Transcendental Subjectivity Part 1
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2017-10-04 · 1:47:34 · 13,431 words
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisideologysubjectivityphilosophy-generalsexuality-gendercapitalismgeopolitics-warscience-physicscinema-art-culturerevolution-violencelanguage
In a lecture-style talk, Žižek moves from a political reflection on Trump and Kim Jong-un as symptoms of post-patriarchal adolescent sovereignty to a sustained philosophical meditation on Lacan's topology, the Möbius strip, cross-cap, and Klein bottle, as ontological figures for how reality is structured. He argues that these shapes illuminate key dialectical reversals: freedom turning into servitude (and vice versa), form returning as content, signifier falling into the signified, and genus appearing as one of its own species. Along the way he draws on Plato's Cave, Freud's dream-analysis, quantum physics, sexual difference, class struggle, and Hegel's logic to illustrate what he calls the Möbius strip structure of thought.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's critical label for postmodern deconstruction, reading one philosopher through another without committing to any claim about how reality actually is.
A redoubled Möbius strip that Žižek treats as the figure of impossible difference, the cut that cannot be clearly defined yet structures the whole field, as in sexual difference or class struggle.
The topological figure in which falling inside immediately places you outside looking at the wall, Žižek reads this as the structure of subjectivity itself and of Plato's Cave.
Žižek uses the Möbius strip as a topological figure for the basic dialectical reversal: following one side to its limit, you find yourself on the opposite side, freedom becoming servitude, form becoming content, signifier falling into signified.
When confronted with the threat of total destruction (nuclear/ecological), what we fear losing retroactively acquires utopian content, 'what we have' is secretly transformed into what could have been.
Plato's theory of recollecting what one never knew, cited via Frank Ruda as structurally parallel to the master's function: enabling the subject to affirm 'I can do this' without telling them what 'this' is.
Borrowed from La Boétie and applied by Žižek to two opposed situations: capitalist subjects who feel free while enslaved to the market, and emancipatory volunteers who freely subject themselves to a liberating cause.
as “enunciated vs. position of enunciation”
Lacan's split between what is explicitly said and the subject-position from which it is said; Žižek uses it to show that the capitalist feels free at the level of content while the position of enunciation is already enslaved, and vice versa in emancipation.
as “minimal ritual”
The empty, belief-free performance of a ritual by the fully secularised modern subject, Žižek argues this is not the failure to get rid of ritual but ritual at its purest, the very thing that sustains modernity.
as “quilting point (point de capiton)”
The Lacanian nodal point where signifier falls into signified, which Žižek maps onto the simple Möbius strip reversal.
Žižek's extension of the Lacanian quilting point: whereas the point de capiton is a single node, the quilting line is the impossible cut that holds a field together and apart, figured by the cross-cap, as in sexual difference or class struggle.
Žižek's name for the cut (sexual difference, class struggle) that is absolutely real yet cannot be pinned to any clear symbolic determination, always producing an excess that escapes categorisation.
The impossible difference (sexual, class) that cannot be fully symbolised yet structures and distorts every attempt at symbolic closure.
Implicitly operative throughout; the gap or cut that prevents any field (sexuality, class) from closing into a harmonious whole.
The Soviet administrative category that, when objectively undefinable, reintroduced subjectivity ('we don't know what you are but subjectively we think you are a danger'), Žižek uses it to show that class struggle always exceeds objective economic classification.
as “wave function collapse / decoherence”
Žižek uses the quantum-mechanical problem of how ordinary reality emerges from quantum oscillations as a scientific analogue for the Möbius reversal of form into content.
Hegel's idea that historical reason uses egotistic passions as its instrument; Žižek raises it only to propose a deeper inversion: good is not the supreme organiser of evil but rather the self-universalisation of a particular evil.
Kripke's concept invoked by Žižek to illustrate how a name does not merely label a pre-existing thing but constitutes it, the Möbius moment where signifier falls into signified.
Žižek reads Hegel's coincidentia oppositorum not as mystical fusion but as the Möbius strip reversal, the precise structural moment when following one side you end up on the other.
as “castration (Lacanian)”
For Žižek, following Lacan, castration is not a simple division into two complementary halves but the loss that means the two sexes together do not add up to a whole, the gap that makes sexual difference impossible to close.
Stories he reaches for 6
Žižek reads Sophie's inability to enter normal sexual relations in The Da Vinci Code as an authentic Lacanian position: Lacan says being a nun is no less authentic than heterosexual womanhood; transsexual identity similarly need not be condemned to endless suffering.
“to be a nun is in no way a kind of a bad sublimation... It's a totally authentic position, no less authentic than being a heterosexual woman”
A patient refuses to recount her dream claiming it is indistinct and muddled. Freud reads the formal feature, the muddledness, as the direct trace of the repressed content: sexual promiscuity and uncertainty about paternity. Form is content.
“the formal feature of the dream. The woman complaining: oh it's muddled, indistinct, I don't know what's happening, as a direct inscription of the repressed content.”
Before crossing the Rubicon Caesar could have turned back and been 'just another warlord'. By crossing he became what he was, but his identity was not fixed in advance; it was constituted retroactively by the act itself.
“when Caesar crossed Rubicon, he became what he was. But he was not really before crossing.”
In his later years Lenin admired large, efficient US capitalists, claiming they already operated almost like administrators of public property. Žižek uses this to show that class struggle means bourgeois elements exist in the working class and proletarian elements in the ruling class.
“Lenin was absolutely fascinated by big efficient capitalists... they are almost already running enterprises because they are so big as public property”
Von Trier shot an ultra-pathetic story in pseudo-documentary style (handheld, clumsy cuts) because direct formal matching would collapse into ridicule. The form opposes the content precisely so the content can land, form is more than content.
“if I were to shoot a movie directly in a way that would fit it form, it would collapse, it would appear ridiculous. So the only way to sell that story it's to oppose form to it, to do the counterform.”
Plato notes that if prisoners' chains are broken they will still spontaneously choose to remain in the cave. Žižek reads this as requiring a master-figure to force them out, and as proof that even without chains we are enslaved by our passions.
“we have to be forced to be free. You need a master. If you are left to yourself even without chains you will never get free.”
Works invoked 13
Grundrisse book
Marx's Introduction is cited for the argument that one mode of production (agriculture in medieval times, industry in capitalism) colours and organises all others, genus appearing as a species.
The Da Vinci Code film
Despite the 'bullshit' religious content, Žižek finds an emancipatory Lacanian moment: Sophie's acceptance of her lineage does not condemn her to asexuality, the film allows an authentic alternative position.
Melancholia film
Called 'a very optimistic movie'; Kirsten Dunst's tent construction is read as the minimal empty ritual, the formal gesture of constructing a space with no belief attached.
What is Sex? book
Alenka Zupančič's book; Žižek announces it is on the US market and doing well, expressing pride in their shared project.
Žižek's own forthcoming book mentioned in passing; the lecture material derives from the next book after this one.
The Republic book
Plato's Republic, specifically the Cave allegory; Žižek urges a close reading of the overlooked passage about prisoners voluntarily staying in the cave even when unshackled.
Breaking the Waves film
Not Žižek's favourite (he prefers Dogville), but used to illustrate how an ultra-pathetic story is made bearable by a counterform, pseudo-documentary style that opposes the content.
The Dark Tower film
Acknowledged as a 'shitty movie' but its narrative structure (two realities bridged by the Dark Tower) is used as a pop illustration of the cross-cap: a line connecting incommensurable worlds.
Naming and Necessity book
Kripke's work cited for the concept of rigid designator, used to illustrate the Möbius point that names constitute their referents.
Blade Runner 2049 film
Mentioned with anticipation ('Let's hope') on the eve of its release, no substantive analysis.
Wind River film
Described as 'a little bit simplistic' but deeply affecting; the mourning scene with the Native American father is used as the central illustration of the Möbius strip structure of empty secular ritual.
Dogville film
Praised enthusiastically for its revenge ending in which Nicole Kidman's character kills her tormentors, Žižek calls himself a 'primitive revenge feminist' who loves it.
Homo Hierarchicus book
Louis Dumont's study, accessed via Dupuy, on how hierarchies always contain a reversal within the lower level, used to illustrate the Möbius structure of sacred/secular power.
People invoked 23
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Cited via his use of Louis Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus on the structure of social hierarchies, the higher is superseded within the lower domain (Luther/sacred vs. secular power).
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as 'my good friend and theoretical partner'; Žižek extensively quotes her argument that we are 'held hostage to something that does not exist yet' and that we must create what we are about to lose. Her book 'What is Sex?' is praised.
Jacques Derrida negative
Represented as the exemplar of 'philosophy without position', unable to simply assert 'things are like this'; Badiou reportedly confirmed this in conversation with Derrida himself.
Lars von Trier positive
Described as 'half crazy' but admired; Breaking the Waves used to illustrate form/content reversal; Melancholia for the minimal empty ritual; Dogville praised for its revenge ending.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Late Lenin's fascination with big American capitalists (almost like public administrators) is used to show that class struggle is never a clean binary, bourgeois elements exist in the proletariat and vice versa.
Jacques Lacan positive
The entire talk is structured around Lacan's late topology (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle) and his concepts of quilting point, castration, enunciated/enunciation, sexual difference.
Frank Ruda positive
Extensively quoted on Plato's Cave: the master who forces the prisoner out, the dialectics of master and volunteer, and the parallel with the psychoanalytic situation of voluntary submission.
Étienne de La Boétie positive
His concept of servitude volontaire is directly invoked to name the paradox of voluntary submission as both the form of capitalist unfreedom and the structure of authentic emancipation.
Saul Kripke positive
His concept of rigid designator from Naming and Necessity is invoked to illustrate that names constitute things rather than merely labelling them, the Möbius moment of signifier falling into signified.
Louis Dumont positive
Author of Homo Hierarchicus, cited for the principle that within the lower level the lower is higher than the higher, a Möbius hierarchical reversal.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited for his diagnosis of post-patriarchal ethical disintegration and the abolition of universal military conscription as a dark sign; also recalled in a conversation with Derrida.
Jacqueline Rose negative
Mockingly referred to as 'Jackie Rose' (knowing she hates it); mentioned as the implied opponent of Žižek's position on sexual difference vs. class struggle.
Mladen Dolar positive
Described as 'my other good Lacanian friend'; his forthcoming collected essays (described as his Écrits) with Bloomsbury are enthusiastically announced.
Mentioned sardonically as the 'crazy guy' who 'saw very clearly the madness and violence of my position', invoked as the right-wing critic who at least grasped the radical implications of Žižek's forced-freedom thesis.
Ernesto Laclau positive
Described as 'our deceased friend'; credited for the Hegelian-derived point that external difference is always at the same time internal difference, which Žižek links to Lacanian castration.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe positive
Cited as knowing the 'nastiest trick of male chauvinism': the ideological celebration of feminine power as what secretly sustains the male hero.
Plato positive
The Cave allegory is a central motif; Žižek highlights the overlooked point that freed prisoners voluntarily remain in the cave, requiring forced liberation.
Karl Marx positive
The passage from the Introduction to the Grundrisse on how one mode of production colours all others is cited to illustrate the Hegelian point that a genus appears as one of its own species.
Sigmund Freud positive
The dream of the promiscuous woman is used to illustrate the Hegelian/Möbius point that repressed content returns as the form of the representation.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Fundamental reference for the logic of reversal, coincidence of opposites, Aufhebung, retroactivity, species/genus, and cunning of reason.
His notion of time and space as a priori empty containers is contrasted with the quantum physics view in which time itself becomes a wave-like content.
His formula 'become what you are' is cited by Ruda in connection with the master's function; Žižek also expresses suspicion of the Nietzschean framing of 'beyond good and evil'.
Martin Luther positive
Used as the historical theorist of the hierarchy-within-hierarchy: God is higher than social order, but within the secular order political power supersedes religious authority.
What it argues
Lacanian topology as ontological modelMöbius strip reversal of freedom and servitudethe paradox of being forced to be freesexual difference as impossible cut (cross-cap)form returning as content of the repressedclass struggle as irreducible antagonismquantum physics and the collapse of the form/content distinction
Dialectical moves 12
“The true choice is not between preserving what we have and losing it all, but between losing it all and creating what we are about to lose.”
The threat of total destruction retroactively transforms 'what we have' into a utopian content that does not yet exist, what must be built, not merely saved.
“In capitalism I am enslaved precisely when I feel free; in emancipation I am free when I feel as a slave.”
The Möbius inversion of freedom and servitude: the content of experience (feeling free/enslaved) is the opposite of the subject's actual position.
“To be forced to be free — you have to volunteer to be forced out.”
Freedom requires a master-figure who compels exit from the cave; but the subject must also volunteer for this compulsion, producing a dialectics of master and volunteer.
“The most radical change is demanded just to protect what we have.”
The conservative gesture of preservation secretly requires revolutionary transformation, protecting the status quo and overturning it coincide.
“If you go to the end of modernity — secularisation — ritual returns but at its purest, as an empty form with no belief required.”
Following the line of secularisation to its limit, you find yourself back at ritual, not as regression but as the minimal formal gesture that sustains modern subjectivity.
“Form itself falls into content: the purely formal feature of the dream (its muddledness) is the direct inscription of the repressed content.”
What seems to be a mere formal property of representation turns out to be the only available trace of what has been excluded from explicit content.
“Signifier has to fall into the signified — at the Möbius turning point the name becomes part of the thing it names.”
The rigid designator does not merely label a pre-given referent; the name constitutes the thing, collapsing the distinction between sign and signified.
“Far from quantum waves being merely epistemological tools, quantum reality is the only thing that truly exists — ordinary reality is the superficial statistical approximation.”
The Copenhagen agnostic inversion (quantum = mere calculation, ordinary objects = real) is reversed: quantum oscillations are primary and our everyday reality is the derivative.
“In capitalism I volunteer to become a servant of market mechanisms while feeling free; in emancipation I voluntarily submit to servitude to a cause from a position already of freedom.”
Two forms of voluntary servitude are structurally different: capitalist freedom is the form of enslaved content; emancipatory enslavement is the form of free content.
“Sexual difference means precisely that it is impossible to define it clearly — its very undefinability is proof that the difference is real.”
The failure to locate a firm symbolic boundary between sexes is not evidence that difference is fluid or absent, but the phenomenal trace of a real impossible cut.
“Within secular power, secular power should rule over religious power — the higher (sacred) is superseded within the lower (secular) domain.”
Luther's hierarchy within hierarchy: the absolute priority of the divine is not undermined but fulfilled by allowing secular authority to dominate within its own sphere.
“Time itself is not a form within which things happen; time becomes its own content — a gravitational wave oscillation, not an empty a priori container.”
Following Kantian form (time as container) to its quantum limit, form collapses into content: time is itself a temporal object.
