Jameson as subscribing to the 'era of complete cynicism' thesis that Žižek argues is wrong.
Žižek identifies with Marx's communist aspiration but argues Marx's use of Hegel (in the Grundrisse especially) is pseudo-Hegelian, it retains an eschatological structure (the proletariat as zero-point that reappropriates substance) that the mature Hegel had already overcome.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central figure of the lecture; Žižek argues Hegel's dialectics is more radically contingent and open than its standard reading, that the absoluter Gegenstoß and Versöhnung are misread by Marxists, and that returning to Hegel is today more urgent than returning to Marx.
Sidney Hook positive
Ex-Trotskyist turned anti-communist philosopher; his witty reply to Galbraith (the worry is not that you'll return as a socialist but that you'll return saying the USSR is not socialist) is used to illustrate the 'purity of the concept' fallacy.
What it argues
global capitalism thriving while the West declinesthe Left's failure to articulate an alternative during crisisthe Hölderlin paradigm and eschatological hope on the Leftthe fall retroactively creates what it is the fall fromHegelian reconciliation as accepting the wound rather than healing itcolonial language as both oppression and condition of emancipationcontingency versus historical necessity in Hegel versus Marx
Dialectical moves 10
“The fall is not the fall from some prior goodness—you fall directly into sin, and the fall retroactively creates what it is the fall from.”
There is no originary wholeness prior to the loss; the prelapsarian state is itself constituted by the movement of falling away from it.
“The Australian Muslim cleric who blames women for rape is, against his own intention, the only one who treats women as ethical subjects—men are reduced to dogs.”
A misogynist argument that removes male ethical responsibility paradoxically elevates women to the sole position of ethical agency.
“Eve did not pull Adam into sin—she humanized him; the innocence of Paradise is another name for animal life, so the Fall is nothing but the passage from animal life to properly human existence.”
The Fall is not a catastrophic loss of original goodness but the very act that constitutes humanity as such.
“What is found only comes to be through being left behind.”
Hegel's absoluter Gegenstoß: the presupposed origin is produced retroactively by the very process of departing from it.
“Far from confirming the purity of the concept, the failure of its realisation must be grounded in some imperfection or flaw of the pure concept itself.”
When a historical project (communism, free-market capitalism) fails, the Hegelian move is to read the failure as revealing an internal contradiction in the idea, not an external obstacle to its realisation.
“Hegel heals the wound not by closing it—so that there is no wound—but by radicalising and fully accepting the wound itself; what we lose in Versöhnung is not the wound but what allegedly preceded it.”
Reconciliation does not restore an imagined prior wholeness; it dissolves the standard by which the wound appeared as a wound.
“Through colonisation you don't really lose your pre-colonial identity—you lose something much more precious, which is created only through colonialist oppression.”
What colonialism destroys is not the authentic pre-colonial self but a universal democratic subject that could only come into being through that very destruction.
“Cynicism is the most ideologically blind position: precisely when you think you speak the brutal language of open realistic egotism, you are most blind.”
The cynic who believes he sees through ideology is in fact following its fictions most faithfully, as shown by the financial crisis caused by those who thought themselves hard realists.
“The imposed English colonial language that oppresses Indians is at the same time the very thing that opens up the prospect of emancipation for them.”
What appears as the obstacle (colonial imposition) is simultaneously the condition of possibility for the very freedom it seems to block, Hegelian Versöhnung in the colonial context.
“It is not that Christ came to deliver people from sin; Adam had to fall in order to enable Christ to come down and display salvation—Malebranche's God loves only himself.”
Malebranche reveals a dark theological inversion: redemption presupposes the fall it claims to remedy, and divine love is a form of narcissistic enjoyment of the suffering it ostensibly relieves.
Claims 16
asserts
Capitalism was never developing as fast as now at the global level; the 'crisis' is a specifically Western European and American phenomenon, not a worldwide one.global capitalism and the scope of the economic crisis
asserts
The emergent phase of worldwide dynamic capitalism is dangerous because it increasingly decouples economic growth from democracy, tending toward what he calls 'capitalism with Asian values'.capitalism with Asian values / authoritarianism
asserts
Revolutions and rebellions happen not when conditions are worst but when things have begun to improve and expectations outpace reality.conditions of revolution and social unrest
asserts
The radical left has been the great loser of the recent crisis, having failed to articulate a viable alternative political project when the opportunity arose.the contemporary left's political failure
asserts
The failure of a historical project (communism, capitalism) must be located in an immanent flaw of the concept itself, not excused as imperfect implementation.the relationship between concept and its realisation
rejects
The Hölderlin paradigm—the expectation that approaching catastrophe will trigger a saving reversal—is the shared ideological structure of mainstream Left thought from Marx through Heidegger and Derrida, and must be abandoned.Hölderlin paradigm / eschatological left politics
asserts
The first step of the Hegelian dialectical process is not an originary immediate unity that then falls away, but the fall itself, which retroactively creates what it is the fall from.Hegel's dialectics / the logic of the fall
asserts
Hegel's reconciliation (Versöhnung) is not the healing of the wound but the full acceptance of the wound—what we lose in reconciliation is not the wound but the imagined pre-wound wholeness.Hegel's Versöhnung / dialectical reconciliation
asserts
The List der Vernunft (cunning of reason) does not mean bad events are retrospectively justified by good outcomes; Hegel is a thinker of genuine contingency, not teleological necessity.Hegel's cunning of reason and historical contingency
asserts
Colonial imposition of English on India did not repress a pre-existing authentic identity but created the very universal democratic identity that now feels repressed.colonialism, language, and identity
asserts
There is no natural mother tongue; every language is a parasitic foreign incubator, and the experience of an imposed language merely makes visible a gap that is constitutive of all language.language, subjectivity, and symbolic castration
asserts
Cynicism is not a privileged position of clear-sightedness but the most ideologically blind stance: brutal cynics follow fictions most blindly, as demonstrated by those who caused the financial crisis.cynicism and ideology
asserts
Hegel's prohibition against philosophy thinking into the future is not a conservative limitation but a genuine epistemological constraint: the meaning of historical action is decided retroactively.philosophy's relationship to history and the future
asserts
Gandhi was proto-fascist in accepting the caste system while merely insisting on the dignity of its lowest members, rather than challenging the caste structure itself.Gandhi and the caste system
asserts
Marx's reading of Hegel in the Grundrisse—where Hegelian dialectics expresses the process of collective re-appropriation—is itself pseudo-Hegelian; Hegel's dialectics is more radically contingent than Marx allows.Marx's use of Hegel / the Grundrisse
asserts
Malebranche's theology reveals the secret logic of Christianity: God created the world out of selfish vanity, Adam had to fall to enable Christ's arrival, and God the Father was happiest watching his Son suffer on the cross.Malebranche's Christology and the logic of Christianity
Quotes 16
“My fiancé is never late for an appointment because the moment she is late, she is no longer my fiancé.”Slavoj Žižek · fallacy of protecting a concept by expelling counter-examples
“We want a just society. I told them, okay, fuck off, Hitler wanted this, go on.”Slavoj Žižek · the Left's failure to articulate a substantive alternative
“What is found only comes to be through being left behind.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's absoluter Gegenstoß: the presupposed origin is constituted by the movement of loss
“at no time was God the Father happier than when He was observing His Son suffering and dying on the cross.”Slavoj Žižek · Malebranche's theology of divine narcissism and the logic of redemption requiring the fall
“Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur der sie schlug.”Slavoj Žižek · the wound is healed only by the spear that made it—Hegelian Versöhnung as radical acceptance
“The biggest wisdom of Hegel is the necessity of the illusion. That's what we have to learn today. How you cannot just drop the illusion.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology cannot be dissolved by mere exposure; illusion has structural necessity
“Precisely when you think you speak the brutal language of open realistic egotism, you are most blind.”Slavoj Žižek · cynicism as ideological blindness
“Language is not our spontaneous mode of expression. There's always a traumatic gap called in psychoanalysis with different technical names like symbolic castration and so on. The point is language hurts, there is no natural symbiosis.”Slavoj Žižek · language as parasitic foreign incubator / symbolic castration
“You have to torture language to make it tell the truth.”Slavoj Žižek · language's constitutive untruth—cited from Jelinek
“We are as it were condemned to contingency, condemned to—condemned to freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · the absence of the Big Other as the condition of freedom and contingency in Hegel
“Progress and chaos, political chaos, are not opposed. It's the—if we have to learn something from history, it's the opposite.”Slavoj Žižek · improving conditions produce, not prevent, rebellion
“Even those in power no longer take seriously their own proclamations... we live in a cynical era—and the idea is, who needs ideology critique with all this complex reading and so on and so on?”Slavoj Žižek · the false claim that cynicism renders ideology critique obsolete
“We are not only much more particular than we appear to be, we are also much more universal than we appear to be. The reality of capitalism is universal. Fictions are universal. Fictions are much stronger.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology works through universal fictions, not only particular interests in disguise
“The innocence of Paradise is another name for animal life, so that what the Bible calls fall is nothing but the passage from animal life to properly human existence.”Slavoj Žižek · the Fall as the condition of humanity, not its loss
“Never in our life have we faced a situation so charged with revolutionary opportunities. Never in our life have we been so impotent.”Slavoj Žižek · the paradox of the current Left's impotence amid revolutionary potential
“Hegel just prohibits this as it were eschatological certainty. Like you do what you want, but be aware that history is an open process whose meaning is decided retroactively so there is no guarantee.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's ban on teleological certainty and the retroactive determination of historical meaning
Transcript 2 turns
unknown
Okay, so since we are nonetheless in Heidelberg, which for me has certain
Okay, so since we are nonetheless in Heidelberg, which for me has certain
Slavoj Žižek
philosophical associations, I hope you will pardon me if I will, beginning with some new, not contained here philosophical reflections, sorry, political reflections, nonetheless go into philosophy, into the very basic question of how to read Hegel today, and then return to our situation. So, let me begin with a simple question: crisis. We hear all the time around, we are in deep crisis and so on and so on. But listen, what happened to me when I recently visited some Far Eastern countries, China, South Korea and so on. They gave me a wonderful answer. They told me, what crisis are you talking about? Look at the so-called BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China. Look at South Korea, Singapore, even Latin American countries, in Europe even, Poland, even many Sub-Saharan countries. Economy is doing—it never was doing as well as it is doing now there. The losers are only Western Europe and up to a point the United States. So they claim, if you look at the entire world, at least at the level of brutal economic data, capitalism was never doing as well as today. Never were so many people elevated above the poverty level and so on and so on. So, incidentally, a nice symptom of this is the recent situation in Portugal. You know, Angola, Mozambique were their old colonies. But do you know that now Portuguese people, because Portugal is in big crisis, they are quite massively returning to Angola and Mozambique? This time not as colonizers, but as immigrant workers and so on. So again, they are telling me—you, a very nice point they are making—you Western leftists, you like to criticize often in a masochistic way all the sins of Eurocentrism and so on. But here you are Eurocentric. What crisis? You are in crisis. The world is not in crisis. Again, on average it's exploding. On average, never was capitalism being in a process of development as fast as now. Ah, then I nonetheless answered them. I told them, okay, don't get too many anti-colonialist orgasms, like there is now a response outside Europe. The question to be raised is, if Europe is in gradual decay, what is replacing the ideological hegemony, hegemony of Europe? The answer is: it is mostly so-called capitalism with Asian values, which as we all know, of course, has nothing to do with Asian people and everything