What is Reconciliation? Hegel Against Schiller
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2015-12-03 · 1:51:42 · 14,654 words
hegel-dialecticsideologypsychoanalysisphilosophy-generalcommunism-socialismhistoryliberalism-political-correctnesssexuality-gendergeopolitics-wardemocracycinema-art-culture
The second lecture of a series called 'Hegelian Batters,' Žižek mounts a sustained critique of Robert Brandom's analytic re-normalization of Hegel, arguing that Brandom domesticates Hegel by eliminating his most radical insights: self-relating negativity, contradictions in things themselves, and the immanent normativity of reality. Žižek defends a reading of Hegel in which reconciliation is not a future utopia but a retroactive shift in the symbolic order, you change the past by reinterpreting it, illustrated with examples from feminist consciousness, the fall of communist regimes, and South African apartheid. Along the way he engages current politics (SYRIZA, Tsipras, Netanyahu), makes brief detours on Freud and Marx as misread by Brandom, and closes with notes on Islam and feminine mediation of truth.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 26
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Hegelian term for those who refuse to get their hands dirty with the contradictions of actuality, invoked here against critics who accuse SYRIZA opponents of being beautiful souls.
A Hegelian judgment whose subject and predicate are radically at odds (e.g., 'spirit is a bone'), whose first experience is necessarily failure, and whose absurdity is itself what Hegel calls negativity, the subject emerging from the gap.
as “Aufhebung (sublation)”
Hegel's dialectical cancellation-and-preservation, which Derrida himself acknowledged is almost infinitely proximate to his own deconstruction.
as “the subject as self-relating negation”
For Lacan and Hegel alike, a subject is not another positive object but is what is not an object, the inner break or disparity of the object is itself the subject.
The productive, constitutive failure at the heart of the speculative process: you arrive at a result only through failure, and the failure is never simply a failure.
as “reconciliation”
For Žižek, Hegel's reconciliation is not a harmonious future state but reconciliation with the contradictions we are already in, a tragic recognition that things are as they are, from which paradoxically real change can emerge.
Brandom's (mis)reading of Freud and Marx as positing an objective trans-subjective domain (the unconscious, economic being) that controls consciousness, Žižek rejects this as a substantialist misreading of both.
Implicit in Žižek's reading of Marx: the objective socioeconomic domain is not a substance external to subjects but the terrain of class struggle and subjective engagement.
Historical events whose horror cannot be recuperated by any rational narrative of progress, Holocaust, Gulag, colonial atrocities, which expose the limit of Brandom's reconciliation model.
From the final paragraph of the Phenomenology: history is the site of skulls/bones/death, marking Hegel's deeply pessimistic view of history even within apparent optimism.
as “bestimmte Negation”
Determinate negation as Hegel uses it: not mere property-exclusion but the self-relating structure where certain objects positively embody negation rather than just excluding other properties.
as “mediation (Vermittlung)”
The situating of any immediate object within the network of processes that made it possible; Žižek insists Brandom stops too early and misses the Hegelian 'immediacy of mediation', the point where the process of mediating is itself an immediacy (the ego).
Hegel's concept of the tension between an object's oneness and its multiple properties, where the one excludes itself from its own properties, actualized paradigmatically in the human person reduced to the Cartesian cogito.
The point at which the process of mediating does not resolve into another particular immediacy but becomes immediately itself, as in the ego, which is pure mediation experienced as self-identical.
as “Asiatic mode of production as empty envelope”
For Žižek, the Asiatic mode of production is a paradoxical positive entity whose substantial truth is just negation, it covers all that did not fit other modes of production, like the Borges category 'all dogs not included in this list.'
as “contradictions in things themselves”
Against Kant's and Brandom's restriction of contradiction to our knowledge, Žižek reads Hegel as holding that real contradictions exist in reality, the dialectical process begins when a subjective antinomy is recognized as a feature of the thing itself.
as “immanent normativity of reality”
Hegel's claim that there is a normative gap between what a thing effectively is and what it should be according to its own notion, normativity is not merely in our knowledge but inscribed in things themselves.
Žižek's counter-example to Brandom's straight stick: imagine a stick that remains straight in itself only insofar as it appears bent, dispelling the illusion destroys the reality, which is Žižek's definition of ideological mystification and commodity fetishism.
Ideological illusion that is not a mistake overlaid on social reality but the innermost constituent of that reality, dispelling it does not reveal how society really is; it dissolves the reality itself.