Claims 18
reframes
The true choice when facing nuclear or ecological catastrophe is not between preserving what we have and losing it all, but between losing it all and first creating what we are about to lose.ecology-climate and nuclear threat
asserts
In capitalism, subjects are enslaved precisely when they feel free — the feeling of freedom is the very form of their servitude.capitalist ideology and subjective freedom
asserts
In an authentic emancipatory movement, one is already in a position of minimal freedom precisely when one feels enslaved.emancipation and the subject
asserts
To become free one must be forced to be free — a paradoxical master-figure is necessary for liberation.freedom, the master, and Plato's Cave
asserts
The most radical change is demanded precisely in order to protect what we already have.radical politics and conservatism
reframes
Sexual difference is not a binary categorisation but an impossible cut that always produces an excess — there will always be positions that do not fit either side.sexual difference and LGBT identity politics
asserts
Transgender people confront Lacanian castration at its purest, not as avoidance but as direct exposure to the constitutive loss.transgender subjectivity and castration
reframes
Class struggle does not mean there are ultimately only two clearly defined classes; it means the line between them is never objectively fixable.Marxist class theory
asserts
Love is more 'evil' than sexual promiscuity in the formal sense: it is a traumatic attachment that absolutises one thing at the expense of all other social links.love as evil / beyond good and evil
asserts
The reigning Copenhagen agnosticism about quantum reality is being displaced by the opposite view that quantum waves are the only thing that truly exists and ordinary reality is a statistical approximation.quantum physics ontology
asserts
What is repressed from a dream's content does not simply get blocked but returns in the formal features of the dream itself — form must be read as content.Freudian dream analysis / form and content
asserts
The solution to nuclear proliferation is not crushing North Korea but internationalising nuclear weapons so that no single sovereign state has the right to decide who may possess them.nuclear geopolitics and sovereignty
asserts
The abolition of universal military conscription is a dark sign of ethical disintegration, not a pacifist victory.military conscription and ethics
asserts
In today's cynical capitalism, knowing what you are doing and continuing to do it does not liberate you — the liberating aspect of knowledge is suspended.ideology, cynicism, and enlightenment
reframes
The Hegelian notion that things become what they are must be read literally as an open retroactive process, not as a teleological unfolding of pre-given essence.Hegel's teleology and retroactivity
asserts
A genus always appears as one of its own species — universal categories must be included within the particular domain that embodies them.Hegel's logic of species and genus
asserts
The truly modern subject is the Native American father who performs an empty ritual knowing it is 'bullshit' — full secularisation produces the need for minimal ritual, not its elimination.modernity, secularisation, and ritual
rejects
Deconstruction (philosophy without position) must be superseded: we need to take the risk of returning to naive ontological questions about the nature of reality.Derridean deconstruction
Quotes 15
“The true choice is between losing it all (in a nuclear or ecological catastrophe) and creating what we are about to lose.”Slavoj Žižek · catastrophe as occasion for creation
“In capitalism I am enslaved precisely when I feel free. This feeling is the very form of my servitude.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalist servitude as feeling of freedom
“We have to be forced to be free. You need a master. If you are left to yourself even without chains you will never get free.”Slavoj Žižek · forced freedom / paradox of liberation
“The most radical change is demanded just to protect what we have.”Slavoj Žižek · conservation requires revolution
“The true utopianism today is not radically different utopianism — it is what we have to do just to protect what we have.”Slavoj Žižek · true utopianism as conservative-radical paradox
“If you follow a certain direction to the end you find yourself on the opposite side. This is the Möbius strip.”Slavoj Žižek · Möbius strip as basic dialectical figure
“There must be a dialectics of master and volunteer. The master to some extent constitutes the volunteers as volunteers, whereby the master ultimately becomes superfluous.”Slavoj Žižek · dialectics of master and volunteer
“In emancipatory process I am free when I feel as a slave — the very feeling of being enslaved bears witness to the fact that in the core of my subjectivity I am free.”Slavoj Žižek · emancipatory freedom as felt enslavement
“A name never just names a thing. Ultimately a thing becomes a thing by adding a name to it.”Slavoj Žižek · name constitutes its referent / rigid designator
“Sexuality as such is an embarrassment. The moment you will be able to find your place: I am this, I am that — it's no longer sexuality.”Slavoj Žižek · sexuality as constitutive impossibility of self-placement
“Transgender people in a way experience castration at its purest — without being either men or women, they come closest to the loss that sustains both.”Slavoj Žižek · transgender as purest experience of Lacanian castration
“The Native American father with his colored face is the pure modern subject. And as such you need this minimal ritual.”Slavoj Žižek · secularised modern subject and empty ritual
“Class struggle doesn't mean only we fight — it means precisely that it's not clear where you are.”Slavoj Žižek · class struggle as positional undecidability
“Time only appears at a certain level of reality which is not the ultimate level.”Slavoj Žižek · quantum physics and the non-ultimacy of linear time
“Love is much more evil than sexual promiscuity — it is a traumatic attachment that sabotages all other links.”Slavoj Žižek · love as formal evil
Transcript 10 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Okay, thanks very much. I don't want to disappoint you. I it will be acceptable to you what I will do. We will come at this point because I don't want to repeat myself only in the second class. What I will try to do after some short political introduction is more and more I try to do something maybe crazy. I'm trying to stop with this postmodern games of, you know, reading one philosopher through the eyes of another philosopher and being brighter than both. I try to approach, you know, how much of today's philosophy still is a philosophy without position. And once, Alain Badiou told me, I have great appreciation for Jacques Derrida, that he spoke with Derrida and that Derrida simply admitted to him that he is not able simply to say things are like this, I think. It has to be just if you read this text, even better, if you see how this text is reading another text, you can see some some cuts, some inconsistencies and so on and so on. While not ignoring the results of such deconstructive reading, I think that we should take a risk and return to this very naive questions. Not in a naive way. I mean, fuck it, like, what is reality? Is it meaningful to talk about reality? Do things exist outside our mind? Can we talk about things in themselves? If yes, how? And so on and so on, all this stuff. Of course, I'm not advocating in the in the sense of new so-called speculative realism some simple return to big claims, reality is out there and so on. But it is a problem. And the way I decided to approach it, at least I will not repeat myself too much, is not in a strict mathematical sense, but nonetheless, to progress at this towards this big question through late Lacan's topology. Don't be afraid. No formulas. I will just focus on, and don't be afraid, I will show them, explain everything in the lowest Wikipedia way. You know, these three basic forms: Möbius strip, cross-cap, and Klein bottle. I think that we can learn quite a great a great deal from simply reflecting what does it mean to take, of course, at a formal level, this figures as an ontological clue, as a clue to how our reality is structured. But as it is usual with me, I will begin with a short political reflection which will then bring us to this topic. Okay, so let me begin. As you may have noticed, lately our media report on the more and more ridiculous exchange of insults between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump. The situation I find very ironic because we get what appears to be two immature men letting go their rage and hurling insults at each other. And what we secretly hope is that there must be some anonymous invisible institutional constraint preventing their rage to explode in full war. What I like is this, that our usual reaction is the following, is the opposite one. Usually we tend to complain that in today's alienated bureaucratized politics, institutional pressures and constraints prevent politicians to articulate their personal vision, to do what they really want. Now we hope the exact opposite. Let's hope there is some alienated invisible deep structure that will prevent these two madmen to do it. Okay, how did we come to this point? I already developed it a time developed it a time ago the situation that it's this as Badiou developed it in his one of his last books, what is happening today in our growing post-patriarchal social order which presents itself as the domain of new freedoms. We witness the disintegration of shared ethical base of our lives. And I agree with Miller, who, sorry, with Badiou, who even claims that one of the dark signs of this is the abolishment of universal military conscription. Now, this may appear to be good news for all pacifists and so on, but are you aware what this basically means? It means it of course, it means mercenaries will fight for us. I mean, I am absolutely for, if you ask me, global military conscription. Are you aware that this is the reason why Vietnam War ended? Because without military conscription, the poor blacks and others would be fighting it. But because there was military conscription and all those young white kids had actually to risk their lives, there was such pressure against it. All honest leftists admit it. What I'm trying to say is that, I'm repeating Badiou and myself here, this ethical disintegration affects differently the two sexes. Men are gradually turning into perpetual adolescents with no clear passage of initiation that would enact their entry into maturity. No wonder then that in order to supplant this lack, post-paternal youth gangs proliferate, providing some ersatz initiation and social identity. And now comes the more problematic point. In contrast to men, women are today more and more precociously mature, treated as small adults, expected to control their lives and so on and so on. So in this new version of sexual difference, men are ludic adolescents, outlaws, while women appear as much more mature, serious, legal, punitive. And this brings us back to Trump and Kim. These two eternal adolescents, both prone to irrational brutal outbursts that hurt their own chances. Although the differences between North Korea and the United States are obvious, one should nonetheless insist that they both cling to the extreme version of state sovereignty, Korea First versus America First. Plus that the obvious madness of North Korea, a small country ready to strike to risk it all and bomb the United States or so they claim, because my the most relaxed people today are my friends in Seoul who take all this as a joke and claim it's absolutely not to be taken seriously and so on. But nonetheless, this North Korean madness has its counterpart in the United States, which still pretend to play the role of the global policeman, a single state assuming the right to decide which other state should be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. So I think the solution is not to just crush North Korea, but to find a genuine way of internationalizing nuclear weapons, to make the situation when a single sovereign state is allowed to possess them illegal, unacceptable. The moment we just focus on the madness of North Korea, we endorse the premise that they should not be allowed to do what only the selected superpowers can do. So I think again that the problem is this entire constellation. As long as we will have states which not only do have nuclear weapons, but assume the role of allowing to deciding who of the others will have them or not, we will have North Koreas all around. Now comes the more interesting theoretical point. This urge to change the entire constellation emerges precisely when we are confronted a threat of total destruction. And we are today confronting it by nuclear war, by ecological catastrophe and so on. In such a situation, our first reaction is a defensive effort to guarantee our survival. If nuclear war is at the horizon or total ecological catastrophe, the message we usually hear is, now it's the time to forget big emancipatory projects of radical change. Our task is now just to fight for the survival of what we have with all the compromises and moderation that such a task involves. But here comes a much more refined counter-argument that I openly admit I plagiarized from my good friend and theoretical partner Alenka Zupančič. But what is it that we have? The threat of the total destruction of humanity makes us aware of the totality of humanity. Humanity appears as one only against the background of its self-destruction. It was not here before. So the true choice is not the one between what we have and losing it all or, in the Cold War terms, between developing nuclear arms to protect our liberal freedoms or abandoning nuclear arms and thereby exposing ourselves to the risk of losing our freedoms. I will quote now, so what is our choice? I quote listen carefully Alenka Zupančič: 'The true choice is between losing it all (in a nuclear or ecological catastrophe) and creating what we are about to lose. Only this could eventually save us. When caught in the threat and fear of losing it all, we are in fact held hostages to something that does not exist yet. And is this kind of blackmail not actually the very means of making sure that it will never exist? It makes us focus on preserving what is here and what we have but excludes any real alternative, any means of really thinking differently.' So, the possible awakening call of the bomb is not simply, let's do all in our power to prevent it before it's too late, but rather, let's first build this totality, unity, community, freedom, that we are about to lose through the bomb. End of quote. And I think here we can locate the unique chance opened up by the very real threat of nuclear or ecological self-destruction. It makes us aware of the danger that we will lose it all. But when we become aware of this, we, I claim and in a good sense, automatically get caught in some kind of retroactive illusion, a short circuit between reality and its hidden potentials. What we want to say when is we say let's just save what can be saved, is not the reality of our world, but reality as it might have been if we were not hindered by antagonisms which gave birth to the nuclear threat. So you see what I'm saying, that when we feel threatened that we will lose it all, this all changes in a subtle way. It's an illusion but it's a good illusion if you put it like this. This all in a subtle way is no longer our reality. It's this all which is threatened immediately acquires a utopian content. This all that we want to protect, we have to change it radically in order to be able to protect it. So it's a nice example of how the most radical change is demanded just to just to protect what we have. The true utopianism today is precisely not radically different, utopianism in a good sense of the term is not just oh we need a totally different world but what we have to do just to protect what we have. Because again, the moment you want to protect it, you have to radically to change it radically. What kind of epistemology is involved now slowly approaching Möbius strip in this type of retroactive illusion. I want to go back to Plato here. I hope I don't have to tell you the entire story. You know it, Plato's Cave, no? I want just to focus on something and here I'm referring to another friend of mine whom I appreciate very much, Frank Ruda, who was here, the German guy, who recently developed some wonderful lines on it. And you will see now up to a point my dark totalitarian side, whatever. You will see how right was that crazy guy Roger Scruton who saw very clearly the madness and violence, whatever, of my position. Namely, Plato's Cave, there is one aspect of it's already in Plato which is usually neglected. This concerns the relationship between freedom and servitude. It's not simply that when we are in the cave just watching shadows false reality on the wall that we are chained there, we are not free. Plato asks the crucial question, and I think it's the duty of the left to assume it fully. Namely, it's not just the chain, the chains that keep us there. Read carefully Republic. Plato says but what will happen if we break the chains? People will not simply say fine, we are free, let's run out of the cave. People will want spontaneously to remain there even without chains. So in some sense, and I think this is the paradox that we have to assume fully, and I know how this is usually considered a totalitarian formula, we have to be forced to be free. You need a master. If you are left to yourself even without chains you will never get free. A quote from Frank Ruda: 'The exit from the cave begins when one of the prisoners is not only freed from his chains but when he is forced out. This clearly must be the place for the libidinal but also epistemological, political, ontological function of the master. This can only be a master who does neither tell me what precisely to do nor whose instrument I could become. He must be the one who just gives me back to myself. And in a sense, one might say that this could be connected to Plato's anamnesis theory, remembering what one never knew as it were. And implies that the proper master just affirms or makes it possible for me to affirm, to accept: I can do this. Without telling me what this is and without telling me too much of who I am.' Again, so the idea is that very brutal paradoxical one, that to become free you have to be forced to be free, and this for this you need a figure of the master. But it's a paradoxical master. It's not an oppressive master who tells you what you want and so on. It's a master whose message to you is just: you can do it. You are not just limited to what you are and so on and so on, you can do more. And I refer here to your very naive everyday experience. This master can be a good friend, a good teacher. Isn't it that when you are in crisis, you know you should do something, you don't have enough strength and so on and so on, a true master figure, a friend, a teacher, whatever, his message to you is just a very naive one: I know that you can do it. And he even doesn't have to know what. The point that Frank Ruda now back makes here is again a subtle one. It's not only that if I am left to myself in a cave even when I am without chains I prefer to stay there so that a master has to force me out. The situation is much more subtle. I have to, I know the madness of this formula, I have to volunteer to be forced out. Similar to psychoanalysis, and this is the genius of Ruda, he drew a parallel with psychoanalytic situation where basically you volunteer to abdicate your conscious ego autonomy. But you must be a volunteer. You must volunteer to accept analyst as, of course, a very specific form of a master. So here I have another quote from Frank Ruda. 