with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism to limit or even suspend democracy. So I think that, again, this is why I think now it's the time to return to Eurocentrism. What I fear is this new, so much celebrated stage of worldwide dynamic capitalism. I don't think I like it very much because to propose a very simple analysis: till now, there was one very good argument for capitalism, which was, okay, sometimes it needed ten, twenty years of military dictatorship, but sooner or later in South Korea, in Chile and so on, when things started to function, it did generate a demand for democracy. I am afraid that this epoch is over. Some months ago I was in a debate with Francis Fukuyama, and he laughed so much when I told him, okay, let's say you were right, the big triumph of worldwide capitalism. But admit it, that we ex-communists had our revenge. We are more and more appearing in China and so on as the best managers of this new capitalism. So again, let's not celebrate too much this new phase of capitalism. Next thing, a brutal thing which has to be said. Does this mean then that we will have revolts, resistances only in Europe, all the demonstrations now? Ah, here something has to be clarified, which some leftists don't like to hear. You know, people rebel not when things are really bad. Revolutions happen when things get a little bit better, but then expectations develop even faster and you have this gap between hopes, expectations and reality. Let me take the big example: French Revolution. It happened, every history will tell you, when in France the king and the nobles were for decades gradually losing their full hold on power. They didn't attack when the king was strong, but the king was weakened for decades, immediately basically after the death of *le Roi Soleil* of Louis XIV. Let's take an anti-communist example: the Budapest anti-Soviet uprising. My god, do you know that for two years Imre Nagy was already Prime Minister, the situation was slowly opening and so on. So again, the revolt didn't happen when Stalinist oppression was really bad. No, it happened when things were already opening. I claim the same thing can be said even about the so-called Arab Spring. Mubarak was not at top, he was down. I sympathized, I was connected with Egyptian rebels, but they admitted to me, things were developing, a new middle class of educated, connected to internet young people emerged, and it's precisely this partial development which created conditions for rebellion. This is why I think the Chinese Communists are right to be in panic. Precisely because on average Chinese are now living considerably better than forty years ago. This is the situation where you get rebellions. And that's the other side of Chinese economic miracle. You know that when I was in China, they told me we are having serious disturbances per year. I asked them, cut this Confucian bullshit, what do you mean by serious disturbances? Translate it into normal language. And they did it. They told me, okay, serious disturbances means local unrest, strike, demonstration, which is so strong that local police cannot deal with it and federal police or army has to intervene. per year. Which is why again, I think that you see rebellion, chaos, political chaos, and progress are not opposed. It's not, okay, we will make lives of the people better and then they will be satisfied. No, it's the—if we have to learn something from history, it's the opposite. Which is why the sad points is, I doubt there will be a big rebellion in North Korea. Maybe there will be, but precisely because they are now already allowing internet and so on, all that stuff. Now, in order not to miss this link between progress and instability, we should always focus on how what first appears as an incomplete realization of some social project signals its immanent limitation. This will bring us immediately to Hegel. What I mean by this? There is a wonderful from my youth, really when I was young in the sixties I remember, apocryphal probably, story about John Galbraith, you remember from the sixties a well-known left-Keynesian economist, who visited at that time, I think late fifties, early sixties, Soviet Union. And before going there, he wrote to his ex-Trotskyist but then anti-communist philosopher friend, Sidney Hook. He wrote to him, don't worry, I will not be seduced by the Soviets, I will not return to United States from my trip to Russia claiming that they have socialism there. And Hook, a reactionary but intelligent one, answered him: but that's what worries me, not that you will return as a convinced socialist, but that you will return claiming that Soviet Union is not socialist. That is to say, what worried Hook was the naive defense of the purity of the concept. If things go wrong with building a socialist society, so the defenders were saying, this does not invalidate the idea itself, it just means we didn't implement it properly. You know, that's what for example old Trotskyists or so-called democratic communists are saying, but communism wasn't even till now really tested, tried. It was all false and so on. Here unfortunately, although I remain a communist in some sense, I am a Hegelian. No, nonetheless, the realization, *Verwirklichung* of a concept, is the moment of each of its truth. But I think we should be honest enough and say the same about today's market fundamentalism. Aren't they acting exactly in the same way as old fanatical communists, who said if things went wrong, if millions died, no, this is not the true communism. When during a recent TV debate in France where I participated, Guy Sorman, otherwise a friend of mine but a total fanatic like worse than Ayn Rand fanatic of capitalism, he claimed that democracy and capitalism necessarily go together. Then I asked him the obvious stupid common sense question: what about China today? Oh, he answered, in China there is no capitalism. You see, this logic I am afraid of. You stick to your ideal, and if you have obviously a capitalism without democracy, the answer was, oh, that cannot be a true capitalism. You can easily identify the mistake here. It's the same mistake as in the well-known joke about paradox of definition used often by one of my big teachers, Jacques Lacan. My fiancé is never late for an appointment because the moment she is late, she is no longer my fiancé. This is how today's apologists of market explain the crisis of It was not the failure of the free market which caused it, but the excessive state regulation. That is to say, the fact that our market economy was not a true one, that it was too much regulated by state and so on and so on. What has this to do with Hegel? I think the great Hegelian dialectical move when a project fails is to make the shift from imperfect realization of a concept—the crucial dialectical shift is then to see how this imperfect realization must be grounded in some imperfection flaw of the pure concept itself. And I think again, this is what we should learn to do today. How? Ah, that's the problem because now about all these protests, which are obviously bearing witness to the fact that there is something problematic with today's capitalism. All the rage exploding all around Europe today. The Italian autonomist Franco "Bifo" Berardi, who is I think more intelligent than Toni Negri and one should read him, wrote how this rage exploding today is, I quote from Berardi, is impotent and inconsequential as consciousness and coordinated action seem beyond the reach of present society. Look at the European crisis. Never in our life have we faced a situation so charged with revolutionary opportunities. Never in our life have we been so impotent. Never have intellectuals and militants been so silent, so unable to find a way to show a new possible direction. I write about this in the very last pages of the book, namely, I think that the great loser of this last years of crisis is precisely the radical left, I think. From my youth I remember when things were functioning more or less well, at least for us in the developed West, the radical left was saying, oh, you live in—you live in apparent welfare but you live in illusions, wait, there will be a crisis and then... Well, now we had a crisis and basically left did not come with a viable alternative project. And I don't mean by this of course a detailed plan, but just with general idea like, what to do? I was in Wall Street occupy, in here in Börsenplatz in Frankfurt, and I was always just asking the demonstrators one same and the same question for which I was almost attacked as being a saboteur and so on. This Freudian question to them: what do you want? And it's incredible what I got. We want a just society. I told them, okay, fuck off, Hitler wanted this, go on. We want a society where money serves people and people don't serve money. I told them, Hitler would subscribe this immediately, because money which doesn't serve people is controlled by Jews and so on and so on. And then you know, basically you see there, apart from these vague ideas of we—we need more just society and so on, what you get is some pseudo-neo-Keynesianism. Not exactly to abolish capitalism, but more welfare, more money for this, for that. And then retroactively I think we can discover that this isn't really a new phenomenon. Recently I read a good book on Mexican Revolution. In November this was the big event, Pancho Villa from north, Emiliano Zapata with his people from south, they occupied Mexico City. They took over. And it's so sad. You know what happened? For two months they were there in Mexico City debating what to do, and then they left home. Pancho Villa north—they were not defeated by counter-revolution. They simply didn't know, believe me or you don't believe, they simply didn't know what to do, they—they withdrew, they withdrew home. So—so what's the problem here? Here I follow another guy whom I appreciate, the British art theorist T. J. Clark. He is well known, his most famous art theory, and it's a wonderful theory, was his detailed interpretation of, you know, the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David, *The Death of Marat*. He claims this is the first modernist painting. And he is right. Why? You should look again at that painting. Did you notice what's so strange about that painting? The lower half, you know, a bathtub, the dying Marat, blah blah, and you know what's the upper half? Nothing, just darkness. And I claim this painting singular is a proof that my beloved Jacobins were not totalitarians. Because imagine the same painting in a properly totalitarian society, let's say Soviet Union in the thirties. It's clear how would it have been structured. You have Marat dying there in a pietà, then you would have in the other half a kind of a—like in comics balloon, and then you would see the noble thoughts of dying Marat: happy French people dancing in freedom or whatever. No, isn't this a beautiful gesture? All the nightmare is abyss, the darkness remains there. It's not covered up by the fantasy of the bri—of the bright future. So again, T. J. Clark made this point very nicely of how, now I simplify very much, now I am entering the philosophical part, of how from Marx's time onwards, the left is, and this is my term, not Clark's, the left is caught in what I am tempted to call the Hölderlin paradigm. Was it that way also somewhere here? Yes. The poet. Ah, so we are in home territory. Oh yeah. Fine. Hölderlin paradigm I mean of course, *Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch*. That is to say, you pre—perceive your own epoch as the epoch of extreme danger, but then, you know, we are close to the Kairos reversal. So his idea is even the most radical anti-Stalinist leftists, they claimed, yeah, everything went wrong in twentieth century, Stalinism and so on, but don't lose hope, we are today because of ecology, technology, approaching this point of great danger. We can all die: ecology, DNA we can all be manipulated, but there is a hope for the big awakening. And T. J. Clark uses a wonderful evil metaphor of, you know, that first Chinese emperor, that Terracotta Army. He said as if we all still hope there is a big proletarian terracotta army buried somewhere, which will awaken and do the big authentic revolution, which this time will not be alienated, but true immediate democracy, whatever you want and so on and so on. And his claim is maybe we should break with this basic paradigm. There is another German philosopher who, in a little bit half-forgotten today, but he is not a complete idiot, we should maybe be research him, maybe you know him, Karl Löwith. He developed a nice—this point of precisely this eschatological notion of the greatest danger but then reversal and he traced it from Christianity to Nietzsche, Heidegger and so on. And I think even the Derridians part, Jacques Derrida's part of this line. You know, this idea that now we are at the moment of extreme tension of metaphysics of presence, but things are already turning around and so on and so on, metaphysics has exhausted this potential, the *Gefahr*, the turn is near. Now, I think it's clear that Marx himself is part of this logic. The whole notion of proletarian revolution is again, *Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch*. *Das Gefahr*, the total self-alienation of proletarian, of proletariat reduction to this pure zero point of radical alienation, but then there is a possibility here for things to turn around. Now, this is the reason that I think what we need today is a return from Marx to Hegel. Because although Hegel, now comes the a little bit more boring philosophical part, I think that although Hegel is often perceived as the very model of this logic, you know, negation then negation goes to the extreme, but hop-hop then you have the magical reversal, *Versöhnung*, reconciliation, that Hegel precisely does not follow this model, that we have to learn a lot from Hegel today. Hegel here is much further than Marx. Why? With Marx, again, in his famous manuscript on the pre-capitalist mode of economic production, this is really the most hege—pseudo-Hegelian Marx. He develops how, you know, you begin in pre-history with substantial identity between workers and the objective conditions of working process, then the whole history is the history of gradual alienation. The—the objective conditions of production are torn away from