Vote: For Hegel
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2011-11-24 · 1:26:05 · 11,171 words
hegel-dialecticsideologypsychoanalysisreligion-theologydemocracysexuality-genderliberalism-political-correctnesssubjectivitycapitalismphilosophy-generalcinema-art-culturehistoryeveryday-life
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture, likely at a Jesuit university in Germany, opening with a critique of the Bologna university reform before moving to psychoanalytic and Hegelian themes via Jack London's Martin Eden and the concept of symbolic castration. He defends Hegel's theory of monarchy and the necessity of contingency against technocratic expert rule, critiques the two Oscar films The King's Speech and Black Swan, and develops arguments about love, sexuality, Leitkultur, political correctness, and democratic dogma. He closes with a series of Hegelian correctives, on the rabble (Pöbel), sexuality, war, and madness, arguing that Hegel must be read against himself toward a more radical, open dialectics.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 25
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “public vs. private use of reason”
Kant's distinction invoked to argue that truly public reason allows radical thought unconstrained by problems set by others, whereas working for the state or market constitutes merely 'private' reason.
Žižek's critical formulation for the goal of the Bologna Reform: reducing universities to producers of problem-solvers whose problems are set by others, eliminating the space for radical intellectual questioning.
as “radical decentering of personality”
The existential condition in which one's identity resides entirely in the minds of others rather than in one's own substance or achievements, illustrated through Jack London's Martin Eden.
What one is in the eyes of the Other, one's socially recognized status, which is radically decoupled from one's actual properties or achievements.
The psychoanalytic name for the radical gap between one's immediate reality or actual qualities and one's symbolic title or identity as constituted by others' recognition.
Confucian ethical principle that one's duty is to fully embody the role one's name or social position designates, which Žižek uses as a foil for the Christian egalitarian break with hierarchic identity.
The condition in which bureaucratic symbolic registration operates with autonomous authority over empirical reality, illustrated by letters declaring a living person dead and demanding proof of life.
Žižek's formula for the Kafkaesque horror: not an irrational tyrant but a rationalized administrative apparatus that has lost its minimal contingent sovereign anchor and therefore runs wild.
as “post-politics”
The ideological condition in which politics is presented as mere expert administration, abolishing genuine political decision by pretending all questions are technical rather than antagonistic.
The symbolic order whose registration of facts (as in bureaucratic certification of death) has autonomous force independent of empirical reality.
The irreducible contingent element in love that cannot be grounded in enumerable properties, deployed by Žižek to argue that genuine love necessarily exceeds rational accountancy.
as “neighbor as traumatic abyss”
The Judeo-Christian neighbor (nächste) is not the comfortable fellow-man but the shocking Other who suddenly reveals an unfamiliar depth that exceeds one's communal circle of sameness.
as “Western Buddhist bullshit”
Žižek's dismissive label for the pseudo-Oriental ideology of non-attachment, don't get too close, keep distance from others, which he sees as threatening authentic Christian passionate commitment.
Hegel's concept of the structurally excluded underclass produced necessarily by modern capitalist society, which Žižek argues Hegel fails to push to its radical dialectical conclusion as a figure of universal negativity.
as “element in excess as figure of universality”
Žižek's dialectical claim that whenever a totality contains a part with no proper place (rabble, outcasts, proletariat), that excess element stands for universality as such against all particular determinations.
For Žižek, a critical Hegelian concept meaning not harmonious closure but the inclusion of all antagonisms, excesses, and excluded elements as immanent parts of the system.
The Hegelian dialectical force of antagonism and excess that prevents any social totality from closing on itself, which Žižek argues must be kept internal to the system rather than externalized as war.
Marx's catch-all category for societies that don't fit his schema of historical stages, which Žižek exposes as a negative container masquerading as a positive concept.
as “democratic dogma”
Certain ethical propositions (e.g. that rape is wrong) that must be treated as unquestionable presuppositions rather than open to debate if democracy is to function, a necessary non-negotiable floor.
Žižek redefines this German term not as cultural dominance but as the minimal set of unwritten shared dogmas or ethical substance required for diverse cultures to coexist without collapsing into regulated hatred.
Žižek's claim that human sexuality, far from being our animal residue, is the most elementary expression of metaphysical infinity, the readiness to stake everything on a particular other.
as “Kingdom of the Night”
Borrowed from Wagner's Tristan, used by Žižek to name the space of absolute deadly passion that is neither nature nor culture but a third, irreducible metaphysical dimension of human sexuality.
Kant's insight, cited approvingly, that humans possess a radical metaphysical freedom, not reducible to nature, which must be disciplined not to tame animal instinct but to control this excessive freedom itself.
Hegelian sublation, the preservation-and-cancellation of a lower determination in a higher synthesis, invoked here critically as too smooth a resolution of radical negativity.
as “Gewohnheit (habit/custom)”
In Hegel's Anthropology, the normalization of the primordial psychotic gap through mechanical custom, our symbolic universe is the routinization of an original madness.
Stories he reaches for 8
A friend in the Yugoslav army asked whether signing the military oath was obligatory or free; told it was free, he declined; after a standoff, the officer issued a written order commanding him 'to freely sign this document', a perfect performative paradox of compulsory freedom.
“I hereby order soldier [name] to freely sign this document.”
When the Pope came to crown Napoleon Emperor, Napoleon took the crown and placed it on his own head; the wise Pope reportedly told him he would not succeed in ruining Christianity because the Church had been trying to do so for two thousand years without success.
“You want to ruin Christianity. But I tell you, you will not succeed. We the Church are trying to do this already for two thousand years and we did not succeed.”
Žižek uses the Democratic Republic of Congo, a state that barely functions, with child soldiers drugged from age five, as an example of Hegelian totality: Congo is not an external exception but an integral part of global capitalism as supplier of minerals for digital industries.
“As such, Congo is an integral part of global capitalism. Congo is absolutely crucial in supplying minerals and so on for our digital industries.”
During the Austro-Prussian War, the Prussian king watched the battle in worried confusion while General von Moltke, who had already controlled everything, turned to the king at the moment of victory and said 'May I congratulate your Majesty for a brilliant victory?', illustrating Hegel's point that the sovereign need not know, only formally decide.
“May I be the first to congratulate your Majesty for a brilliant victory?”
Žižek praises the Jesuit missions (reductions) in Paraguay as an extraordinary humanitarian achievement, including printing books in the Guarani language, and defends them against both Foucault's reading as totalitarian control and the colonial-era European campaign against them.
“Do you know, for example, that Jesuits were there already printing books in their own Indian Guarani language?”
Žižek reads the film as a tragedy: the king's stutter is a healthy resistance to accepting the absurdity of his divine title; the speech therapist 'cures' him by making him stupid enough to sincerely believe 'I am king by divine right.'
“The king shouts back, 'Because I'm a king by divine right.' And then the coach says, 'Now you got it. Now I cured you.'”
Jack London's protagonist Martin Eden kills himself after achieving fame because he realizes his recognition has nothing to do with his actual qualities, he is the same person who was previously ignored, showing that social identity resides entirely in others' projection.
“He was the same Martin Eden. What made the difference? The fact that the stuff he had written appeared inside the covers of his books.”
Žižek argues the film revives the reactionary myth that a woman who fully identifies with her vocation must die, whereas men are permitted to pursue their mission, citing parallels in Hoffmann's Tales, Red Shoes, and Kieślowski's Double Life of Véronique.
“This ultra-male-chauvinist myth that while a man can be a king… a woman has to make a choice. If you identify too much with your mission, it means self-destruction, death.”
Works invoked 18
The Da Vinci Code film
Mentioned as 'one of the big candidates to the worst novel of all time' in its novelistic form; cited for the perverse economy of having Jesus engage in sex to cover the absence of any sexual tension between the protagonists.
Quantum of Solace film
The first Bond film with no sex between Bond and the Bond girl, used as evidence of the ideological tendency toward non-attachment and avoidance of passionate commitment.
Tristan und Isolde opera
Wagner's opera cited for the concept of 'the Kingdom of the Night', absolute deadly passion irreducible to nature or civilization, used in Žižek's argument about sexuality as metaphysics.
Angels and Demons film
The film version erases the sex between Langdon and Vittoria Vetra that existed in the novel, cited as further evidence of Hollywood's trend away from passionate commitment.
The Lost Symbol book
Described as one of the worst novels of all time; cited for the complete absence of even sexual tension between Langdon and the female lead.
The King's Speech film
Žižek explicitly hates the film; reads it as a reactionary story about training a man to be stupid enough to believe in his divine title, presenting ideological subjection as cure.
Black Swan film
Žižek explicitly hates the film even more than The King's Speech; reads it as reviving the ultra-male-chauvinist myth that women who fully identify with a vocation face self-destruction and death.
Called 'a very beautiful film' but criticized for encoding the anti-feminist myth: the Polish Véronique who fully commits to singing dies; the French one who withdraws survives.
The Red Shoes film
Michael Powell's film cited as another instance of the myth of the woman-dancer who must die if she fully identifies with her vocation.
A Theory of Justice book
Rawls's theory is criticized for requiring the cancellation of envy and resentment to function; in a truly just meritocracy, inequality would be unbearable because it would have to be attributed to genuine merit.
Martin Eden book
Jack London's novel used as the central literary illustration opening the lecture: Martin Eden's suicide after achieving fame illustrates symbolic castration and the intolerable gap between real qualities and symbolic identity.
Hegel's work cited for the treatment of sexuality as natural substance to be aufgehoben through Bildung, which Žižek finds insufficient, missing the third dimension of absolute passion.
Specifically the Anthropology section, cited for Hegel's deduction of the necessity of madness and Gewohnheit as its normalization, called 'incredibly actual, totally ignored.'
Tales of Hoffmann opera
Cited as an example of the traditional story type where women who pursue their artistic mission (singing) end in death, used to contextualize the Black Swan myth.
Hegel's work cited for the theory of monarchy, marriage and sexuality, and the concept of Pöbel; Žižek also criticizes Marx's early critique of it as missing Hegel's point.
Confessions book
Augustine's Confessions cited as evidence that any good Christian knows envy is irreducible, used to support the critique of Rawls's theory of justice.
Spiritual Exercises book
Loyola's Exercises cited via Eisenstein, who grounded his montage theory on them, used by Žižek to illustrate the cultural productivity of the Jesuit tradition.
Kafka's prose universe cited as the analysis of bureaucracy without a king, administration that has lost its minimal sovereign anchor and runs wild in irrational excess.
People invoked 33
Franz Kafka positive
Cited for the insight in private notes that bureaucratic irrationality is modern secular contact with the divine; and as the analyst of bureaucracy without a sovereign anchor running wild.
The general who congratulated the ignorant Prussian king on a victory he had no understanding of, key figure in Žižek's anecdote illustrating Hegel's theory of monarchy.
Thomas Jefferson positive
Cited for 'the tree of liberty must be watered with blood,' used to argue that Hegel's theory of war should be pushed toward internal political negativity and rebellion as regeneration of the state.
Mahatma Gandhi negative
Mentioned only as the opponent of Ambedkar, on whose side Žižek explicitly places himself.
Explicitly disagreed with politically, but credited with the intelligent point that market injustice is a feature rather than a bug of capitalism that makes it psychologically tolerable.
Mentioned historically as the person who hired Stalin as Politburo secretary, first offering the role to Trotsky.
Richard Wagner positive
Cited for his concept of 'the Kingdom of the Night' (Nacht) in his rewriting of Tristan, used by Žižek to name the third space of absolute deadly passion beyond both nature and civilization.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
Criticized for the claim that philosophical totality leads to political totalitarianism; Žižek refutes this both empirically (totalitarians were historicists, not totality-thinkers) and theoretically.
Mentioned as the actor playing the speech therapist in The King's Speech.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for the statement that the madman is not the beggar who thinks he is king but the king who thinks he is king, used to illustrate the theory of symbolic decentering.
John Rawls negative
His Theory of Justice is criticized because a fully just meritocracy would destroy the narcissistic illusion ('he was just lucky') that makes inequality bearable, thereby intensifying envy and resentment.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Called 'my beloved theologian'; cited for the observation that 'love your neighbor' and 'love your enemy' are the same commandment because the neighbor is usually one's enemy.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Mentioned as the theorist of liberal-democratic end of history, whose dream has been ironically 'avenged' by ex-communist administrators efficiently running capitalism.
B. R. Ambedkar positive
Described as 'a wonderful Indian politician and thinker, the great enemy of Gandhi'; cited for 'As long as there are castes, there will be outcasts,' used to illustrate the structural necessity of exclusion.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as 'my friend' who found the same 'in love without the fall' advertisement in French, used as corroborating evidence for the commodification of love.
Discussed historically: refused the Politburo secretary role as humiliating; then was 'already walking in the air' without real power, not knowing it, illustrates the gap between real and symbolic power.
Mentioned as the actress playing the ballerina in Black Swan.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Mentioned as a serious leftist who admired the Jesuits; his Lehrstücke are grounded in Jesuit pedagogical plays.
Michel Foucault negative
Criticized for painting Jesuit missions as places of totalitarian control; Žižek sees this as unjust given the historical context.
Jörg Haider negative
Named as an example of right-wing anti-immigrant politicians who claim to defend European Judeo-Christian identity while actually threatening it.
Ignatius of Loyola positive
Cited via Eisenstein's reading of the Spiritual Exercises as the ground for cinematic theory of enthusiasm through montage.
Jack London positive
Author of Martin Eden, used as the central literary illustration of symbolic castration and the gap between real qualities and symbolic identity.
Appears in the anecdote about taking the crown from the Pope at his coronation, used to illustrate the vitality of Christianity's radical core.
Krzysztof Kieślowski negative
The Double Life of Véronique is called 'a very beautiful film' but criticized for reproducing the anti-feminist myth that a woman who fully commits to her vocation dies while the one who withdraws survives.
Angela Merkel negative
Her use of Leitkultur is distinguished from Žižek's own defense of the concept, he is not endorsing her meaning of cultural dominance.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Argued to be more Hegelian than he realized: his insistence on the contingent individual event (Christ) as the only path to eternal truth is anticipated by Hegel's own logic of contingent incarnation.
Jean-Marie Le Pen negative
Named alongside Haider as a right-wing figure whose politics betray the European Judeo-Christian legacy they claim to defend.
Sergei Eisenstein positive
Cited for grounding his theory of cinematic montage of attraction in Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, used to support the progressive Jesuit legacy.
Augustine of Hippo positive
His Confessions are invoked as the source that 'every good Christian' would know, showing that Rawls's just society requires cancelling envy, something Augustine diagnosed as endemic to the human condition.
Joseph Stalin negative
Used as the central historical example of an expert/bureaucrat who believed he really knew, exactly the formula of totalitarianism Žižek diagnoses. His rise from Politburo secretary illustrates how bureaucratic power overtakes symbolic authority.
Karl Marx positive
Referenced for the insight that people treat someone as king because they think he is one in himself; also criticized for the Asiatic mode of production as dishonest negative container, and for missing Hegel's point in his critique of Rechtsphilosophie.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central theoretical reference throughout: monarchy as symbolic decentering, Pöbel as structural exclusion, totality, Aufhebung, Naturphilosophie on sexuality, theory of war, Anthropology on madness and Gewohnheit. Žižek simultaneously argues Hegel is 'not Hegelian enough' in several places.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for the distinction between public and private use of reason, and for a text on education defining man as 'an animal who needs a master' with noumenal violent freedom requiring discipline.