'A question arises at precisely this point from using the reference to the master in psychoanalytic terms. Does this mean that those who need a master are always already in the position of an analysand patient? If politically such a master is needed for us to become what we are, to use Nietzsche's formula, and this can be structurally linked to liberating the prisoner from the cave to force him out after the chains are broken and he still does not want to leave, the question arises how to link this with the idea that the patient analysand who demands for a psychoanalysis treatment has to be a volunteer and not simply slave or bondsman.' I mean why am I mentioning this example? So that you see I'm not involved in abstract paradoxes. This happens precisely in a psychoanalytic situation. It is, to be brutal, a form of what La Boétie called servitude volontaire. So in short, I quote back to Ruda: 'There must be a dialectics of master and volunteer. A dialectics because the master to some extent constitutes the volunteers as volunteers, liberates them from previously seemingly unquestionable position so that they become voluntarily followers of the master's injunction whereby the master ultimately becomes superfluous.' End of quote. But as Frank Ruda is immediately aware, what complicates the picture is that, I quote Ruda: 'Capitalism relies massively on unpaid and thereby structurally voluntary labor. There are thus volunteers and volunteers. So maybe one has to distinguish not only between different types of master figures but also to link them to different understandings of the volunteer of the volunteer.' End of quote. Now I will try to explain this in very clear terms. We have here two levels of volunteering. They are different not only with regard to the content of servitude. In capitalism I volunteer to become a servant of market mechanisms, in the second case I become a volunteer to some emancipatory cause. The very form is different of volunteering. In capitalist servitude we simply feel free. While in an authentic act of liberation we accept voluntary servitude as serving a cause and not just serving ourselves. What do I mean by this? In today's cynical functioning of capitalism I can know very well what I am doing and continue to do it. The liberating aspect of my knowledge is suspended. While in an authentic dialectics of liberation the awareness of my situation is already the first step of liberation. In other words, in capitalism I am enslaved precisely when I feel free. This feeling is the very form of my servitude. I'm not saying something obscure, dark, but an usual consumerist subject, let's say you are a consumerist precarious worker, you feel free, you do whatever you want, you sell yourself, you consume, but of course this doing what you want freely is the very form of your serving the existing system. While in an emancipatory process I am free when I feel as a slave. That is to say the very feeling of being enslaved already bears witness to the fact that in the core of my subjectivity I am free. You see the point, one should here or one could here introduce Lacan's distinction between enunciated, what I'm explicitly claiming, and what Lacan calls the position of enunciation, the position from which I speak. In the everyday capitalist servitude volontaire, I experience myself as free, the content of my existence is freedom, I consume, I choose the job that I want and so on and so on, but the position from which I say this is already that of being enslaved to the existing system. While in an authentic emancipatory movement, the content of my statement, what I enunciate, is: I am a slave. But by saying it, I already speak from a position of minimal freedom. Now, where is here where is here the the Möbius strip? Ah incidentally, if this was not clear and I think we should fully assume a different levels this idea that the highest act of freedom is something done under pressure. You submit, you subject yourself to it. I'm still an old romantic and claim love. What is love, personal erotic love, other than a form of very brutal and cruel servitude volontaire. I accept to serve the man, the lady and so on. And that's the paradox. So when you think I'm playing some cheap postmodern paradoxical games, no, I simply appeal to your experience. If you're fanatic in love, serving the guy, the lady, you don't experience it as simply serving as opposed to your freedom. You experience this directly as the highest form of your freedom. And it's the same in in politics. The example that I often used here: your count, okay, your country, your political cause is in danger and you decide to join this cause. You serve your cause, but you experience this as your utmost act of freedom. So again, what I'm just claiming is that the paradoxes that I'm trying to describe are not abstract conceptual jokes, they are part of our very intimate daily experience. How when you feel free in your daily life, usually it means you are, and Plato saw this very clearly, it means you are simply fully enslaved to your to your to your arbitrary passions and so on and through them to the existing system and so on and so on. And I'm not afraid to say this: in a way you have to be forced, awakened to be free. You need some call, somebody has to push you into it minimally. So ah, now we slowly approach my point. Where do we have here the Möbius strip? You know the basic structure, I will show it immediately, of Möbius strip is, you know how it is twisted. You progress on one side Oh my God, you have it here, I'm not sure, okay but you know better than me at you progress on one side you find yourself on the other side. Again I will show it immediately. This is what happens here, we don't simply have freedom servitude. If you go to the end in freedom and grasp freedom in this arbitrary way: free means I do I work for my pleasures, I do whatever I want and so on and so on, you find yourself in servitude volontaire, serving the system. While on the other hand, the other type of freedom, highest freedom, is again serving a cause but again in a different way. But in both cases, you know, going progressing on the side of freedom you find yourself serving something, a cause or whatever. And this is the basic paradox to be to be to be accepted. So we begin with now, I will just first show you and then I will describe them and maybe give you some hint. Then we go on. You know what, let's do it now after and yes, I will so that I will not, because it will give me a heart attack if I jump up and down and repeat it. Let's begin with this one. Yes, yes. So, these are the three and then I did something so humiliating from Wikipedia or even YouTube. I copied some. So this upper one, the green one is of course the Möbius strip. You see the point, you follow the line around, you find yourself at exactly the same place but on the opposite side. Then next one, this crazy ball is the cross-cap, which is, it will be explained immediately through a short movie presentation, which is the can be topologically developed from a redoubled Möbius strip. What's interesting here, I think it's a perfect visualization of the minimal coordinates of an antagonistic totality, let's say class struggle. How it appears to be a perfect ball, round form, but you see this is crucial, the down you have we have the line which is really a radical cut. The two sides are not clearly coordinated and so on and so on. It's like class struggle, if you want. And then the most interesting one, my God, what you can develop from this one cross-cap. Why is it so interesting? It is that up there you fall in and you make the turn and you find yourself inside on the opposite side. I will develop this later today but mostly two days in detail how this, I think, inside, being inside looking at it is Plato's Cave. And this turn, U-turn, it's precisely the turn of subjectivity. Okay, let's do now so that you will get it all these transformations. Let's let's do first this one. Let me show you some. Does it work? Yes. I'm sorry, I'm sorry but I just wanted to make it clear. How do you get from Möbius strip to cross-cap. Okay, now I will do something totally crazy and jump to my last example. It's more amusing because I think I liked it very much when you laughed a little bit. You were right. Isn't it that especially in the last case of Klein bottle, there is some undescribable not clear obscene eroticism in it. Didn't you have the feeling that there's something dirty is going on definitely there. And okay, we will develop later what, but this is just so that we get with this over, then I will go into much more detail. So I wonder, this is like now a small detour because we do have a minimal Möbius strip line in the sense of you follow a certain direction to the end you find yourself on the opposite side. It's a beautiful example from a movie which, I don't know why because it's a little bit simplistic but it affected me deeply. Did you see the movie, I think it still plays in movie theaters, not Dunkirk, but Wind River. I really liked it. Okay, it's a little bit simplistic and so on, but you know why I liked it? Because although it was done by a white man, Native American Indians, whatever, for reasons well-known, anti-racist reasons I prefer the term Indians. Because Native Americans what does it mean, that they are part of nature or what, I mean. So they were so fascinated by it that they offered him million dollars, one reservation which was lucky with casinos I don't know. So they immediately recognized in it that it's not this white patronizing horror, it's a okay, what I'm the story is clear that it's simple. In a Wyoming reservation in the north of United States, they found a dead girl, they find the body of a dead girl who was raped and running for miles in the snow in mid-winter. Then the hero, a hunter white guy there protecting wild animals on the reservation, collaborates with a relatively honest good FBI girl to solve the problem. And you will just see, don't be afraid, the final scene where he comes to the father of the killed girl, the hero, and he also we learn that his daughter was also killed three years ago in a similar way. And just tells him that he found the murderer and so on and so on. And it's a beautiful scene because he comes to the house of the father in total distress and he finds father painted with some weird blue and white colors. And ask listen, I hope it will be understandable, I'm very sorry that's the only copy that I was able to get it, pirated of course. There are some strange, I even don't know are they Chinese, Korean or Japanese subtitles, but it's a wonderful, so short simple dialogue because the guy, the Indian in mourning, says simply I have my death face on. And the hero ask him but how did you learn, how do you know, and he says I don't know, there is nobody to taught me, to teach me how to do it. I just invented it myself, you know. And then the guy said but I have some good news, my son who was a delinquent and it shows the desperation on the reservation, is called me, he was released from prison, and then he says as soon as I will wash off my face this stupid paint, I will go and fetch him up, but I must stay a little bit here, just to sit down in silence to as an act of mourning for my daughter, and in a beautiful line of friendship he, the Indian in mourning, says to the hero, do you also have some time to sit here. And the hero says yes and they just sit down. You know why I like this? Because be listen to it carefully. When the Native American Indian father of the killed girl, when he says I wash this as soon as I wash this stupid color from my face, it doesn't mean it's bullshit because I no longer am able to do it in the authentic old way. Like if there were be my if my tribal tradition were to be still a blah blah blah. I think it's a much more refined position. In this way by saying this he fully recognizes himself as already a modern subject. He knows all this is bullshit, you know like oh this stupid face. But and that's the this Möbius strip reversal. So he goes to the end in getting rid of these traditional rituals. But nonetheless, although you are aware that they are pure nonsense, in a beautiful way you can see how the ritual as an empty ritual, you don't have to believe in anything, the ritual survives. But it's a ritual with no bluffing of you know all this stuff which I suspect some of my Native American friends told me that when we say, oh this is our ancient wisdom, beware, we are speaking for stupid tourists here and new agers, you know. That this is the how you go to the end in process of secularization, you know all this is bullshit. But maybe only at that point, and this is what you get at the end of this scene, we not only in some pseudo-dialectical sense, pseudo-religious, nonetheless you discover that you need a ritual or whatever, but in a way you discover in this minimal form where you don't have to believe in anything, none of the bullshit, the value of ritual in its empty form at its purest. And here I'm not bluffing now. You remember when I made fun with you some stupid dead tribes, maybe they can do this. This would be yeah that you know they are not stupid. It's not fuck it I always laugh when they tell me but we have, these are the tourist Indians, you know like. And many of them I read somewhere are not even authentically Native American, you know. They just know that you can earn money by visiting white people and playing on their guilt: but we have our own holistic wisdom and so on, you know. Every authentic Indian, Native American laughs at it, you know. But what interests me is how again in this totally empty way, no belief in it, the ritual survives. So let's do it and again, I will do my usual totally illegal propaganda. You can download, no you can denounce me or whatever. Let's go directly there. Ah yeah, here we are, a little bit back. I don't know why I missed it or does it have to the end, there is a feature here that I really don't like. Because at the end, if you saw the movie there is there are a couple of lines like which is statistically true that for all other ethnic groups in United States you have statistics how many girls go missing per year. For Native American girls they you don't get any statistics. It would have been very easy to get her but the rate is so high that I mean are we aware, here I get although me and political correctness when when God, Platonic God created the world, he put it the idea of me and the idea of political correctness don't overlap, you know. But nonetheless here I recognize the horror. You know that like, I already mentioned this example, for example, my Canadian friends gave it to me. There is Native American, I see more Inuit than Indian, city of way north, you know how many inhabitants of that city killed themselves in last half a year of over Like this is really a society even now in total disintegration and so on. So but to get back to this point, you see you see what I simply my point, the Möbius Möbius strip point, is this precisely when you bring secularization to the end, this I know just what expression when I wash this shit of my face or whatever, like the point is not none of this enthusiasm I take the rituals seriously and so on. You are deprived of all tradition. If anyone here it's the Native American with his colored face who is the pure modern subject. And as such you need this minimal ritual. You know who also invented this ritual, I don't have the time to go into it but, did you see a wonderful nice movie I liked it, very optimistic movie and I don't mean it as a bad joke, Lars von Trier's Melancholia. You know also when at the end when the girl Kirsten Dunst proposes that tent-like structure. It's totally wrong to put into it some kind of magic value: this will protect us and so on and so on. No, it's just the pure minimal gesture of constructing some space there. That's all, pure former pure pure formal gesture. And okay, we can go on here but again my point is simply and this is the minimum of Möbius strip how you have two lines, let's call it modern empty subject and ritual. We usually associate rituals with traditional subjectivity where as we say in our European racist way, those primitives, even if we praise them, they don't yet know the notion of modern individualism, they are deeply embedded in their stupid traditions whatever. No, but again, the true the true modernity again, the truly modern subject is that the Native American father. He does a truly modern ritual, this minimal form of ritual. How if you go to the end of modernity, ritual returns but ritual returns at its purest. And the big mistake would have been to dismiss this as oh you see we didn't yet get rid of the ritual, we have to work more to get rid of it. No, that ritual, minimal ritual sustains modernity. But let me go back to my main line. So what I will try to develop and again if I talk too much I will I will through Madison I will keep to my old rule, which means I will send you a text so that even if I get lost here you will get the stuff. And it will be really unpublished stuff mostly because it's the stuff of my next book. Okay, I want to say this that to translate it directly into Lacanian terms, what Lacan calls point de capiton, the quilting point where the two levels mix in a point, this would be this would be Möbius strip. You go on one side you find yourself at the opposite side. This simple reversal. Cross-cap is what I'm tempted to call not not quilting point but the quilting line. It's the line you remember when the strange ball gets together, you have the cut, the line. And this is for me either sexual difference or class struggle or whatever you want, kind of a cut which holds it apart but at the same time holds together a society. And then the last one, most interesting Klein bottle, this strange twisted line where from outside you find yourself inside all of a sudden looking at the wall of the cave. This would have been, sorry, this would have been I call it the quilting tube or whatever, channel, whatever. And I will try again to develop much more in detail how this how this how this works. Okay, maybe we should simply begin with the underlying ontological structure which is, to put it very simply, that of the Hegelian reversal of, as Hegel puts it apparently in a apparently in an idealist way, that the development of spirit is a closed circle where things just become what they are. Usually this is read in a totally wrong teleological way. It means nothing new in the world, everything is implicitly already there and reality is just the deployment, the actualization of what things already are potentially in themselves. So this is usual approach to Hegel, nothing really new can happen, actuality is a closed circle. At but but if we that's my point, if we read Hegel closely we can see that this what Hegel means by things become what they are is not things become what they already are but in a much more literal way, things become what they are. What you are is not fixed in advance but in a retroactive process. In an only in an open process which might have turned differently, you become what retroactively it will appear that you always already were. For example, I'm sorry for using old examples, when Caesar crossed Rubicon, he became what he was. But he was not really before crossing. Before crossing Rubicon he was who knows what, he might have turned back to Gaul, back to France today and just be another warlord there or whatever. But or my usual example, you know by falling in love you become what you are. Because when you fall in love or have another achievement, you have this feeling, now I fully am what I am. But the process is open. It's a kind of a abyssal circle. You're trying to catch yourself and you never catch yourself. There is a gap, a hole in this circularity. This is still the simple circle of Möbius strip. And precisely you pass to the other side and so on, but it's clear that there is some cut, some hole in it which propels the circle. The other one, the cross-cap is we will develop it later it's a redoubled circle where things are even more interesting in the sense that in this type of a redoubled circle it's not that things just become what they are is that here the cut, the line is explicitly posited. It's an impossible difference. By this I mean what, let's take sexual difference. Partisans of this fluidity of gender positions and so on like to claim but we cannot cut a clear difference of the two sexes. You know, we men are all a little bit women, women a little bit men, it's all fluid and so on and so on. Of course, the what is impossible is not to define a clear difference, or rather, what is impossible is precisely to translate into firm symbolic determinations difference. Difference is here absolutely but impossible. A kind of a point of reference which cannot be clearly defined but casts its shadow on all of it. This is why, for example, this is why as I develop in my books, for me transgender people are difference at its purest. Because that's the paradox, I hope you will get it, that's how I read cross-cap. You know we have a total field of sexuality but then we have that strange line which makes it totally disharmonious. There is a cut, but it's an impossible cut in the sense that you cannot even clearly define it. What so against this accusation of binary logic and so on, what Lacan means by sexual difference is precisely that it's a kind of an obstacle cut which you cannot clearly define. Sexual difference means precisely for Lacan that at the phenomenal level of our self-experience, you cannot say I'm purely man, I'm purely woman and so on. All the wealth of sexuality cannot be squeezed into this two couples. You are either a man or a woman. There's always there is always some excess which precisely bears witness to the fact that the difference, the cut is real. And the same, I don't have time to go into it now, but the same holds also for for class struggle, although the logic of course is not the same. It's that class struggle does not mean this is vulgar Marxism: there are ultimately just two classes and ultimately you are here or there. No, class struggle in its phenomenal social practice means precisely there are never only two classes. Because if the moment you could have said this is the basic class difference, you're either here or there, it's no longer class struggle. It's just a harmonious even if it's struggle all the time, it's just a harmonious division you are either here or there. Class struggle doesn't mean only we fight, it means precisely that it's not clear as it were it's not clear where you are. You all the time borrow from the opponent, you can be here, you can be there and so on and so on. Which is why again class struggle means precisely that there is always in the same way as transgender that there is always some some we can call them whatever, rebel or or or sub-proletarians or whatever you want. There is always petit bourgeois, there are always some who do not fit it. You cannot define it in a clear social way. And I will develop this in the manuscript a nice example which I developed in I forgot which one of my books maybe it's living in the end of time