Žižek insists, against Brandom, that Hegelian absolute knowing is not a future ideal we are approaching but a retroactive presupposition, recognizing that reconciliation is always already accomplished.
Brandom's formula for Hegelian reconciliation: traditional societies find norms as pre-given; modern societies make them; the third synthetic stage sees finding and making as two sides of one process, Žižek grants the formula but rejects the futurological framing.
as “big Other”
The objective normative order, for Lacan there is no big Other, yet every symbolic system functions only through the illusion that it is already there independent of subjective activity.
Implicit in the discussion of how subjects are produced by ideological systems they experience as pre-given; Žižek frames this via the necessity of the illusion that the big Other already exists.
as “retroactive change”
The Hegelian insight that the only way to change things is to presuppose they are already changed: real change is a rewriting of the past in which history appears entirely differently, not merely a modification of the future.
as “freedom as condition of liberation”
Following Marcuse: you must already in some sense be free in order to fight for liberation, applied to feminist consciousness, the first step is not fighting oppression but even becoming aware of it as oppression.
as “the magic moment / shift in the symbolic order”
The mysterious moment, before material victory, when everyone, including those in power, knows the game is over: the real change happens at the symbolic level before the political one.
Stories he reaches for 4
Žižek was rude to Judith Butler, called to apologize; she said he didn't need to apologize, which tempted him to withdraw the apology. The point: for the apology to appear superfluous (genuine pardon) you still had to perform it, you cannot go directly to the superfluous result.
“she told me Slavoj I know what you are you didn't need to apologize. And my immediate temptation was to say okay then I withdraw my apology”
Spinoza dismisses the personal notion of God (old wise man with a beard) as merely a name for our ignorance: when you reach the limit of knowledge, you posit a personal God as the embodiment of that void, a positive entity whose truth is nothing.
“the only truth of the notion of personal God is the embodiment of that ignorance. It appears to be something but it's actually just something that fills in the void.”
Adorno refuses to synthesize the individualist and objectivist notions of society: their antinomy is not a problem to be resolved but is itself what characterizes our society, the antinomy is transposed from our categories into reality itself.
“the truth is this antinomy is this antinomy itself”
A soldier pretends madness by looking at every paper and saying 'this is not that.' Doctors eventually give him a discharge paper; he looks at it and says 'this is that.' The punchline is that the object (the paper that is that) emerges only through the endless series of 'this is not that.'
“you you arrive at a result only through the failure. The failure is never simply a failure.”
Works invoked 6
Capital book
Defended against Brandom's substantialist reading: the point of Capital is not to posit an objective economic domain but to show it as the terrain of class struggle; the manuscript breaks off at class struggle.
Central text of the entire lecture; Žižek defends its Vorrede, the section on Erfahrung, and the closing Schädel passage against Brandom's re-normalization throughout.
Mentioned as grammatically nightmarish but excellently translated by Kemp Smith; the doctrine of antinomies is the foil against which Hegel's move of contradictions into things themselves is defined.
The Order of Things book
The preface and its reference to the Borges taxonomy of dogs is cited to illustrate the paradox of a positive entity whose truth is pure negation.
Žižek recommends both the novel and the TV series; the key interpretive insight (the novel-within-a-novel depicts a third, inexistent reality) is read through Lacan as a figure of the Real; the Amazon series is praised as released in the new Netflix style.
Making It Explicit book
Brandom's main work providing the analytic re-reading of Hegel that Žižek systematically critiques; appreciated for clarity and argumentative rigor but rejected for domesticating Hegel's radicalism.
People invoked 27
Named as the main protagonist of the objectivist view of society, where society comes first and individuals are secondary, used as one pole of the Adornian antinomy.
Ferdinand de Saussure positive
His definition of the signifier, identity consists only in its differences from other signifiers, is cited as almost what Brandom quotes for determinate negation, but Brandom stops short of the self-relating dimension.
Philip K. Dick positive
The Man in the High Castle is praised as a 'pretty good series'; Žižek reads its novel-within-a-novel structure through a Lacanian lens as depicting the Real.
Robert Pippin negative
Grouped with Brandom as remaining stuck in the oscillation between mediation and immediacy without reaching the Hegelian 'immediacy of mediation.'
Marine Le Pen negative
Cited as the horizon toward which SYRIZA's economic nationalism is heading, her rhetoric is now pro-working class, making the left-right convergence via nationalist populism the big danger.
Jacques Derrida positive
Žižek notes Derrida's own acknowledgment of the near-infinite proximity between deconstruction and Hegelian Aufhebung, and defends Derrida against 'stupid followers' who dismiss Hegel.