workers and in capitalism this process reaches its high point. You have proletarians as pure as Marx put it in very Hegelian terms *Substanz als Subjektivität*, but precisely this radical alienation creates the point of subjectivity, collective subjectivity for Marx outside substance, which can then recreate the unity, a collective subject can re-appropriate objective conditions. Here is a nice quote, I'm sorry, in English. This capitalist extreme form of alienation, in which in the guise of the relationship of the capital towards wage labor, labor, productive activity appears as opposed to its own conditions and to its own product, is a necessary point of transition, and for that reason is in itself, in an inverted form, posited on its head, it already contains the disintegration of all limited presuppositions of production, and even creates and produces the unconditional presuppositions of production and thereby all material conditions for the total universal development of the productive forces of the individuals. End of quote. So again, the idea is that history is thus the gradual process of the separation of subject activity from these objective conditions and again when the danger, the alienation is at its worst, the possibility is given for collective subjectivity to re-appropriate the alienated content. There are, if you are a little bit a professional philosopher, you immediately can note how and I wonder why more people didn't notice this, how ambiguous in Marx himself but also later in Young Lukács, Adorno, the Marxist reference to Hegel is. I am talking about serious Marxist, not those of general ontology, dialectical materialism. Because on the one hand, to simplify it, you have Young Lukács or you have Marx in *Grundrisse*, where the Hegelian dialectics is conceived, as we have just seen, as the mystified expressive articulation of the process of liberation. What Hegel is describing as subject appropriating alienated substance is the idealist version of the working class as collective re-appropriation of substantial alienated wealth. But then, we have the opposite reading in late Marx, *Capital*, and for example in Adorno or Helmut Reichelt, *Hegel, Kapital, Jude*, which was very important I think in the sixties, where they claim on the contrary that Hegel's logic is not the logic of liberation, but it's an idealist reproduction of the very logic of capitalist alienation. So that revolution is really a step outside dialectics, in the sense that speculative dialectics is an idealist expression of speculative movement of the capital. But my point here is again, is this process, which sounds very Hegelian, we begin with substantial unity, we get gradual alienation, and then when the alienation is at its lowest, precisely when the subject is reduced to zero, this zero as the negative form of absolute negativity can reassert itself appropriate all context. Is this really Hegel? If you allow me some twenty minutes before conclusion, I will try to prove that this is not the case, that Hegel is not this triad. Okay, there are some ABC things to say first, like when idiots reduce Hegel to thesis, antithesis, synthesis, you know, now that. It's incredible how many people don't know that Hegel never used these terms, with some I don't know who in the 1840s. But okay. Now what do I mean by this? Ah, now I will make some crazy steps. I claim that the basic point of Hegel is that a typical Hegelian cycle, I will talk at very abstract level although I will use some concrete examples, but conceptually I will remain abstract there, you don't have some immediate unity which then disintegrates. The first step of the dialectical process is the fall itself, and the fall retroactively creates what it is the fall from. For example, you find this clearly in Hegel's wonderful reading of the Bible where he says Paradise is simply animal kingdom, and it's through the fall that when you fall into sin, this very movement retroactively creates what it is the fall from. You don't fall from goodness. You fall directly into sin. What does this mean? Let me give you a very weird example which I think wonderfully makes this point, and it's a very problematic political example from Islam in the fall of Sheikh Taj El-Din Hilaly, Australia's most senior Muslim cleric, caused a scandal, maybe you remember it from the newspapers. A group of Muslim men in Australia were jailed for gang rape, they raped a young girl. And he defended them. He said the young girl should be blamed. Why? Here is the quote. It's horrible and I claim, don't hit me yet, I am a feminist, but I claim to provoke you that there is an unexpected pro-feminist dimension in this. Here is the quote. If you take uncovered meat and place it outside on the street and the dogs come and eat it, whose fault it is, the dogs or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. In other words, why did the girl walk there alone, even if fully dressed offering herself? She is to be blamed. Now of course I am well aware that this is a scandalous comparison between a woman who is not veiled and raw uncovered meat. I certainly don't again don't agree with this. But, okay, now you will say okay you are now playing like a bad magician with they pull the rabbit out, where is your stupid feminism here, you know? Ah, think a little bit further. Don't you notice something very strange in this story metaphor? The guy, this cleric, compares us men to raw dogs. If we are not guilty, it means when I saw a half-dressed woman, I can't do anything, it's my nature, I just jump on her or whatever. Like we are not treated men in this story as—as ethical agents. We can't do it. We are like dogs. His metaphor. He attacks women because implicitly he considers women the only ethically responsible ones. You see the paradox? Men are like dogs. I see a human I jump, can't do anything. The only one who should show restraint, that is to say, the only one who can be addressed as a potential ethical subject is—is the woman. And I claim that this is how we should even re-read the Bible. Yes, Eve pulled Adam into sin, but she humanized Adam in this way. Adam without Eve is an animal, nothing. I mean Eve like, you—it's okay, to make the theoretical point, the innocence of Paradise is another name for animal life, so that what the Bible calls fall is nothing but the passage from animal life to properly human existence. It is thus the fall itself which creates the dimension from which it is the fall. Now back to Islam, you will say I am dreaming here, it's a bad taste remark. It's more complex. You know, I am opposed to Islam, don't misunderstand me here, but there is something interesting to know how from the very beginning in Islam, man is not considered as someone who can have an access to truth without woman as a witness, as a guarantor. Let's go to the very top, Muhammad himself. You know, this is official story. You know when that stupid angel Gabriel or whoever appeared to Muhammad giving him messages? Do you know what's the official Islam story? Muhammad first thought this is the voice of the devil and then it's his wife Khadija who convinced him that this is the truth. And the lesson is clear, you see, that how—I can give you dozens of other stories, how like truth cannot be direct, cannot be for the man, cannot be approached without woman as, in Lacanian terms, the Big Other, as the mediator. And this is nonetheless the wonderful ambiguity in—in Islam. It's, I like this paradoxical crazy points in history of religion. For example, my Jewish friends told me another one which I love, about God's omnipotence and so on. It's really the scene of Woody Allen, *Annie Hall* realized. And I warn you, what I will tell you now it may sound as a stupid joke, but this is sacred Talmud, at two places my Jewish friends gave me exact quotations. It's the same story told two times where, to simplify it in my other book which will appear by Fischer next year I hope you can get all the proper references, two big rabbis debate a theological point. And then one of them who is losing the debate says, oh, let's call God himself, Jehovah, to come and be the judge. And really then God comes. An old man approaches them and you know what happens then? The other guy who was winning the debate starts to shout at God. Listen old man, like I translate it plastically: fuck off, you did your job, you created the universe, you did it very badly, you did it whatever you could, now you leave to us educated people to do some theological thinking, go away. And it's a wonderful little God said: oh my god, my pupils beat me but they are right, and runs away. You see again, the highest point of Judaism, you know. So the—okay, I love this ambiguity. But let me go on here. Uh, where I was saying that the fall precedes what it is the fall from so that you have to fall. Now this is much more radical than it may appear. I'm not making this simple triadic statement like you have to fall to develop negativity in an alienated form and then to get it back. No, the one whom I really like here, my favorite theologian who developed to the end this wrong reading of the fall, was Nicolas Malebranche. He is Christianity at its craziest. Uh, in the best Pascalian tradition, Malebranche in a way I claim revealed the secret of Christianity. Namely, his Christology of Malebranche, no wonder he was immediately excommunicated after his death, is based on a very original answer to the question: why did God create the world? Malebranche's clear answer: so that God could bask in the glory of being celebrated by His creation. God wanted to be celebrated, God wanted recognition, so He created the world out of pure selfishness, Malebranche, God created the world out of pure selfish vanity. He wanted to be praised, so He created world and then people to celebrate Him. Consequently, now things come—come become theologically problematic: it was not that Christ came down to earth in order to deliver people from sin. On the contrary, Adam had to fall in order to enable Christ to come down to earth and display salvation. Malebranche applies here to God himself this deep psychological insight which tells us that the saintly figure who sacrifices himself for the benefit of others to deliver them from their misery secretly wants the others to suffer misery so that he will be able to help them. Like the proverbial husband who works all day to help his poor crippled wife, but he would probably abandon her if she were to regain her health and turn into a successful career woman. You know people, I think the—the—the filthiest way to be evil is to be in this self-complacent way good and sacrificial. You know you sacrifice yourself to make it sure that the other is indebted to you and so on and so on. Malebranche developed this parallel to its conclusion. He claimed, Malebranche, that in the same way that the saintly person uses the suffering of others to bring about his own narcissistic satisfaction in helping those others suffering, God also ultimately, I quote Malebranche here, loves only himself and He pushes humans into misery so that then He can selfishly be celebrated by them. From this, all this, Malebranche drew a terrifying consequence. It is not true that if Jesus Christ had not come to earth to deliver humanity everyone would have been lost. Quite on the contrary, without Christ coming, nobody would have been lost. Every human—no, for him every human being had to fall so that Christ could come and deliver some of us. Malebranche's conclusion again is here shattering. Since the death of Christ is a key step in realizing the goal of creation, and then he says this Malebranche, I quote it: "at no time was God the Father happier than when He was observing His Son suffering and dying on the cross." He says this was the moment of almost orgasmic happiness of God the Father. Not to back for theological madness, but precisely this is what Hegel—it's not, sometimes Hegel is read like this: we have to fall so that we triumphantly return to ourselves. But what Hegel calls *List der Vernunft*, it's not this. Like, to evoke a more contemporary example, it's not that there had to be Holocaust so that we could get the state of Israel. It's not that God said, okay, let's organize Holocaust to help the Jews in the long term. No, this is not Hegel's *List der Vernunft*. I think Hegel is much more contingently open. Holocaust happened because people are genuinely evil, and then afterwards in a kind of a bricolage there may be beneficial consequences but they in no way justify the horror. There is no retroactive justification here. Okay, I will try not to be too long so I will skip how the logic that I am trying to describe functions. I think Wagner was here very Hegelian. You know in the last towards the end famous lines from *Parsifal*: *Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur der sie schlug*. What is Hegel saying here? Okay, *die Wunde* is basically spirit itself. Hegel says spirit is the wound, the wound of nature. But how is the wound closed? Not so that it's undone, that there is no wound. But that you radicalize, fully accept the wound itself. You know, so Hegel is much more ambiguous than people perceive when he claims that the spirit heals its own wounds. Yes, but it heals them so that precisely what we lose in *Versöhnung* is not the wound, but precisely that what allegedly preceded the wound. Like we lose the very measure from which the wound appears as a wound. What do I mean by this? Now I warn you if you are sensitive, now comes a very dirty story, a wonderful I think deeply Christian joke about Jesus Christ which makes this point. It was told with me of all people, I liked it there, by a Christian Palestinian in Ramallah. The joke is this one. When Christ was alone reflecting in his tent the night before he was arrested and crucified, his apostles gathered around and said, "My God, our Lord did so much for us and tomorrow he will die," because they all knew it was part of the divine plan the crucifixion, and they said, "Shouldn't we bring some happiness to our master? Look, he didn't even spend the night with a woman. Doesn't he deserve for the last evening to have some good sex?" So they asked Mary Magdalene, wouldn't you go in there and seduce him? And of course Mary Magdalene being who she is, she said, "Of course, with joy" and so on, you know. So