of the problems that, for example, it's a beautiful problem I'm sorry if you know it, in Soviet Union in early 1930s when they were doing the dekulakization, they wanted to do it in an objective way. They wanted to define precisely the class criterion. First it was it was ridiculous, if you have I don't know more than five cows and if you exploit more than five other paid workers you are a kulak, no? Then then it got more and more complex among other things also because in the chaos of dekulakization, farmers got poorer and poorer so at the end although already one cow, one goat meant you were but what I like so much is that then so they endlessly complicated the classification. They wanted clearly to define where you are. At the end they ended and sorry, with introducing a category of sub like sub-proletarian, sub-kulak. And they tried to define it in the sense that you have a just one cow or whatever, minimal, but if you look at it closely, what really meant is objectively we don't know what you are, but subjectively we think you are a danger. You know, basically it meant that subjectivity intervened. Basically, it was a concession that you cannot define who is a kulak in an objective social way, economic category. That subjectivity emerges again. So again, back to back to back to sexuality, I underline it that's my only misunderstanding and reproach to LGBT to repeat it again. First I think they are absolutely in a good sense subversive, but not in the sense they think. The big difference as the last time when I was here, I think it was Jacqueline Rose, okay to insult her Jackie Rose you know because she hates to be Is she's there? No no, it's Esther just. Ah yeah, okay she will report it, okay. No that the opposition class struggle in LGBT for me is this one. Either you think in a pseudo-Deleuzian way that there is some original plurality of positions and then bad Oedipus enters and sexual difference totalizes the entire field, so that then the goal becomes just to expand the categorization, you know instead of two sexes you have I don't know, in New York City they have a committee which decided there are I think or or whatever and then that's the illusion, each of us will have like I am a I am a lesbian butch or whatever, each of us will have a category and we will be satisfied. Or my much more pessimistic realism that sexuality as such is an embarrassment. Pure difference and and like the point is precisely that you will never find your place by definition. The moment you will be able to find your place: I am this, I am that, it's no longer sexuality. The same again the same the same with class struggle. It's always an ambiguity. Read Lenin if you don't believe me. Lenin you will think the toughest class struggle guy. But you know in his last years when Soviet Union tried to open a little bit towards trade with capitalist countries, Lenin was absolutely fascinated by big efficient capitalists. Some Americans visited him and he claimed that they are somewhere in between, although they are the top of capitalism, they are almost already running enterprises because they are so big as public property and so on and so on. You see, this is class struggle that it like I put it like this, it's not a categorization it's not that you have a social structure we are here, you are there. It's a kind of antagonism which cuts across. We have bourgeois elements in the working class, we have proletarian elements in the ruling class when it gets highly developed, they almost work like representatives of some kind of twisted communist dimension is there and so on and so on. So this would be for me the cross-cap and the interest of Klein bottle would be that I think it's the best of course emergent presentation of subjectivity of how I will even try to do it, now I'm reading books trying to bluff my way into it, quantum physics. You know, it's so interesting now it's read it, if you understand, I don't, but what I mean is that it's so tense because now quantum physicists are dropping the, let's call it, Copenhagen Orthodoxy and with revenge the ontological question is emerging. And it's incredible what type of paradoxes you have. One line, the old Copenhagen the problem is this one, you know the story. We have these ordinary particles our everyday life when we measure things and then we have this proto-virtual space of whatever you call it wave oscillations phi this quantum reality so-called. Okay, what is the status of this quantum reality with regard to the reality of ordinary objects in our reality. The radically let's call it agnostic Copenhagen Orthodoxy is ultimately no status at all, it's just epistemological like what really exist are our measurements. You measure this this type of I don't know what electrons and so on when they pop up and there. And quantum waves quantum reality is just in my mind, it's the way complicated calculation that we try to account for, calculate the process, probabilities of passing from one to another measurement, but it's meaningless to ask the ontological question. Now what is so interesting is that the latest trend and it got a big boost now with the latest Nobel Prize, no, about gravitational waves and so on. If we will have time read it, it's so fascinating, it's the opposite one. It's that not only quantum waves exist, but they are ultimately the only thing that exists. That our temporary reality is just the result of the limitation of our knowledge. Like, we cannot observe individual photons or whatever, we get statistic statistical average and this is how space, time and so on emerge. Okay, I don't want to go into it too much. What I'm saying is that here we get exactly the opposite version again. Reality is quantum reality and there are wonderful things there, I just don't know, I'm sorry for my stupidity, how serious scientifically they are, but again, I'm sorry, it sounds nice, no? No, the idea that the moment you accept this you have to posit a level at which time and space are no longer this Kantian formal empty containers so that things happen in time and space. No, time becomes its own stuff. Like time is not a form of things happening. At this wave level, time is not a time in which waves oscillate. Time is just a gravitational oscillation and so on. And they develop in a very nice way how we get although this is always a critical point, how we get from here to our daily notion of time where time is a frame form within which things happen. But ah, here I'm back at my Möbius strip. You see the beauty of it. Our ordinary everyday in our reality ontology is: we have form and content as Kant put it, but also this is our spontaneous teleology. Time is an a priori form and things happen in time. No, they say if you go to the end at the level of time, you reach the point where time itself like on Möbius strip falls into content. Time is really a temporal object, a certain wave function, which doesn't happen in time but is time itself as a certain oscillation. And then you have wonderful sub-theories, like one is that there is no time without heat. Why? Because our notion of time is strictly linked to entropy and so on to a system cooling down. Because only the moment you have heat, you have irreversible processes. And if you don't get an irreversible process like for example theoretically you can, but de facto you cannot if I burn this piece of paper. It's irreversible. It's very difficult even to imagine to run it backwards to compose out of the ashes the paper. So the idea is that time only in the sense that we know it, linear global time, the empty container in which things happen, only appears at a certain level of reality which is not the ultimate level. So back to my opposition I find this so fascinating how we have two and then they reproach us philosopher: you are crazy guy who can claim the opposites whatever you want. Well, believe me we are not as crazy as quantum physicists where really, you can claim again that quantum waves are just our calculation and more and more popular theory the exact opposite. And I will not do it now of course, but I just want to draw your attention to how the big problem for me is precisely how to pass from one level, quantum oscillation outside space and time in our ordinary sense, how the problem is not to penetrate to the original pre-ontological space of these oscillations. The problem is how to come back. The problem is and this is the big as they call it in TV quiz shows, million dollar question, no? How to come back, why how to account for the so-called collapse of wave function where you know, our ordinary reality of object emerges immanently out of quantum processes themselves. Because the problem with older versions of quantum mechanics is that it implies a certain dualism in the sense that we observers are simply here. And we measure, we observe. But in some sense, if you're consequent, we observers must be part of the very reality we measure. How to account for this? You probably some of you know it better than me that the main candidate is so-called decoherence theory, no? They try to formulate the criteria how this collapse of wave function happens following the immanent necessity of the quantum processes itself, but again it's not yet resolved the problem. And here comes, okay but let's do now some, let's move to a little bit more explanation of Möbius strip to give you some some some examples. And they will be just examples from different levels and so on and so on of this mixture of this reversal. For example, one simple example would have been the reversal of good into evil. What we all liberals as we are like to point out is how if you follow the path of religious fundamentalism then with extreme obsession with good, I think my religion tells the truth, good, then your extreme good, too much good turns into evil. In this liberal pluralist vision, evil is good in self if you get too much of it, if you absolutize it and so on. I claim my religion is the only true one and so on and so on, I end up killing all the others and so on and so on. Well this is some kind of example but I find much more attractive the opposite example that evil itself if you progress on the side of evil it can turn into good. In the sense no, I'm not trying to sell you any cheap any cheap paradoxes. I'm just trying to give you the example of, for example, take sorry well-known example, take Jesus Christ. I can well understand that from the standpoint of Jewish establishment, he was in a way evil incarnated. His existence and so on meant denying Jewish tradition, Jewish hierarchy and so on and so on. But you know then the key reversal happens when evil itself brought to the end when it becomes ruling principle defines good. But I would like to give you another example which I use in one of my books, beautiful one of this remember again Möbius strip, two lines how they are intertwined and so on. In Jean-Pierre Dupuy relies on this classical book Louis Dumont Homo Hierarchicus, where he claimed that how are always social structures hierarchies function. It's not only that you have higher level, ruling class and lower level the subordinated, but that it's a condition of power that you have higher and lower level but within the lower level the lower is higher than the higher. What do I mean by this? This you find this line from ancient India to from ancient India to Martin Luther. The problem is this one. We have two worlds, let's say the sacred world and our secular world. Or in the terms of power, religious power and secular power. Okay, in principle of course, religious power is highest, my God it deals with God and so on. But as Luther emphasized, of course religious power is higher than secular power, but within the secular power, once you're within the secular power, secular power should rule over religious power. You have to turn it around. This mean meant for Luther of course, God is higher than social order, but within a secular social order, a local prince, political power should have higher authority than than the sacred and so on and so on. So here we also can have again this dialectic of good and evil. Good, divine domain versus the terrestrial sphere of power struggles, egotistical interest, search for pleasure and so on and so on. In traditional view of religion you can say that we are dealing here with what Hegel called cunning of reason. That the high the higher power, divinity or historical reason uses our lower egotistic instincts to to realize itself. Like you know this is pseudo I claim, but nonetheless it appears to be Hegel's vision. That of course history is full of egotistic passions and so on, but these egotistic passions are just instruments used by good, by historical reason to realize a goal. As Hegel said, nothing great in history was achieved without passion. But so the point is not to condemn egotist passions. Of course Caesar was acting out of egotist motives. Caesar is not thinking: oh my God I have to fulfill my historical mission and so on but I want wealth, power and so on. But in this sense he contributed to history and Hegel even goes so far as in a very cynical way enumerates examples from which it's clear that that those rulers who were not egotistic usually meant total ruin, a catastrophe. But I think that it at a at a deeper level it's also the opposite which is a much more profound Hegelian category. It's not that the good supremely reigns and uses evil as its means, like there is some divine plan, the good which organizes history so that we do whatever we want follow our evil motives but they serve the good. What if we accept the opposite view, which is that out of the struggle of evil particular motives, good is precisely the winning side, something that good is a process of self-differentiation of evil. In the sense that again in the in the sense that what we think good is the way that a particular evil universalizes, legitimizes itself. But let's not let's not maybe lose time with it. I want to give you another example from this of this reversal of content and form. Because one big couple where Möbius strip function is content and form. You know like, you have certain content something happens in a certain form. And the Möbius strip reversal is the point where form itself falls into content. If you listened carefully you saw how I tried to I didn't explain it because it's too abstract to hint at it apropos quantum physics. How the ultimate speculative point of this gravitational wave theory is that quantum waves is that form itself becomes content. Form, temporal form which in which changes waves oscillate is disclosed to be just another more fundamental wave. Let me give you a different example. I'm just trying to illustrate to you this Möbius strip reversal. In a wonderful dream, wonderful interpretation of dream, Freud quotes a woman who presented didn't want to report to Freud a certain dream, she claimed that the dream is so indistinct and muddled that she doesn't remember it clearly and so on and so on. But then it become clear that the woman was, I'm not criticizing her, very promiscuous and the true content of the dream was: I screwed around a lot and it's indistinct and muddled muddle, she was pregnant who the father of my child is. And what Freud does in a wonderful properly Hegelian way is he reads this formal feature of the dream. The woman complaining: oh it's muddled, indistinct, I don't know what's happening, as a direct inscription of the repressed content. You see the beauty, the woman didn't want to confront the true problem. Even in the dream she was sorry of using this stupid term, afraid to directly raise this question: who is the father of my child? And I love this, I mean you know all those stupid they are now already out of fashion jokes about stupid blondines, you know. But I think some of their jokes I think they are very intelligent, they are Hegelian. Did you hear it, you know which is my favorite blondine joke? That a doctor tells her that she is pregnant, no? You must know it, what she answers: are you sure that the child is mine, you know. That's that's the Hegelian moment, if you you know. But okay, let's go here. You know that something that is excluded from the content returns in a form, returns as a form. So again, a purely formal feature, the dream is muddled, indistinct and so on, is a return of what is repressed from the content. So you see where so we don't have a simple duality. We have content, we have form and the content is too wealthy cannot fully express itself in the form. That's the simple version, you know, or even the mystical one, you know like oh there is some much I want to say, I cannot fully express it and so on and so on. No, Freud's here and Hegel's view is much more dialectical, refined. It's that no, there is content is never simply a content in itself. There is something primordially repressed in the content itself. And this repressed returns in the form. So that's the nice paradox. If you want to get in a dream or in any work of art which tries to express something, if you want to get all of content, it's wrong to say oh the form is enough I have to look deeper. No, you have to include form in the content itself. I hope I'm clear here this how does it work this Möbius strip reversal. And it's again, it's the same with that dream of Freud. The content of the dream, to get at it, you have to include the purely formal element of: the dream is indistinct, muddled and so on. This is the only trace left of the fact of what of what the dream is about. And maybe you remember in my in my books I give here a whole series of standard examples. For example, in melodramas often you have a story which is too pathetic to stage it and this so it would have been ridiculous, but this pathetic excess then returns in the form, in a too pathetic music and so on and so on. Again the secret of it's not only that content it's too mysterious, form cannot penetrate it. No, on no, content is blocked, thwarted in itself and to get at all of content you need to include the form. You know who also did this in a back to my beloved although now he is half crazy I heard Lars von Trier. Did you see his 'Breaking the Waves'? Yeah, it's not my favorite movie. I'm a primitive revenge feminist. I like what is that one with Nicole Kidman? Dogville. No, the first one. Dogville? Yeah. Isn't it, sorry I'm so low, but don't you like the last ten minutes when she takes revenge and kill them and so on. You don't like it? I love it. I love it, yes. I'm against this no it's sublime not to take revenge. Fuck it I want revenge and kill them all, you know. It's great to see Kidman doing that. Yeah, yeah, yes. It's always like yeah. So let's go on with this yes. So so content, yes so Lars von Trier, yes he gives himself a wonderful reading of 'Breaking the Waves' where the story is ultra-pathetic but it's shot in a pseudo-documentary way, handheld camera, clumsy cuts. And he says if I were to to shoot a movie directly in a way that would fit it form, it would collapse, it would appear ridiculous. So the only way to sell that story it's to oppose form to it, to do the counterform. Again you see my point, again it's not the usual hermeneutic triad: form, content, and behind the content some more mystical inner content. No, behind the content it's the form itself. There is more in the form than in the content. My okay. My final example and then I give some time for debate would be of course what I repeat I'm sorry now I warning, I will repeat some old jokes. It's of course that of the two lines, signifier and signified. The whole point of point Lacan calls the quilting point, point de capiton, is that at a certain point signifier has to fall into the signified. The way I mean I'm embarrassed to do it, I use these examples I don't know how many times, okay just permit me, you've heard it ten times okay you will hear it the eleventh time. You know my favorite jokes from Eastern Europe, that Polish one, you know what is socialism. The idea it's the result of all that is highest in the history of humanity, no? Socialism is a synthesis of first societies, ancient Greek, medieval times, capitalism, no? The joke goes like this: socialism took from primitive societies their barbarism, from from ancient Greek slavery, from medieval times feudal domination, from capitalism exploitation and now comes the beauty, you know it, from socialism the name. But you see that's the point, you have to include the name into it. And it's the same with antisemitism. It's clear that the Jew is this kind of composite picture. The of course I'm talking about antisemite figure of the Jew. They took exploitation from rich bankers, they took the the fact that they don't wash so they say from poor people, blah blah blah and at the end they took from the Jews the name. Antisemitism. You see and I think that this dialectic is in every name. When you have to and this is what I think Saul Kripke, he tragically disappeared no, was after in his 'Naming and Necessity' when he introduced this strict notion of rigid designator. That simply a name never just names a thing. Ultimately a thing becomes a thing by adding a name to it. In this sense signifier, a name, has to fall into the signified. There must be this Möbius strip short circuit. If you pursue to the end the line of signifiers, okay up to a certain point signified is on the other side, but then you change sides you encounter yourself among the signifieds. Not to mention Hegel, I was telling this to you dozens of times, how for Hegel that's why for Hegel, a species is always if we oppose sorry, a species or a genus and its species. A genus, universality, is always included as one among its species. And in a very dialectical way, for example, the point is to Marx was aware of this. You remember the classic, I often quoted it, passage from introduction to Grundrisse where Marx develops how in every capitalist in every mode of production, one specific domain of production embodies production as such. Like in medieval times it was agricultural production which colored them all, so that even artisanship, others were organized like agriculture. In capitalism it's industrial production, so that even agriculture is organized like industrial. So in other words what Marx is saying is that we don't have universal genus and its species. It's again the Möbius structure where genus has to appear as one of its species. And this is what Hegel calls coincidence of opposite. Just this reversal. It's not that stupidity of oh opposites coincide because we have many other ways of coinciding opposites. We have this mystical theological: God is so sublime that he is at the same time exists, doesn't exist, good, evil or our finite oppositions coincide there. That's not Hegel. We have another version which is Maoist, pseudo-Maoist rather primitive, which is that what is life but in eternal struggle of opposites: light and darkness, masculine, feminine, whatever you want. No, that's also not it. Again what Hegel means by coincidence of opposites it's Möbius strip. Is this simple reversal. But then it gets complicated now the concluding bad joke not obscene don't be afraid. The best way to explain next point cross-cap is: don't laugh, it's a shitty movie but I like the story, don't kill me don't prohibit me to come back. Did you see that Stephen King, not the last one 'It' but 'Dark Tower.' 