What it argues
symbolic castration and the gap between reality and symbolic identityHegelian monarchy and the necessity of contingency in authoritytechnocracy versus democratic decision-makingthe radical egalitarian core of Christianity vs. institutional Christianitycritique of Western Buddhism and commodified lovepolitical correctness, Leitkultur, and multiculturalismHegel's unfinished dialectics: rabble, sexuality, war, and madness
Dialectical moves 12
“A madman is not a beggar who thinks he is a king; a madman is the king who thinks he is a king.”
True pathology is not delusion from below but the refusal of symbolic decentering by the one who actually holds the title, believing one's symbolic position to be grounded in one's real properties.
“The stuttering king was right; his cure is the tragedy—he was rendered stupid enough to take his title seriously.”
What appears as illness (refusing the symbolic role) is actually healthy resistance; what appears as cure (successful identification with the title) is ideological subjection.
“Far from being the animal in us, human sexuality is on the contrary the zero level of metaphysics.”
The reversal of the standard view: sexuality is not what drags us down to animal life but what elevates us to infinite passion, making it a metaphysical rather than natural phenomenon.
“The formula of totalitarianism is not an arbitrary leader but experts taking power.”
The opposite of what is usually assumed: totalitarianism emerges not from arbitrary whim at the top but from the rationalist fantasy of direct expert governance eliminating the contingent sovereign moment.
“The more a society is rich, the more necessarily it produces Pöbel—rabble.”
Wealth and social richness do not progressively include all; the very dynamic of development structurally generates an excluded underclass as its immanent byproduct.
“The element within a totality that has no proper place is precisely what stands for universality as such.”
The excess or remainder that cannot be fitted into the social order does not simply lack a place; it occupies the place of the universal against all particular determinations.
“Kierkegaard was more Hegelian than he thought in his criticism of Hegel.”
Kierkegaard's insistence on the contingent individual event (Christ) against Hegelian mediation is itself anticipated by Hegel's own logic of contingent incarnation as the only path to universality.
“For Hegel, our symbolic universe of habit (Gewohnheit) is the normalization of an original madness.”
Cultural normalcy is not the opposite of madness but its sublimated continuation: sanity is what we call madness once it has been routinized into custom.
“To explain evil as a stain that from the right perspective contributes to global harmony is the most profound anti-Christian wisdom.”
Theodicy that reconciles evil with a higher harmony is not Christian consolation but a betrayal of the particular sufferer; Christ's death expresses solidarity with the particular, not transcendent justification.
“For Kant, public use of reason is not working for the state or community—that is precisely private use of reason.”
The intuitive association of public with state service is exactly reversed: institutional/state-commissioned thinking is private (constrained), while truly public reason is unconstrained radical thought.
“The best administrators of today's capitalism are ex-communists—this is Communism's revenge on the Fukuyama dream.”
What appears as the defeat of Communism reveals itself as its perverse victory: the post-communist managers most efficiently run the capitalist system their ideology was supposed to destroy.
“Marx's Asiatic mode of production, which appears as a positive category, is in reality just a negative container for all that doesn't fit the classification.”
What seems to be an additional positive historical type is exposed as a conceptual dustbin, the honest formulation would be 'everything that doesn't fit our schema.'
Claims 22
rejects
The Bologna university reform aims to turn universities into factories for experts who solve problems defined by others, eliminating the space for radical intellectual questioning.Bologna Reform / neoliberal university
asserts
The first intellectual task when confronting a problem is to ask whether the very formulation of the problem is already part of the problem.the nature of intellectual work
asserts
Symbolic castration—the gap between what one is in reality and what one is for others—is intolerable and can destroy desire, as shown by Martin Eden's suicide.symbolic identity and desire
rejects
The King's Speech is a reactionary film because it portrays the cure of a man's healthy resistance to his absurd symbolic title, training him to be stupid enough to believe in it.The King's Speech
rejects
Black Swan revives the ultra-male-chauvinist myth that women, unlike men, cannot identify fully with a mission without self-destruction.Black Swan / anti-feminist myth in cinema
asserts
For Hegel, the king's function is to embody radical decentering—knowing he is nothing but a projection of others—and the madman is not the beggar who thinks he is king but the king who really thinks he is king in himself.Hegel's theory of monarchy and symbolic authority
asserts
The formula of totalitarianism is not an arbitrary leader but experts taking power; democracy requires an ignorant contingent figure at the top whose decisions are not grounded in technical knowledge.totalitarianism and technocracy
asserts
Modern capitalist society necessarily produces a rabble (Pöbel) with no proper place, and Hegel fails to draw the radical conclusion that this excess element stands for universality as such.Hegel's concept of rabble and its dialectical potential
rejects
Political correctness is a fiasco because it tries to regulate through legal rules what should be a spontaneous shared ethical substance, resulting in regulated hatred rather than genuine coexistence.political correctness
asserts
A functioning democracy and multiculturalism require not only laws but a minimal set of shared unwritten dogmas—a Leitkultur in a non-hierarchical sense.democracy, multiculturalism, and Leitkultur
asserts
Democratic elections must contain an element of contingency and cannot be grounded purely in measurable objective abilities, because eliminating contingency destroys the narcissistic buffer that makes inequality tolerable.democratic contingency and Rawls's theory of justice
asserts
Love is by definition contingent and cannot be grounded in enumerable qualities; the moment you can give reasons for love, it is no longer love but mathematical accountancy.the nature of love and its commodification
rejects
The contemporary tendency toward non-attachment and avoiding deep commitment—'Western Buddhist bullshit'—threatens authentic Judeo-Christian passionate love and community.Western Buddhism / non-attachment ideology
asserts
Human sexuality, far from being our animal residue, is the zero level of metaphysics—the space of infinite passion—and Hegel is not radical enough in reducing it to nature subsequently civilized.sexuality and Hegel's Naturphilosophie
asserts
Hegelian totality does not mean harmonious closure but the inclusion of all antagonisms and excesses as immanent parts of the system; excluded elements like Congo are integral to global capitalism, not external exceptions.Hegelian totality and global capitalism
asserts
The correct move today is back from Marx to Hegel: the Marxist notion of proletariat is too narrow, and the contemporary figure of the excluded is closer to Hegel's rabble.Marx vs. Hegel on social exclusion
reframes
Hegel's theory of war as external shock needed to restore universality should be pushed further toward Jefferson's idea of internal rebellion that regenerates the state.Hegel's theory of war and political negativity
rejects
Marx's Asiatic mode of production is not a genuine positive category but a negative container for all societies that do not fit the primary schema—a dishonest residual category.Marx's theory of historical stages
asserts
The Jesuits' reductions in Paraguay, far from being totalitarian control as Foucault implies, were a genuine achievement of humane colonial-era governance and an instance of progressive Christian practice.Jesuit missions in Paraguay and Foucault's reading
reframes
Christ's 'If you do not hate your father and mother' does not mean detachment but the founding of a new egalitarian community outside traditional hierarchical social bonds.Christ's saying on family and Christian community
rejects
Dogmatism is not a priori the enemy of democracy; totalitarian regimes were typically contingent historicists, not philosophical totality-thinkers, refuting Levinas's claim that totality leads to totalitarianism.Levinas's critique of totality and its link to totalitarianism
asserts
Continuous surveillance-based evaluation in progressive schools, contrary to its intention, increases anxiety because it eliminates the minimal gap between performance and symbolic registration.assessment, contingency, and educational anxiety
Quotes 15
“The first thing when we confront a problem, the first question to ask is: what if the way we formulate the problem is already part of the problem?”Slavoj Žižek · intellectual critique as questioning the problem's formulation
“Something has gone out of me. I have always been unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being sated with life. Life has so filled me that I am empty of any desire for anything.”Slavoj Žižek · desire destroyed by symbolic saturation (Martin Eden)
“A madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king; a madman is only the king who thinks he is a king.”Slavoj Žižek · symbolic decentering: pathology of believing one's title is grounded in real substance
“We should learn to become stupid again. The master should believe that he is naturally a master and our lives would be better. Well, I hope this is not the only way to resist Hitler, to become stupid.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of The King's Speech and ideological stupidity as solution
“The formula of totalitarianism is not an arbitrary leader. No, it's experts take power.”Slavoj Žižek · technocracy as the true form of totalitarianism
“We will enable you to be in love without the fall.”Slavoj Žižek · commodification of love: erasing the contingent fall that constitutes genuine love
“The Bible says 'love your neighbor' and 'love your enemy,' and it has good reason to say both these things because the two are usually the same.”Slavoj Žižek · Chesterton on neighbor and enemy as identical
“Human sexuality, far from being at its most elementary what is animal in us, it's on the contrary the zero level of metaphysics.”Slavoj Žižek · sexuality as metaphysics, not animal nature
“As long as there are castes, there will be outcasts.”Slavoj Žižek · structural necessity of exclusion in hierarchical societies
“I would like to live in a society where rape is, as a simple dogma, presupposition, accepted as something ridiculously wrong.”Slavoj Žižek · democratic dogma: some things must be beyond debate
“Even Hegel explicitly says this: it is only possible for the human animal to break with nature—the first form of break is madness—and our symbolic universe of Gewohnheit is the normalization of this madness.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's Anthropology: habit as normalized madness
“You want to ruin Christianity. But I tell you, you will not succeed. We the Church are trying to do this already for two thousand years and we did not succeed.”Slavoj Žižek · the radical core of Christianity survives institutional failure
“The tree of liberty has to be watered from time to time by blood to flourish.”Slavoj Žižek · Jefferson on internal negativity as condition of political renewal
“My formula is, as a leftist in some sense communist: back from Marx to Hegel.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's political-philosophical programme
“The crucial ingredient of functioning multiculturalism? Good racist jokes.”Slavoj Žižek · ethnic self-mockery as vehicle of genuine solidarity
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
First, I would like to emphasize the important moment where we are. I experienced this here today after I arrived; we passed a door where it says Institut für Philosophie here und leadership. No, I was a little bit shocked, and then Herr Finke explained to me that this is all part of this Bologna Reform Umstrukturierung where, you know, even we philosophers have to look for connections with business and so on. No, why do I find this problematic? Not just for obvious reasons, kind of easy critique, but do you know that the goal of this reform and all pressures connected with it is a very precise and can be put in the terms of Immanuel Kant when he opposes public use of reason—I think the German term is öffentliches Vernunftgebrauch—and private use of reason. You know the paradox: for Kant, public use of reason is not working for the state, for community; this is for Kant precisely private use of reason, when your reason is in advance limited by tasks, problems decided by others, while in public use of reason you can afford to be radical. So this is what I think is the ultimate dangerous goal of this push towards reform, which is now, as we all know, acquiring almost ridiculous, threatening dimensions, for example in England, in Netherlands. This idea, to put it very simply—I simplify, but it's true—they want to make ultimately out of universities factories for experts. I participated in a debate two years ago, three years ago, in Frankreich, in France, where I—there was also a politician, you remember this was the time when cars were burning in Paris suburbs—who explained to me, I'm grateful to him, very clearly. He said, "Who needs your big metaphysical philosophical thinking? Look, now cars are burning in the Paris suburbs. So what we need are psychologists to teach us how to contain, how to control the crowd. We need urbanists to teach us how to structure the city so that massen crowds cannot gather too easily," and so on and so on. Sorry, but this is not intellectual life. Intellectual life is first and foremost something else. It's not to solve problems formulated by others. It is to—the first thing when we, if we want to be intellectuals, when we confront a problem, the first question to ask is: what if the way we formulate the problem is already part of the problem? That we mystify the problem. For this type of thinking, where you are not simply expert solving problems formulated by others, there is unfortunately less and less space. And I think it's again extremely important to insist on this. And frankly, let's not forget—I'm serious here, I've written three books about it—that if there is some meaning in Jesus Christus Spaltung split with Jewish establishment, it's precisely that the establishment of Herod's state was, if you wanted, private use of reason and the community of believers of Christ was public use of reason. This is how I read these provocative lines, you know: "If you don't hate your father, your mother, you are not my follower." No, it doesn't mean some Oedipal stupidity that, "Come to me to Christ and I will help you to finish your fight with your parents." For me, the way I read it—I wonder if you will agree—father, mother, sisters stand here for this traditional hierarchic social community. And the idea is that there is, maybe for the first time in history, an egalitarian space outside this hierarchic order. So I am—ich bin dankbar for what you said that Jesuiten und Žižek, das passt nicht zusammen. Yes, I agree, but then also, you know I'm in good company. Die jüdische Staat von zwei tausend Jahren und Jesus hat auch nicht zusammen gepasst. It never belongs. And on the top of it, I should say, you Jesuits were for me always the good guys. You have a wonderful tradition, starting, for example, with—are you aware how uniquely, unique it was historically? You remember in, I think it was sixteenth, in late seventeenth, early eighteenth century, the so-called missions or reducciones in Paraguay. I mean, this was the worst of European colonialism. Not missions themselves, but the way the big colonial powers, Portugal and Spain—Portugal dominating Brazil, Spain dominating all other Latin America—out of pure envy or colonial interests, they manipulatively adopted this hatred of Jesuits which was at that point, it was popular, as you know, in Europe to hate Jesuits, to justify this totally unfounded attack on the Jesuit state there. And you know what a good job Jesuits were doing there? Do you know, for example, that Jesuits were there already printing books in their own Indian Guarani, or how is it called, language? Can you even imagine, just if Jesuits were allowed to do their work to the end, how the entire picture of Latin America would have been different? And so I don't quite agree with those followers of—not me, I'm not a postmodernist as you rightly said—followers of like Michel Foucault, who paint this terrifying picture of Jesuit mission as some places of totalitarian control and so on and so on. Even Hegel, in a not quite justified way, makes some fun of this. But nonetheless, if you put it in the context of that time, this was paradise compared with all things that went around. And there are other things, like as a leftist, I'm telling you, I barely know a serious leftist who doesn't like Jesuits. From Brecht, we know very well that Brecht based his Lehrstücke on Jesuit plays. Eisenstein, cinema: do you know that Eisenstein wrote a wonderful piece where he founds his theory of how montage of attraction in cinema should generate enthusiasm, he grounds his text on Loyola's Exercises and so on? So no, wir sind hier unter Parteigenossen, how you say, no, so don't be—give me a chance, no. So now, unfortunately, we have to do some serious work and I ask kindly for your patience and tolerance. I would like to begin with a literary reference which maybe will surprise you. A work today half forgotten but interesting: Jack London's Martin Eden. You know, story of a writer, artist, who at the end kills himself by drowning. How did Martin Eden, the novel's hero, arrive at this point of despair? What pushed him to suicide was his very success, which was for him, for Martin Eden, totally enigmatic. After long years of struggle and hard work, Martin finally succeeds, becomes a famous writer. However, while he is living in wealth and fame, one thing puzzles him. Here now comes a quotation: "A little thing that would have puzzled the world had it known. But the world would have puzzled over this bepuzzlement rather than over the little thing that to him, to Martin Eden, loomed gigantic. Judge Blount, a rich figure in the novel, invited