she goes into tent and the apostles wait around for some five minutes when she runs out with a terrifying cry. And they ask her, "Tell me what happened, what happened?" And she says—she says, "Horrible. First it began well. I started to dance in front of Christ, he looked at me nicely, kindly. Then I undressed myself, then I spread my legs, I showed him my vagina intimate parts and then Christ looked at my vagina and said, 'Oh, what a horrible wound' and put his palm on it." Hegel is not this! Don't be afraid. With Hegel the wound remains. No, the wound is not healed in this way. In what way is then the wound healed with Hegel? Here again, the wound is healed in the way that as it were we discover how what we lose with the wound is basically the wound itself, that the way out of the wound is to accept fully the wound itself. What we have to draw is not the wound but what allegedly comes before. To give you an example which is deeply Hegelian. You know all these returns to national origins in this end of nineteenth century nationalist revival. We know today, Eric Hobsbawm who recently died, a great British Marxist historian, collected a wonderful volume on invented traditions. How the tradition to which European nations, at least with us Slovenians I know it's true, were returning in that revival was a tradition invented in that very interval. They didn't return to some real previous tradition. In the very return to it they created it. There was nothing before it. Where do you find this in Hegel formally? Now a little bit of pure philosophy and then more politics to get the point. In Hegel's, at the beginning of the second volume of Hegel's Logic, *Logik des Wesens*, Hegel precisely to designate this paradox uses a wonderful term, it will be the title of the book that hopefully you will publish, *absoluter Gegenstoß*. I don't know how to translate it, counter-push, why not even counter-punch. Here is the quote but I will try to explain it, it may appear abstract but it's crucial. "Reflection therefore finds before it an immediate which it transcends and from which it is the return, but this return is only the presupposing of what reflection finds before it. What is thus found only comes to be through being left behind. The reflexive moment is to be taken as an—again—*absoluter Gegenstoß*, absolute recoil upon itself, for the presupposition of the returning into self—that from which essence comes—is only in the return itself." This is the formula. What is found only comes to be through being left behind. Let me give you now my big example to make all this clear if it was not. I was in India two years ago, it didn't end well, even something absolutely comical I loved it happened. I got engaged there in political debates and they—by they I mean my friends Maoist Naxalite rebels and the untouchables, the lowest, converted me against Gandhi. My hero is now Dr. Ambedkar, a much more egalitarian, one of the untouchables who was always in conflict with Gandhi. His claim was that Gandhi was, sorry to use this word, a proto-fascist. Why? Gandhi was not against castes. In a typical proto-fascist move Gandhi just said all castes have their own dignity, even the lowest members of the lowest caste are children of God and so on. So you know, like, let's recognize all their dignity but we need castes and so on. So, you know what happened to me? As an intermezzo, it's a wonderful joke. When I returned after in visit India to Slovenia, a friend whose wife works as a clerk in Slovene Ministry of Foreign Affairs told me that one week after my return an official letter came from Indian Foreign Ministry to Slovene Foreign Ministry saying: your citizen Slavoj Žižek claimed that Gandhi is no better than Hitler, is this now the official Slovene position? I advised to answer them: not yet, but we are thinking about it. No, Ambedkar is the great guy. And so back to India, what happened to me there, they really hated me, all those multiculturalists who are of course cultural anti-imperialist Eurocentric cultural theorists and they are what you expect them to be. Like, you mention what about equality, democracy, they say oh, don't force upon us your Eurocentric oppressive notions and so on. So some of them, that's where I exploded, because incidentally I discovered that all those big multicultural theorists are of course Brahmins, all, all at the top, you know. Uh, they complained to me that the very fact that we debate there in English language puts me into an advantage. That can I even imagine how for them to be forced to speak in English is already a form of cultural colonialism which censors their true identity? Basically they told me we have to speak in an imposed foreign language to express our innermost identity. And does this not put us in a position of radical alienation? Even our resistance to colonization has to be formulated in the language of the colonizer. Okay, my answer to them was, first one: I thank them sincerely of this, and this is typical of neglecting the most fact that English was also not my native language, you know. That's okay for me to be identified, who cares about city small nations like Slovenia, but they big Indians whatever. But then my answer at a more serious level was much more aggressive. My answer is that, and now I come to the point of what Hegel meant with this "what we lose is created retroactively by the very process of losing it". You Indians want to get out of colonization and reassert some authentic core of your identity. But are you aware that it is precisely the imposition of English, a foreign language, which created that X which you feel is oppressed by it? Because what is oppressed for them is the new emancipated India, but this has nothing to do with the old India, the old pre-colonial India. They even openly admitted to me, the pre-colonial, they don't want to return to that India. The pre-colonial India was a terrifying mess of exploitation, starvation, whatever you want. The new universalist democratic India is oppressed by colonialism, but it's at the same time created, can only exist through, you know, like the paradox is this one: through colonization you don't really lose your pre-colonial identity, you lose something much more precious which is created only through this colonialist oppression. Incidentally then some of them which became my friends even gave me the supreme proof of this. There is a—I forgot the name, the book of—they have some old Indian legislation, the book of—sorry I forgot—which is all the rules of castes and so on are there. But you know what I discovered? From them, they told me that far from being part of old Indian tradition, this book which is the very model of traditional caste India was put together by Indian British colonizers to have the tools to control Indians in their own terms. So back to my example here of India. I think that Malcolm X, whom I appreciate very much, the one played by Denzel Washington and so on, was aware of this when he adopted X as a name. And I read some of his texts where he makes it very clear, this X what we lost in being enslaved, colonized, are not our African roots. He said fuck the African roots and so on. It's an X which paradoxically we become aware of precisely when through brutal colonization we were torn off from our ethnic groups. Okay, for Malcolm X, a problematic move, he found this X in Islam, but it's precisely Islam as universalist, nothing to do with African roots and so on and so on. So you see my point, this is for me the Hegelian dialectical process. To put it in very simple simplified way, at the beginning you have not some authentic immediate substantial unity, you have just the pre-colonial mess, which you have simply to measure in totally different terms. It's a society not good, not bad, it's different and it's usually very confused. Then colonizers come and of course brutally impose on you foreign language, foreign way of thinking, and you feel deprived. But what you don't know is that what you are deprived of is not what you really lost. This very deprivation creates a much stronger universal, let's say true freedom X. And so I claim that precisely this is why I told them: the way for you to really emancipate yourself is not to drop English language and to return to some primordial thinking and so on and so on, but to beat the colonizers in their own language. Which is now even happening. You know, I spoke with some American conservatives which were horrified and I think they were right to be horrified. They told me, okay, English is now a world language. But it's not really our American English. What is now the worldwide English is something formed by Chinese merchants in Singapore who speak English... [unintelligible] and so on, you know. This is the beauty of global capitalism which I like, that it's not that we are all losing trying to speak English, even English language itself is taken from—from the English ones. Okay, a more theoretical Hegelian point, which concerns this *Wunde* wound and so on. I think the experience of English language as an oppressive imposition obfuscates a much more traumatic fact. And here I follow Jacques Lacan, that every language is a parasitic foreign incubator. If there is a point which Lacan made in a justified way, it's that the relationship between human animal and language is parasitic. Language is not our spontaneous mode of expression. There's always a traumatic gap called in psychoanalysis with different technical names like symbolic castration and so on. The point is language hurts, there is no natural symbiosis. That's why I agree with Elfriede Jelinek, whom I otherwise don't like as a writer, who's too dirty for me, I'm a moralist, who wrote somewhere that language in itself lies, that you have to torture language to make it tell the truth. So again, I think that the problem—the problem with this experience as English as an imposed language is that you obfuscate the fact that there is no natural language, there is no mother tongue. Every language is basically oppressive. There is a gap between subjectivity and language, which is why, and Hegel knew this, in a wonderful passage here you see that Hegel was a genius, he says, as if criticizing in advance Heidegger, he says that it was a high point of historical wisdom, wisdom of history, to have Latin and not Greek to become the lingua franca. Because Greek language with all its Heideggerian authenticity and so on would precisely be too suffocating. What's so great about Latin? It's precisely that it's a kind of a much more cold language, it's not authentic language and so on and so on. So what is—what follows from all this? If I propose this in a very abstract way, I will finish soon, as a model. The first step of dialectical process in Hegel is not there was an immediate identity. It's the loss itself. And then—but the two steps of dialectical process is first you experience a loss but you live in the illusion that you should somehow return to what you had lost, that what you lost was really there before the loss. And what Hegel calls reconciliation is simply when you accept fully the loss itself. That's—that's what Hegel is saying again and again. Yes, Geist is *die Wunde*, the wound of nature, and you don't overcome it, there is no unity with nature, you just discover that I don't know, nature is already in itself denaturalized or whatever, you fully accept the wound. This is why I claim the typical Hegelian historical moment is not this Hölderlin-Marx-Heidegger moment of Kairos, you know, we are approaching the zero point, things are really bad, but there is the end—the light at the end of the tunnel, things will turn better. I think Hegel's typical moment is precisely when this reversal *Gefahr das Rettende* fails. Things were bad, you get French Revolution, but things turn almost even worse. And then the Hegelian greatness is to demonstrate how even if things turn bad after liberation, it was still worth it, how to find as it were victory in defeat itself. In the—in the sense that let me give you another example here, I think that Hegel was much more a thinker of contingency than Marx. For Hegel it would never have been permitted to occupy, it would have been too idealist for Hegel in the bad sense, the position occupied by Marx, which is, I know the logic of history, which gives the objective possibility of communism, and I perceive myself as an agent of historical necessity. In the sense of, even if it's not necessity but just as Lukács would have called *objektive Möglichkeit*, no, that like I can as it were step off my shoulder, I can see where I stand in history and I can act accordingly. For Hegel this is too idealist, it's prohibitive. That's why he said philosophy cannot think into the future, it only can paint gray on gray. And the whole book is now written by a very intelligent Canadian young Hegelian, Rebecca Comay, on what this tautology means: gray on gray. That philosophy only paints gray on gray. But another—so what I want to say is that reconciliation, *Versöhnung* for Hegel, is not, oh, no wound. *Versöhnung* simply means that you must perceive in what appears to you as an obstacle at the same time also the condition, the very ground of your freedom. Like, the *Versöhnung* for today's Indians is simply to admit that the imposed English colonial language which oppresses them is at the same time the very thing that opens up the prospect of emancipation for them. This is Hegelian *Versöhnung*. No ideal solution, the battle goes on. I think that Hegel's unification of subject and substance absolutely does not mean this Fichtean, Young Lukács, Marxist [unintelligible] that the subject dominates, swallows the substance or whatever. No, it's a much more refined position. What Hegel is saying is that of course there is no in-itself, there is no substantial higher destiny which controls us, but this does not make us masters of our universe. Precisely what we cannot, we cannot dominate history, not because there is some higher power which is impenetrable to us, but precisely because there is no Big Other, there is no higher power. We are as it were condemned to contingency, condemned to—condemned to freedom. Which is why, now just to conclude... If Hegel is not something, he is not a cynic. The biggest wisdom of Hegel is the necessity of the illusion. That's what we have to learn