Robert Brandom negative
Žižek highly appreciates Brandom's analytical clarity and rigor ('a model of clear argumentative reasoning,' 'not a complete idiot') but systematically argues that his re-normalization of Hegel loses every essential dimension: self-relating negativity, contradictions in things themselves, the proper meaning of reconciliation, and the necessity of the illusion of the big Other.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited approvingly for the claim that the antinomy between individualist and objectivist notions of society is not to be resolved but transposed into reality itself, the antinomy is what characterizes our society.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited repeatedly to illuminate Hegelian points: subject is what is not an object, the big Other does not exist, the Lacanian Real as the inexistent third reality in The Man in the High Castle.
Ryszard Kapuściński positive
The great Polish political journalist; Žižek cites his account of the Tehran crossing during the Shah's fall as the paradigmatic example of the 'magic moment' when the symbolic order shifts before material victory.
Judith Butler positive
Subject of a personal anecdote about an apology: Žižek was rude to her, called to apologize; she said he didn't need to, which illustrates the Hegelian logic of the retroactively superfluous necessary act. Žižek says he is 'an evil guy' for repeating the story against her wishes.
Alexis Tsipras negative
Žižek is sharply critical of Tsipras's visit to Israel and alignment with Netanyahu (proclaiming Jerusalem as eternal capital), his ties to the Greek Orthodox Church and Serbian Orthodox Patriarch, and his drift toward economic nationalism, predicting it ends in a convergence with Marine Le Pen.
Norman Kemp Smith positive
Praised as a masterful Kant translator whose English version is better than the German original by cutting Kant's labyrinthine sentences into clear shorter ones.
Benedictus de Spinoza positive
Cited as an example of the paradox of a positive entity (personal God) whose truth is purely negative (embodiment of ignorance); Žižek notes he is 'not a Spinozian' but uses the example for the logic it illustrates.
Julian Assange positive
Žižek visited Assange at the Ecuador embassy; they discussed The Man in the High Castle. Assange provided a key interpretive formula for the novel. Žižek is sympathetic to Assange's imprisonment ('poor Julian').
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Varoufakis provided Žižek with a 'nice answer' explaining Greece's high pension levels via the specific situation of multigenerational unemployment; Žižek trusts his account over Costas Douzinas's.
Benjamin Netanyahu negative
Called a 'well-known Holocaust revisionist'; Žižek finds Tsipras's public alliance with Netanyahu intolerable, even for a left-wing politician under pressure.
Mentioned in the context of the French Revolution's Jacobin terror and Thermidor, more ordinary people were killed after Robespierre's overthrow than during the Terror, a statistic nobody notices.
Michel Foucault positive
The Order of Things (preface) is cited for the Borges taxonomy of dogs as illustration of a positive entity whose truth is pure negation.
Kostas Douzinas negative
Uses Hegel's 'beautiful soul' to defend SYRIZA capitulation; responded to Žižek's concerns by shouting 'you're listening to your Catholic fascist propaganda'; Žižek resists his use of Hegel to justify the left compromising with austerity.
Herbert Marcuse positive
Cited for the formulation 'freedom is a condition of liberation', you must already in some way be free to fight for liberation, applied to feminist struggle.
Nelson Mandela positive
Admired for the symbolic moment of his apparent victory while still in prison, even Botha's invitation for a chat signaled to everyone the game was over for apartheid, illustrating the symbolic precedes the political.
Karl Marx positive
Defended against Brandom's reading of Capital as positing an objective economic domain: the point of Capital is that the economic domain is the domain of class struggle, i.e., subjective engagement; ideology is not a false overlay but constitutive of social reality.
Jorge Luis Borges positive
His story of the crazy categorization of dogs (ending with 'all dogs not included in this list') is used to illustrate the paradox of a positive entity that is merely the embodiment of negation.
Sigmund Freud positive
Defended against Brandom's misreading: the Freudian unconscious is not an objective external substance but a higher degree of Hegelian self-consciousness; the symptom persists only insofar as its meaning is unknown.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central theoretical authority throughout; Žižek defends a radical, materialist, pessimistic reading of Hegel against analytic domestications, insisting on contradictions in reality, immanent normativity, and reconciliation as a retroactive presupposition.
Immanuel Kant positive
Contrasted with Hegel: Kant's sentences are a grammatical nightmare, but excellent translators (Kemp Smith) surpassed the German original; Kant restricts contradictions to knowledge (antinomies as transcendental illusions), which Hegel radically rejects.