Martin to dinner. That was the little thing, or the beginning of the little thing. He, Martin, had insulted Judge Blount, treated him abominably, and Judge Blount, meeting him on the street, invited him to dinner. Martin thought, reflected on himself on numerous occasions on which he had met Judge Blount, and when Judge Blount had not invited him to dinner then. He, Martin, had not changed. He was the same Martin Eden. What made the difference? The fact that the stuff he had written appeared inside the covers of his books. But it was work performed. It was nothing new. It was something he wrote long ago," and so on and so on. End of quote. What Martin Eden cannot accept is the radical gap that forever separates his, let's say, real qualities—being a writer, having certain features as a person—from his symbolic status in the eyes of the other. He was treated as trash, no one, ignored by the rich. And he feels, "I did not do anything new. I'm exactly the same person. All of a sudden everyone is inviting me. What is going on?" All of a sudden he is no longer avoided by respectable public. He is a famous author invited by the pillars of society. But again, he is fully aware that nothing changed in him in reality. He is the same person as he was. What Martin Eden cannot accept is this radical decentering of his personality, which as Jack London puts it, resides in the minds of others. He is nothing in himself. He is just a concentrated projection of others' dreams. This realization kills his desire. A quote from Martin Eden: "Something has gone out of me. I have always been unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being sated with life. Life has so filled me that I am empty of any desire for anything." End of quote. So it is this conclusion that he was nobody, nothing, which drove—which pushed him to suicide. You know, it's this—this full existential awareness of how I am something for the others, my symbolic identity. But this has ultimately nothing to do with what I am in myself, not in the sense of some deep psychology, but in the sense of what I do, my achievements, and so on. This gap is intolerable for him. He becomes aware that what he is in himself doesn't matter. He functions socially as strictly what he is for the others. This also kills his desire because there is also an erotic subplot where the woman, his love object, who previously ignored him, all of a sudden now discovered what a great guy he is after his fame. So he cannot live with this gap. Now we are already in the middle of psychoanalyse, psychoanalysis, because what in psychoanalysis we call symbolic castration, it's nothing mysterious. It's precisely the name for this gap between my immediate reality and my symbolic title, what I am for the others. The problem is that in our daily life, there is always some kind of mystification, or as already Marx put it, people think—people treat someone as a king because they think he is a king in himself, but in reality someone is a king because people treat him like a king. And you know, for political leaders, the problem is always how to blur this clear distinction. Politicians are always afraid that they will be caught in a situation where people will clearly perceive that they are nothing in themselves, that there is no substance for their authority. Now you will tell me: what has this to do with our predicament today? It has. Let me do a little bit, before we go on to more serious waters, a little bit of analysis of—I hope some of you saw these films—the two films which triumphed at the last, this spring Oscar ceremony: The King’s Speech and Black Swan. I hate both films. Why? The problem of The King’s Speech is what? You know, it's the story of British king, I think Edward whoever, who before becoming king has the problem of stuttering. And then we get the Australian coach, trainer, who teaches him how to speak properly. Okay, there is an interesting here political background also, because obviously the true opponent of the king, the guy who knows how to speak, is Hitler, of course. And you know, it's this back, but this is not central. I want to propose a simple, naive but I think correct reading of the film. I think that the king when he stutters, he has right. It's—he has a great mind. He knows that, "My God, why am I a king? This is stupid." He simply stutters as a kind of a very reasonable resistance to—wait a minute, what is this comedy? People treating me like a divine anointed king, and I cannot take it seriously. And his stuttering is a kind of a resistance to seriously accept this title. So I think it's really a very sad story. It's a story about how someone who had normal Christian democratic reflexes is then trained through a coach, a trainer, to become stupid enough to take seriously his title. It literally happens, if you saw the film, towards the end, when the trainer, played by Geoffrey Rush, sits at the king's chair. And the king, furious, said, "How dare you sit there? This is my chair." The trainer asked him, "Why is this your chair?" The king shouts back, "Because I'm a king by divine right." And then, this is the most reactionary moment of the film, the coach says, "Now you got it. Now I cured you." Yeah, but it's a very sad end of illness. He simply literally rendered him stupid enough to play seriously the role. And I think—I don't have time to go into this—I think that this is the greatness of the Gospel, one of the marginal, not often, not noted features. The way I read the Gospel, Christ is doing this all the time. You know how, for example, when he is asked some question, Christ says, "I will tell you a parable, a story." But then what regularly happens is that not only does this story explain nothing, but you know the problem is then how to read this story. It's all the time this kind of provocation, precisely a spontaneous, beautifully done revenge against this type of stupidity of, you know, simply believing "I am who I am" and so on and so on. So again, what the movie says, the message is: the only solution to our crisis is to restore divine or paternal, whichever authority. And the movie is very cynical because the message is: we should learn to become stupid again. The master should believe that he is naturally a master and our lives would be better. Well, I hope this is not the only way to resist Hitler, to become stupid. Now, just briefly, let's go to the other side: the film Black Swan, the feminine counterpart. You remember the story of a ballerina, played by Natalie Portman, who gets so obsessed by her role that at the end it's death. Oh, this is even worse, I claim, in what sense? Are we aware that this film revives, resuscitates the most reactionary myth you can imagine? This ultra-male-chauvinist myth that while a man, at least, can be a king—that is to say, as a man you can have your symbolic identity, title, Herr Professor, doctor, whatever, your public role, but at the same time you can enjoy private life—while a woman has to make a choice. If you identify too much with your mission, it means self-destruction, death. It's, you know, this motive that we find, for example, in many traditional stories like, you know, Hoffmann’s Tales, where at the end usually it's singing, not dancing. Although in Red Shoes, the nice film by Michael Powell, also dancing. This idea that we men are allowed to follow our mission, to be fanatics; with women, it's more problematic, it's death at the end. So the woman should stop and withdraw. And even in some contemporary films, unfortunately, you have this anti-feminist myth. For example, a very beautiful film: Krzysztof Kieślowski, The Double Life of Véronique. You know, remember it's the parallel story of two Véroniques: the Polish one fully identifies with singing, dies; the French one knows it's too risky, withdraws, happily survives. What I wanted to show you is how precisely today, in our critical times, when people start to doubt their, let's call it, symbolic public identity, the temptation is great to play this—to enact, to push for this return to your identity which is inscribed into your name. Even in Communist China today, there is a massive return to—sorry—to Confucian ethics. You know, Confucian ethics is precisely based on so-called rectification of names, like be truly what your name says. Like, you know, this traditional ethics where your ethical duty is to fully fit the particular role that you have in the corporate social body. And ironically, even today in China, the Communists fully adopted this logic. When I visited China, I asked them, "In what sense are you still Communists? Isn't it," I told them, "which is true, that this is the biggest revenge of Communism on the Fukuyama dream, on the end of Communism, liberal capitalism? Yes, but it looks more and more that the best administrators of today's capitalism are ex-communists." No, this is their revenge. So they told me, "No, no, no, it's no longer Communism. Today we define our goal as harmonious society." Okay, I asked them, "Give me a stupid, simple explanation. What do we mean by this?" They told me, "A harmonious society is a society where everyone does his, her, their particular duty. A leader is a good leader, father a good father, worker a good worker, wife a good wife," and so on and so on. So of course I exploded. I told them, "This is so nice because we don't have here any multicultural misunderstandings. We know what this is. In Europe, we call this corporate fascism, you know, like feel at home here." No, so again, if you are truly Christians, you should explode here. Because I think the very idea of Heiliger Geist, of Holy Spirit, breaks with this. You know, the most beautiful part for me in Paul's letters is when he does refer somewhere—I must admit I forgot where—to this corporate metaphor, you know, society as a human body. But did you notice how he turns it around? He says, "No, for us Christians, precisely the lowest member of the body can be the highest," and so on and so on. This is the big temptation today. Okay, but nonetheless, so now we have this gap between what I am in myself, in my reality, and my symbolic identity. And I claim that for Hegel—now first I want to do my usual crazy thing: defend Hegelian notion or deduction of the King, of monarchy. It's much more crazy than you think. For Hegel, the definition of a king is precisely—it's a very tragic position in a way—it's a subject who accepts this radical decentering. The Hegelian King knows totally, "I am nothing. I'm just a function of what people think that I am. The only reality that matters is my penis. My duty is to bring—to produce, to produce next kings and, as Hegel says it openly, the duty of the King is to sign documents. He doesn't have to know what he is signing. This is decided by ministers who know," and so on and so on. So what does this decentering mean? That has to be accepted as a king, which again is the exact opposite of the king who believes that he is a king. You know, like Jacques Lacan has this wonderful statement that a madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king; a madman is only the king who thinks he is a king. That is to say, a king who really thinks that in himself he is what people take him to be. Maybe you know it, maybe not—I love it—there is a wonderful anecdote about what happened during the big battle between the Prussian and the Austrian army in I think, Prussian-Austrian War, where the Prussian king, formally the supreme commander of the army, was observing the battle from a nearby hill. He looked worried at what appeared to him the confusion of the front where, you know, to him it looked the confusion, some Prussian troops were even retreating, so he was very worried. Then the famous General von Moltke, the famous strategist who planned the battle, at a certain point when the king was still worried, totally confused, turned to the king and told him, "May I be the first to congratulate your Majesty for a brilliant victory?" No, this is what I like. The idea that the King, who was the master, the total commander, was totally ignorant of what goes on. Already everything was controlled by Moltke. Nonetheless, formally the king was the boss, so he congratulated the king. And I think that this is what Hegel was deeply aware of. And I think it's Hegel's Christian moment at his best, especially actual today where, I don't know if you noticed it, but we are slowly stepping out of democracy into expert rule, literally. Did you notice the strange thing that happened in Greece recently? The Prime Minister proposed a referendum; all Europe was in a total panic. "My God, ask the people! Horror!" Then the Greeks decided just to nominate totally non-legitimized a pure technocratic expert government. "Oh, we can live in Europe," and so on and so on. And it's not just Greece; in Italy it happened the same, and so on and so on. What Hegel knew is that the greatest threat is when experts, those who are directly legitimized by their knowledge, abilities, take power. That this is the formula of totalitarianism. The paradox of Hegelian Staat der Vernunft, rational state, is that you must have an ignorant idiot on the top who decides. You can have experts, but they only give counsels, proposals. The decision itself, that the gesture "Yes, no, this is now the law, this is not the law," must not be made by experts. Here I think—I don't have time to go into it—Marx totally missed the point in his early critique of Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie, where he makes all the fun of Hegel and so on. And history had a great revenge on Marxism here. Because in Stalinism, we precisely got a master, a leader, who thought that he knows, really. Stalin was not just like a king. Stalin was not just a symbolic top. The whole machinery was to demonstrate that he really knows. And then you get the nightmare that we got. It's the same with, for example, among other things, with Kafkaesque bureaucracy. People do not often notice that this abyss, horror of Kafka's universe, is not because we have some higher authority there which is purely irrational. No, it's bureau—the definition of Kafka's universe is bureaucracy without a king, which then runs crazy. The formula of totalitarianism is not an arbitrary leader. No, it's experts take power. And you can even find this at the literal level, like: did you notice that, for example, Stalin's origins are not the leader? He was—the biggest mistake of his life, probably—hired by, hired as it were by Lenin as, you know, in twenty-two, I think, or twenty-one, Lenin said, "Oh my God, we have so many things to decide in Politburo, we need someone just to take notes and put things in order." So because Stalin was at that time considered a kind of a local idiot of the Politburo, first Lenin proposed it to Trotsky. Trotsky said, "No, it's too humiliating, I don't take it." So Stalin said modestly, "Okay, I will do it." And then you know, two years later, Trotsky—Trotsky was a little bit stupid there if you read history, because Trotsky believed in himself. He thought, "Who cares about this small bureaucrat? I will make one big speech and Stalin will be out." Well, he noticed, you know, Trotsky was really—it's tragic—in the, from twenty-three to twenty-five, six, Trotsky was like, you know that famous scene from Zeichentrickfilme cartoons where a cat walks above the precipice and falls down only when it notices that, no? Trotsky was already walking up in the air. He was totally without power but he didn't know it. Then in twenty-six, I think, he was reminded by Stalin, "Hey, look down, there is nothing." And he went all of a sudden. So again, I claim that this lesson again is actual especially today when more and more politics is presented to us as simply the art of expert administration. That this is post-politics, this is the end of politics. You know why? Because the price we pay is that what is presented to us as expert knowledge is not really expert knowledge. First, I find it a little bit ridiculous to put bankers on leading positions, like now in Greece and Italy. Wait a minute, I mean, do they really know? I think the best argument is that they brought us into the crisis in which we are now. So but let me make a more important point, a slightly nonetheless more refined point. The point here is what? Let me go to another topic which may appear different but it's basically the same, I claim. Did you notice how whenever you have the procedure of measuring a qualification, grading in school and so on, it's never a simple, flat procedure in the sense of "we measure it, that's it"? There is always a minimal gap between the actual procedure of grading, whatever, and the public declaration of the results. And you can experience this quite literally. You know after you—isn't it that when you do an exam, even if you are pretty sure that your answers were perfect, there is always this minimum of uncertainty? You know, it's the gap between the reality and its symbolic registration. All things can be done in reality, but you never know what will happen. And back to Kafka, this is, I think, the great mystique of today's bureaucracy. It wants to be rational, expert bureaucracy, but this gap explodes again and again. For example, from Greece itself, I have a friend in Greece who told me his father, who is very old, stopped getting pension money for three, four months. So he complained, wrote to the ministry, why not. And I love this example. I couldn't believe that it's true, but I saw the document. Okay, it was translated to me from Greek, but I learned enough, I know enough Greek to see that they didn't lie to me. Namely, he got—father—the message from the ministry which literally involved this pragmatic paradox. The letter was addressed to him as a living person, but the letter said something like, "Sorry, but according to our documents, you are dead for three months. Could you please visit us and prove that you are alive and then you will get your money back?" This is from what bureaucracy lives, this gap between, you know, something can be true in immediate reality, but if bureaucracy says something, yo, it's an—in this way, I'm tempted to read Kafka, Franz Kafka, when he wrote in some of his private notes that in our godless times, often these irrationalities of bureaucracy are the only contact we have with the mysterious divine or whatever, you know. This total miss—like, am I dead, am I alive, or whatever. Or how even—and the stories, we can multiply them, can be wonderful here. I have a lady, I know her, an old lady in France. Again, it's not a joke. This lady got a letter from city authorities that her identity card was stolen, so she should visit them there and demand a new card. She went there and said, "Listen, I have here my carte