today. How you cannot just drop the illusion. This is why I think precisely today when many of my friends, some old leftist Marxists from Fredric Jameson to Noam Chomsky, they—it's a pretty popular theory today, they claim that we are in an era of complete cynicism, where even those in power no longer take seriously their own proclamations. Like if you listen to those in power, they pretend to talk about democracy but basically they openly say it's all about power, money, faith, whatever you want. So we live in a cynical era and the idea is, who needs ideology critique with all this complex reading and so on and so on? You know like the idea is the following one: old Marxist ideology critique tried to use—to put it—to discover a particular content behind false ideological universality. Like you as a bourgeois, or you're again the bad guy here, you preach human rights and I come as an a Marxist, no, your human rights are really the rights of privileged white bourgeois white minority female and so on like you know, to denounce false universality as really based on a privileging a particular content. But already in Marx, Marx knew well that this is not the true power of ideology, that cynicism is false. The thesis of Marx is beautiful here already. It is not only—people only remember this part of Marx, denounce false ideological universality, like we talk about freedom today. But don't you see when we impose our freedom on Egyptians, on Iranians, that we are cultural imperialist that our freedom privileges our values? Yes, that's one side. But Marx also knew something much more interesting: that the opposite is also true. We are not only much more particular than we appear to be, we are also much more universal than we appear to be. The reality of capitalism is universal. Fictions are universal. Fictions are much stronger. What I mean by this? It's an insight well formulated by Hegel. Let's take a brutal cynic who says, oh, who cares, screw democracy, it's all really about money, power, and so on. It's totally wrong to see, to think that this is brutal power, this guy knows what he's doing. No, they don't know what they're doing. Precisely when you think you speak the brutal language of open realistic egotism, you are most blind. A proof if you want one, everywhere, just look. From Hitler, you know I read, you should do it maybe, Hitler's *Mein Kampf* with a specific view. I asked myself while reading it, a very simple question, stupid one: did Hitler believe in what he was writing there? And the answer is clear and unambiguous: yes and no. On the one hand, Hitler was consciously manipulating. You know he says often, like in those famous passages where Hitler says if you repeat a lie often enough it will blah blah blah. So he was manipulating. But what's so terrifying is then that you can almost see the passages where as it were, although he knows he manipulates, all of a sudden he falls into his own trap and—and believes it. Or let's take a modern example. The financial crisis of Who caused it? Sorry, it's not some crazy welfare state idealists. It's precisely the most cynical capitalists who thought we are brutal realists, we just do what—they caused it. They live in illusions. What brutal cynics don't see is that precisely in their egotist brutality, they follow fictions about money circulation and so on and so on. And here I think again, we can learn a lot from Hegel. Because this is I think Hegel's problem. Hegel does not renounce emancipatory activity and so on and so on. Hegel just prohibits this as it were eschatological certainty. Like you do what you want, but be—and you have to do what you want, but be aware that history is an open process whose meaning is decided retroactively so there is no guarantee, you cannot control in advance the symbolic effect of what you are doing. So, to really conclude now, after Derrida and so on, namely you know the joke but I cannot resist, the same again. I think that Hegel missed something. I'm sorry if you know this story: what to do with *Antigone*, really. I would like to imagine a Hegelian rewriting on *Antigone*, a kind of a Hegelian triad, *Antigone* for today. It would be something like Tom Tykwer, *Lola rennt*, three or Brecht, *Der Jasager und der Neinsager*, *Der Jasager II*. Three versions of the story. The first story would have been *Antigone* that we know. In the big dialogue which is the middle of the play, conflict strife with [unintelligible] as it were between Antigone and Creon, Creon wins, okay, we know the story, I will not repeat it. Then my second version, Hegelian negation: Antigone would have won. She would have convinced Creon that, okay, nonetheless back in those unwritten laws, better to respect them, let's bury Polynices. And in my version as Creon with you I always had the respect for Creon, it would be catastrophe. Because of this there would have been a new civil war and all of Thebes of the city would be in fire. And in my second version the last image of the play would have been Antigone wandering around and quoting the hit lines, "no but I was created for love not for hatred" and then the chorus answering her "Well, fuck you bitch, that's what you perceived with your, you know, because of your stupid insistence the whole city is in the ruins." Hegel would have loved this because Hegel loves this example of catastrophic consequences of pathologically high attitude. Then the properly Hegelian *Versöhnung*, third version: it's not a reconciliation between Antigone and Creon. No, no, no, no, no. Here comes the Stalinist twist: while Antigone and Creon are fighting, Chorus, which is usually the voice of stupidity, you know, always conformist, steps forward, establishes itself the chorus, as some kind of Jacobin Committee for Public Salvation, arrests them both. Like you are ruining our country for your feudal conflicts, both Antigone and Creon are arrested and revolutionary committee goes, establishes people's democracy. That would be the Hegelian conclusion of *Antigone*. Thank you very much.
philosophical associations, I hope you will pardon me if I will, beginning with some new, not contained here philosophical reflections, sorry, political reflections, nonetheless go into philosophy, into the very basic question of how to read Hegel today, and then return to our situation. So, let me begin with a simple question: crisis. We hear all the time around, we are in deep crisis and so on and so on. But listen, what happened to me when I recently visited some Far Eastern countries, China, South Korea and so on. They gave me a wonderful answer. They told me, what crisis are you talking about? Look at the so-called BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China. Look at South Korea, Singapore, even Latin American countries, in Europe even, Poland, even many Sub-Saharan countries. Economy is doing—it never was doing as well as it is doing now there. The losers are only Western Europe and up to a point the United States. So they claim, if you look at the entire world, at least at the level of brutal economic data, capitalism was never doing as well as today. Never were so many people elevated above the poverty level and so on and so on. So, incidentally, a nice symptom of this is the recent situation in Portugal. You know, Angola, Mozambique were their old colonies. But do you know that now Portuguese people, because Portugal is in big crisis, they are quite massively returning to Angola and Mozambique? This time not as colonizers, but as immigrant workers and so on. So again, they are telling me—you, a very nice point they are making—you Western leftists, you like to criticize often in a masochistic way all the sins of Eurocentrism and so on. But here you are Eurocentric. What crisis? You are in crisis. The world is not in crisis. Again, on average it's exploding. On average, never was capitalism being in a process of development as fast as now. Ah, then I nonetheless answered them. I told them, okay, don't get too many anti-colonialist orgasms, like there is now a response outside Europe. The question to be raised is, if Europe is in gradual decay, what is replacing the ideological hegemony, hegemony of Europe? The answer is: it is mostly so-called capitalism with Asian values, which as we all know, of course, has nothing to do with Asian people and everything with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism to limit or even suspend democracy. So I think that, again, this is why I think now it's the time to return to Eurocentrism. What I fear is this new, so much celebrated stage of worldwide dynamic capitalism. I don't think I like it very much because to propose a very simple analysis: till now, there was one very good argument for capitalism, which was, okay, sometimes it needed ten, twenty years of military dictatorship, but sooner or later in South Korea, in Chile and so on, when things started to function, it did generate a demand for democracy. I am afraid that this epoch is over. Some months ago I was in a debate with Francis Fukuyama, and he laughed so much when I told him, okay, let's say you were right, the big triumph of worldwide capitalism. But admit it, that we ex-communists had our revenge. We are more and more appearing in China and so on as the best managers of this new capitalism. So again, let's not celebrate too much this new phase of capitalism. Next thing, a brutal thing which has to be said. Does this mean then that we will have revolts, resistances only in Europe, all the demonstrations now? Ah, here something has to be clarified, which some leftists don't like to hear. You know, people rebel not when things are really bad. Revolutions happen when things get a little bit better, but then expectations develop even faster and you have this gap between hopes, expectations and reality. Let me take the big example: French Revolution. It happened, every history will tell you, when in France the king and the nobles were for decades gradually losing their full hold on power. They didn't attack when the king was strong, but the king was weakened for decades, immediately basically after the death of *le Roi Soleil* of Louis XIV. Let's take an anti-communist example: the Budapest anti-Soviet uprising. My god, do you know that for two years Imre Nagy was already Prime Minister, the situation was slowly opening and so on. So again, the revolt didn't happen when Stalinist oppression was really bad. No, it happened when things were already opening. I claim the same thing can be said even about the so-called Arab Spring. Mubarak was not at top, he was down. I sympathized, I was connected with Egyptian rebels, but they admitted to me, things were developing, a new middle class of educated, connected to internet young people emerged, and it's precisely this partial development which created conditions for rebellion. This is why I think the Chinese Communists are right to be in panic. Precisely because on average Chinese are now living considerably better than forty years ago. This is the situation where you get rebellions. And that's the other side of Chinese economic miracle. You know that when I was in China, they told me we are having serious disturbances per year. I asked them, cut this Confucian bullshit, what do you mean by serious disturbances? Translate it into normal language. And they did it. They told me, okay, serious disturbances means local unrest, strike, demonstration, which is so strong that local police cannot deal with it and federal police or army has to intervene. per year. Which is why again, I think that you see rebellion, chaos, political chaos, and progress are not opposed. It's not, okay, we will make lives of the people better and then they will be satisfied. No, it's the—if we have to learn something from history, it's the opposite. Which is why the sad points is, I doubt there will be a big rebellion in North Korea. Maybe there will be, but precisely because they are now already allowing internet and so on, all that stuff. Now, in order not to miss this link between progress and instability, we should always focus on how what first appears as an incomplete realization of some social project signals its immanent limitation. This will bring us immediately to Hegel. What I mean by this? There is a wonderful from my youth, really when I was young in the sixties I remember, apocryphal probably, story about John Galbraith, you remember from the sixties a well-known left-Keynesian economist, who visited at that time, I think late fifties, early sixties, Soviet Union. And before going there, he wrote to his ex-Trotskyist but then anti-communist philosopher friend, Sidney Hook. He wrote to him, don't worry, I will not be seduced by the Soviets, I will not return to United States from my trip to Russia claiming that they have socialism there. And Hook, a reactionary but intelligent one, answered him: but that's what worries me, not that you will return as a convinced socialist, but that you will return claiming that Soviet Union is not socialist. That is to say, what worried Hook was the naive defense of the purity of the concept. If things go wrong with building a socialist society, so the defenders were saying, this does not invalidate the idea itself, it just means we didn't implement it properly. You know, that's what for example old Trotskyists or so-called democratic communists are saying, but communism wasn't even till now really tested, tried. It was all false and so on. Here unfortunately, although I remain a communist in some sense, I am a Hegelian. No, nonetheless, the realization, *Verwirklichung* of a concept, is the moment of each of its truth. But I think we should be honest enough and say the same about today's market fundamentalism. Aren't they acting exactly in the same way as old fanatical communists, who said if things went wrong, if millions died, no, this is not the true communism. When during a recent TV debate in France where I participated, Guy Sorman, otherwise a friend of mine but a total fanatic like worse than Ayn Rand fanatic of capitalism, he claimed that democracy and capitalism necessarily go together. Then I asked him the obvious stupid common sense question: what about China today? Oh, he answered, in China there is no capitalism. You see, this logic I am afraid of. You stick to your ideal, and if you have obviously a capitalism without democracy, the