'Dark Tower' it's the clearest because you know you have two realities: our world and that pseudo-Western world and 'Dark Tower' is the line which connects them. That's why they want, it's as usual with Stephen King don't underestimate him, you know. He's an interesting author in spite of all. Okay, let me stop and next time but again if we will not come to the end again, although I don't know which of you, there is one of you whose ball I want to cut and then eat them with parsley and garlic nicely. You know why? Because maybe it's not even you, I did the same in Seoul, Korea. Because I talk too much and wasn't able to give, I said okay I give you my future manuscript. Fuck you I saw it two weeks afterwards on on internet. Please don't do this to me because then I get problems with my publishers and so on. But I have it all from my forthcoming book, not the one which will be out now it already is 'Incontinence of the Void.' But maybe Alenka, is it already available? It's excellent book by Alenka Zupančič 'What is Sex?' in United States it's already on the market and it's doing very well. No no no we are now exploding, I mean, now we will really be Troika, not just me. Because Mladen Dolar will publish soon my other good Lacanian friend with Bloomsbury. We ironically refer to it as his Écrits. pages, all his texts, big book so now we are on. That's why Litsa is so busy. Sorry that's why? Litsa Thompson, that's why she is so busy, your editor. Yeah but I like her Litsa Thompson my publisher, she is great because she is this kind of a I mean this as extreme celebration of her this naughty dirty Irish girl always for my bad taste jokes you know and so on. Okay, very naughty. Okay let's stop it. So again in two days from now I will try to condense cross-cap, this structure of impossible difference, which is like redoubled two circles Möbius strip and then the trick of this Klein bottle which again is extremely interesting how you know you just it's a more complex Möbius strip, you fall in and you are outside and just continuing you look at it from the inside. What's the meaning of this especially the political use? Now we still have a little bit of time so if you want little time, some ten minutes perhaps if we take together some two or three questions, we can deal with them in the next ten minutes. Do you know, but maybe I can ask you, do you know any of good movies, I think that 'Wind River' is almost, 'It' is an interesting story but the movie is a little bit boring. Are there any good movies? Not now, just wait, 'Blade Runner' is just around the corner, it's tomorrow no? Let's hope, sorry. I've seen the IMAX, don't tell my bosses please please. Thank you. A word that cropped up a few times was opposite. Sorry. A word that cropped up a few times in your presentation was the word opposite. Yeah. But when I see that Möbius strip yeah, there's actually a visual extinguishment of the opposite. You start with two sides and you end up with one. And I'm wondering whether what you what you take opposite to to mean, is it an observation of a process, or is it one thing and another thing? So there's a Jungian term you might be familiar with, enantiodromia, which is the idea of if you take as a process a force and you push from one position to a counter-position, that's exactly where you end up, so that you know the snake eats its tail. And so I'm wondering if I could just quiz you a bit about what you have in mind when you use the word opposite and is it this observation of a process or is it actually one thing and another. It's of course in a Hegelian way I think that what you call process is in a way inscribed into the thing itself. Because I claim that the okay opposition simply the two sides are not simply cancelled. The process goes on indefinitely. They remain two sides in the same way that okay the last example I give you language. Okay, at a certain point signifier has to fall into the signified to guarantee the unity. But they are nonetheless still still distinguished. So I what interests me is that what there must be some kind of a cut cut or gap which is present there implicitly in a way. You know what I mean it's not just that instead of two sides you get okay you get one side but this side is nonetheless in a way its own opposite because remember you say you get to the same point but on the other side of the track. Because you begin here then you come back it twists around to the same point but on the other side. So the problem with Möbius strip is precisely that it blurs the line of opposition which remains here and I try to read it in this maybe a little bit primitive Hegelian way that cross-cap is then if I may put it in this speculative terms the truth of the Möbius strip because there you get the clear gap in in cross-cap no? And I will try to develop this with further elements, but you did hit the the crucial point how no the mystery is that although you arrive at the same point two sides are not really two, but this doesn't abolish the tension if I may put it like this. You know it makes the confusion the tension even even stronger in a way. That that would be my point, sorry yeah. Do you think it's really possible for the transsexual subject to avoid castration anxiety? Do you think? It all depends with what do you mean castration. I mean if you mean in this very basic Lacanian sense, then I think not only they don't avoid it, they confront it at its purest. It's ordinary male or feminine position which tries much more to avoid castration. Because you avoid castration precisely because you know castration is not I'm here a man you are there woman we are clearly delimited. This is precisely in strict Lacanian sense the avoidance of castration. Castration means that by it's a very nice again Möbius strip speculative remark on Hegel which was taken over although he was anti-Hegelian by our deceased friend Ernesto Laclau. Where he says that the basic paradox of his logic of hegemony is that external difference is always at the same time internal difference. And in this sense sexual difference is not simply I'm here you are there, and it's not this simple differentiality in the sense that man defines woman, woman defines man but simply an opposite. Like in the same way you cannot define left without right, no? You cannot define man without woman. No no no castration means that by way of being differentiated from a woman I lose myself. I at the same time lose a part of myself. The the or to put it in more simple but nonetheless speculative terms, the paradox of castration is not cut into two and each of us loses a part: I lose my feminine part, you lose your masculine part, whatever. No, that's bullshit. The point is that precisely that when you get sexual difference, if you put the two parts together you don't get the whole. Because that's precisely the ideological fantasy: men, women alone they don't work and we should have some kind of unification, masculine feminine principle harmoniously collaborating that and many the worst male chauvinists know this very well. Because even Goethe knew this that the nastiest trick of male chauvinism is to always admit that great male heroes always have a kind of a feminine power that sustains them, you know. And even Nazis like to play this game by the way, you know. Like the true male chauvinism is not screw women I am a man but it's that there is a noble creative caring side of
Okay, thanks very much. I don't want to disappoint you. I it will be acceptable to you what I will do. We will come at this point because I don't want to repeat myself only in the second class. What I will try to do after some short political introduction is more and more I try to do something maybe crazy. I'm trying to stop with this postmodern games of, you know, reading one philosopher through the eyes of another philosopher and being brighter than both. I try to approach, you know, how much of today's philosophy still is a philosophy without position. And once, Alain Badiou told me, I have great appreciation for Jacques Derrida, that he spoke with Derrida and that Derrida simply admitted to him that he is not able simply to say things are like this, I think. It has to be just if you read this text, even better, if you see how this text is reading another text, you can see some some cuts, some inconsistencies and so on and so on. While not ignoring the results of such deconstructive reading, I think that we should take a risk and return to this very naive questions. Not in a naive way. I mean, fuck it, like, what is reality? Is it meaningful to talk about reality? Do things exist outside our mind? Can we talk about things in themselves? If yes, how? And so on and so on, all this stuff. Of course, I'm not advocating in the in the sense of new so-called speculative realism some simple return to big claims, reality is out there and so on. But it is a problem. And the way I decided to approach it, at least I will not repeat myself too much, is not in a strict mathematical sense, but nonetheless, to progress at this towards this big question through late Lacan's topology. Don't be afraid. No formulas. I will just focus on, and don't be afraid, I will show them, explain everything in the lowest Wikipedia way. You know, these three basic forms: Möbius strip, cross-cap, and Klein bottle. I think that we can learn quite a great a great deal from simply reflecting what does it mean to take, of course, at a formal level, this figures as an ontological clue, as a clue to how our reality is structured. But as it is usual with me, I will begin with a short political reflection which will then bring us to this topic. Okay, so let me begin. As you may have noticed, lately our media report on the more and more ridiculous exchange of insults between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump. The situation I find very ironic because we get what appears to be two immature men letting go their rage and hurling insults at each other. And what we secretly hope is that there must be some anonymous invisible institutional constraint preventing their rage to explode in full war. What I like is this, that our usual reaction is the following, is the opposite one. Usually we tend to complain that in today's alienated bureaucratized politics, institutional pressures and constraints prevent politicians to articulate their personal vision, to do what they really want. Now we hope the exact opposite. Let's hope there is some alienated invisible deep structure that will prevent these two madmen to do it. Okay, how did we come to this point? I already developed it a time developed it a time ago the situation that it's this as Badiou developed it in his one of his last books, what is happening today in our growing post-patriarchal social order which presents itself as the domain of new freedoms. We witness the disintegration of shared ethical base of our lives. And I agree with Miller, who, sorry, with Badiou, who even claims that one of the dark signs of this is the abolishment of universal military conscription. Now, this may appear to be good news for all pacifists and so on, but are you aware what this basically means? It means it of course, it means mercenaries will fight for us. I mean, I am absolutely for, if you ask me, global military conscription. Are you aware that this is the reason why Vietnam War ended? Because without military conscription, the poor blacks and others would be fighting it. But because there was military conscription and all those young white kids had actually to risk their lives, there was such pressure against it. All honest leftists admit it. What I'm trying to say is that, I'm repeating Badiou and myself here, this ethical disintegration affects differently the two sexes. Men are gradually turning into perpetual adolescents with no clear passage of initiation that would enact their entry into maturity. No wonder then that in order to supplant this lack, post-paternal youth gangs proliferate, providing some ersatz initiation and social identity. And now comes the more problematic point. In contrast to men, women are today more and more precociously mature, treated as small adults, expected to control their lives and so on and so on. So in this new version of sexual difference, men are ludic adolescents, outlaws, while women appear as much more mature, serious, legal, punitive. And this brings us back to Trump and Kim. These two eternal adolescents, both prone to irrational brutal outbursts that hurt their own chances. Although the differences between North Korea and the United States are obvious, one should nonetheless insist that they both cling to the extreme version of state sovereignty, Korea First versus America First. Plus that the obvious madness of North Korea, a small country ready to strike to risk it all and bomb the United States or so they claim, because my the most relaxed people today are my friends in Seoul who take all this as a joke and claim it's absolutely not to be taken seriously and so on. But nonetheless, this North Korean madness has its counterpart in the United States, which still pretend to play the role of the global policeman, a single state assuming the right to decide which other state should be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. So I think the solution is not to just crush North Korea, but to find a genuine way of internationalizing nuclear weapons, to make the situation when a single sovereign state is allowed to possess them illegal, unacceptable. The moment we just focus on the madness of North Korea, we endorse the premise that they should not be allowed to do what only the selected superpowers can do. So I think again that the problem is this entire constellation. As long as we will have states which not only do have nuclear weapons, but assume the role of allowing to deciding who of the others will have them or not, we will have North Koreas all around. Now comes the more interesting theoretical point. This urge to change the entire constellation emerges precisely when we are confronted a threat of total destruction. And we are today confronting it by nuclear war, by ecological catastrophe and so on. In such a situation, our first reaction is a defensive effort to guarantee our survival. If nuclear war is at the horizon or total ecological catastrophe, the message we usually hear is, now it's the time to forget big emancipatory projects of radical change. Our task is now just to fight for the survival of what we have with all the compromises and moderation that such a task involves. But here comes a much more refined counter-argument that I openly admit I plagiarized from my good friend and theoretical partner Alenka Zupančič. But what is it that we have? The threat of the total destruction of humanity makes us aware of the totality of humanity. Humanity appears as one only against the background of its self-destruction. It was not here before. So the true choice is not the one between what we have and losing it all or, in the Cold War terms, between developing nuclear arms to protect our liberal freedoms or abandoning nuclear arms and thereby exposing ourselves to the risk of losing our freedoms. I will quote now, so what is our choice? I quote listen carefully Alenka Zupančič: 'The true choice is between losing it all (in a nuclear or ecological catastrophe) and creating what we are about to lose. Only this could eventually save us. When caught in the threat and fear of losing it all, we are in fact held hostages to something that does not exist yet. And is this kind of blackmail not actually the very means of making sure that it will never exist? It makes us focus on preserving what is here and what we have but excludes any real alternative, any means of really thinking differently.' So, the possible awakening call of the bomb is not simply, let's do all in our power to prevent it before it's too late, but rather, let's first build this totality, unity, community, freedom, that we are about to lose through the bomb. End of quote. And I think here we can locate the unique chance opened up by the very real threat of nuclear or ecological self-destruction. It makes us aware of the danger that we will lose it all. But when we become aware of this, we, I claim and in a good sense, automatically get caught in some kind of retroactive illusion, a short circuit between reality and its hidden potentials. What we want to say when is we say let's just save what can be saved, is not the reality of our world, but reality as it might have been if we were not hindered by antagonisms which gave birth to the nuclear threat. So you see what I'm saying, that when we feel threatened that we will lose it all, this all changes in a subtle way. It's an illusion but it's a good illusion if you put it like this. This all in a subtle way is no longer our reality. It's this all which is threatened immediately acquires a utopian content. This all that we want to protect, we have to change it radically in order to be able to protect it. So it's a nice example of how the most radical change is demanded just to just to protect what we have. The true utopianism today is precisely not radically different, utopianism in a good sense of the term is not just oh we need a totally different world but what we have to do just to protect what we have. Because again, the moment you want to protect it, you have to radically to change it radically. What kind of epistemology is involved now slowly approaching Möbius strip in this type of retroactive illusion. I want to go back to Plato here. I hope I don't have to tell you the entire story. You know it, Plato's Cave, no? I want just to focus on something and here I'm referring to another friend of mine whom I appreciate very much, Frank Ruda, who was here, the German guy, who recently developed some wonderful lines on it. And you will see now up to a point my dark totalitarian side, whatever. You will see how right was that crazy guy Roger Scruton who saw very clearly the madness and violence, whatever, of my position. Namely, Plato's Cave, there is one aspect of it's already in Plato which is usually neglected. This concerns the relationship between freedom and servitude. It's not simply that when we are in the cave just watching shadows false reality on the wall that we are chained there, we are not free. Plato asks the crucial question, and I think it's the duty of the left to assume it fully. Namely, it's not just the chain, the chains that keep us there. Read carefully Republic. Plato says but what will happen if we break the chains? People will not simply say fine, we are free, let's run out of the cave. People will want spontaneously to remain there even without chains. So in some sense, and I think this is the paradox that we have to assume fully, and I know how this is usually considered a totalitarian formula, we have to be forced to be free. You need a master. If you are left to yourself even without chains you will never get free. A quote from Frank Ruda: 'The exit from the cave begins when one of the prisoners is not only freed from his chains but when he is forced out. This clearly must be the place for the libidinal but also epistemological, political, ontological function of the master. This can only be a master who does neither tell me what precisely to do nor whose instrument I could become. He must be the one who just gives me back to myself. And in a sense, one might say that this could be connected to Plato's anamnesis theory, remembering what one never knew as it were. And implies that the proper master just affirms or makes it possible for me to affirm, to accept: I can do this. Without telling me what this is and without telling me too much of who I am.' Again, so the idea is that very brutal paradoxical one, that to become free you have to be forced to be free, and this for this you need a figure of the master. But it's a paradoxical master. It's not an oppressive master who tells you what you want and so on. It's a master whose message to you is just: you can do it. You are not just limited to what you are and so on and so on, you can do more. And I refer here to your very naive everyday experience. This master can be a good friend, a good teacher. Isn't it that when you are in crisis, you know you should do something, you don't have enough strength and so on and so on, a true master figure, a friend, a teacher, whatever, his message to you is just a very naive one: I know that you can do it. And he even doesn't have to know what. The point that Frank Ruda now back makes here is again a subtle one. It's not only that if I am left to myself in a cave even when I am without chains I prefer to stay there so that a master has to force me out. The situation is much more subtle. I have to, I know the madness of this formula, I have to volunteer to be forced out. Similar to psychoanalysis, and this is the genius of Ruda, he drew a parallel with psychoanalytic situation where basically you volunteer to abdicate your conscious ego autonomy. But you must be a volunteer. You must volunteer to accept analyst as, of course, a very specific form of a master. So here I have another quote from Frank Ruda. 