d'identité, they call it. I have it here, what's the problem?" Ah, she got the answer of a lifetime. The bureaucrat told her, "I don't care what you have there. Officially, your card is stolen, so what you have in your hand is an illegal document. Destroy it and ask for a new one." Now, if this is not divine dimension in secular times, then I don't know what is. To go even to the end here, the most beautiful moment of this madness happened in the army, I'm sorry if some of you know the case but it's beautiful, in the army, Yugoslav army, thirty years ago to a friend of mine. You know that as in every army, after the first one, two weeks of training when you are acclimatized to the army, you get some ritual where you swear, "Oh, I'm ready to risk my life for my country, blah blah," and then you sign the document and you are in, you are fully a soldier. Okay, this friend of mine did something wonderfully naive. When he approached the officer with the big book where he would have to sign, he said, asked the officer a simple question: "Is my signing this oath obligatory or free?" Officer told him, "My God, we cannot order this, it's free." "Okay," then the soldier said, "If it's free, I will not sign it." Then the officer told him, "Are you crazy? You will be arrested," and so on. Okay, after a long struggle, my friend told the officer, "Look, let's make a deal. I will sign it if you give me a written order that I have to sign it." And my friend did obtain a document which is, I think, a legend—I have a photocopy of it—where officer says, "I hereby order soldier [blah blah, name] to freely sign this document." But you know, I don't think this is simply a totalitarian mechanism. Isn't it that at the most fundamental level, belonging to any social order involves at one level or another this kind of a paradox? You know, you are free, you have a free choice, if you make the right choice, if I may put it like this, no. So what am I aiming at here? How again there have to be this gap of minimal contingency between measuring something in the sense of social evaluation and registering, like making it performatively stick, making it official, whatever you want. The two should not collapse. Now, it's—I even empirically can confirm this to you—in some progressive American schools, blah blah, it's fashionable to say, "We will abolish exams. Students will simply all the time be observed, evaluated by the teachers." The result is an extreme growth in anxiety and so on. Because you know, all the result is not freedom, it's all the time you feel under pressure and control. It's the same for votes. I think the worst enemy of democracy—sorry if this shocks you—is if we base our—found, ground our votes on simple actual abilities and so on. I think that all really existing democracies from Ancient Greece to Venezia, Venice—which was okay, a suspicious democracy, but nonetheless—understood well that in every democratic election there should be an element of contingency. And even, if I may permit myself here a criticism of the great liberal thinker and so on, John Rawls' Theory of Justice. I think it doesn't work, his theory. Why? Because as every good Christian who has read Saint Augustine's Confessions knows, and even Rawls admitted it afterwards, his notion of just society works only if you cancel envy and resentment. That is to say, let me do a simple experiment. Imagine that, okay, I will sacrifice you, Dominik, like let's say we are members of a society where you are—even on the market it works like this—you are successful, I failed on the market. Okay, isn't it much better for me if I am allowed to live in the illusion—it doesn't matter if it's true or not—that you are the same idiot as me or even I am much wiser than you, but you were lucky? In this way, it's much more tolerable to me. My narcissism is not hurt. I can tell to myself, "This idiot was just lucky." But imagine what a trauma it would have been for me if we were to live in a just society. Because then I would have to admit, "My God, he is richer, which means because we live in a just society, he is much more intelligent than me." Hayek, Friedrich, with whom I—don't misunderstand me—absolutely don't agree, made here nonetheless an intelligent point. He said that the market injustice of capitalism is not an obstacle of capitalism; it is what makes capitalism effective and acceptable. So again, what I want to emphasize is that this minimal gap in elections, in evaluation and so on, between the reality of the process—what we measure and so on—and the decision, that this gap has to be maintained. And this is what again Hegel was fully aware in his theory of the monarch. That Hegel says in a brilliant way when he approaches the usual critique: "But aren't you aware that if we have hereditary monarchy, then who is the king is left to pure biological contingency?" Hegel basically answers, "But this is my point." You know, this already—ah, and incidentally we could go on here into how the same even holds, don't you think, for love in a way? The love must be contingent. It shouldn't be based on actual properties. I mean, this should be, if you know minimally what is love, this should be clear to you. Like, the moment you can answer the question "Why do I love her or him or whoever?" by giving reasons, it's not love by definition. Because then we are in mathematical accountancy, like: if you permit me a male-chauvinist example, that lady has a nice smile, beautiful breasts, but that one has beautiful eyes, beautiful legs, more intelligent. So I compare, wait a minute, here only two, therefore, okay, I choose that one. This is not love. Love must involve a contingent element, as they put it, je ne sais quoi. Which is why as good Christians you should be horrified as what is going on today. Did you notice a strange tendency that we are de facto returning to pre-modern arranged marriages and dating? When I flew two weeks ago back from United States to Europe with United Airlines, I looked into their Hemispheres magazine. I found a whole page advertisement which was terrifying to me. It said something like, "We learned to outsource this and that work. Isn't it time to outsource our love life, no?" And then they went into: if you are a successful manager, businessman, you don't have time to look for your partner. You go to the agency, you basically commodify yourself. You describe yourself, your interests, qualities, and they will take care of it. What disappears here? Unfortunately this doesn't work in German, but it works in English and French. You know where the expression is precisely "to fall in love" (tomber amoureux). So I found in English and—my friend Alain Badiou found it in French—an advertisement for a dating and marriage agency where they use the same expression, and it's horrible for me: "We will enable you to be in love without the fall." But I doubt if this is love. You know, for me, love is fall. Fall means this opening to the neighbor, this "I don't know why but I am traumatized, I see you, I know." Love always has this wonderful retroactive teleology. You encounter someone on the subway, I don't know where, but once you are in love, it's always, "My God, all my life I was waiting for you." Suddenly you understand that everything was pointing towards it. This commodification of love is mixed with something else. So maybe I will challenge you here about what I see—please correct me if I am wrong—how you see you as whatever, Jesuits, Catholics, sexuality. Because are you aware that we are approaching a state gradually where passionate love itself, love or too passionate a commitment, is considered dangerous? You open yourself too much to the other. Can I give you an empirical proof which will maybe surprise you? I go now to the lowest of the low of popular culture. Did you see the last James Bond film, Quantum of Solace? Did you notice something strange? At the end, it's the first James Bond where there is no sex between Bond and Bond girl. Now you will say, "Okay, it's one case, means nothing." Ah, let's go now to really lowest of the low, and here I was on the side of the Church—I mean, The Da Vinci Code, no. Did you notice something strange? Again, no sex, love between Robert Langdon, the symbologist, and this grand-grand-grand-grand-granddaughter of Jesus Christ, Sophie Neveu, or what. And I even think that this is the utterly perverse economy of the film. That poor Jesus Christ, according to the story, had to make love—you know all this stupid theory, Christ had a child, blah blah—had to make love, be sexually active, just to cover up the fact that there is no sex here between the two heroes. Then the last novel—one of the big candidates to the worst novel of all time—The Lost Symbol: absolutely not even a sexual tension. Things get even more mysterious. If you go to the last Dan Brown film, Angels Demons, there there is sex in the novel, but no sex in the film between Langdon and that Italian scientist Vittoria Vetra. Where are we? Usually we thought Hollywood adds sex to make it more commercial; now Hollywood is erasing sex too. I'm not glad about this tendency. I think it's connected strictly with another tendency, this—what I ironically call "Western Buddhist bullshit." You know, this idea of: don't attach yourself too much to any person, whatever, keep distance and so on. This is—this is for me—this is for me something horrible. And I noticed how unknowingly even some Christians accept it this in this way. For example, at a theological conference in United States, I was part of a debate where I provoked some priests there. Okay, I asked them, "How do you read that famous statement which I already mentioned: 'If you do not hate your mother and father, you are not my follower'?" I think they gave me—some of them—a horrible answer. They told me, "You know, it's a metaphor. It really means don't get attached to persons too much." Like they fell into some kind of a New Age pseudo-Oriental bullshit. I told them, "This is a blasphemy. You are making out of Christ a kind of a stupid petty jealous God, you know. Love your wife, but no, no, I want to be loved a little bit more, you know, not too much." I told them, "You are totally wrong. When you love somebody, your neighbor, passionately, Christ is there in this love. It's not that you have on the side to love him more." Then I really loved this: one priest gave me then the strangest answer I ever heard. And then it's typical how another priest proposed another answer and so on, very self-contradictory. Then at the end, a priest told me, "Why didn't you tell us in advance? We were not prepared. You surprised us with this question." And believe me, with great pleasure I told them, "My God, you had two thousand years to prepare the answer! It's not that I invented this now!" What I'm trying to tell you this is absolutely not to make fun of Christianity, but of a deep truth that there is something absolutely worth fighting in Christianity, something so traumatic, deeply true, that it's sometimes—not always—even too traumatic for Christian institutions themselves. You know that wonderful line—it's an anecdote, I don't know if it really happened—but when Napoleon was crowned Emperor by the Pope, the rumor is that when Pope was approaching him, Napoleon simply took the crown and put it on his own head. And you know what the wise Pope told him then, Napoleon? He told Napoleon, "I know what you want to do. You want to ruin Christianity. But I tell you, you will not succeed. We the Church are trying to do this already for two thousand years and we did not succeed." Okay, it's not as simple as that, I know. But what I'm saying is that Christianity is absolutely alive in its radical egalitarian and so on core, more than ever. And it is under threat today, I claim, with precisely—here I am in an unashamed way Eurocentric—precisely with this pseudo-Western Buddhism, pseudo-Orientalist approach. And it's something very dangerous happening. Which is why, if I may make this brief political intervention, you know when somebody praises European identity and so on, the threat to Judeo-Christian legacy... I think we shouldn't react like politically correct liberals who react with shame: "Yeah, we know, we Europeans did all the horrible things from Holocaust to colonization, we killed millions," and so on. No, maybe we should change the tone and be proud of European legacy. But of course not in the sense of the right-wing anti-immigrants. We should say the opposite. We should say: "Yes, Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened, but it's threatened precisely by people like—I don't know—Haider, Le Pen, whom you want. That Europe would no longer have been Europe." The real European legacy, which started maybe with Ancient Greeks, the crucial point being precisely Judeo-Christian legacy. For me, all good things begin with Book of—how do you say—Job, Hiob. The guy who was screwed by God and so on, yeah. Job, then going on to Christ, which you can view only as a repetition of Job. This is something which is not only alive but extremely important today. How can you say Christianity is no longer actual when our central—one of the central political problems today is precisely: love your neighbor. Isn't the entire populist politics today based on mistrust, on who will protect us from the neighbor? Here my beloved theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton said something wonderful. He said the Bible says "love your neighbor" and "love your enemy," and it has good reason to say both these things because the two are usually the same. I mean, the problem is there. You know, the Judeo-Christian notion of neighbor is not this comfortable communitarian notion of the guy who is like me, you know, the what we say the fellow man. Neighbor is not the fellow man. Neighbor is the fellow man who suddenly appears strange. Like, didn't it happen to you this elementary traumatic experience? You think that you know someone closely, but all of a sudden this guy does something either in the good or in the bad sense which shocks you. Like it happened to me, I thought I have a good friend, then somebody was dying of cancer and this friend of mine started to make extremely brutal, humiliating, cynical remarks. And you know, you ask yourself, "My God, did I know that person at all?" Or hopefully—that's a good sign—also in the opposite direction. This is very nice, you know, how you think somebody is simply a conformist and so on, but all of a sudden he does something heroic, unexpected. At that point you encounter a neighbor, I claim. A neighbor is something very traumatic. A neighbor is precisely this abyss of human personality outside this simple affinity where we know each other, we have our own small circle of semblance. For example, recently I saw a film—I forgot the title, I think it's a German-Polish film—you know that Polish priest who was—I forgot his name, not Popiełuszko, it's an old one, from German occupation—who was imprisoned by Germans—forgot his name, I'm sorry—but then volunteered himself to be shot instead of another Polish guy who had a family and so on and so on. It was absolutely a pure heroic act. And then there was a big polemics in Poland when they discovered that before, in the late twenties, early thirties, this same priest was racist, anti-Semitic, whatsoever. But this is for me the miracle of ethics. It's not usually with a true ethical miracle your entire personality. You can be an average man and—it's always—isn't it that in a true ethical great act, it's always this element of surprise? You know, like "My God, who would have expected this? You can be average opportunist." Ethics is always this moment of all of a sudden you say, "I had enough. I do it." So things are here again much more complex. Okay, now I got a little lost here, so let's go further. Yes, we did this anti-totalitarian stuff. The next thing I want to say is that it would be interesting to connect this idea, Hegel's idea of the King, which I think could be very easily transposed into democracy. I mean, the point of Hegel's notion of the King is not really, "This is Hegel as some of his time, the King." Hegel was just aware that you need a moment of contingency. Like, it shouldn't be decided by simple objective, quantifiable, whatever criteria who will lead us. That on the opposite hand, we have the notion of rabble, Pöbel, which is also a very interesting point of Hegel. Why? Hegel, as we all know, was very prescient there in an almost Marxist way. Hegel got it that the modern capitalist or market, whatever, system necessarily produces rabble. Rabble, that is to say, a part of society with no part, with no proper place. An element out of place. Or as Ambedkar, a wonderful Indian politician and thinker, the great enemy of Gandhi—and I'm here on Ambedkar's side—says: "As long as there are castes, there will be outcasts," you know. You never can have a hierarchic system which will include all. Okay, here I think we encounter the great ambiguity of Hegel's philosophy. I think that when he deals with rabble, Pöbel, Hegel is not Hegelian enough. In what sense? He sees the necessity of rabble, and he's very honest, he sees no solution. He says there are some pragmatic solutions—colonization, charity, and so on—but there is no real solution of the problem. It's part of modern society to expand and as such to produce rabble. He even has this wonderful paradoxical formulation: the more a society is rich, the more necessarily it produces Pöbel, rabble. But I think what Hegel doesn't say is the Christian elementary insight, which would have been that whenever you have within a totality an element which is the excess of this totality, in the sense of a part of total, let's say, social body which is part of society but without a proper place, like this place, this element stands for the dimension of universality. This Hegel is not ready to accept, unfortunately. And I feel that this makes all the difference between, let's call it, the proto-fascist conservative Hegel, where you have this organic state, you know, with estates, everyone at his place, and maybe a more radical Hegel where you have an element where within the elements of society there is always one element in excess which stands for negativity with regard to all other determinations of society, but at the same time for universality as such. This is the basic paradox of dialectics. Let me mention, to make it clearer, another example from Marx where I'm critical of Marx. You know the Marxists, if you remember—you know, once there was a time, once upon a time there were strange people called Marxists and so on. If you are old enough, you remember it. And in Marxism, you know, you have this classification of modes of production: primitive