answer was, oh, that cannot be a true capitalism. You can easily identify the mistake here. It's the same mistake as in the well-known joke about paradox of definition used often by one of my big teachers, Jacques Lacan. My fiancé is never late for an appointment because the moment she is late, she is no longer my fiancé. This is how today's apologists of market explain the crisis of It was not the failure of the free market which caused it, but the excessive state regulation. That is to say, the fact that our market economy was not a true one, that it was too much regulated by state and so on and so on. What has this to do with Hegel? I think the great Hegelian dialectical move when a project fails is to make the shift from imperfect realization of a concept—the crucial dialectical shift is then to see how this imperfect realization must be grounded in some imperfection flaw of the pure concept itself. And I think again, this is what we should learn to do today. How? Ah, that's the problem because now about all these protests, which are obviously bearing witness to the fact that there is something problematic with today's capitalism. All the rage exploding all around Europe today. The Italian autonomist Franco "Bifo" Berardi, who is I think more intelligent than Toni Negri and one should read him, wrote how this rage exploding today is, I quote from Berardi, is impotent and inconsequential as consciousness and coordinated action seem beyond the reach of present society. Look at the European crisis. Never in our life have we faced a situation so charged with revolutionary opportunities. Never in our life have we been so impotent. Never have intellectuals and militants been so silent, so unable to find a way to show a new possible direction. I write about this in the very last pages of the book, namely, I think that the great loser of this last years of crisis is precisely the radical left, I think. From my youth I remember when things were functioning more or less well, at least for us in the developed West, the radical left was saying, oh, you live in—you live in apparent welfare but you live in illusions, wait, there will be a crisis and then... Well, now we had a crisis and basically left did not come with a viable alternative project. And I don't mean by this of course a detailed plan, but just with general idea like, what to do? I was in Wall Street occupy, in here in Börsenplatz in Frankfurt, and I was always just asking the demonstrators one same and the same question for which I was almost attacked as being a saboteur and so on. This Freudian question to them: what do you want? And it's incredible what I got. We want a just society. I told them, okay, fuck off, Hitler wanted this, go on. We want a society where money serves people and people don't serve money. I told them, Hitler would subscribe this immediately, because money which doesn't serve people is controlled by Jews and so on and so on. And then you know, basically you see there, apart from these vague ideas of we—we need more just society and so on, what you get is some pseudo-neo-Keynesianism. Not exactly to abolish capitalism, but more welfare, more money for this, for that. And then retroactively I think we can discover that this isn't really a new phenomenon. Recently I read a good book on Mexican Revolution. In November this was the big event, Pancho Villa from north, Emiliano Zapata with his people from south, they occupied Mexico City. They took over. And it's so sad. You know what happened? For two months they were there in Mexico City debating what to do, and then they left home. Pancho Villa north—they were not defeated by counter-revolution. They simply didn't know, believe me or you don't believe, they simply didn't know what to do, they—they withdrew, they withdrew home. So—so what's the problem here? Here I follow another guy whom I appreciate, the British art theorist T. J. Clark. He is well known, his most famous art theory, and it's a wonderful theory, was his detailed interpretation of, you know, the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David, *The Death of Marat*. He claims this is the first modernist painting. And he is right. Why? You should look again at that painting. Did you notice what's so strange about that painting? The lower half, you know, a bathtub, the dying Marat, blah blah, and you know what's the upper half? Nothing, just darkness. And I claim this painting singular is a proof that my beloved Jacobins were not totalitarians. Because imagine the same painting in a properly totalitarian society, let's say Soviet Union in the thirties. It's clear how would it have been structured. You have Marat dying there in a pietà, then you would have in the other half a kind of a—like in comics balloon, and then you would see the noble thoughts of dying Marat: happy French people dancing in freedom or whatever. No, isn't this a beautiful gesture? All the nightmare is abyss, the darkness remains there. It's not covered up by the fantasy of the bri—of the bright future. So again, T. J. Clark made this point very nicely of how, now I simplify very much, now I am entering the philosophical part, of how from Marx's time onwards, the left is, and this is my term, not Clark's, the left is caught in what I am tempted to call the Hölderlin paradigm. Was it that way also somewhere here? Yes. The poet. Ah, so we are in home territory. Oh yeah. Fine. Hölderlin paradigm I mean of course, *Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch*. That is to say, you pre—perceive your own epoch as the epoch of extreme danger, but then, you know, we are close to the Kairos reversal. So his idea is even the most radical anti-Stalinist leftists, they claimed, yeah, everything went wrong in twentieth century, Stalinism and so on, but don't lose hope, we are today because of ecology, technology, approaching this point of great danger. We can all die: ecology, DNA we can all be manipulated, but there is a hope for the big awakening. And T. J. Clark uses a wonderful evil metaphor of, you know, that first Chinese emperor, that Terracotta Army. He said as if we all still hope there is a big proletarian terracotta army buried somewhere, which will awaken and do the big authentic revolution, which this time will not be alienated, but true immediate democracy, whatever you want and so on and so on. And his claim is maybe we should break with this basic paradigm. There is another German philosopher who, in a little bit half-forgotten today, but he is not a complete idiot, we should maybe be research him, maybe you know him, Karl Löwith. He developed a nice—this point of precisely this eschatological notion of the greatest danger but then reversal and he traced it from Christianity to Nietzsche, Heidegger and so on. And I think even the Derridians part, Jacques Derrida's part of this line. You know, this idea that now we are at the moment of extreme tension of metaphysics of presence, but things are already turning around and so on and so on, metaphysics has exhausted this potential, the *Gefahr*, the turn is near. Now, I think it's clear that Marx himself is part of this logic. The whole notion of proletarian revolution is again, *Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch*. *Das Gefahr*, the total self-alienation of proletarian, of proletariat reduction to this pure zero point of radical alienation, but then there is a possibility here for things to turn around. Now, this is the reason that I think what we need today is a return from Marx to Hegel. Because although Hegel, now comes the a little bit more boring philosophical part, I think that although Hegel is often perceived as the very model of this logic, you know, negation then negation goes to the extreme, but hop-hop then you have the magical reversal, *Versöhnung*, reconciliation, that Hegel precisely does not follow this model, that we have to learn a lot from Hegel today. Hegel here is much further than Marx. Why? With Marx, again, in his famous manuscript on the pre-capitalist mode of economic production, this is really the most hege—pseudo-Hegelian Marx. He develops how, you know, you begin in pre-history with substantial identity between workers and the objective conditions of working process, then the whole history is the history of gradual alienation. The—the objective conditions of production are torn away from workers and in capitalism this process reaches its high point. You have proletarians as pure as Marx put it in very Hegelian terms *Substanz als Subjektivität*, but precisely this radical alienation creates the point of subjectivity, collective subjectivity for Marx outside substance, which can then recreate the unity, a collective subject can re-appropriate objective conditions. Here is a nice quote, I'm sorry, in English. This capitalist extreme form of alienation, in which in the guise of the relationship of the capital towards wage labor, labor, productive activity appears as opposed to its own conditions and to its own product, is a necessary point of transition, and for that reason is in itself, in an inverted form, posited on its head, it already contains the disintegration of all limited presuppositions of production, and even creates and produces the unconditional presuppositions of production and thereby all material conditions for the total universal development of the productive forces of the individuals. End of quote. So again, the idea is that history is thus the gradual process of the separation of subject activity from these objective conditions and again when the danger, the alienation is at its worst, the possibility is given for collective subjectivity to re-appropriate the alienated content. There are, if you are a little bit a professional philosopher, you immediately can note how and I wonder why more people didn't notice this, how ambiguous in Marx himself but also later in Young Lukács, Adorno, the Marxist reference to Hegel is. I am talking about serious Marxist, not those of general ontology, dialectical materialism. Because on the one hand, to simplify it, you have Young Lukács or you have Marx in *Grundrisse*, where the Hegelian dialectics is conceived, as we have just seen, as the mystified expressive articulation of the process of liberation. What Hegel is describing as subject appropriating alienated substance is the idealist version of the working class as collective re-appropriation of substantial alienated wealth. But then, we have the opposite reading in late Marx, *Capital*, and for example in Adorno or Helmut Reichelt, *Hegel, Kapital, Jude*, which was very important I think in the sixties, where they claim on the contrary that Hegel's logic is not the logic of liberation, but it's an idealist reproduction of the very logic of capitalist alienation. So that revolution is really a step outside dialectics, in the sense that speculative dialectics is an idealist expression of speculative movement of the capital. But my point here is again, is this process, which sounds very Hegelian, we begin with substantial unity, we get gradual alienation, and then when the alienation is at its lowest, precisely when the subject is reduced to zero, this zero as the negative form of absolute negativity can reassert itself appropriate all context. Is this really Hegel? If you allow me some twenty minutes before conclusion, I will try to prove that this is not the case, that Hegel is not this triad. Okay, there are some ABC things to say first, like when idiots reduce Hegel to thesis, antithesis, synthesis, you know, now that. It's incredible how many people don't know that Hegel never used these terms, with some I don't know who in the 1840s. But okay. Now what do I mean by this? Ah, now I will make some crazy steps. I claim that the basic point of Hegel is that a typical Hegelian cycle, I will talk at very abstract level although I will use some concrete examples, but conceptually I will remain abstract there, you don't have some immediate unity which then disintegrates. The first step of the dialectical process is the fall itself, and the fall retroactively creates what it is the fall from. For example, you find this clearly in Hegel's wonderful reading of the Bible where he says Paradise is simply animal kingdom, and it's through the fall that when you fall into sin, this very movement retroactively creates what it is the fall from. You don't fall from goodness. You fall directly into sin. What does this mean? Let me give you a very weird example which I think wonderfully makes this point, and it's a very problematic political example from Islam in the fall of Sheikh Taj El-Din Hilaly, Australia's most senior Muslim cleric, caused a scandal, maybe you remember it from the newspapers. A group of Muslim men in Australia were jailed for gang rape, they raped a young girl. And he defended them. He said the young girl should be blamed. Why? Here is the quote. It's horrible and I claim, don't hit me yet, I am a feminist, but I claim to provoke you that there is an unexpected pro-feminist dimension in this. Here is the quote. If you take uncovered meat and place it outside on the street and the dogs come and eat it, whose fault it is, the dogs or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. In other words, why did the girl walk there alone, even if fully dressed offering herself? She is to be blamed. Now of course I am well aware that this is a scandalous comparison between a woman who is not veiled and raw uncovered meat. I certainly don't again don't agree with this. But, okay, now you will say okay you are now playing like a bad magician with they pull the rabbit out, where is your stupid feminism here, you know? Ah, think a little bit further. Don't you notice something very strange in this story metaphor? The guy, this cleric, compares us men to raw dogs. If we are not guilty, it means when I saw a half-dressed woman, I can't do anything, it's my nature, I just jump on her or whatever. Like we are not treated men in this story as—as ethical agents. We can't do it. We are like dogs. His metaphor. He attacks women because implicitly he considers women the only ethically responsible ones. You see the paradox? Men are like dogs. I see a human I jump, can't do anything. The only one who should show restraint, that is to say, the only one who can be addressed as a potential ethical subject is—is the woman. And I claim