What it argues
Brandom's analytic domestication of Hegel and its limitsContradictions in things themselves vs. only in knowledgeImmanent normativity: the gap between what a thing is and what it ought to beRetroactive change: winning by establishing the game is already overSelf-relating negativity and self-exclusion in HegelThe immediacy of mediationReconciliation as a present-tense presupposition, not a future ideal
Dialectical moves 11
“Spirit is a bone — the truth of spirit is not its opposite (non-bone) but this absurd identification, and the absurdity is itself what Hegel calls negativity.”
The speculative identity of opposites means you must pass through the paradoxical identification before you can grasp the negation; the gap between subject and predicate is the subject.
“The wrong choice is not simply wrong — you can make the right choice only after the wrong choice, because only the wrong choice establishes the conditions for the right choice.”
Necessity and erroneousness are not opposed; certain necessary steps reveal themselves as superfluous only retroactively after having been taken.
“The only way to change things is to perceive and assume them as already changed.”
Real change is not a modification of the future but a retroactive shift in what the past was, the change must already have happened at the symbolic level.
“A stick that remains straight in itself only insofar as it appears to us as a bent stick — if you erase the illusion the thing itself disappears.”
Ideological illusion is not a false overlay on social reality but its constitutive condition; dispelling it does not reveal reality but dissolves it.
“The problem is its own solution — the antinomy should not be resolved; you resolve it by transposing it into reality itself.”
What appears as a subjective contradiction in our categories is revealed to be a feature of the object when properly understood; the solution is to recognize the contradiction is real.
“Far from being a future ideal, Hegelian reconciliation is always already accomplished — the result needs not wait upon us.”
Against Brandom's futurological reading, Žižek insists that absolute knowing means recognizing the reconciliation is already here, not striving toward it.
“The extreme catastrophe is not a deviation from the rational narrative but always has the function of the truth of a movement.”
Rather than excluding historical horrors as irrational excesses, Hegel treats them as what brings out the inner destructive potential that was there from the beginning.
“It's not that we have ideological illusions about society and then real society — the illusions are the innermost constituent of this society.”
Ideology is not false consciousness masking a real base; it is constitutive of the social reality it appears to distort.
“The progress of knowledge consists not in resolving contradictions but in discovering that what you thought was your subjective contradiction is a feature of the thing itself.”
Contra Brandom/Popper, dialectical progress moves contradictions from the epistemological into the ontological, rather than eliminating them.
“Freedom is a condition of liberation — you must already in a certain way be free in order to fight for liberation.”
The presupposition of freedom precedes and enables the struggle for it; the change at the symbolic level (recognizing oppression as oppression) is the real change.
“If you want a true state it should no longer be a state — the state that perfectly fulfills its notion transcends itself into a religious community.”
The immanent normativity of the state points beyond the state form: fully realizing what state was supposed to be requires abolishing the state.
Claims 20
rejects
Brandom's re-normalization of Hegel domesticates and loses Hegel's most radical dimension: the self-relating structure of negativity.Brandom's reading of Hegel
asserts
Contradictions are in things themselves, not merely in our knowledge — this is the ABC of Hegel that Brandom entirely misses.Hegelian ontology / dialectical contradiction
rejects
Hegelian reconciliation is not a future ideal we are approaching but a retroactive presupposition — recognizing that we are already reconciled with the contradictions we inhabit.Brandom's futurological reading of absolute knowing
asserts
The proper Hegelian logic is that you arrive at a result only through failure: the failure is never simply a failure but the condition of the result.Hegelian speculative process / negativity
rejects
Brandom's Hegel is essentially Karl Popper without aggressiveness: an ontology of infinite reality we approach by resolving contradictions in knowledge, leaving the object untouched.Brandom's ontology
asserts
Revolutionary terror was a false choice, but one you nonetheless had to go through — you cannot go directly to the rational state without it.French Revolution / Hegel's philosophy of history
asserts
The Stalinist terror cannot simply be dismissed as an unintended consequence of good intentions; the potential for Stalinism was already present in early Bolshevism.Stalinism and Leninism / historical responsibility
rejects
Brandom's dismissal of 'excessive' historical events like Holocaust and Gulag as irrational deviations from rational narrative is deeply non-Hegelian: for Hegel extreme catastrophes are always the truth of a movement.Brandom's histoire raisonnée / rational narrative of history
rejects
Any logic that uses the Holocaust to justify the existence of Israel and thereby erects a monument to Hitler has pushed reconciliation narrative too far; such reasoning justifies everything.Zionist instrumentalization of Holocaust in teleological narrative