pre-class society, slavery, no, sorry, then it's Asiatic mode of production, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and whatever you call it later, socialism, communism. But if you read Marx closely, you can see that he cheats with Asiatic mode of production. Asiatic mode of production appears just one in the series of stages. But if you look at it closely, you will see that what Marx did is that he proposed his original classification—primitive pre-class societies, antique slave societies, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, whatever—and then he found societies which did not fit in any of this. So he threw all that does not fit into it into Asiatic mode of production. That is to say, what appears to be a positive category is really just a negative container. If Marx were to be honest, he should have said, "We have this, this, this mode of production, and we have a mode of production of all those who doesn't fit my classification." And the idea again is that—this is the very core of Hegelian dialectics—it is that precisely—Hegel is the most, I claim, anti-organicist corporate thinker that you can imagine. It's that through particularities, the universality is also struggling with itself. What again—let me go further, maybe another—maybe another example here. For Hegel, the first thing to say, and it's another point of the same, you know that today it's fashionable with postmodernists—which I definitely am not—to claim how totality is bad. You know, you have this idea: one step from philosophical totality to totalitarianism. For example, Emmanuel Levinas likes to say this: that the origins of political totalitarianism is the philosophical notion of totality. Well, first I think if I may play a good British empiricist: that if you look at it empirically, it's not true. If you look closely at the spontaneous ideology of totalitarian regimes, they were as a rule always some kind of contingent historicists. I mean, my God, Stalin's basic motto was: "Everything depends on circumstances, everything is contingent," and so on. Read Hitler. Well, it's not amusing reading, it's boring, but you can learn something. In Hitler also, it's clear that his vision is some kind of a tragic historicist contingency. Heroes emerge, but at the end everything falls apart, we are all doomed to die. The only thing we can do is to die fighting in a great tragic way and so on and so on. I claim that first it's again empirically wrong. Here you should be proud as theologians here. It's not true that dogmatism is a priori the enemy of democracy. On the contrary, you should be especially sensitive to this central point, which is that a truly democratic society needs quite many unquestionable dogmas. Dogmas, I am using this term. What do I mean by this? Listen, let me ask you a simple question. Because people usually are shocked: "What do you mean dogma? Are you smuggling some of your Stalinist stuff or what?" No, no, I mean something very simple. Let's take the example of rape. Would you like to live in a society where you would have to debate again and again and demonstrate that rape is bad? No, I would like to live in a society where rape is, as a simple dogma, presupposition, accepted as something ridiculously wrong. So that if some idiot advocates rape—you know, with this stupid logic, "Ah, women provoke us, they really want to be raped but are not honest enough to admit"—you don't even have to reason, you treat this guy like, "Are you stupid or what?" And it's not only this; there are many, many in this sense, not dogmas in the prescribed sense, but spontaneous dogmas which are absolutely necessary, I claim, for a functioning democracy. And even I go a step further here, to the horror of many of my friends, and I think Süddeutsche Zeitung even published this. I put a very weird defense of Leitkultur, not exactly in the Angela Merkel sense, but in this sense: I think the liberal illusion is that you can have different cultures and then all the state has to do is to provide some kind of a neutral legal framework which regulates how cultures interact. I claim this never functions. I'm not saying we have to have Leitkultur in the simple sense of pure authority, predominance of one culture. What we need is Leitkultur in this sense: if different cultures are to coexist, laws are not enough to regulate this coexistence. You need again a set of dogmas, in the sense of simple rules but unwritten rules, accepted by all, about, for example, how me as a Christian coexist, I don't know, with—with a Chinese guy across the street, with a Muslim across the street, and so on. If we don't have some minimal shared ethical substance, then we end with regulated hatred, which is what is for me political correctness. The reason I'm opposed to political correctness is that it tries to regulate, legalize even, what should be the spontaneous, as it were, ethical substance. Now, sometimes this has funny effects, I must admit. For example, I learned that in—there, the most crazy politically correct—in a small campus somewhere there around Oregon or where, northwestern United States, they did a detailed politically correct guide of rules to follow in seduction. Like basic rules being at every step you have to ask, like: you shouldn't simply grab the woman but, "Can I unbutton this button here? Can I put my hand there?" and so on and so on. And I was told that strangely it did work. But you know why? Not because they—it was taken literally, but because it was eroticized in the way couples played with it, you know. For example, all of a sudden there, instead of saying in a vulgar way, "I want to sleep with you," it was, "Oh my God, you have a nice button there. Can I please just unbutton that button or whatever?" No, it became very elegant. In this way it works. But it must be this mediation. Otherwise again, for me political correctness is just—it's the worst thing that can happen. We have all effective racism and so on and you just control it with some ethical—what, sorry—with some even legal rules. It's for me a fiasco. You know where they are too narrow. You must have noticed how—like: once I was in the United States and I was asked what is the crucial ingredient of functioning multiculturalism. You can imagine how the politically correct journalist almost lost consciousness when I said, "Good racist jokes." No, okay, they thought I'm crazy. I was not. From ex-Yugoslavia, this is my old story, I can tell you, my big experience is that—I'm not of course talking of racist jokes in the sense of "I humiliate you, you humiliate me." But I remember how it worked in ex-Yugoslavia wonderfully that when I met a Serb friend, a Montenegrin friend, each of us mockingly identified with the racist cliché about ourselves. We Slovenians were supposed to be envious misers, no. Like: what is the Slovenian national proverb? Let's say God or a magician appears to me and tells me, "I will give you a cow for free, but I warn you, I will give two cows to your neighbor." What is the Slovenian farmer's answer? "Rather kill one of my cows, but kill two cows of—of the neighbor." That's our identity, story. Then Montenegrins are lazy and so on and so forth. But you know in what wonderful way the exchange of these jokes functioned? It was not aggressivity. We were kind of a friendly competing about who will tell a more funny joke about oneself. And it was a wonderful instrument of some kind of a true solidarity. The signal of these jokes what—it's not just this official respect; it simply meant, "We are truly friends." This is not possible under political correctness. But let me return to the big story. We said Hegel, rabble, Pöbel, where Hegel was not as it were Hegelian enough. Now let me to finish—I know time is running and so on—just I claim that another point where Hegel is not Hegelian enough—ah, just one political point. I'm not here—I'm not a Marxist. I'm more and more convinced we should return from Marx to Hegel. Because the standard Marxist reading is that the Hegel's notion of rabble is a historically limited notion which points later towards the Marxist notion of proletariat. I think no, if anything today, with all those living in slums, outcasts, those excluded, we are in a way returning from Marx to Hegel. We should maybe return from the narrow notion of proletariat to rabble in the sense of all those half-excluded and so on and so on. So yeah, another thing that I forgot. Why am I for the notion of totality, just to finish that line? You know, totality is not for me this totalitarian notion of how: you have all the crazy struggles but at the end everything is harmonized in a higher totality. No, and I also think that this insight is deeply anti-Christian. I wonder if you agree. Namely, what I think is the most profound anti-Christian wisdom, even if it was advocated by some Christians, is this for me disgusting idea of to explain evil like a stain in a picture. You know this old teleological topic that if you look at the picture from too close, it appears a stain; from a proper distance, you see how what appeared to you a stain really contributes to global harmony. Okay, maybe you find this sympathetic, but I would like to see people who would say Auschwitz and Gulag are stains only for our limited perspective; from the global harmony, you can see how Auschwitz and Gulag contribute to the beauty of the universe. I wouldn't like to live in a universe where Auschwitz contributes to the beauty of the universe. And the way I read the death of Christ, it's precisely renouncing to this simple transcendent God which somehow from his majestic royal perspective knows how things are. No, I think that the death of Christ is precisely solidarity with the particular. It's: you suffer, it's horrible, there is no way with any bullshit teleological universality to justify it. So to go on, Hegelian totality for me is a very important critical notion. It means—it doesn't mean everything can be harmonized in a higher order. It means on the contrary that when you speak about a certain concept order, you should include into it as its immanent part all the antagonism, excesses and so on which may appear just contingent distortions. For example, today's ideological notion of order would have been the standard Fukuyama one: liberal democratic capitalism is the best thing we can possibly ask for, and there are some countries where horrible things happen but they just did not yet arrive there. No, the Hegelian notion of totality tells us this: let's take a country like Congo, which is a living nightmare today. You must know this. The state doesn't even function, you have over one hundred thousand of these children warriors who, you know, they discovered there that if you start giving drugs to children if you begin when they are aged five or six, then after five years you get perfect soldiers who don't care if they die and so on, all that. But as such, Congo is an integral part of global capitalism. Congo is absolutely crucial in supplying minerals and so on for our digital industries and so on and so on. So you take the excess and you can show how it is part of the system. To include all these disturbing things into the system itself, this is for me the notion of Hegelian totality. Next thing: I think that similar mistake to that of rabble, Hegel commits it with sexuality. Now here I will try a little bit, okay, to provoke you or whatever. Maybe I'm simplifying you, so I would love to get from you a critical answer, correcting me if and when I'm wrong. But for me, first I will put it in very primitive simplistic terms. I never got why sexuality, if it's not done for procreation, it's closer to some animal lust. If I may put—formulate—a very common sense statement, isn't it rather the exact opposite? Animals do it for procreation. We humans take something which may appear just a biological function and trans—like you have this wonderful German word umfunktionieren, no—and transpose it, refunctioning as an expression of spirituality. I think that human sexuality, far from being at its most elementary what is animal in us, it's on the contrary the zero level of metaphysics. This is why Freud emphasized sexuality, not being a naturalist—"We are all animals copulating." No, sexual passion is the zero level of infinity. It's when you say, "I love you, I want to have sex with you infinitely, to death, it doesn't matter. You are ready to risk, to suspend all—all empirical short-term interests," and so on and so on. Here I think again Hegel is not radical enough again. What Hegel does is that he proposes this too simple notion of sexuality. He does this towards the end of his Philosophie der Natur and then again in the theory of marriage in Rechtsphilosophie. His idea is basically that sexuality is a natural substance—animal—and then through the process of Bildung, cultural formation, it's gradually aufgehoben, civilized. Like, now if I see a woman, I don't knock her with a stone on the head and rape her. I do stupid things, I invite her out, I write her poems, whatever you want. But I think something is missing between the two: this zero level of absolute passion that we know, for example, from legends like Tristan and so on. What in his rewriting of Tristan, Wagner calls this—this Nacht, the Kingdom of the Night, is this absolute deadly passion which is self-destructive. It's not civilization, symbolic fictions, duties, but it's also not nature. You know who was nicely aware of this? Immanuel Kant, in a tiny text which is half forgotten today on education. Kant—it's there that Kant says this weird thing that I like, famous definition of what is man: "Man is an animal who needs an answer"—sorry, a mystical Freudian slip—"who needs a master." But then how does Kant ground it? He says that only in man there is a kind of a violent freedom, a kind of a brutal freedom which animals don't have. Animals follow their instincts. Man has this almost metaphysical, noumenal, radical freedom which has to be tamed. And this freedom again is neither culture nor nature. The way the—the reason we need discipline is not to control our nature. It's to control this as it were elementary metaphysical excess. So again, I am not now simply celebrating sexuality. I'm just telling that nonetheless things are in a way more complex here. For me, the conflict between sexuality and other forms of metaphysical spirituality is not a conflict between animality and—and spirituality; it's a conflict with meta—it's a metaphysical competition. Both, none of them is animal in the sense of simple animal instincts and so on and so on. Okay, let me go then even further. The last of Hegel's where I think one should read Hegel against Hegel, and which is also actual today, is Hegel's another horror for politically correct pacifists: Hegel's theory of war. His deduction, against Kant's eternal peace, that the idea is a very simple one: that if we live in a well-organized Zivilgesellschaft and rational state, we simply get inert, identified to our particular role, narrow happiness. So from time to time, we need radical negativity, shock, which makes us aware of our true universality, where you purely as an individual identify with state, ready to risk your life, and so on and so on. I think that this notion is interesting insofar as I'm tempted to say we should push Hegel further, but along his own lines, towards something like what, for example, Thomas Jefferson was saying. You know these famous lines where he says, "The tree of liberty has to be watered from time to time by blood to flourish," and so on. That is to say, Hegel's mistake I think is to externalize this negativity. Why not say—and it's still strictly Hegelian, I say thing—what Jefferson was saying: that to have a state which does not become an ossified mechanism, you—you need something like, it needn't be a violent revolution, but you need something like rebellion or whatever which regenerates the state. If you read Hegel in this way, you will see that Hegel is a much more perplexing, open author than it may appear. Hegel is not a Hegel where finally some kind of metaphysical necessity sublates—sublation is a very clumsy English translation but it's only one we have for Aufhebung—where all contingency is aufgehoben and so on. No, no. What Hegel is saying at his best is that the contingency of radical negativity persists. For example, we never have full social, fully stable social order. There is always a threat of war. Or the most subversive Hegel, incredibly actual, totally ignored: the beginning of his Philosophie des Geistes, Anthropologie. It's wonderful where Hegel deals with madness, Verrücktheit, Torheit. Where he in a wonderful way deduces the necessity of madness. He claims that it's only possible for the human animal to break with nature—the first form of break is madness, a kind of psychotic gap, withdrawal—and that then our symbolic universe of Gewohnheit, customs, mechanical customs, is the normalization of this madness. So in a way, even more radically than Michel Foucault, Hegel explicitly says this: even if this doesn't mean that we all should be mad at some point, it's only possible to understand our cultural phenomena, the symbolic universe, against the eternal threat of madness. The Hegel we get here is, I think, a deeply Christological Hegel. What Hegel understood already in his notion of the King—I will now just finish with his formula—is that every universal necessity in order to actualize itself has to be supplemented with a kind of totally contingent incarnation. You have reasonable state, but it's really a state of reason if you have a contingent idiot called the King or whatever. Or even Hegel—this is why, I don't have time to develop it fully, but this is why I think Hegel, contrary to what Kierkegaard thought in a too simplified criticism of Hegel—I claim that Kierkegaard was more Hegelian than he thought. Hegel was fully aware of this idea, of this fundamental anti-Platonic insight of Christianity, where as Kierkegaard saw it correctly, no? You—that—the—that you need a totally contingent event: Jesus Christ. And even if this was a contingent human being, somebody walking around two thousand years ago, the only way to eternal truth is through that figure. There is no direct Gnostic shortcut or whatever. Hegel was fully aware of this. Which is why my formula is, as a leftist in some sense communist: back from Marx to Hegel. Let's give Hegel a chance. I'm sorry if this was confused, but as my friend Dominik hinted at, I am now involved in an act of madness. I finished my book on Hegel, a short book; it will just be printed. About one thousand and two hundred pages, but okay. Now I can die in peace if I did it. I thank you very much for your patience with my madness. Thank you.