that this is how we should even re-read the Bible. Yes, Eve pulled Adam into sin, but she humanized Adam in this way. Adam without Eve is an animal, nothing. I mean Eve like, you—it's okay, to make the theoretical point, the innocence of Paradise is another name for animal life, so that what the Bible calls fall is nothing but the passage from animal life to properly human existence. It is thus the fall itself which creates the dimension from which it is the fall. Now back to Islam, you will say I am dreaming here, it's a bad taste remark. It's more complex. You know, I am opposed to Islam, don't misunderstand me here, but there is something interesting to know how from the very beginning in Islam, man is not considered as someone who can have an access to truth without woman as a witness, as a guarantor. Let's go to the very top, Muhammad himself. You know, this is official story. You know when that stupid angel Gabriel or whoever appeared to Muhammad giving him messages? Do you know what's the official Islam story? Muhammad first thought this is the voice of the devil and then it's his wife Khadija who convinced him that this is the truth. And the lesson is clear, you see, that how—I can give you dozens of other stories, how like truth cannot be direct, cannot be for the man, cannot be approached without woman as, in Lacanian terms, the Big Other, as the mediator. And this is nonetheless the wonderful ambiguity in—in Islam. It's, I like this paradoxical crazy points in history of religion. For example, my Jewish friends told me another one which I love, about God's omnipotence and so on. It's really the scene of Woody Allen, *Annie Hall* realized. And I warn you, what I will tell you now it may sound as a stupid joke, but this is sacred Talmud, at two places my Jewish friends gave me exact quotations. It's the same story told two times where, to simplify it in my other book which will appear by Fischer next year I hope you can get all the proper references, two big rabbis debate a theological point. And then one of them who is losing the debate says, oh, let's call God himself, Jehovah, to come and be the judge. And really then God comes. An old man approaches them and you know what happens then? The other guy who was winning the debate starts to shout at God. Listen old man, like I translate it plastically: fuck off, you did your job, you created the universe, you did it very badly, you did it whatever you could, now you leave to us educated people to do some theological thinking, go away. And it's a wonderful little God said: oh my god, my pupils beat me but they are right, and runs away. You see again, the highest point of Judaism, you know. So the—okay, I love this ambiguity. But let me go on here. Uh, where I was saying that the fall precedes what it is the fall from so that you have to fall. Now this is much more radical than it may appear. I'm not making this simple triadic statement like you have to fall to develop negativity in an alienated form and then to get it back. No, the one whom I really like here, my favorite theologian who developed to the end this wrong reading of the fall, was Nicolas Malebranche. He is Christianity at its craziest. Uh, in the best Pascalian tradition, Malebranche in a way I claim revealed the secret of Christianity. Namely, his Christology of Malebranche, no wonder he was immediately excommunicated after his death, is based on a very original answer to the question: why did God create the world? Malebranche's clear answer: so that God could bask in the glory of being celebrated by His creation. God wanted to be celebrated, God wanted recognition, so He created the world out of pure selfishness, Malebranche, God created the world out of pure selfish vanity. He wanted to be praised, so He created world and then people to celebrate Him. Consequently, now things come—come become theologically problematic: it was not that Christ came down to earth in order to deliver people from sin. On the contrary, Adam had to fall in order to enable Christ to come down to earth and display salvation. Malebranche applies here to God himself this deep psychological insight which tells us that the saintly figure who sacrifices himself for the benefit of others to deliver them from their misery secretly wants the others to suffer misery so that he will be able to help them. Like the proverbial husband who works all day to help his poor crippled wife, but he would probably abandon her if she were to regain her health and turn into a successful career woman. You know people, I think the—the—the filthiest way to be evil is to be in this self-complacent way good and sacrificial. You know you sacrifice yourself to make it sure that the other is indebted to you and so on and so on. Malebranche developed this parallel to its conclusion. He claimed, Malebranche, that in the same way that the saintly person uses the suffering of others to bring about his own narcissistic satisfaction in helping those others suffering, God also ultimately, I quote Malebranche here, loves only himself and He pushes humans into misery so that then He can selfishly be celebrated by them. From this, all this, Malebranche drew a terrifying consequence. It is not true that if Jesus Christ had not come to earth to deliver humanity everyone would have been lost. Quite on the contrary, without Christ coming, nobody would have been lost. Every human—no, for him every human being had to fall so that Christ could come and deliver some of us. Malebranche's conclusion again is here shattering. Since the death of Christ is a key step in realizing the goal of creation, and then he says this Malebranche, I quote it: "at no time was God the Father happier than when He was observing His Son suffering and dying on the cross." He says this was the moment of almost orgasmic happiness of God the Father. Not to back for theological madness, but precisely this is what Hegel—it's not, sometimes Hegel is read like this: we have to fall so that we triumphantly return to ourselves. But what Hegel calls *List der Vernunft*, it's not this. Like, to evoke a more contemporary example, it's not that there had to be Holocaust so that we could get the state of Israel. It's not that God said, okay, let's organize Holocaust to help the Jews in the long term. No, this is not Hegel's *List der Vernunft*. I think Hegel is much more contingently open. Holocaust happened because people are genuinely evil, and then afterwards in a kind of a bricolage there may be beneficial consequences but they in no way justify the horror. There is no retroactive justification here. Okay, I will try not to be too long so I will skip how the logic that I am trying to describe functions. I think Wagner was here very Hegelian. You know in the last towards the end famous lines from *Parsifal*: *Die Wunde schließt der Speer nur der sie schlug*. What is Hegel saying here? Okay, *die Wunde* is basically spirit itself. Hegel says spirit is the wound, the wound of nature. But how is the wound closed? Not so that it's undone, that there is no wound. But that you radicalize, fully accept the wound itself. You know, so Hegel is much more ambiguous than people perceive when he claims that the spirit heals its own wounds. Yes, but it heals them so that precisely what we lose in *Versöhnung* is not the wound, but precisely that what allegedly preceded the wound. Like we lose the very measure from which the wound appears as a wound. What do I mean by this? Now I warn you if you are sensitive, now comes a very dirty story, a wonderful I think deeply Christian joke about Jesus Christ which makes this point. It was told with me of all people, I liked it there, by a Christian Palestinian in Ramallah. The joke is this one. When Christ was alone reflecting in his tent the night before he was arrested and crucified, his apostles gathered around and said, "My God, our Lord did so much for us and tomorrow he will die," because they all knew it was part of the divine plan the crucifixion, and they said, "Shouldn't we bring some happiness to our master? Look, he didn't even spend the night with a woman. Doesn't he deserve for the last evening to have some good sex?" So they asked Mary Magdalene, wouldn't you go in there and seduce him? And of course Mary Magdalene being who she is, she said, "Of course, with joy" and so on, you know. So she goes into tent and the apostles wait around for some five minutes when she runs out with a terrifying cry. And they ask her, "Tell me what happened, what happened?" And she says—she says, "Horrible. First it began well. I started to dance in front of Christ, he looked at me nicely, kindly. Then I undressed myself, then I spread my legs, I showed him my vagina intimate parts and then Christ looked at my vagina and said, 'Oh, what a horrible wound' and put his palm on it." Hegel is not this! Don't be afraid. With Hegel the wound remains. No, the wound is not healed in this way. In what way is then the wound healed with Hegel? Here again, the wound is healed in the way that as it were we discover how what we lose with the wound is basically the wound itself, that the way out of the wound is to accept fully the wound itself. What we have to draw is not the wound but what allegedly comes before. To give you an example which is deeply Hegelian. You know all these returns to national origins in this end of nineteenth century nationalist revival. We know today, Eric Hobsbawm who recently died, a great British Marxist historian, collected a wonderful volume on invented traditions. How the tradition to which European nations, at least with us Slovenians I know it's true, were returning in that revival was a tradition invented in that very interval. They didn't return to some real previous tradition. In the very return to it they created it. There was nothing before it. Where do you find this in Hegel formally? Now a little bit of pure philosophy and then more politics to get the point. In Hegel's, at the beginning of the second volume of Hegel's Logic, *Logik des Wesens*, Hegel precisely to designate this paradox uses a wonderful term, it will be the title of the book that hopefully you will publish, *absoluter Gegenstoß*. I don't know how to translate it, counter-push, why not even counter-punch. Here is the quote but I will try to explain it, it may appear abstract but it's crucial. "Reflection therefore finds before it an immediate which it transcends and from which it is the return, but this return is only the presupposing of what reflection finds before it. What is thus found only comes to be through being left behind. The reflexive moment is to be taken as an—again—*absoluter Gegenstoß*, absolute recoil upon itself, for the presupposition of the returning into self—that from which essence comes—is only in the return itself." This is the formula. What is found only comes to be through being left behind. Let me give you now my big example to make all this clear if it was not. I was in India two years ago, it didn't end well, even something absolutely comical I loved it happened. I got engaged there in political debates and they—by they I mean my friends Maoist Naxalite rebels and the untouchables, the lowest, converted me against Gandhi. My hero is now Dr. Ambedkar, a much more egalitarian, one of the untouchables who was always in conflict with Gandhi. His claim was that Gandhi was, sorry to use this word, a proto-fascist. Why? Gandhi was not against castes. In a typical proto-fascist move Gandhi just said all castes have their own dignity, even the lowest members of the lowest caste are children of God and so on. So you know, like, let's recognize all their dignity but we need castes and so on. So, you know what happened to me? As an intermezzo, it's a wonderful joke. When I returned after in visit India to Slovenia, a friend whose wife works as a clerk in Slovene Ministry of Foreign Affairs told me that one week after my return an official letter came from Indian Foreign Ministry to Slovene Foreign Ministry saying: your citizen Slavoj Žižek claimed that Gandhi is no better than Hitler, is this now the official Slovene position? I advised to answer them: not yet, but we are thinking about it. No, Ambedkar is the great guy. And so back to India, what happened to me there, they really hated me, all those multiculturalists who are of course cultural anti-imperialist Eurocentric cultural theorists and they are what you expect them to be. Like, you mention what about equality, democracy, they say oh, don't force upon us your Eurocentric oppressive notions and so on. So some of them, that's where I exploded, because incidentally I discovered that all those big multicultural theorists are of course Brahmins, all, all at the top, you know. Uh, they complained to me that the very fact that we debate there in English language puts me into an advantage. That can I even imagine how for them to be forced to speak in English is already a form of cultural colonialism which censors their true identity? Basically they told me we have to speak in an imposed foreign language to express our innermost identity. And does this not put us in a position of radical alienation? Even our resistance to colonization has to be formulated in the language of the colonizer. Okay, my answer to them was, first one: I thank them sincerely of this, and this is typical of neglecting the most fact that English was also not my native language, you know. That's okay for me to be identified, who cares about city small nations like Slovenia, but they big Indians whatever. But then my answer at a more serious level was much more aggressive. My answer is that, and now I come to the point of what Hegel meant with this "what we lose is created retroactively by the very process of losing it". You Indians want to get out of colonization and reassert some authentic core of your identity. But are you aware that it is precisely the imposition of English, a foreign language, which created that X which you feel is oppressed by it? Because what is oppressed for them is the new emancipated India, but this has nothing to do with the old India, the old pre-colonial India. They even openly admitted to me, the pre-colonial, they don't want to return to that India. The pre-colonial India was a terrifying mess of exploitation, starvation, whatever you want. The new universalist democratic India is oppressed by colonialism, but