'A question arises at precisely this point from using the reference to the master in psychoanalytic terms. Does this mean that those who need a master are always already in the position of an analysand patient? If politically such a master is needed for us to become what we are, to use Nietzsche's formula, and this can be structurally linked to liberating the prisoner from the cave to force him out after the chains are broken and he still does not want to leave, the question arises how to link this with the idea that the patient analysand who demands for a psychoanalysis treatment has to be a volunteer and not simply slave or bondsman.' I mean why am I mentioning this example? So that you see I'm not involved in abstract paradoxes. This happens precisely in a psychoanalytic situation. It is, to be brutal, a form of what La Boétie called servitude volontaire. So in short, I quote back to Ruda: 'There must be a dialectics of master and volunteer. A dialectics because the master to some extent constitutes the volunteers as volunteers, liberates them from previously seemingly unquestionable position so that they become voluntarily followers of the master's injunction whereby the master ultimately becomes superfluous.' End of quote. But as Frank Ruda is immediately aware, what complicates the picture is that, I quote Ruda: 'Capitalism relies massively on unpaid and thereby structurally voluntary labor. There are thus volunteers and volunteers. So maybe one has to distinguish not only between different types of master figures but also to link them to different understandings of the volunteer of the volunteer.' End of quote. Now I will try to explain this in very clear terms. We have here two levels of volunteering. They are different not only with regard to the content of servitude. In capitalism I volunteer to become a servant of market mechanisms, in the second case I become a volunteer to some emancipatory cause. The very form is different of volunteering. In capitalist servitude we simply feel free. While in an authentic act of liberation we accept voluntary servitude as serving a cause and not just serving ourselves. What do I mean by this? In today's cynical functioning of capitalism I can know very well what I am doing and continue to do it. The liberating aspect of my knowledge is suspended. While in an authentic dialectics of liberation the awareness of my situation is already the first step of liberation. In other words, in capitalism I am enslaved precisely when I feel free. This feeling is the very form of my servitude. I'm not saying something obscure, dark, but an usual consumerist subject, let's say you are a consumerist precarious worker, you feel free, you do whatever you want, you sell yourself, you consume, but of course this doing what you want freely is the very form of your serving the existing system. While in an emancipatory process I am free when I feel as a slave. That is to say the very feeling of being enslaved already bears witness to the fact that in the core of my subjectivity I am free. You see the point, one should here or one could here introduce Lacan's distinction between enunciated, what I'm explicitly claiming, and what Lacan calls the position of enunciation, the position from which I speak. In the everyday capitalist servitude volontaire, I experience myself as free, the content of my existence is freedom, I consume, I choose the job that I want and so on and so on, but the position from which I say this is already that of being enslaved to the existing system. While in an authentic emancipatory movement, the content of my statement, what I enunciate, is: I am a slave. But by saying it, I already speak from a position of minimal freedom. Now, where is here where is here the the Möbius strip? Ah incidentally, if this was not clear and I think we should fully assume a different levels this idea that the highest act of freedom is something done under pressure. You submit, you subject yourself to it. I'm still an old romantic and claim love. What is love, personal erotic love, other than a form of very brutal and cruel servitude volontaire. I accept to serve the man, the lady and so on. And that's the paradox. So when you think I'm playing some cheap postmodern paradoxical games, no, I simply appeal to your experience. If you're fanatic in love, serving the guy, the lady, you don't experience it as simply serving as opposed to your freedom. You experience this directly as the highest form of your freedom. And it's the same in in politics. The example that I often used here: your count, okay, your country, your political cause is in danger and you decide to join this cause. You serve your cause, but you experience this as your utmost act of freedom. So again, what I'm just claiming is that the paradoxes that I'm trying to describe are not abstract conceptual jokes, they are part of our very intimate daily experience. How when you feel free in your daily life, usually it means you are, and Plato saw this very clearly, it means you are simply fully enslaved to your to your to your arbitrary passions and so on and through them to the existing system and so on and so on. And I'm not afraid to say this: in a way you have to be forced, awakened to be free. You need some call, somebody has to push you into it minimally. So ah, now we slowly approach my point. Where do we have here the Möbius strip? You know the basic structure, I will show it immediately, of Möbius strip is, you know how it is twisted. You progress on one side Oh my God, you have it here, I'm not sure, okay but you know better than me at you progress on one side you find yourself on the other side. Again I will show it immediately. This is what happens here, we don't simply have freedom servitude. If you go to the end in freedom and grasp freedom in this arbitrary way: free means I do I work for my pleasures, I do whatever I want and so on and so on, you find yourself in servitude volontaire, serving the system. While on the other hand, the other type of freedom, highest freedom, is again serving a cause but again in a different way. But in both cases, you know, going progressing on the side of freedom you find yourself serving something, a cause or whatever. And this is the basic paradox to be to be to be accepted. So we begin with now, I will just first show you and then I will describe them and maybe give you some hint. Then we go on. You know what, let's do it now after and yes, I will so that I will not, because it will give me a heart attack if I jump up and down and repeat it. Let's begin with this one. Yes, yes. So, these are the three and then I did something so humiliating from Wikipedia or even YouTube. I copied some. So this upper one, the green one is of course the Möbius strip. You see the point, you follow the line around, you find yourself at exactly the same place but on the opposite side. Then next one, this crazy ball is the cross-cap, which is, it will be explained immediately through a short movie presentation, which is the can be topologically developed from a redoubled Möbius strip. What's interesting here, I think it's a perfect visualization of the minimal coordinates of an antagonistic totality, let's say class struggle. How it appears to be a perfect ball, round form, but you see this is crucial, the down you have we have the line which is really a radical cut. The two sides are not clearly coordinated and so on and so on. It's like class struggle, if you want. And then the most interesting one, my God, what you can develop from this one cross-cap. Why is it so interesting? It is that up there you fall in and you make the turn and you find yourself inside on the opposite side. I will develop this later today but mostly two days in detail how this, I think, inside, being inside looking at it is Plato's Cave. And this turn, U-turn, it's precisely the turn of subjectivity. Okay, let's do now so that you will get it all these transformations. Let's let's do first this one. Let me show you some. Does it work? Yes. I'm sorry, I'm sorry but I just wanted to make it clear. How do you get from Möbius strip to cross-cap. Okay, now I will do something totally crazy and jump to my last example. It's more amusing because I think I liked it very much when you laughed a little bit. You were right. Isn't it that especially in the last case of Klein bottle, there is some undescribable not clear obscene eroticism in it. Didn't you have the feeling that there's something dirty is going on definitely there. And okay, we will develop later what, but this is just so that we get with this over, then I will go into much more detail. So I wonder, this is like now a small detour because we do have a minimal Möbius strip line in the sense of you follow a certain direction to the end you find yourself on the opposite side. It's a beautiful example from a movie which, I don't know why because it's a little bit simplistic but it affected me deeply. Did you see the movie, I think it still plays in movie theaters, not Dunkirk, but Wind River. I really liked it. Okay, it's a little bit simplistic and so on, but you know why I liked it? Because although it was done by a white man, Native American Indians, whatever, for reasons well-known, anti-racist reasons I prefer the term Indians. Because Native Americans what does it mean, that they are part of nature or what, I mean. So they were so fascinated by it that they offered him million dollars, one reservation which was lucky with casinos I don't know. So they immediately recognized in it that it's not this white patronizing horror, it's a okay, what I'm the story is clear that it's simple. In a Wyoming reservation in the north of United States, they found a dead girl, they find the body of a dead girl who was raped and running for miles in the snow in mid-winter. Then the hero, a hunter white guy there protecting wild animals on the reservation, collaborates with a relatively honest good FBI girl to solve the problem. And you will just see, don't be afraid, the final scene where he comes to the father of the killed girl, the hero, and he also we learn that his daughter was also killed three years ago in a similar way. And just tells him that he found the murderer and so on and so on. And it's a beautiful scene because he comes to the house of the father in total distress and he finds father painted with some weird blue and white colors. And ask listen, I hope it will be understandable, I'm very sorry that's the only copy that I was able to get it, pirated of course. There are some strange, I even don't know are they Chinese, Korean or Japanese subtitles, but it's a wonderful, so short simple dialogue because the guy, the Indian in mourning, says simply I have my death face on. And the hero ask him but how did you learn, how do you know, and he says I don't know, there is nobody to taught me, to teach me how to do it. I just invented it myself, you know. And then the guy said but I have some good news, my son who was a delinquent and it shows the desperation on the reservation, is called me, he was released from prison, and then he says as soon as I will wash off my face this stupid paint, I will go and fetch him up, but I must stay a little bit here, just to sit down in silence to as an act of mourning for my daughter, and in a beautiful line of friendship he, the Indian in mourning, says to the hero, do you also have some time to sit here. And the hero says yes and they just sit down. You know why I like this? Because be listen to it carefully. When the Native American Indian father of the killed girl, when he says I wash this as soon as I wash this stupid color from my face, it doesn't mean it's bullshit because I no longer am able to do it in the authentic old way. Like if there were be my if my tribal tradition were to be still a blah blah blah. I think it's a much more refined position. In this way by saying this he fully recognizes himself as already a modern subject. He knows all this is bullshit, you know like oh this stupid face. But and that's the this Möbius strip reversal. So he goes to the end in getting rid of these traditional rituals. But nonetheless, although you are aware that they are pure nonsense, in a beautiful way you can see how the ritual as an empty ritual, you don't have to believe in anything, the ritual survives. But it's a ritual with no bluffing of you know all this stuff which I suspect some of my Native American friends told me that when we say, oh this is our ancient wisdom, beware, we are speaking for stupid tourists here and new agers, you know. That this is the how you go to the end in process of secularization, you know all this is bullshit. But maybe only at that point, and this is what you get at the end of this scene, we not only in some pseudo-dialectical sense, pseudo-religious, nonetheless you discover that you need a ritual or whatever, but in a way you discover in this minimal form where you don't have to believe in anything, none of the bullshit, the value of ritual in its empty form at its purest. And here I'm not bluffing now. You remember when I made fun with you some stupid dead tribes, maybe they can do this. This would be yeah that you know they are not stupid. It's not fuck it I always laugh when they tell me but we have, these are the tourist Indians, you know like. And many of them I read somewhere are not even authentically Native American, you know. They just know that you can earn money by visiting white people and playing on their guilt: but we have our own holistic wisdom and so on, you know. Every authentic Indian, Native American laughs at it, you know. But what interests me is how again in this totally empty way, no belief in it, the ritual survives. So let's do it and again, I will do my usual totally illegal propaganda. You can download, no you can denounce me or whatever. Let's go directly there. Ah yeah, here we are, a little bit back. I don't know why I missed it or does it have to the end, there is a feature here that I really don't like. Because at the end, if you saw the movie there is there are a couple of lines like which is statistically true that for all other ethnic groups in United States you have statistics how many girls go missing per year. For Native American girls they you don't get any statistics. It would have been very easy to get her but the rate is so high that I mean are we aware, here I get although me and political correctness when when God, Platonic God created the world, he put it the idea of me and the idea of political correctness don't overlap, you know. But nonetheless here I recognize the horror. You know that like, I already mentioned this example, for example, my Canadian friends gave it to me. There is Native American, I see more Inuit than Indian, city of way north, you know how many inhabitants of that city killed themselves in last half a year of over Like this is really a society even now in total disintegration and so on. So but to get back to this point, you see you see what I simply my point, the Möbius Möbius strip point, is this precisely when you bring secularization to the end, this I know just what expression when I wash this shit of my face or whatever, like the point is not none of this enthusiasm I take the rituals seriously and so on. You are deprived of all tradition. If anyone here it's the Native American with his colored face who is the pure modern subject. And as such you need this minimal ritual. You know who also invented this ritual, I don't have the time to go into it but, did you see a wonderful nice movie I liked it, very optimistic movie and I don't mean it as a bad joke, Lars von Trier's Melancholia. You know also when at the end when the girl Kirsten Dunst proposes that tent-like structure. It's totally wrong to put into it some kind of magic value: this will protect us and so on and so on. No, it's just the pure minimal gesture of constructing some space there. That's all, pure former pure pure formal gesture. And okay, we can go on here but again my point is simply and this is the minimum of Möbius strip how you have two lines, let's call it modern empty subject and ritual. We usually associate rituals with traditional subjectivity where as we say in our European racist way, those primitives, even if we praise them, they don't yet know the notion of modern individualism, they are deeply embedded in their stupid traditions whatever. No, but again, the true the true modernity again, the truly modern subject is that the Native American father. He does a truly modern ritual, this minimal form of ritual. How if you go to the end of modernity, ritual returns but ritual returns at its purest. And the big mistake would have been to dismiss this as oh you see we didn't yet get rid of the ritual, we have to work more to get rid of it. No, that ritual, minimal ritual sustains modernity. But let me go back to my main line. So what I will try to develop and again if I talk too much I will I will through Madison I will keep to my old rule, which means I will send you a text so that even if I get lost here you will get the stuff. And it will be really unpublished stuff mostly because it's the stuff of my next book. Okay, I want to say this that to translate it directly into Lacanian terms, what Lacan calls point de capiton, the quilting point where the two levels mix in a point, this would be this would be Möbius strip. You go on one side you find yourself at the opposite side. This simple reversal. Cross-cap is what I'm tempted to call not not quilting point but the quilting line. It's the line you remember when the strange ball gets together, you have the cut, the line. And this is for me either sexual difference or class struggle or whatever you want, kind of a cut which holds it apart but at the same time holds together a society. And then the last one, most interesting Klein bottle, this strange twisted line where from outside you find yourself inside all of a sudden looking at the wall of the cave. This would have been, sorry, this would have been I call it the quilting tube or whatever, channel, whatever. And I will try again to develop much more in detail how this how this how this works. Okay, maybe we should simply begin with the underlying ontological structure which is, to put it very simply, that of the Hegelian reversal of, as Hegel puts it apparently in a apparently in an idealist way, that the development of spirit is a closed circle where things just become what they are. Usually this is read in a totally wrong teleological way. It means nothing new in the world, everything is implicitly already there and reality is just the deployment, the actualization of what things already are potentially in themselves. So this is usual approach to Hegel, nothing really new can happen, actuality is a closed circle. At but but if we that's my point, if we read Hegel closely we can see that this what Hegel means by things become what they are is not things become what they already are but in a much more literal way, things become what they are. What you are is not fixed in advance but in a retroactive process. In an only in an open process which might have turned differently, you become what retroactively it will appear that you always already were. For example, I'm sorry for using old examples, when Caesar crossed Rubicon, he became what he was. But he was not really before crossing. Before crossing Rubicon he was who knows what, he might have turned back to Gaul, back to France today and just be another warlord there or whatever. But or my usual example, you know by falling in love you become what you are. Because when you fall in love or have another achievement, you have this feeling, now I fully am what I am. But the process is open. It's a kind of a abyssal circle. You're trying to catch yourself and you never catch yourself. There is a gap, a hole in this circularity. This is still the simple circle of Möbius strip. And precisely you pass to the other side and so on, but it's clear that there is some cut, some hole in it which propels the circle. The other one, the cross-cap is we will develop it later it's a redoubled circle where things are even more interesting in the sense that in this type of a redoubled circle it's not that things just become