First, I would like to emphasize the important moment where we are. I experienced this here today after I arrived; we passed a door where it says Institut für Philosophie here und leadership. No, I was a little bit shocked, and then Herr Finke explained to me that this is all part of this Bologna Reform Umstrukturierung where, you know, even we philosophers have to look for connections with business and so on. No, why do I find this problematic? Not just for obvious reasons, kind of easy critique, but do you know that the goal of this reform and all pressures connected with it is a very precise and can be put in the terms of Immanuel Kant when he opposes public use of reason—I think the German term is öffentliches Vernunftgebrauch—and private use of reason. You know the paradox: for Kant, public use of reason is not working for the state, for community; this is for Kant precisely private use of reason, when your reason is in advance limited by tasks, problems decided by others, while in public use of reason you can afford to be radical. So this is what I think is the ultimate dangerous goal of this push towards reform, which is now, as we all know, acquiring almost ridiculous, threatening dimensions, for example in England, in Netherlands. This idea, to put it very simply—I simplify, but it's true—they want to make ultimately out of universities factories for experts. I participated in a debate two years ago, three years ago, in Frankreich, in France, where I—there was also a politician, you remember this was the time when cars were burning in Paris suburbs—who explained to me, I'm grateful to him, very clearly. He said, "Who needs your big metaphysical philosophical thinking? Look, now cars are burning in the Paris suburbs. So what we need are psychologists to teach us how to contain, how to control the crowd. We need urbanists to teach us how to structure the city so that massen crowds cannot gather too easily," and so on and so on. Sorry, but this is not intellectual life. Intellectual life is first and foremost something else. It's not to solve problems formulated by others. It is to—the first thing when we, if we want to be intellectuals, when we confront a problem, the first question to ask is: what if the way we formulate the problem is already part of the problem? That we mystify the problem. For this type of thinking, where you are not simply expert solving problems formulated by others, there is unfortunately less and less space. And I think it's again extremely important to insist on this. And frankly, let's not forget—I'm serious here, I've written three books about it—that if there is some meaning in Jesus Christus Spaltung split with Jewish establishment, it's precisely that the establishment of Herod's state was, if you wanted, private use of reason and the community of believers of Christ was public use of reason. This is how I read these provocative lines, you know: "If you don't hate your father, your mother, you are not my follower." No, it doesn't mean some Oedipal stupidity that, "Come to me to Christ and I will help you to finish your fight with your parents." For me, the way I read it—I wonder if you will agree—father, mother, sisters stand here for this traditional hierarchic social community. And the idea is that there is, maybe for the first time in history, an egalitarian space outside this hierarchic order. So I am—ich bin dankbar for what you said that Jesuiten und Žižek, das passt nicht zusammen. Yes, I agree, but then also, you know I'm in good company. Die jüdische Staat von zwei tausend Jahren und Jesus hat auch nicht zusammen gepasst. It never belongs. And on the top of it, I should say, you Jesuits were for me always the good guys. You have a wonderful tradition, starting, for example, with—are you aware how uniquely, unique it was historically? You remember in, I think it was sixteenth, in late seventeenth, early eighteenth century, the so-called missions or reducciones in Paraguay. I mean, this was the worst of European colonialism. Not missions themselves, but the way the big colonial powers, Portugal and Spain—Portugal dominating Brazil, Spain dominating all other Latin America—out of pure envy or colonial interests, they manipulatively adopted this hatred of Jesuits which was at that point, it was popular, as you know, in Europe to hate Jesuits, to justify this totally unfounded attack on the Jesuit state there. And you know what a good job Jesuits were doing there? Do you know, for example, that Jesuits were there already printing books in their own Indian Guarani, or how is it called, language? Can you even imagine, just if Jesuits were allowed to do their work to the end, how the entire picture of Latin America would have been different? And so I don't quite agree with those followers of—not me, I'm not a postmodernist as you rightly said—followers of like Michel Foucault, who paint this terrifying picture of Jesuit mission as some places of totalitarian control and so on and so on. Even Hegel, in a not quite justified way, makes some fun of this. But nonetheless, if you put it in the context of that time, this was paradise compared with all things that went around. And there are other things, like as a leftist, I'm telling you, I barely know a serious leftist who doesn't like Jesuits. From Brecht, we know very well that Brecht based his Lehrstücke on Jesuit plays. Eisenstein, cinema: do you know that Eisenstein wrote a wonderful piece where he founds his theory of how montage of attraction in cinema should generate enthusiasm, he grounds his text on Loyola's Exercises and so on? So no, wir sind hier unter Parteigenossen, how you say, no, so don't be—give me a chance, no. So now, unfortunately, we have to do some serious work and I ask kindly for your patience and tolerance. I would like to begin with a literary reference which maybe will surprise you. A work today half forgotten but interesting: Jack London's Martin Eden. You know, story of a writer, artist, who at the end kills himself by drowning. How did Martin Eden, the novel's hero, arrive at this point of despair? What pushed him to suicide was his very success, which was for him, for Martin Eden, totally enigmatic. After long years of struggle and hard work, Martin finally succeeds, becomes a famous writer. However, while he is living in wealth and fame, one thing puzzles him. Here now comes a quotation: "A little thing that would have puzzled the world had it known. But the world would have puzzled over this bepuzzlement rather than over the little thing that to him, to Martin Eden, loomed gigantic. Judge Blount, a rich figure in the novel, invited Martin to dinner. That was the little thing, or the beginning of the little thing. He, Martin, had insulted Judge Blount, treated him abominably, and Judge Blount, meeting him on the street, invited him to dinner. Martin thought, reflected on himself on numerous occasions on which he had met Judge Blount, and when Judge Blount had not invited him to dinner then. He, Martin, had not changed. He was the same Martin Eden. What made the difference? The fact that the stuff he had written appeared inside the covers of his books. But it was work performed. It was nothing new. It was something he wrote long ago," and so on and so on. End of quote. What Martin Eden cannot accept is the radical gap that forever separates his, let's say, real qualities—being a writer, having certain features as a person—from his symbolic status in the eyes of the other. He was treated as trash, no one, ignored by the rich. And he feels, "I did not do anything new. I'm exactly the same person. All of a sudden everyone is inviting me. What is going on?" All of a sudden he is no longer avoided by respectable public. He is a famous author invited by the pillars of society. But again, he is fully aware that nothing changed in him in reality. He is the same person as he was. What Martin Eden cannot accept is this radical decentering of his personality, which as Jack London puts it, resides in the minds of others. He is nothing in himself. He is just a concentrated projection of others' dreams. This realization kills his desire. A quote from Martin Eden: "Something has gone out of me. I have always been unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being sated with life. Life has so filled me that I am empty of any desire for anything." End of quote. So it is this conclusion that he was nobody, nothing, which drove—which pushed him to suicide. You know, it's this—this full existential awareness of how I am something for the others, my symbolic identity. But this has ultimately nothing to do with what I am in myself, not in the sense of some deep psychology, but in the sense of what I do, my achievements, and so on. This gap is intolerable for him. He becomes aware that what he is in himself doesn't matter. He functions socially as strictly what he is for the others. This also kills his desire because there is also an erotic subplot where the woman, his love object, who previously ignored him, all of a sudden now discovered what a great guy he is after his fame. So he cannot live with this gap. Now we are already in the middle of psychoanalyse, psychoanalysis, because what in psychoanalysis we call symbolic castration, it's nothing mysterious. It's precisely the name for this gap between my immediate reality and my symbolic title, what I am for the others. The problem is that in our daily life, there is always some kind of mystification, or as already Marx put it, people think—people treat someone as a king because they think he is a king in himself, but in reality someone is a king because people treat him like a king. And you know, for political leaders, the problem is always how to blur this clear distinction. Politicians are always afraid that they will be caught in a situation where people will clearly perceive that they are nothing in themselves, that there is no substance for their authority. Now you will tell me: what has this to do with our predicament today? It has. Let me do a little bit, before we go on to more serious waters, a little bit of analysis of—I hope some of you saw these films—the two films which triumphed at the last, this spring Oscar ceremony: The King’s Speech and Black Swan. I hate both films. Why? The problem of The King’s Speech is what? You know, it's the story of British king, I think Edward whoever, who before becoming king has the problem of stuttering. And then we get the Australian coach, trainer, who teaches him how to speak properly. Okay, there is an interesting here political background also, because obviously the true opponent of the king, the guy who knows how to speak, is Hitler, of course. And you know, it's this back, but this is not central. I want to propose a simple, naive but I think correct reading of the film. I think that the king when he stutters, he has right. It's—he has a great mind. He knows that, "My God, why am I a king? This is stupid." He simply stutters as a kind of a very reasonable resistance to—wait a minute, what is this comedy? People treating me like a divine anointed king, and I cannot take it seriously. And his stuttering is a kind of a resistance to seriously accept this title. So I think it's really a very sad story. It's a story about how someone who had normal Christian democratic reflexes is then trained through a coach, a trainer, to become stupid enough to take seriously his title. It literally happens, if you saw the film, towards the end, when the trainer, played by Geoffrey Rush, sits at the king's chair. And the king, furious, said, "How dare you sit there? This is my chair." The trainer asked him, "Why is this your chair?" The king shouts back, "Because I'm a king by divine right." And then, this is the most reactionary moment of the film, the coach says, "Now you got it. Now I cured you." Yeah, but it's a very sad end of illness. He simply literally rendered him stupid enough to play seriously the role. And I think—I don't have time to go into this—I think that this is the greatness of the Gospel, one of the marginal, not often, not noted features. The way I read the Gospel, Christ is doing this all the time. You know how, for example, when he is asked some question, Christ says, "I will tell you a parable, a story." But then what regularly happens is that not only does this story explain nothing, but you know the problem is then how to read this story. It's all the time this kind of provocation, precisely a spontaneous, beautifully done revenge against this type of stupidity of, you know, simply believing "I am who I am" and so on and so on. So again, what the movie says, the message is: the only solution to our crisis is to restore divine or paternal, whichever authority. And the movie is very cynical because the message is: we should learn to become stupid again. The master should believe that he is naturally a master and our lives would be better. Well, I hope this is not the only way to resist Hitler, to become stupid. Now, just briefly, let's go to the other side: the film Black Swan, the feminine counterpart. You remember the story of a ballerina, played by Natalie Portman, who gets so obsessed by her role that at the end it's death. Oh, this is even worse, I claim, in what sense? Are we aware that this film revives, resuscitates the most reactionary myth you can imagine? This ultra-male-chauvinist myth that while a man, at least, can be a king—that is to say, as a man you can have your symbolic identity, title, Herr Professor, doctor, whatever, your public role, but at the same time you can enjoy private life—while a woman has to make a choice. If you identify too much with your mission, it means self-destruction, death. It's, you know, this motive that we find, for example, in many traditional stories like, you know, Hoffmann’s Tales, where at the end usually it's singing, not dancing. Although in Red Shoes, the nice film by Michael Powell, also dancing. This idea that we men are allowed to follow our mission, to be fanatics; with women, it's more problematic, it's death at the end. So the woman should stop and withdraw. And even in some contemporary films, unfortunately, you have this anti-feminist myth. For example, a very beautiful film: Krzysztof Kieślowski, The Double Life of Véronique. You know, remember it's the parallel story of two Véroniques: the Polish one fully identifies with singing, dies; the French one knows it's too risky, withdraws, happily survives. What I wanted to show you is how precisely today, in our critical times, when people start to doubt their, let's call it, symbolic public identity, the temptation is great to play this—to enact, to push for this return to your identity which is inscribed into your name. Even in Communist China today, there is a massive return to—sorry—to Confucian ethics. You know, Confucian ethics is precisely based on so-called rectification of names, like be truly what your name says. Like, you know, this traditional ethics where your ethical duty is to fully fit the particular role that you have in the corporate social body. And ironically, even today in China, the Communists fully adopted this logic. When I visited China, I asked them, "In what sense are you still Communists? Isn't it," I told them, "which is true, that this is the biggest revenge of Communism on the Fukuyama dream, on the end of Communism, liberal capitalism? Yes, but it looks more and more that the best administrators of today's capitalism are ex-communists." No, this is their revenge. So they told me, "No, no, no, it's no longer Communism. Today we define our goal as harmonious society." Okay, I asked them, "Give me a stupid, simple explanation. What do we mean by this?" They told me, "A harmonious society is a society where everyone does his, her, their particular duty. A leader is a good leader, father a good father, worker a good worker, wife a good wife," and so on and so on. So of course I exploded. I told them, "This is so nice because we don't have here any multicultural misunderstandings. We know what this is. In Europe, we call this corporate fascism, you know, like feel at home here." No, so again, if you are truly Christians, you should explode here. Because I think the very idea of Heiliger Geist, of Holy Spirit, breaks with this. You know, the most beautiful part for me in Paul's letters is when he does refer somewhere—I must admit I forgot where—to this corporate metaphor, you know, society as a human body. But did you notice how he turns it around? He says, "No, for us Christians, precisely the lowest member of the body can be the highest," and so on and so on. This is the big temptation today. Okay, but nonetheless, so now we have this gap between what I am in myself, in my reality, and my symbolic identity. And I claim that for Hegel—now first I want to do my usual crazy thing: defend Hegelian notion or deduction of the King, of monarchy. It's much more crazy than you think. For Hegel, the definition of a king is precisely—it's a very tragic position in a way—it's a subject who accepts this radical decentering. The Hegelian King knows totally, "I am nothing. I'm just a function of what people think that I am. The only reality that matters is my penis. My duty is to bring—to produce, to produce next kings and, as Hegel says it openly, the duty of the King is to sign documents. He doesn't have to know what he is signing. This is decided by ministers who know," and so on and so on. So what does this decentering mean? That has to be accepted as a king, which again is the exact opposite of the king who believes that he is a king. You know, like Jacques Lacan has this wonderful statement that a madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king; a madman is only the king who thinks he is a king. That is to say, a king who really thinks that in himself he is what people take him to be. Maybe you know it, maybe not—I love it—there is a wonderful anecdote about what happened during the big battle between the Prussian and the Austrian army in I think, Prussian-Austrian War, where the Prussian king, formally the supreme commander of the army, was observing the battle from a nearby hill. He looked worried at what appeared to him the confusion of the front where, you know, to him it looked the confusion, some Prussian troops were even retreating, so he was very worried. Then the famous General von Moltke, the famous strategist who planned the battle, at a certain point when the king was still worried, totally confused, turned to the king and told him, "May I be the first to congratulate your Majesty for a brilliant victory?" No, this is what I like. The idea that the King, who was the master, the total commander, was totally ignorant of what goes on. Already everything was controlled by Moltke. Nonetheless, formally the king was the boss, so he congratulated the king. And I think that this is what Hegel was deeply aware of. And I think it's Hegel's Christian moment at his best, especially actual today where, I don't know if you noticed it, but we are slowly stepping out of democracy into expert rule, literally. Did you notice the strange thing that happened in Greece recently? The Prime Minister proposed a referendum; all Europe was in a total panic. "My God, ask the people! Horror!" Then the Greeks decided just to nominate totally non-legitimized a pure technocratic expert government. "Oh, we can live in Europe," and so on and so on. And it's not just Greece; in Italy it happened the same, and so on and so on. What Hegel knew is that the greatest threat is when experts, those who are directly legitimized by their knowledge, abilities, take power. That this is the formula of totalitarianism. The paradox of Hegelian Staat der Vernunft, rational state, is that you must have an ignorant idiot on the top who decides. You can have experts, but they only give counsels, proposals. The decision itself, that the gesture "Yes, no, this is now the law, this is not the law," must not be made by experts. Here I think—I don't have time to go into it—Marx totally missed the point in his early critique of Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie, where he makes all the fun of Hegel and so on. And history had a great revenge on Marxism here. Because in Stalinism, we precisely got a master, a leader, who thought that he knows, really. Stalin was not just like a king. Stalin was not just a symbolic top. The whole machinery was to demonstrate that he really knows. And then you get the nightmare that we got. It's the same with, for example, among other things, with Kafkaesque bureaucracy. People do not often notice that this abyss, horror of Kafka's universe, is not because we have some higher authority there which is purely irrational. No, it's bureau—the definition of Kafka's universe is bureaucracy without a king, which then runs crazy. The formula of totalitarianism is not an arbitrary leader. No, it's experts take power. And you can even find this at the literal level, like: did you notice