it's at the same time created, can only exist through, you know, like the paradox is this one: through colonization you don't really lose your pre-colonial identity, you lose something much more precious which is created only through this colonialist oppression. Incidentally then some of them which became my friends even gave me the supreme proof of this. There is a—I forgot the name, the book of—they have some old Indian legislation, the book of—sorry I forgot—which is all the rules of castes and so on are there. But you know what I discovered? From them, they told me that far from being part of old Indian tradition, this book which is the very model of traditional caste India was put together by Indian British colonizers to have the tools to control Indians in their own terms. So back to my example here of India. I think that Malcolm X, whom I appreciate very much, the one played by Denzel Washington and so on, was aware of this when he adopted X as a name. And I read some of his texts where he makes it very clear, this X what we lost in being enslaved, colonized, are not our African roots. He said fuck the African roots and so on. It's an X which paradoxically we become aware of precisely when through brutal colonization we were torn off from our ethnic groups. Okay, for Malcolm X, a problematic move, he found this X in Islam, but it's precisely Islam as universalist, nothing to do with African roots and so on and so on. So you see my point, this is for me the Hegelian dialectical process. To put it in very simple simplified way, at the beginning you have not some authentic immediate substantial unity, you have just the pre-colonial mess, which you have simply to measure in totally different terms. It's a society not good, not bad, it's different and it's usually very confused. Then colonizers come and of course brutally impose on you foreign language, foreign way of thinking, and you feel deprived. But what you don't know is that what you are deprived of is not what you really lost. This very deprivation creates a much stronger universal, let's say true freedom X. And so I claim that precisely this is why I told them: the way for you to really emancipate yourself is not to drop English language and to return to some primordial thinking and so on and so on, but to beat the colonizers in their own language. Which is now even happening. You know, I spoke with some American conservatives which were horrified and I think they were right to be horrified. They told me, okay, English is now a world language. But it's not really our American English. What is now the worldwide English is something formed by Chinese merchants in Singapore who speak English... [unintelligible] and so on, you know. This is the beauty of global capitalism which I like, that it's not that we are all losing trying to speak English, even English language itself is taken from—from the English ones. Okay, a more theoretical Hegelian point, which concerns this *Wunde* wound and so on. I think the experience of English language as an oppressive imposition obfuscates a much more traumatic fact. And here I follow Jacques Lacan, that every language is a parasitic foreign incubator. If there is a point which Lacan made in a justified way, it's that the relationship between human animal and language is parasitic. Language is not our spontaneous mode of expression. There's always a traumatic gap called in psychoanalysis with different technical names like symbolic castration and so on. The point is language hurts, there is no natural symbiosis. That's why I agree with Elfriede Jelinek, whom I otherwise don't like as a writer, who's too dirty for me, I'm a moralist, who wrote somewhere that language in itself lies, that you have to torture language to make it tell the truth. So again, I think that the problem—the problem with this experience as English as an imposed language is that you obfuscate the fact that there is no natural language, there is no mother tongue. Every language is basically oppressive. There is a gap between subjectivity and language, which is why, and Hegel knew this, in a wonderful passage here you see that Hegel was a genius, he says, as if criticizing in advance Heidegger, he says that it was a high point of historical wisdom, wisdom of history, to have Latin and not Greek to become the lingua franca. Because Greek language with all its Heideggerian authenticity and so on would precisely be too suffocating. What's so great about Latin? It's precisely that it's a kind of a much more cold language, it's not authentic language and so on and so on. So what is—what follows from all this? If I propose this in a very abstract way, I will finish soon, as a model. The first step of dialectical process in Hegel is not there was an immediate identity. It's the loss itself. And then—but the two steps of dialectical process is first you experience a loss but you live in the illusion that you should somehow return to what you had lost, that what you lost was really there before the loss. And what Hegel calls reconciliation is simply when you accept fully the loss itself. That's—that's what Hegel is saying again and again. Yes, Geist is *die Wunde*, the wound of nature, and you don't overcome it, there is no unity with nature, you just discover that I don't know, nature is already in itself denaturalized or whatever, you fully accept the wound. This is why I claim the typical Hegelian historical moment is not this Hölderlin-Marx-Heidegger moment of Kairos, you know, we are approaching the zero point, things are really bad, but there is the end—the light at the end of the tunnel, things will turn better. I think Hegel's typical moment is precisely when this reversal *Gefahr das Rettende* fails. Things were bad, you get French Revolution, but things turn almost even worse. And then the Hegelian greatness is to demonstrate how even if things turn bad after liberation, it was still worth it, how to find as it were victory in defeat itself. In the—in the sense that let me give you another example here, I think that Hegel was much more a thinker of contingency than Marx. For Hegel it would never have been permitted to occupy, it would have been too idealist for Hegel in the bad sense, the position occupied by Marx, which is, I know the logic of history, which gives the objective possibility of communism, and I perceive myself as an agent of historical necessity. In the sense of, even if it's not necessity but just as Lukács would have called *objektive Möglichkeit*, no, that like I can as it were step off my shoulder, I can see where I stand in history and I can act accordingly. For Hegel this is too idealist, it's prohibitive. That's why he said philosophy cannot think into the future, it only can paint gray on gray. And the whole book is now written by a very intelligent Canadian young Hegelian, Rebecca Comay, on what this tautology means: gray on gray. That philosophy only paints gray on gray. But another—so what I want to say is that reconciliation, *Versöhnung* for Hegel, is not, oh, no wound. *Versöhnung* simply means that you must perceive in what appears to you as an obstacle at the same time also the condition, the very ground of your freedom. Like, the *Versöhnung* for today's Indians is simply to admit that the imposed English colonial language which oppresses them is at the same time the very thing that opens up the prospect of emancipation for them. This is Hegelian *Versöhnung*. No ideal solution, the battle goes on. I think that Hegel's unification of subject and substance absolutely does not mean this Fichtean, Young Lukács, Marxist [unintelligible] that the subject dominates, swallows the substance or whatever. No, it's a much more refined position. What Hegel is saying is that of course there is no in-itself, there is no substantial higher destiny which controls us, but this does not make us masters of our universe. Precisely what we cannot, we cannot dominate history, not because there is some higher power which is impenetrable to us, but precisely because there is no Big Other, there is no higher power. We are as it were condemned to contingency, condemned to—condemned to freedom. Which is why, now just to conclude... If Hegel is not something, he is not a cynic. The biggest wisdom of Hegel is the necessity of the illusion. That's what we have to learn today. How you cannot just drop the illusion. This is why I think precisely today when many of my friends, some old leftist Marxists from Fredric Jameson to Noam Chomsky, they—it's a pretty popular theory today, they claim that we are in an era of complete cynicism, where even those in power no longer take seriously their own proclamations. Like if you listen to those in power, they pretend to talk about democracy but basically they openly say it's all about power, money, faith, whatever you want. So we live in a cynical era and the idea is, who needs ideology critique with all this complex reading and so on and so on? You know like the idea is the following one: old Marxist ideology critique tried to use—to put it—to discover a particular content behind false ideological universality. Like you as a bourgeois, or you're again the bad guy here, you preach human rights and I come as an a Marxist, no, your human rights are really the rights of privileged white bourgeois white minority female and so on like you know, to denounce false universality as really based on a privileging a particular content. But already in Marx, Marx knew well that this is not the true power of ideology, that cynicism is false. The thesis of Marx is beautiful here already. It is not only—people only remember this part of Marx, denounce false ideological universality, like we talk about freedom today. But don't you see when we impose our freedom on Egyptians, on Iranians, that we are cultural imperialist that our freedom privileges our values? Yes, that's one side. But Marx also knew something much more interesting: that the opposite is also true. We are not only much more particular than we appear to be, we are also much more universal than we appear to be. The reality of capitalism is universal. Fictions are universal. Fictions are much stronger. What I mean by this? It's an insight well formulated by Hegel. Let's take a brutal cynic who says, oh, who cares, screw democracy, it's all really about money, power, and so on. It's totally wrong to see, to think that this is brutal power, this guy knows what he's doing. No, they don't know what they're doing. Precisely when you think you speak the brutal language of open realistic egotism, you are most blind. A proof if you want one, everywhere, just look. From Hitler, you know I read, you should do it maybe, Hitler's *Mein Kampf* with a specific view. I asked myself while reading it, a very simple question, stupid one: did Hitler believe in what he was writing there? And the answer is clear and unambiguous: yes and no. On the one hand, Hitler was consciously manipulating. You know he says often, like in those famous passages where Hitler says if you repeat a lie often enough it will blah blah blah. So he was manipulating. But what's so terrifying is then that you can almost see the passages where as it were, although he knows he manipulates, all of a sudden he falls into his own trap and—and believes it. Or let's take a modern example. The financial crisis of Who caused it? Sorry, it's not some crazy welfare state idealists. It's precisely the most cynical capitalists who thought we are brutal realists, we just do what—they caused it. They live in illusions. What brutal cynics don't see is that precisely in their egotist brutality, they follow fictions about money circulation and so on and so on. And here I think again, we can learn a lot from Hegel. Because this is I think Hegel's problem. Hegel does not renounce emancipatory activity and so on and so on. Hegel just prohibits this as it were eschatological certainty. Like you do what you want, but be—and you have to do what you want, but be aware that history is an open process whose meaning is decided retroactively so there is no guarantee, you cannot control in advance the symbolic effect of what you are doing. So, to really conclude now, after Derrida and so on, namely you know the joke but I cannot resist, the same again. I think that Hegel missed something. I'm sorry if you know this story: what to do with *Antigone*, really. I would like to imagine a Hegelian rewriting on *Antigone*, a kind of a Hegelian triad, *Antigone* for today. It would be something like Tom Tykwer, *Lola rennt*, three or Brecht, *Der Jasager und der Neinsager*, *Der Jasager II*. Three versions of the story. The first story would have been *Antigone* that we know. In the big dialogue which is the middle of the play, conflict strife with [unintelligible] as it were between Antigone and Creon, Creon wins, okay, we know the story, I will not repeat it. Then my second version, Hegelian negation: Antigone would have won. She would have convinced Creon that, okay, nonetheless back in those unwritten laws, better to respect them, let's bury Polynices. And in my version as Creon with you I always had the respect for Creon, it would be catastrophe. Because of this there would have been a new civil war and all of Thebes of the city would be in fire. And in my second version the last image of the play would have been Antigone wandering around and quoting the hit lines, "no but I was created for love not for hatred" and then the chorus answering her "Well, fuck you bitch, that's what you perceived with your, you know, because of your stupid insistence the whole city is in the ruins." Hegel would have loved this because Hegel loves this example of catastrophic consequences of pathologically high attitude. Then the properly Hegelian *Versöhnung*, third version: it's not a reconciliation between Antigone and Creon. No, no, no, no, no. Here comes the Stalinist twist: while Antigone and Creon are fighting, Chorus, which is usually the voice of stupidity, you know, always conformist, steps forward, establishes itself the chorus, as some kind of Jacobin Committee for Public Salvation, arrests them both. Like you are ruining our country for your feudal conflicts, both Antigone and Creon are arrested and revolutionary committee goes, establishes people's democracy. That would be the Hegelian conclusion of *Antigone*. Thank you very much.