what they are is that here the cut, the line is explicitly posited. It's an impossible difference. By this I mean what, let's take sexual difference. Partisans of this fluidity of gender positions and so on like to claim but we cannot cut a clear difference of the two sexes. You know, we men are all a little bit women, women a little bit men, it's all fluid and so on and so on. Of course, the what is impossible is not to define a clear difference, or rather, what is impossible is precisely to translate into firm symbolic determinations difference. Difference is here absolutely but impossible. A kind of a point of reference which cannot be clearly defined but casts its shadow on all of it. This is why, for example, this is why as I develop in my books, for me transgender people are difference at its purest. Because that's the paradox, I hope you will get it, that's how I read cross-cap. You know we have a total field of sexuality but then we have that strange line which makes it totally disharmonious. There is a cut, but it's an impossible cut in the sense that you cannot even clearly define it. What so against this accusation of binary logic and so on, what Lacan means by sexual difference is precisely that it's a kind of an obstacle cut which you cannot clearly define. Sexual difference means precisely for Lacan that at the phenomenal level of our self-experience, you cannot say I'm purely man, I'm purely woman and so on. All the wealth of sexuality cannot be squeezed into this two couples. You are either a man or a woman. There's always there is always some excess which precisely bears witness to the fact that the difference, the cut is real. And the same, I don't have time to go into it now, but the same holds also for for class struggle, although the logic of course is not the same. It's that class struggle does not mean this is vulgar Marxism: there are ultimately just two classes and ultimately you are here or there. No, class struggle in its phenomenal social practice means precisely there are never only two classes. Because if the moment you could have said this is the basic class difference, you're either here or there, it's no longer class struggle. It's just a harmonious even if it's struggle all the time, it's just a harmonious division you are either here or there. Class struggle doesn't mean only we fight, it means precisely that it's not clear as it were it's not clear where you are. You all the time borrow from the opponent, you can be here, you can be there and so on and so on. Which is why again class struggle means precisely that there is always in the same way as transgender that there is always some some we can call them whatever, rebel or or or sub-proletarians or whatever you want. There is always petit bourgeois, there are always some who do not fit it. You cannot define it in a clear social way. And I will develop this in the manuscript a nice example which I developed in I forgot which one of my books maybe it's living in the end of time of the problems that, for example, it's a beautiful problem I'm sorry if you know it, in Soviet Union in early 1930s when they were doing the dekulakization, they wanted to do it in an objective way. They wanted to define precisely the class criterion. First it was it was ridiculous, if you have I don't know more than five cows and if you exploit more than five other paid workers you are a kulak, no? Then then it got more and more complex among other things also because in the chaos of dekulakization, farmers got poorer and poorer so at the end although already one cow, one goat meant you were but what I like so much is that then so they endlessly complicated the classification. They wanted clearly to define where you are. At the end they ended and sorry, with introducing a category of sub like sub-proletarian, sub-kulak. And they tried to define it in the sense that you have a just one cow or whatever, minimal, but if you look at it closely, what really meant is objectively we don't know what you are, but subjectively we think you are a danger. You know, basically it meant that subjectivity intervened. Basically, it was a concession that you cannot define who is a kulak in an objective social way, economic category. That subjectivity emerges again. So again, back to back to back to sexuality, I underline it that's my only misunderstanding and reproach to LGBT to repeat it again. First I think they are absolutely in a good sense subversive, but not in the sense they think. The big difference as the last time when I was here, I think it was Jacqueline Rose, okay to insult her Jackie Rose you know because she hates to be Is she's there? No no, it's Esther just. Ah yeah, okay she will report it, okay. No that the opposition class struggle in LGBT for me is this one. Either you think in a pseudo-Deleuzian way that there is some original plurality of positions and then bad Oedipus enters and sexual difference totalizes the entire field, so that then the goal becomes just to expand the categorization, you know instead of two sexes you have I don't know, in New York City they have a committee which decided there are I think or or whatever and then that's the illusion, each of us will have like I am a I am a lesbian butch or whatever, each of us will have a category and we will be satisfied. Or my much more pessimistic realism that sexuality as such is an embarrassment. Pure difference and and like the point is precisely that you will never find your place by definition. The moment you will be able to find your place: I am this, I am that, it's no longer sexuality. The same again the same the same with class struggle. It's always an ambiguity. Read Lenin if you don't believe me. Lenin you will think the toughest class struggle guy. But you know in his last years when Soviet Union tried to open a little bit towards trade with capitalist countries, Lenin was absolutely fascinated by big efficient capitalists. Some Americans visited him and he claimed that they are somewhere in between, although they are the top of capitalism, they are almost already running enterprises because they are so big as public property and so on and so on. You see, this is class struggle that it like I put it like this, it's not a categorization it's not that you have a social structure we are here, you are there. It's a kind of antagonism which cuts across. We have bourgeois elements in the working class, we have proletarian elements in the ruling class when it gets highly developed, they almost work like representatives of some kind of twisted communist dimension is there and so on and so on. So this would be for me the cross-cap and the interest of Klein bottle would be that I think it's the best of course emergent presentation of subjectivity of how I will even try to do it, now I'm reading books trying to bluff my way into it, quantum physics. You know, it's so interesting now it's read it, if you understand, I don't, but what I mean is that it's so tense because now quantum physicists are dropping the, let's call it, Copenhagen Orthodoxy and with revenge the ontological question is emerging. And it's incredible what type of paradoxes you have. One line, the old Copenhagen the problem is this one, you know the story. We have these ordinary particles our everyday life when we measure things and then we have this proto-virtual space of whatever you call it wave oscillations phi this quantum reality so-called. Okay, what is the status of this quantum reality with regard to the reality of ordinary objects in our reality. The radically let's call it agnostic Copenhagen Orthodoxy is ultimately no status at all, it's just epistemological like what really exist are our measurements. You measure this this type of I don't know what electrons and so on when they pop up and there. And quantum waves quantum reality is just in my mind, it's the way complicated calculation that we try to account for, calculate the process, probabilities of passing from one to another measurement, but it's meaningless to ask the ontological question. Now what is so interesting is that the latest trend and it got a big boost now with the latest Nobel Prize, no, about gravitational waves and so on. If we will have time read it, it's so fascinating, it's the opposite one. It's that not only quantum waves exist, but they are ultimately the only thing that exists. That our temporary reality is just the result of the limitation of our knowledge. Like, we cannot observe individual photons or whatever, we get statistic statistical average and this is how space, time and so on emerge. Okay, I don't want to go into it too much. What I'm saying is that here we get exactly the opposite version again. Reality is quantum reality and there are wonderful things there, I just don't know, I'm sorry for my stupidity, how serious scientifically they are, but again, I'm sorry, it sounds nice, no? No, the idea that the moment you accept this you have to posit a level at which time and space are no longer this Kantian formal empty containers so that things happen in time and space. No, time becomes its own stuff. Like time is not a form of things happening. At this wave level, time is not a time in which waves oscillate. Time is just a gravitational oscillation and so on. And they develop in a very nice way how we get although this is always a critical point, how we get from here to our daily notion of time where time is a frame form within which things happen. But ah, here I'm back at my Möbius strip. You see the beauty of it. Our ordinary everyday in our reality ontology is: we have form and content as Kant put it, but also this is our spontaneous teleology. Time is an a priori form and things happen in time. No, they say if you go to the end at the level of time, you reach the point where time itself like on Möbius strip falls into content. Time is really a temporal object, a certain wave function, which doesn't happen in time but is time itself as a certain oscillation. And then you have wonderful sub-theories, like one is that there is no time without heat. Why? Because our notion of time is strictly linked to entropy and so on to a system cooling down. Because only the moment you have heat, you have irreversible processes. And if you don't get an irreversible process like for example theoretically you can, but de facto you cannot if I burn this piece of paper. It's irreversible. It's very difficult even to imagine to run it backwards to compose out of the ashes the paper. So the idea is that time only in the sense that we know it, linear global time, the empty container in which things happen, only appears at a certain level of reality which is not the ultimate level. So back to my opposition I find this so fascinating how we have two and then they reproach us philosopher: you are crazy guy who can claim the opposites whatever you want. Well, believe me we are not as crazy as quantum physicists where really, you can claim again that quantum waves are just our calculation and more and more popular theory the exact opposite. And I will not do it now of course, but I just want to draw your attention to how the big problem for me is precisely how to pass from one level, quantum oscillation outside space and time in our ordinary sense, how the problem is not to penetrate to the original pre-ontological space of these oscillations. The problem is how to come back. The problem is and this is the big as they call it in TV quiz shows, million dollar question, no? How to come back, why how to account for the so-called collapse of wave function where you know, our ordinary reality of object emerges immanently out of quantum processes themselves. Because the problem with older versions of quantum mechanics is that it implies a certain dualism in the sense that we observers are simply here. And we measure, we observe. But in some sense, if you're consequent, we observers must be part of the very reality we measure. How to account for this? You probably some of you know it better than me that the main candidate is so-called decoherence theory, no? They try to formulate the criteria how this collapse of wave function happens following the immanent necessity of the quantum processes itself, but again it's not yet resolved the problem. And here comes, okay but let's do now some, let's move to a little bit more explanation of Möbius strip to give you some some some examples. And they will be just examples from different levels and so on and so on of this mixture of this reversal. For example, one simple example would have been the reversal of good into evil. What we all liberals as we are like to point out is how if you follow the path of religious fundamentalism then with extreme obsession with good, I think my religion tells the truth, good, then your extreme good, too much good turns into evil. In this liberal pluralist vision, evil is good in self if you get too much of it, if you absolutize it and so on. I claim my religion is the only true one and so on and so on, I end up killing all the others and so on and so on. Well this is some kind of example but I find much more attractive the opposite example that evil itself if you progress on the side of evil it can turn into good. In the sense no, I'm not trying to sell you any cheap any cheap paradoxes. I'm just trying to give you the example of, for example, take sorry well-known example, take Jesus Christ. I can well understand that from the standpoint of Jewish establishment, he was in a way evil incarnated. His existence and so on meant denying Jewish tradition, Jewish hierarchy and so on and so on. But you know then the key reversal happens when evil itself brought to the end when it becomes ruling principle defines good. But I would like to give you another example which I use in one of my books, beautiful one of this remember again Möbius strip, two lines how they are intertwined and so on. In Jean-Pierre Dupuy relies on this classical book Louis Dumont Homo Hierarchicus, where he claimed that how are always social structures hierarchies function. It's not only that you have higher level, ruling class and lower level the subordinated, but that it's a condition of power that you have higher and lower level but within the lower level the lower is higher than the higher. What do I mean by this? This you find this line from ancient India to from ancient India to Martin Luther. The problem is this one. We have two worlds, let's say the sacred world and our secular world. Or in the terms of power, religious power and secular power. Okay, in principle of course, religious power is highest, my God it deals with God and so on. But as Luther emphasized, of course religious power is higher than secular power, but within the secular power, once you're within the secular power, secular power should rule over religious power. You have to turn it around. This mean meant for Luther of course, God is higher than social order, but within a secular social order, a local prince, political power should have higher authority than than the sacred and so on and so on. So here we also can have again this dialectic of good and evil. Good, divine domain versus the terrestrial sphere of power struggles, egotistical interest, search for pleasure and so on and so on. In traditional view of religion you can say that we are dealing here with what Hegel called cunning of reason. That the high the higher power, divinity or historical reason uses our lower egotistic instincts to to realize itself. Like you know this is pseudo I claim, but nonetheless it appears to be Hegel's vision. That of course history is full of egotistic passions and so on, but these egotistic passions are just instruments used by good, by historical reason to realize a goal. As Hegel said, nothing great in history was achieved without passion. But so the point is not to condemn egotist passions. Of course Caesar was acting out of egotist motives. Caesar is not thinking: oh my God I have to fulfill my historical mission and so on but I want wealth, power and so on. But in this sense he contributed to history and Hegel even goes so far as in a very cynical way enumerates examples from which it's clear that that those rulers who were not egotistic usually meant total ruin, a catastrophe. But I think that it at a at a deeper level it's also the opposite which is a much more profound Hegelian category. It's not that the good supremely reigns and uses evil as its means, like there is some divine plan, the good which organizes history so that we do whatever we want follow our evil motives but they serve the good. What if we accept the opposite view, which is that out of the struggle of evil particular motives, good is precisely the winning side, something that good is a process of self-differentiation of evil. In the sense that again in the in the sense that what we think good is the way that a particular evil universalizes, legitimizes itself. But let's not let's not maybe lose time with it. I want to give you another example from this of this reversal of content and form. Because one big couple where Möbius strip function is content and form. You know like, you have certain content something happens in a certain form. And the Möbius strip reversal is the point where form itself falls into content. If you listened carefully you saw how I tried to I didn't explain it because it's too abstract to hint at it apropos quantum physics. How the ultimate speculative point of this gravitational wave theory is that quantum waves is that form itself becomes content. Form, temporal form which in which changes waves oscillate is disclosed to be just another more fundamental wave. Let me give you a different example. I'm just trying to illustrate to you this Möbius strip reversal. In a wonderful dream, wonderful interpretation of dream, Freud quotes a woman who presented didn't want to report to Freud a certain dream, she claimed that the dream is so indistinct and muddled that she doesn't remember it clearly and so on and so on. But then it become clear that the woman was, I'm not criticizing her, very promiscuous and the true content of the dream was: I screwed around a lot and it's indistinct and muddled muddle, she was pregnant who the father of my child is. And what Freud does in a wonderful properly Hegelian way is he reads this formal feature of the dream. The woman complaining: oh it's muddled, indistinct, I don't know what's happening, as a direct inscription of the repressed content. You see the beauty, the woman didn't want to confront the true problem. Even in the dream she was sorry of using this stupid term, afraid to directly raise this question: who is the father of my child? And I love this, I mean you know all those stupid they are now already out of fashion jokes about stupid blondines, you know. But I think some of their jokes I think they are very intelligent, they are Hegelian. Did you hear it, you know which is my favorite blondine joke? That a doctor tells her that she is pregnant, no? You must know it, what she answers: are you sure that the child is mine, you know. That's that's the Hegelian moment, if you you know. But okay, let's go here. You know that something that is excluded from the content returns in a form, returns as a form. So again, a purely formal feature, the dream is muddled, indistinct and so on, is a return of what is repressed from the content. So you see where so we don't have a simple duality. We have content, we have form and the content is too wealthy cannot fully express itself in the form. That's the simple version, you know, or even the mystical one, you know like oh there is some much I want to say, I cannot fully express it and so on and so on. No, Freud's here and Hegel's view is much more dialectical, refined. It's that no, there is content is never simply a content in itself. There is something primordially repressed in the content itself. And this repressed returns in the form. So that's the nice paradox. If you want to get in a dream or in any work of art which tries to express something, if you want to get all of content, it's wrong to say oh the form is enough I have to look deeper. No, you have to include form in the content itself. I hope I'm clear here this how does it work this Möbius strip reversal. And it's again, it's the same with that dream of Freud. The content of the dream, to get at it, you have to include the purely formal element of: the dream is indistinct, muddled and so on. This is the only trace left of the fact of what of what the dream is about. And maybe you remember in my in my books I give here a whole series of standard examples. For example, in melodramas often you have a story which is too pathetic to stage it and this so it would have been ridiculous, but this pathetic excess then returns in the form, in a too pathetic music and so on and so on. Again the secret of it's not only that content it's too mysterious, form cannot penetrate it. No, on no, content is blocked, thwarted in itself and to get at all of content you need to include the form. You know who also did this in a back to my beloved although now he is half crazy I heard Lars von Trier. Did you see his 'Breaking the Waves'? Yeah, it's not my favorite movie. I'm a primitive revenge feminist. I like what is that one with Nicole Kidman? Dogville. No, the first one. Dogville? Yeah. Isn't it, sorry I'm so low, but don't you like the last ten minutes when she takes revenge and kill them and so on. You don't like it? I love it. I love it, yes. I'm against this no it's sublime not to take revenge. Fuck it I want revenge and kill them all, you know. It's great to