that, for example, Stalin's origins are not the leader? He was—the biggest mistake of his life, probably—hired by, hired as it were by Lenin as, you know, in twenty-two, I think, or twenty-one, Lenin said, "Oh my God, we have so many things to decide in Politburo, we need someone just to take notes and put things in order." So because Stalin was at that time considered a kind of a local idiot of the Politburo, first Lenin proposed it to Trotsky. Trotsky said, "No, it's too humiliating, I don't take it." So Stalin said modestly, "Okay, I will do it." And then you know, two years later, Trotsky—Trotsky was a little bit stupid there if you read history, because Trotsky believed in himself. He thought, "Who cares about this small bureaucrat? I will make one big speech and Stalin will be out." Well, he noticed, you know, Trotsky was really—it's tragic—in the, from twenty-three to twenty-five, six, Trotsky was like, you know that famous scene from Zeichentrickfilme cartoons where a cat walks above the precipice and falls down only when it notices that, no? Trotsky was already walking up in the air. He was totally without power but he didn't know it. Then in twenty-six, I think, he was reminded by Stalin, "Hey, look down, there is nothing." And he went all of a sudden. So again, I claim that this lesson again is actual especially today when more and more politics is presented to us as simply the art of expert administration. That this is post-politics, this is the end of politics. You know why? Because the price we pay is that what is presented to us as expert knowledge is not really expert knowledge. First, I find it a little bit ridiculous to put bankers on leading positions, like now in Greece and Italy. Wait a minute, I mean, do they really know? I think the best argument is that they brought us into the crisis in which we are now. So but let me make a more important point, a slightly nonetheless more refined point. The point here is what? Let me go to another topic which may appear different but it's basically the same, I claim. Did you notice how whenever you have the procedure of measuring a qualification, grading in school and so on, it's never a simple, flat procedure in the sense of "we measure it, that's it"? There is always a minimal gap between the actual procedure of grading, whatever, and the public declaration of the results. And you can experience this quite literally. You know after you—isn't it that when you do an exam, even if you are pretty sure that your answers were perfect, there is always this minimum of uncertainty? You know, it's the gap between the reality and its symbolic registration. All things can be done in reality, but you never know what will happen. And back to Kafka, this is, I think, the great mystique of today's bureaucracy. It wants to be rational, expert bureaucracy, but this gap explodes again and again. For example, from Greece itself, I have a friend in Greece who told me his father, who is very old, stopped getting pension money for three, four months. So he complained, wrote to the ministry, why not. And I love this example. I couldn't believe that it's true, but I saw the document. Okay, it was translated to me from Greek, but I learned enough, I know enough Greek to see that they didn't lie to me. Namely, he got—father—the message from the ministry which literally involved this pragmatic paradox. The letter was addressed to him as a living person, but the letter said something like, "Sorry, but according to our documents, you are dead for three months. Could you please visit us and prove that you are alive and then you will get your money back?" This is from what bureaucracy lives, this gap between, you know, something can be true in immediate reality, but if bureaucracy says something, yo, it's an—in this way, I'm tempted to read Kafka, Franz Kafka, when he wrote in some of his private notes that in our godless times, often these irrationalities of bureaucracy are the only contact we have with the mysterious divine or whatever, you know. This total miss—like, am I dead, am I alive, or whatever. Or how even—and the stories, we can multiply them, can be wonderful here. I have a lady, I know her, an old lady in France. Again, it's not a joke. This lady got a letter from city authorities that her identity card was stolen, so she should visit them there and demand a new card. She went there and said, "Listen, I have here my carte d'identité, they call it. I have it here, what's the problem?" Ah, she got the answer of a lifetime. The bureaucrat told her, "I don't care what you have there. Officially, your card is stolen, so what you have in your hand is an illegal document. Destroy it and ask for a new one." Now, if this is not divine dimension in secular times, then I don't know what is. To go even to the end here, the most beautiful moment of this madness happened in the army, I'm sorry if some of you know the case but it's beautiful, in the army, Yugoslav army, thirty years ago to a friend of mine. You know that as in every army, after the first one, two weeks of training when you are acclimatized to the army, you get some ritual where you swear, "Oh, I'm ready to risk my life for my country, blah blah," and then you sign the document and you are in, you are fully a soldier. Okay, this friend of mine did something wonderfully naive. When he approached the officer with the big book where he would have to sign, he said, asked the officer a simple question: "Is my signing this oath obligatory or free?" Officer told him, "My God, we cannot order this, it's free." "Okay," then the soldier said, "If it's free, I will not sign it." Then the officer told him, "Are you crazy? You will be arrested," and so on. Okay, after a long struggle, my friend told the officer, "Look, let's make a deal. I will sign it if you give me a written order that I have to sign it." And my friend did obtain a document which is, I think, a legend—I have a photocopy of it—where officer says, "I hereby order soldier [blah blah, name] to freely sign this document." But you know, I don't think this is simply a totalitarian mechanism. Isn't it that at the most fundamental level, belonging to any social order involves at one level or another this kind of a paradox? You know, you are free, you have a free choice, if you make the right choice, if I may put it like this, no. So what am I aiming at here? How again there have to be this gap of minimal contingency between measuring something in the sense of social evaluation and registering, like making it performatively stick, making it official, whatever you want. The two should not collapse. Now, it's—I even empirically can confirm this to you—in some progressive American schools, blah blah, it's fashionable to say, "We will abolish exams. Students will simply all the time be observed, evaluated by the teachers." The result is an extreme growth in anxiety and so on. Because you know, all the result is not freedom, it's all the time you feel under pressure and control. It's the same for votes. I think the worst enemy of democracy—sorry if this shocks you—is if we base our—found, ground our votes on simple actual abilities and so on. I think that all really existing democracies from Ancient Greece to Venezia, Venice—which was okay, a suspicious democracy, but nonetheless—understood well that in every democratic election there should be an element of contingency. And even, if I may permit myself here a criticism of the great liberal thinker and so on, John Rawls' Theory of Justice. I think it doesn't work, his theory. Why? Because as every good Christian who has read Saint Augustine's Confessions knows, and even Rawls admitted it afterwards, his notion of just society works only if you cancel envy and resentment. That is to say, let me do a simple experiment. Imagine that, okay, I will sacrifice you, Dominik, like let's say we are members of a society where you are—even on the market it works like this—you are successful, I failed on the market. Okay, isn't it much better for me if I am allowed to live in the illusion—it doesn't matter if it's true or not—that you are the same idiot as me or even I am much wiser than you, but you were lucky? In this way, it's much more tolerable to me. My narcissism is not hurt. I can tell to myself, "This idiot was just lucky." But imagine what a trauma it would have been for me if we were to live in a just society. Because then I would have to admit, "My God, he is richer, which means because we live in a just society, he is much more intelligent than me." Hayek, Friedrich, with whom I—don't misunderstand me—absolutely don't agree, made here nonetheless an intelligent point. He said that the market injustice of capitalism is not an obstacle of capitalism; it is what makes capitalism effective and acceptable. So again, what I want to emphasize is that this minimal gap in elections, in evaluation and so on, between the reality of the process—what we measure and so on—and the decision, that this gap has to be maintained. And this is what again Hegel was fully aware in his theory of the monarch. That Hegel says in a brilliant way when he approaches the usual critique: "But aren't you aware that if we have hereditary monarchy, then who is the king is left to pure biological contingency?" Hegel basically answers, "But this is my point." You know, this already—ah, and incidentally we could go on here into how the same even holds, don't you think, for love in a way? The love must be contingent. It shouldn't be based on actual properties. I mean, this should be, if you know minimally what is love, this should be clear to you. Like, the moment you can answer the question "Why do I love her or him or whoever?" by giving reasons, it's not love by definition. Because then we are in mathematical accountancy, like: if you permit me a male-chauvinist example, that lady has a nice smile, beautiful breasts, but that one has beautiful eyes, beautiful legs, more intelligent. So I compare, wait a minute, here only two, therefore, okay, I choose that one. This is not love. Love must involve a contingent element, as they put it, je ne sais quoi. Which is why as good Christians you should be horrified as what is going on today. Did you notice a strange tendency that we are de facto returning to pre-modern arranged marriages and dating? When I flew two weeks ago back from United States to Europe with United Airlines, I looked into their Hemispheres magazine. I found a whole page advertisement which was terrifying to me. It said something like, "We learned to outsource this and that work. Isn't it time to outsource our love life, no?" And then they went into: if you are a successful manager, businessman, you don't have time to look for your partner. You go to the agency, you basically commodify yourself. You describe yourself, your interests, qualities, and they will take care of it. What disappears here? Unfortunately this doesn't work in German, but it works in English and French. You know where the expression is precisely "to fall in love" (tomber amoureux). So I found in English and—my friend Alain Badiou found it in French—an advertisement for a dating and marriage agency where they use the same expression, and it's horrible for me: "We will enable you to be in love without the fall." But I doubt if this is love. You know, for me, love is fall. Fall means this opening to the neighbor, this "I don't know why but I am traumatized, I see you, I know." Love always has this wonderful retroactive teleology. You encounter someone on the subway, I don't know where, but once you are in love, it's always, "My God, all my life I was waiting for you." Suddenly you understand that everything was pointing towards it. This commodification of love is mixed with something else. So maybe I will challenge you here about what I see—please correct me if I am wrong—how you see you as whatever, Jesuits, Catholics, sexuality. Because are you aware that we are approaching a state gradually where passionate love itself, love or too passionate a commitment, is considered dangerous? You open yourself too much to the other. Can I give you an empirical proof which will maybe surprise you? I go now to the lowest of the low of popular culture. Did you see the last James Bond film, Quantum of Solace? Did you notice something strange? At the end, it's the first James Bond where there is no sex between Bond and Bond girl. Now you will say, "Okay, it's one case, means nothing." Ah, let's go now to really lowest of the low, and here I was on the side of the Church—I mean, The Da Vinci Code, no. Did you notice something strange? Again, no sex, love between Robert Langdon, the symbologist, and this grand-grand-grand-grand-granddaughter of Jesus Christ, Sophie Neveu, or what. And I even think that this is the utterly perverse economy of the film. That poor Jesus Christ, according to the story, had to make love—you know all this stupid theory, Christ had a child, blah blah—had to make love, be sexually active, just to cover up the fact that there is no sex here between the two heroes. Then the last novel—one of the big candidates to the worst novel of all time—The Lost Symbol: absolutely not even a sexual tension. Things get even more mysterious. If you go to the last Dan Brown film, Angels Demons, there there is sex in the novel, but no sex in the film between Langdon and that Italian scientist Vittoria Vetra. Where are we? Usually we thought Hollywood adds sex to make it more commercial; now Hollywood is erasing sex too. I'm not glad about this tendency. I think it's connected strictly with another tendency, this—what I ironically call "Western Buddhist bullshit." You know, this idea of: don't attach yourself too much to any person, whatever, keep distance and so on. This is—this is for me—this is for me something horrible. And I noticed how unknowingly even some Christians accept it this in this way. For example, at a theological conference in United States, I was part of a debate where I provoked some priests there. Okay, I asked them, "How do you read that famous statement which I already mentioned: 'If you do not hate your mother and father, you are not my follower'?" I think they gave me—some of them—a horrible answer. They told me, "You know, it's a metaphor. It really means don't get attached to persons too much." Like they fell into some kind of a New Age pseudo-Oriental bullshit. I told them, "This is a blasphemy. You are making out of Christ a kind of a stupid petty jealous God, you know. Love your wife, but no, no, I want to be loved a little bit more, you know, not too much." I told them, "You are totally wrong. When you love somebody, your neighbor, passionately, Christ is there in this love. It's not that you have on the side to love him more." Then I really loved this: one priest gave me then the strangest answer I ever heard. And then it's typical how another priest proposed another answer and so on, very self-contradictory. Then at the end, a priest told me, "Why didn't you tell us in advance? We were not prepared. You surprised us with this question." And believe me, with great pleasure I told them, "My God, you had two thousand years to prepare the answer! It's not that I invented this now!" What I'm trying to tell you this is absolutely not to make fun of Christianity, but of a deep truth that there is something absolutely worth fighting in Christianity, something so traumatic, deeply true, that it's sometimes—not always—even too traumatic for Christian institutions themselves. You know that wonderful line—it's an anecdote, I don't know if it really happened—but when Napoleon was crowned Emperor by the Pope, the rumor is that when Pope was approaching him, Napoleon simply took the crown and put it on his own head. And you know what the wise Pope told him then, Napoleon? He told Napoleon, "I know what you want to do. You want to ruin Christianity. But I tell you, you will not succeed. We the Church are trying to do this already for two thousand years and we did not succeed." Okay, it's not as simple as that, I know. But what I'm saying is that Christianity is absolutely alive in its radical egalitarian and so on core, more than ever. And it is under threat today, I claim, with precisely—here I am in an unashamed way Eurocentric—precisely with this pseudo-Western Buddhism, pseudo-Orientalist approach. And it's something very dangerous happening. Which is why, if I may make this brief political intervention, you know when somebody praises European identity and so on, the threat to Judeo-Christian legacy... I think we shouldn't react like politically correct liberals who react with shame: "Yeah, we know, we Europeans did all the horrible things from Holocaust to colonization, we killed millions," and so on. No, maybe we should change the tone and be proud of European legacy. But of course not in the sense of the right-wing anti-immigrants. We should say the opposite. We should say: "Yes, Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened, but it's threatened precisely by people like—I don't know—Haider, Le Pen, whom you want. That Europe would no longer have been Europe." The real European legacy, which started maybe with Ancient Greeks, the crucial point being precisely Judeo-Christian legacy. For me, all good things begin with Book of—how do you say—Job, Hiob. The guy who was screwed by God and so on, yeah. Job, then going on to Christ, which you can view only as a repetition of Job. This is something which is not only alive but extremely important today. How can you say Christianity is no longer actual when our central—one of the central political problems today is precisely: love your neighbor. Isn't the entire populist politics today based on mistrust, on who will protect us from the neighbor? Here my beloved theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton said something wonderful. He said the Bible says "love your neighbor" and "love your enemy," and it has good reason to say both these things because the two are usually the same. I mean, the problem is there. You know, the Judeo-Christian notion of neighbor is not this comfortable communitarian notion of the guy who is like me, you know, the what we say the fellow man. Neighbor is not the fellow man. Neighbor is the fellow man who suddenly appears strange. Like, didn't it happen to you this elementary traumatic experience? You think that you know someone closely, but all of a sudden this guy does something either in the good or in the bad sense which shocks you. Like it happened to me, I thought I have a good friend, then somebody was dying of cancer and this friend of mine started to make extremely brutal, humiliating, cynical remarks. And you know, you ask yourself, "My God, did I know that person at all?" Or hopefully—that's a good sign—also in the opposite direction. This is very nice, you know, how you think somebody is simply a conformist and so on, but all of a sudden he does something heroic, unexpected. At that point you encounter a neighbor, I claim. A neighbor is something very traumatic. A neighbor is precisely this abyss of human personality outside this simple affinity where we know each other, we have our own small circle of semblance. For example, recently I saw a film—I forgot the title, I think it's a German-Polish film—you know that Polish priest who was—I forgot his name, not Popiełuszko, it's an old one, from German occupation—who was imprisoned by Germans—forgot his name, I'm sorry—but then volunteered himself to be shot instead of another Polish guy who had a family and so on and so on. It was absolutely a pure heroic act. And then there was a big polemics in Poland when they discovered that before, in the late twenties, early thirties, this same priest was racist, anti-Semitic, whatsoever. But this is for me the miracle of ethics. It's not usually with a true ethical miracle your entire personality. You can be an average man and—it's always—isn't it that in a true ethical great act, it's always this element of surprise? You know, like "My God, who would have expected this? You can be average opportunist." Ethics is always this moment of all of a sudden you say, "I had enough. I do it." So things are here again much more complex. Okay, now I got a little lost here, so let's go further. Yes, we did this anti-totalitarian stuff. The next thing I want to say is that it would be interesting to connect this idea, Hegel's idea of the King, which I think could be very easily transposed into democracy. I mean, the point of Hegel's notion of the King is not really, "This is Hegel as some of his time, the King." Hegel was just aware that you need a moment of contingency. Like, it shouldn't be decided by simple objective, quantifiable, whatever criteria who will lead us. That on the opposite hand, we have the notion of rabble, Pöbel, which is also a very interesting point of Hegel. Why? Hegel, as we all know, was very prescient there in an almost Marxist way. Hegel got it that the modern capitalist or market, whatever, system necessarily produces rabble. Rabble, that is to say, a part of society with no part, with no proper place. An element out of place. Or as Ambedkar, a wonderful Indian politician and thinker, the great enemy of Gandhi—and I'm here on Ambedkar's side—says: "As long as there are castes, there will be outcasts," you know. You never can have a hierarchic system which will include all. Okay, here I think we encounter the great ambiguity of Hegel's philosophy. I think that when he deals with rabble, Pöbel, Hegel is not Hegelian enough. In what sense? He sees the necessity of rabble, and he's very honest, he sees no solution. He says there are some pragmatic solutions—colonization, charity, and so on—but there is no real solution of the problem. It's part of modern society to expand and as such to produce rabble. He even has this wonderful paradoxical formulation: the more a society is rich, the more necessarily it produces Pöbel, rabble. But I think what Hegel doesn't say is the Christian elementary insight, which would have been that whenever you have within a totality an element which is the excess of this totality, in the sense of a part of total, let's say, social body which is part of society but without a proper place, like this place, this element stands for the dimension of universality. This Hegel is not ready to accept, unfortunately. And I feel that this makes all the difference between, let's call it, the proto-fascist conservative Hegel, where you have this organic state, you know, with estates, everyone at his place, and maybe a more radical Hegel where you have an element where within the elements of society there is always one element in excess which stands for negativity with regard to all other determinations of society, but at the same time for universality as such. This is the basic paradox of dialectics. Let me mention, to make it clearer, another example from Marx where I'm critical of Marx. You know the Marxists, if you remember—you know, once there was a time, once upon a time there were strange people called Marxists and so on. If you are old enough, you remember it. And in Marxism, you know, you have this classification of modes of production: primitive pre-class society, slavery, no, sorry, then it's Asiatic mode of production, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and whatever you call it later, socialism, communism. But if you read Marx closely, you can see that he cheats with Asiatic mode of production. Asiatic mode of production appears just one in the series of stages. But if you look at it closely, you will see that what Marx did is that he proposed his original classification—primitive pre-class societies, antique slave societies, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, whatever—and then he found societies which did not fit in any of this. So he threw all that does not fit into it into Asiatic mode of production. That is to say, what appears to be a positive category is really just a negative container. If Marx were to be honest, he should have said, "We have this, this, this mode of production, and we have a mode of production of all those who doesn't fit my classification." And the idea again is that—this is the very core of Hegelian dialectics—it is that precisely—Hegel is the most, I claim, anti-organicist corporate thinker that you can imagine. It's that through particularities, the universality is also struggling with itself. What again—let me go further, maybe another—maybe another example here. For Hegel, the first thing to say, and it's another point of the same, you know that today it's fashionable with postmodernists—which I definitely am not—to claim how totality is bad. You know, you have this idea: one step from philosophical totality to totalitarianism. For example, Emmanuel Levinas likes to say this: that the origins of political totalitarianism is the philosophical notion of totality. Well, first I think if I may play a good British empiricist: that if you look at it empirically, it's not true. If you look closely at the spontaneous ideology of totalitarian regimes, they were as a rule always some kind of contingent historicists. I mean, my God, Stalin's basic motto was: "Everything depends on circumstances, everything is contingent," and so on. Read Hitler. Well, it's not amusing reading, it's boring, but you can learn something. In Hitler also, it's clear that his vision is some kind of a tragic historicist contingency. Heroes emerge, but at the end everything falls apart, we are all doomed to die. The only thing we can do is to die fighting in a great tragic way and so on and so on. I claim that first it's again empirically wrong. Here you should be proud as theologians here. It's not true that dogmatism is a priori the enemy of democracy. On the contrary, you should be especially sensitive to this central point, which is that a truly democratic society needs quite many unquestionable dogmas. Dogmas, I am using this term. What do I mean by this? Listen, let me ask you a simple question. Because people usually are shocked: "What do you mean dogma? Are you smuggling some of your Stalinist stuff or what?" No, no, I mean something very simple. Let's take the example of rape. Would you like to live in a society where you would have to debate again and again and demonstrate that rape is bad? No, I would like to live in a society where rape is, as a simple dogma, presupposition, accepted as something ridiculously wrong. So that if some idiot advocates rape—you know, with this stupid logic, "Ah, women provoke us, they really want to be raped but are not honest enough to admit"—you don't even have to reason, you treat this guy like, "Are you stupid or what?" And it's not only this; there are many, many in this sense, not dogmas in the prescribed sense, but spontaneous dogmas which are absolutely necessary, I claim, for a functioning democracy. And even I go a step further here, to the horror of many of my friends, and I think Süddeutsche Zeitung even published this. I put a very weird defense of Leitkultur, not exactly in the Angela Merkel sense, but in this sense: I think the liberal illusion is that you can have different cultures and then all the state has to do is to provide some kind of a neutral legal framework which regulates how cultures interact. I claim this never functions. I'm not saying we have to have Leitkultur in the simple sense of pure authority, predominance of one culture. What we need is Leitkultur in this sense: if different cultures are to coexist, laws are not enough to regulate this coexistence. You need again a set of dogmas, in the sense of simple rules but unwritten rules, accepted by all, about, for example, how me as a Christian coexist, I don't know, with—with a Chinese guy across the street, with a Muslim across the street, and so on. If we don't have some minimal shared ethical substance, then we end with regulated hatred, which is what is for me political correctness. The reason I'm opposed to political correctness is that it tries to regulate, legalize even, what should be the spontaneous, as it were, ethical substance. Now, sometimes this has funny effects, I must admit. For example, I learned that in—there, the most crazy politically correct—in a small campus somewhere there around Oregon or where, northwestern United States, they did a detailed politically correct guide of rules to follow in seduction. Like basic rules being at every step you have to ask, like: you shouldn't simply grab the woman but, "Can I unbutton this button here? Can I put my hand there?" and so on and so on. And I was told that strangely it did work. But you know why? Not because they—it was taken literally, but because it was eroticized in the way couples played with it, you know. For example, all of a sudden there, instead of saying in a vulgar way, "I want to sleep with you," it was, "Oh my God, you have a nice button there. Can I please just unbutton that button or whatever?" No, it became very elegant. In this way it works. But it must be this mediation. Otherwise again, for me political correctness is just—it's the worst thing that can happen. We have all effective racism and so on and you just control it with some ethical—what, sorry—with some even legal rules. It's for me a fiasco. You know where they are too narrow. You must have noticed how—like: once I was in the United States and I was asked what is the crucial ingredient of functioning multiculturalism. You can imagine how the politically correct journalist almost lost consciousness when I said, "Good racist jokes." No, okay, they thought I'm crazy. I was not. From ex-Yugoslavia, this is my old story, I can tell you, my big experience is that—I'm not of course talking of racist jokes in the sense of "I humiliate you, you humiliate me." But I remember how it worked in ex-Yugoslavia wonderfully that when I met a Serb friend, a Montenegrin friend, each of us mockingly identified with the racist cliché about ourselves. We Slovenians were supposed to be envious misers, no. Like: what is the Slovenian national proverb? Let's say God or a magician appears to me and tells me, "I will give you a cow for free, but I warn you, I will give two cows to your neighbor." What is the Slovenian farmer's answer? "Rather kill one of my cows, but kill two cows of—of the neighbor." That's our identity, story. Then Montenegrins are lazy and so on and so forth. But you know in what wonderful way the exchange of these jokes functioned? It was not aggressivity. We were kind of a friendly competing about who will tell a more funny joke about oneself. And it was a wonderful instrument of some kind of a true solidarity. The signal of these jokes what—it's not just this official respect; it simply meant, "We are truly friends." This is not possible under political correctness. But let me return to the big story. We said Hegel, rabble, Pöbel, where Hegel was not as it were Hegelian enough. Now let me to finish—I know time is running and so on—just I claim that another point where Hegel is not Hegelian enough—ah, just one political point. I'm not here—I'm not a Marxist. I'm more and more convinced we should return from Marx to Hegel. Because the standard Marxist reading is that the Hegel's notion of rabble is a historically limited notion which points later towards the Marxist notion of proletariat. I think no, if anything today, with all those living in slums, outcasts, those excluded, we are in a way returning from Marx to Hegel. We should maybe return from the narrow notion of proletariat to rabble in the sense of all those half-excluded and so on and so on. So yeah, another thing that I forgot. Why am I for the notion of totality, just to finish that line? You know, totality is not for me this totalitarian notion of how: you have all the crazy struggles but at the end everything is harmonized in a higher totality. No, and I also think that this insight is deeply anti-Christian. I wonder if you agree. Namely, what I think is the most profound anti-Christian wisdom, even if it was advocated by some Christians, is this for me disgusting idea of to explain evil like a stain in a picture. You know this old teleological topic that if you look at the picture from too close, it appears a stain; from a proper distance, you see how what appeared to you a stain really contributes to global harmony. Okay, maybe you find this sympathetic, but I would like to see people who would say Auschwitz and Gulag are stains only for our limited perspective; from the global harmony, you can see how Auschwitz and Gulag contribute to the beauty of the universe. I wouldn't like to live in a universe where Auschwitz contributes to the beauty of the universe. And the way I read the death of Christ, it's precisely renouncing to this simple transcendent God which somehow from his majestic royal perspective knows how things are. No, I think that the death of Christ is precisely solidarity with the particular. It's: you suffer, it's horrible, there is no way with any bullshit teleological universality to justify it. So to go on, Hegelian totality for me is a very important critical notion. It means—it doesn't mean everything can be harmonized in a higher order. It means on the contrary that when you speak about a certain concept order, you should include into it as its immanent part all the antagonism, excesses and so on which may appear just contingent distortions. For example, today's ideological notion of order would have been the standard Fukuyama one: liberal democratic capitalism is the best thing we can possibly ask for, and there are some countries where horrible things happen but they just did not yet arrive there. No, the Hegelian notion of totality tells us this: let's take a country like Congo, which is a living nightmare today. You must know this. The state doesn't even function, you have over one hundred thousand of these children warriors who, you know, they discovered there that if you start giving drugs to children if you begin when they are aged five or six, then after five years you get perfect soldiers who don't care if they die and so on, all that. But as such, Congo is an integral part of global capitalism. Congo is absolutely crucial in supplying minerals and so on for our digital industries and so on and so on. So you take the excess and you can show how it is part of the system. To include all these disturbing things into the system itself, this is for me the notion of Hegelian totality. Next thing: I think that similar mistake to that of rabble, Hegel commits it with sexuality. Now here I will try a little bit, okay, to provoke you or whatever. Maybe I'm simplifying you, so I would love to get from you a critical answer, correcting me if and when I'm wrong. But for me, first I will put it in very primitive simplistic terms. I never got why sexuality, if it's not done for procreation, it's closer to some animal lust. If I may put—formulate—a very common sense statement, isn't it rather the exact opposite? Animals do it for procreation. We humans take something which may appear just a biological function and trans—like you have this wonderful German word umfunktionieren, no—and transpose it, refunctioning as an expression of spirituality. I think that human sexuality, far from being at its most elementary what is animal in us, it's on the contrary the zero level of metaphysics. This is why Freud emphasized sexuality, not being a naturalist—"We are all animals copulating." No, sexual passion is the zero level of infinity. It's when you say, "I love you, I want to have sex with you infinitely, to death, it doesn't matter. You are ready to risk, to suspend all—all empirical short-term interests," and so on and so on. Here I think again Hegel is not radical enough again. What Hegel does is that he proposes this too simple notion of sexuality. He does this towards the end of his Philosophie der Natur and then again in the theory of marriage in Rechtsphilosophie. His idea is basically that sexuality is a natural substance—animal—and then through the process of Bildung, cultural formation, it's gradually aufgehoben, civilized. Like, now if I see a woman, I don't knock her with a stone on the head and rape her. I do stupid things, I invite her out, I write her poems, whatever you want. But I think something is missing between the two: this zero level of absolute passion that we know, for example, from legends like Tristan and so on. What in his rewriting of Tristan, Wagner calls this—this Nacht, the Kingdom of the Night, is this absolute deadly passion which is self-destructive. It's not civilization, symbolic fictions, duties, but it's also not nature. You know who was nicely aware of this? Immanuel Kant, in a tiny text which is half forgotten today on education. Kant—it's there that Kant says this weird thing that I like, famous definition of what is man: "Man is an animal who needs an answer"—sorry, a mystical Freudian slip—"who needs a master." But then how does Kant ground it? He says that only in man there is a kind of a violent freedom, a kind of a brutal freedom which animals don't have. Animals follow their instincts. Man has this almost metaphysical, noumenal, radical freedom which has to be tamed. And this freedom again is neither culture nor nature. The way the—the reason we need discipline is not to control our nature. It's to control this as it were elementary metaphysical excess. So again, I am not now simply celebrating sexuality. I'm just telling that nonetheless things are in a way more complex here. For me, the conflict between sexuality and other forms of metaphysical spirituality is not a conflict between animality and—and spirituality; it's a conflict with meta—it's a metaphysical competition. Both, none of them is animal in the sense of simple animal instincts and so on and so on. Okay, let me go then even further. The last of Hegel's where I think one should read Hegel against Hegel, and which is also actual today, is Hegel's another horror for politically correct pacifists: Hegel's theory of war. His deduction, against Kant's eternal peace, that the idea is a very simple one: that if we live in a well-organized Zivilgesellschaft and rational state, we simply get inert, identified to our particular role, narrow happiness. So from time to time, we need radical negativity, shock, which makes us aware of our true universality, where you purely as an individual identify with state, ready to risk your life, and so on and so on. I think that this notion is interesting insofar as I'm tempted to say we should push Hegel further, but along his own lines, towards something like what, for example, Thomas Jefferson was saying. You know these famous lines where he says, "The tree of liberty has to be watered from time to time by blood to flourish," and so on. That is to say, Hegel's mistake I think is to externalize this negativity. Why not say—and it's still strictly Hegelian, I say thing—what Jefferson was saying: that to have a state which does not become an ossified mechanism, you—you need something like, it needn't be a violent revolution, but you need something like rebellion or whatever which regenerates the state. If you read Hegel in this way, you will see that Hegel is a much more perplexing, open author than it may appear. Hegel is not a Hegel where finally some kind of metaphysical necessity sublates—sublation is a very clumsy English translation but it's only one we have for Aufhebung—where all contingency is aufgehoben and so on. No, no. What Hegel is saying at his best is that the contingency of radical negativity persists. For example, we never have full social, fully stable social order. There is always a threat of war. Or the most subversive Hegel, incredibly actual, totally ignored: the beginning of his Philosophie des Geistes, Anthropologie. It's wonderful where Hegel deals with madness, Verrücktheit, Torheit. Where he in a wonderful way deduces the necessity of madness. He claims that it's only possible for the human animal to break with nature—the first form of break is madness, a kind of psychotic gap, withdrawal—and that then our symbolic universe of Gewohnheit, customs, mechanical customs, is the normalization of this madness. So in a way, even more radically than Michel Foucault, Hegel explicitly says this: even if this doesn't mean that we all should be mad at some point, it's only possible to understand our cultural phenomena, the symbolic universe, against the eternal threat of madness. The Hegel we get here is, I think, a deeply Christological Hegel. What Hegel understood already in his notion of the King—I will now just finish with his formula—is that every universal necessity in order to actualize itself has to be supplemented with a kind of totally contingent incarnation. You have reasonable state, but it's really a state of reason if you have a contingent idiot called the King or whatever. Or even Hegel—this is why, I don't have time to develop it fully, but this is why I think Hegel, contrary to what Kierkegaard thought in a too simplified criticism of Hegel—I claim that Kierkegaard was more Hegelian than he thought. Hegel was fully aware of this idea, of this fundamental anti-Platonic insight of Christianity, where as Kierkegaard saw it correctly, no? You—that—the—that you need a totally contingent event: Jesus Christ. And even if this was a contingent human being, somebody walking around two thousand years ago, the only way to eternal truth is through that figure. There is no direct Gnostic shortcut or whatever. Hegel was fully aware of this. Which is why my formula is, as a leftist in some sense communist: back from Marx to Hegel. Let's give Hegel a chance. I'm sorry if this was confused, but as my friend Dominik hinted at, I am now involved in an act of madness. I finished my book on Hegel, a short book; it will just be printed. About one thousand and two hundred pages, but okay. Now I can die in peace if I did it. I thank you very much for your patience with my madness. Thank you.