see Kidman doing that. Yeah, yeah, yes. It's always like yeah. So let's go on with this yes. So so content, yes so Lars von Trier, yes he gives himself a wonderful reading of 'Breaking the Waves' where the story is ultra-pathetic but it's shot in a pseudo-documentary way, handheld camera, clumsy cuts. And he says if I were to to shoot a movie directly in a way that would fit it form, it would collapse, it would appear ridiculous. So the only way to sell that story it's to oppose form to it, to do the counterform. Again you see my point, again it's not the usual hermeneutic triad: form, content, and behind the content some more mystical inner content. No, behind the content it's the form itself. There is more in the form than in the content. My okay. My final example and then I give some time for debate would be of course what I repeat I'm sorry now I warning, I will repeat some old jokes. It's of course that of the two lines, signifier and signified. The whole point of point Lacan calls the quilting point, point de capiton, is that at a certain point signifier has to fall into the signified. The way I mean I'm embarrassed to do it, I use these examples I don't know how many times, okay just permit me, you've heard it ten times okay you will hear it the eleventh time. You know my favorite jokes from Eastern Europe, that Polish one, you know what is socialism. The idea it's the result of all that is highest in the history of humanity, no? Socialism is a synthesis of first societies, ancient Greek, medieval times, capitalism, no? The joke goes like this: socialism took from primitive societies their barbarism, from from ancient Greek slavery, from medieval times feudal domination, from capitalism exploitation and now comes the beauty, you know it, from socialism the name. But you see that's the point, you have to include the name into it. And it's the same with antisemitism. It's clear that the Jew is this kind of composite picture. The of course I'm talking about antisemite figure of the Jew. They took exploitation from rich bankers, they took the the fact that they don't wash so they say from poor people, blah blah blah and at the end they took from the Jews the name. Antisemitism. You see and I think that this dialectic is in every name. When you have to and this is what I think Saul Kripke, he tragically disappeared no, was after in his 'Naming and Necessity' when he introduced this strict notion of rigid designator. That simply a name never just names a thing. Ultimately a thing becomes a thing by adding a name to it. In this sense signifier, a name, has to fall into the signified. There must be this Möbius strip short circuit. If you pursue to the end the line of signifiers, okay up to a certain point signified is on the other side, but then you change sides you encounter yourself among the signifieds. Not to mention Hegel, I was telling this to you dozens of times, how for Hegel that's why for Hegel, a species is always if we oppose sorry, a species or a genus and its species. A genus, universality, is always included as one among its species. And in a very dialectical way, for example, the point is to Marx was aware of this. You remember the classic, I often quoted it, passage from introduction to Grundrisse where Marx develops how in every capitalist in every mode of production, one specific domain of production embodies production as such. Like in medieval times it was agricultural production which colored them all, so that even artisanship, others were organized like agriculture. In capitalism it's industrial production, so that even agriculture is organized like industrial. So in other words what Marx is saying is that we don't have universal genus and its species. It's again the Möbius structure where genus has to appear as one of its species. And this is what Hegel calls coincidence of opposite. Just this reversal. It's not that stupidity of oh opposites coincide because we have many other ways of coinciding opposites. We have this mystical theological: God is so sublime that he is at the same time exists, doesn't exist, good, evil or our finite oppositions coincide there. That's not Hegel. We have another version which is Maoist, pseudo-Maoist rather primitive, which is that what is life but in eternal struggle of opposites: light and darkness, masculine, feminine, whatever you want. No, that's also not it. Again what Hegel means by coincidence of opposites it's Möbius strip. Is this simple reversal. But then it gets complicated now the concluding bad joke not obscene don't be afraid. The best way to explain next point cross-cap is: don't laugh, it's a shitty movie but I like the story, don't kill me don't prohibit me to come back. Did you see that Stephen King, not the last one 'It' but 'Dark Tower.' 'Dark Tower' it's the clearest because you know you have two realities: our world and that pseudo-Western world and 'Dark Tower' is the line which connects them. That's why they want, it's as usual with Stephen King don't underestimate him, you know. He's an interesting author in spite of all. Okay, let me stop and next time but again if we will not come to the end again, although I don't know which of you, there is one of you whose ball I want to cut and then eat them with parsley and garlic nicely. You know why? Because maybe it's not even you, I did the same in Seoul, Korea. Because I talk too much and wasn't able to give, I said okay I give you my future manuscript. Fuck you I saw it two weeks afterwards on on internet. Please don't do this to me because then I get problems with my publishers and so on. But I have it all from my forthcoming book, not the one which will be out now it already is 'Incontinence of the Void.' But maybe Alenka, is it already available? It's excellent book by Alenka Zupančič 'What is Sex?' in United States it's already on the market and it's doing very well. No no no we are now exploding, I mean, now we will really be Troika, not just me. Because Mladen Dolar will publish soon my other good Lacanian friend with Bloomsbury. We ironically refer to it as his Écrits. pages, all his texts, big book so now we are on. That's why Litsa is so busy. Sorry that's why? Litsa Thompson, that's why she is so busy, your editor. Yeah but I like her Litsa Thompson my publisher, she is great because she is this kind of a I mean this as extreme celebration of her this naughty dirty Irish girl always for my bad taste jokes you know and so on. Okay, very naughty. Okay let's stop it. So again in two days from now I will try to condense cross-cap, this structure of impossible difference, which is like redoubled two circles Möbius strip and then the trick of this Klein bottle which again is extremely interesting how you know you just it's a more complex Möbius strip, you fall in and you are outside and just continuing you look at it from the inside. What's the meaning of this especially the political use? Now we still have a little bit of time so if you want little time, some ten minutes perhaps if we take together some two or three questions, we can deal with them in the next ten minutes. Do you know, but maybe I can ask you, do you know any of good movies, I think that 'Wind River' is almost, 'It' is an interesting story but the movie is a little bit boring. Are there any good movies? Not now, just wait, 'Blade Runner' is just around the corner, it's tomorrow no? Let's hope, sorry. I've seen the IMAX, don't tell my bosses please please. Thank you. A word that cropped up a few times was opposite. Sorry. A word that cropped up a few times in your presentation was the word opposite. Yeah. But when I see that Möbius strip yeah, there's actually a visual extinguishment of the opposite. You start with two sides and you end up with one. And I'm wondering whether what you what you take opposite to to mean, is it an observation of a process, or is it one thing and another thing? So there's a Jungian term you might be familiar with, enantiodromia, which is the idea of if you take as a process a force and you push from one position to a counter-position, that's exactly where you end up, so that you know the snake eats its tail. And so I'm wondering if I could just quiz you a bit about what you have in mind when you use the word opposite and is it this observation of a process or is it actually one thing and another. It's of course in a Hegelian way I think that what you call process is in a way inscribed into the thing itself. Because I claim that the okay opposition simply the two sides are not simply cancelled. The process goes on indefinitely. They remain two sides in the same way that okay the last example I give you language. Okay, at a certain point signifier has to fall into the signified to guarantee the unity. But they are nonetheless still still distinguished. So I what interests me is that what there must be some kind of a cut cut or gap which is present there implicitly in a way. You know what I mean it's not just that instead of two sides you get okay you get one side but this side is nonetheless in a way its own opposite because remember you say you get to the same point but on the other side of the track. Because you begin here then you come back it twists around to the same point but on the other side. So the problem with Möbius strip is precisely that it blurs the line of opposition which remains here and I try to read it in this maybe a little bit primitive Hegelian way that cross-cap is then if I may put it in this speculative terms the truth of the Möbius strip because there you get the clear gap in in cross-cap no? And I will try to develop this with further elements, but you did hit the the crucial point how no the mystery is that although you arrive at the same point two sides are not really two, but this doesn't abolish the tension if I may put it like this. You know it makes the confusion the tension even even stronger in a way. That that would be my point, sorry yeah. Do you think it's really possible for the transsexual subject to avoid castration anxiety? Do you think? It all depends with what do you mean castration. I mean if you mean in this very basic Lacanian sense, then I think not only they don't avoid it, they confront it at its purest. It's ordinary male or feminine position which tries much more to avoid castration. Because you avoid castration precisely because you know castration is not I'm here a man you are there woman we are clearly delimited. This is precisely in strict Lacanian sense the avoidance of castration. Castration means that by it's a very nice again Möbius strip speculative remark on Hegel which was taken over although he was anti-Hegelian by our deceased friend Ernesto Laclau. Where he says that the basic paradox of his logic of hegemony is that external difference is always at the same time internal difference. And in this sense sexual difference is not simply I'm here you are there, and it's not this simple differentiality in the sense that man defines woman, woman defines man but simply an opposite. Like in the same way you cannot define left without right, no? You cannot define man without woman. No no no castration means that by way of being differentiated from a woman I lose myself. I at the same time lose a part of myself. The the or to put it in more simple but nonetheless speculative terms, the paradox of castration is not cut into two and each of us loses a part: I lose my feminine part, you lose your masculine part, whatever. No, that's bullshit. The point is that precisely that when you get sexual difference, if you put the two parts together you don't get the whole. Because that's precisely the ideological fantasy: men, women alone they don't work and we should have some kind of unification, masculine feminine principle harmoniously collaborating that and many the worst male chauvinists know this very well. Because even Goethe knew this that the nastiest trick of male chauvinism is to always admit that great male heroes always have a kind of a feminine power that sustains them, you know. And even Nazis like to play this game by the way, you know. Like the true male chauvinism is not screw women I am a man but it's that there is a noble creative caring side of
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femininity
femininity
Slavoj Žižek
and precisely in my most brutal male assertive position I'm sustained by that femininity. So to go back to your point, I think that it may sound a speculative sophisticated solution but I would have said that transgender people in a way experience castration at its purest without being either men or women. At its most radical, you know men the loss that sustains them both, transgender people come closest to it. No I'm not now I know what's the danger here. The danger is, I'm well aware of it, that in this way I celebrate them in a false way: yes you are authentic but then
and precisely in my most brutal male assertive position I'm sustained by that femininity. So to go back to your point, I think that it may sound a speculative sophisticated solution but I would have said that transgender people in a way experience castration at its purest without being either men or women. At its most radical, you know men the loss that sustains them both, transgender people come closest to it. No I'm not now I know what's the danger here. The danger is, I'm well aware of it, that in this way I celebrate them in a false way: yes you are authentic but then
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fuck you you are condemned to suffer all the time to be the suffering part. No, it's not necessary. I'm not claiming
fuck you you are condemned to suffer all the time to be the suffering part. No, it's not necessary. I'm not claiming
Slavoj Žižek
because they are the moment of truth they must suffer some ultra anxiety and so on. That's the beauty I think that this is the greatness of Lacan. In one of my early books I tried to read it was a provocation of course when I was looking for progressive
because they are the moment of truth they must suffer some ultra anxiety and so on. That's the beauty I think that this is the greatness of Lacan. In one of my early books I tried to read it was a provocation of course when I was looking for progressive
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Hollywood no I used as an example don't laugh please
Hollywood no I used as an example don't laugh please
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the 'Da Vinci Code' you know. But what did I do? I did not forget about all that bullshit you know Jesus Christ and so on no. You know what I liked about the denouement of the novel that obviously you can also read a novel as a psychological case of the girl Sophie being in her fantasy the daughter
the 'Da Vinci Code' you know. But what did I do? I did not forget about all that bullshit you know Jesus Christ and so on no. You know what I liked about the denouement of the novel that obviously you can also read a novel as a psychological case of the girl Sophie being in her fantasy the daughter
Slavoj Žižek
of grand grand granddaughter of Jesus Christ cannot enter sexual relationship. And at the end of the novel the solution is not oh now she found Robert Langdon a guy incidentally if I were to be a woman and the only guy would be Robert Langdon I would prefer to remain without a partner. But what is great about the movie there is emancipatory moment it's very Lacanian, is that it doesn't present herself accepting that she is the grand granddaughter and remaining asexual in the sense of avoiding heterosexuality. I think that the good point of the film is that and the novel is that it accepts this as a genuine position. And Lacan explicitly says that for example to be a how do you call it, women priest, a nun, a nun. That to be a nun is in no way a kind of a bad sublimation, you are not fully a woman thwarted you find no. It's a totally authentic position, no less authentic than being a heterosexual woman and so on and so on. So in this sense I claim you can as transsexual and so on you can absolutely construct your identity if I may use the unfortunate term in a way which will not be just one eternal suffering, you know what I mean. There are miracles possible here. I'm not condemning transsexuals into you are the authentic one and you have to suffer all the time or whatever. Sorry is the not sure we're going to have time for that. Okay but we can do a quick one. Quick question. Hi Stephen. Oh I you mentioned a video where you said the blood is evil. Yeah absolutely. Yeah. My question to you is what is love? Not what is love? I mean what is love? I mean surely love is beyond good and evil. I always was very suspicious about this Nietzschean I have no you know what I meant by this, if I may explain very briefly let's not drag on. Think about falling in love. If by evil we mean in a very formal way something which cuts into your social links and brings imbalance, traumatizes you, ruins all harmony, My God isn't this true authentic love. I always I'm not kidding, were you ever absolutely passionately in love. Doesn't this basically almost ruin your entire life. You only think about this, you neglect your friends. It's a very traumatic attachment. I mean when people claim evil is this one-sided excess instead of living a harmonious life you take one thing you absolutize it. Isn't this love? At least love is just a connection between people on on a basic level, right? What do you yes, but it's a strange connection which sabotages itself. Yeah, but it's not simply a connection among people. It's as a rule a connection among people at the expense of all others. Which is why I think love is much more evil than sexual promiscuity and by Badiou. Okay, let's we're going to have to leave it there but let me just say that you know as Slavoj puts it love must be like freedom for us Chavistas. I'm going to go to Latin America and tell everybody that we're ever more free now that we're really fucked in Brazil and Venezuela. I'm so I'm so sad that we are not in elementary school where I would with pleasure tell you: till next day there is a homework, each of you should write like two pages of a text like how did I experience love as evil and so on and then you get your your grades for that. Slavoj you
of grand grand granddaughter of Jesus Christ cannot enter sexual relationship. And at the end of the novel the solution is not oh now she found Robert Langdon a guy incidentally if I were to be a woman and the only guy would be Robert Langdon I would prefer to remain without a partner. But what is great about the movie there is emancipatory moment it's very Lacanian, is that it doesn't present herself accepting that she is the grand granddaughter and remaining asexual in the sense of avoiding heterosexuality. I think that the good point of the film is that and the novel is that it accepts this as a genuine position. And Lacan explicitly says that for example to be a how do you call it, women priest, a nun, a nun. That to be a nun is in no way a kind of a bad sublimation, you are not fully a woman thwarted you find no. It's a totally authentic position, no less authentic than being a heterosexual woman and so on and so on. So in this sense I claim you can as transsexual and so on you can absolutely construct your identity if I may use the unfortunate term in a way which will not be just one eternal suffering, you know what I mean. There are miracles possible here. I'm not condemning transsexuals into you are the authentic one and you have to suffer all the time or whatever. Sorry is the not sure we're going to have time for that. Okay but we can do a quick one. Quick question. Hi Stephen. Oh I you mentioned a video where you said the blood is evil. Yeah absolutely. Yeah. My question to you is what is love? Not what is love? I mean what is love? I mean surely love is beyond good and evil. I always was very suspicious about this Nietzschean I have no you know what I meant by this, if I may explain very briefly let's not drag on. Think about falling in love. If by evil we mean in a very formal way something which cuts into your social links and brings imbalance, traumatizes you, ruins all harmony, My God isn't this true authentic love. I always I'm not kidding, were you ever absolutely passionately in love. Doesn't this basically almost ruin your entire life. You only think about this, you neglect your friends. It's a very traumatic attachment. I mean when people claim evil is this one-sided excess instead of living a harmonious life you take one thing you absolutize it. Isn't this love? At least love is just a connection between people on on a basic level, right? What do you yes, but it's a strange connection which sabotages itself. Yeah, but it's not simply a connection among people. It's as a rule a connection among people at the expense of all others. Which is why I think love is much more evil than sexual promiscuity and by Badiou. Okay, let's we're going to have to leave it there but let me just say that you know as Slavoj puts it love must be like freedom for us Chavistas. I'm going to go to Latin America and tell everybody that we're ever more free now that we're really fucked in Brazil and Venezuela. I'm so I'm so sad that we are not in elementary school where I would with pleasure tell you: till next day there is a homework, each of you should write like two pages of a text like how did I experience love as evil and so on and then you get your your grades for that. Slavoj you
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were really good
were really good
Slavoj Žižek
today. Thanks.
today. Thanks.