rejects
Brandom's reading of Freud and Marx as hermeneutics of suspicion is wrong: the Freudian unconscious is a higher degree of self-consciousness, not an external substance, and Capital's point is that the economic domain is already the domain of class struggle.Brandom's interpretation of Freud and Marx
asserts
Ideological illusion is not an overlay on top of social reality but its innermost constituent: eliminating the illusion would dissolve the reality it mystifies.ideology / commodity fetishism
asserts
Real social change is not primarily a change of the future but a retroactive rewriting of the past — a shift in how the entire history appears.social change / feminist consciousness / historical transformation
asserts
Freedom is a condition of liberation: you must already be in some sense free in order to fight for liberation (following Marcuse).liberation / feminist struggle / political emancipation
rejects
The necessity of the illusion that the big Other already exists cannot be explained by Brandom's formula of finding-and-making; something more radical — a Christian moment — is required.Brandom's account of the big Other / objective normative order
rejects
Tsipras's cosying up to Netanyahu and the Greek Orthodox Church represents a dangerous drift toward economic nationalism that ends at Marine Le Pen.SYRIZA / Tsipras / left nationalism
rejects
The 'war on terror' is not a serious war but a cover for two different conflicts: the Shia-Sunni conflict and the Russia-Western conflict.war on terror / ISIS / geopolitics
asserts
Hegel's view of history is fundamentally pessimistic: there is no a priori guarantee that anything good will emerge from catastrophes, and some destructions (e.g., Mongol invasions) had no higher meaning.Hegel's philosophy of history / pessimism
rejects
The antinomy between individualist and objectivist notions of society is not to be resolved by synthesis but transposed into reality itself — the antinomy is what characterizes our society.individualism vs. social objectivism / Adorno
asserts
Hegel is materialist in the infinite judgment 'spirit is a bone': the inner break of the object is subject, not a separate ethereal domain.Hegelian materialism / spirit and bone
asserts
The state as such cannot be a true state — the very notion of state points beyond itself toward a religious community, and that too cannot hold.Hegel's theory of the state / political philosophy
Quotes 15
“you you arrive at a result only through the failure. The failure is never simply a failure.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian negativity / speculative process
“the problem is its own solution. The antinomy should not be resolved but simply you resolve it by transposing it into reality itself.”Slavoj Žižek · contradictions in things themselves / dialectical resolution
“imagine a stick which remains straight in reality in itself only insofar as it appears to us as a bent stick. You know that its being misperceived as what it is not is a condition of its being what it is in itself.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as structural illusion / commodity fetishism
“it's not that we have ideological illusions about society and then the real society — illusions are the innermost constituent of this society.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology / commodity fetishism
“The result is that is that and the result it needs not to wait upon us. It's already by implication as well as full actuality accomplished.”Slavoj Žižek · reconciliation as always already accomplished / absolute knowing
“the only way to change things is to perceive assume them as already changed.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive change / Hegelian dialectic of transformation
“freedom is a condition of liberation in the sense as you must already in a certain way be free in order to fight for liberation.”Slavoj Žižek · freedom as presupposition of liberation / Marcuse
“Hegel shows a tenderness for the things of this world as if you know let's not press too much on things things cannot be self-contradictory.”Slavoj Žižek · Kant's restriction of contradiction to knowledge / Hegel's critique
“there is no big Other there is no objective normative order given in advance. But nonetheless for every normative order... you produce something only through the illusion that it already exists.”Slavoj Žižek · big Other / necessity of the illusion
“Hegel's view of history is very pessimistic precisely when he asserts apparently optimism.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's pessimism / history as site of skulls
“the truth is this antinomy is this antinomy itself.”Slavoj Žižek · Adorno / antinomy of society as real contradiction
“this is I think the best metaphor maybe of the Hegelian speculative process”Slavoj Žižek · Yugoslav 'this is not that' joke as speculative process
“a new image of what the past was. You know this idea that yes as Marx put it we have to change reality but to change it we have to redefine it to see it”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive rewriting / change of the past
“The real change is when you say fuck it no I'm not by nature woman... you have to change the entire story.”Slavoj Žižek · feminist consciousness as retroactive symbolic shift
“draw this to the end and put a monument to Hitler in Tel Aviv. Because isn't it in some naive sense true?”Slavoj Žižek · reductio of teleological reconciliation narrative / Holocaust and Israel
Transcript 6 turns
unknown
Welcome to the second lecture of Hegelian Batters. I think Jacqueline already introduced Žižek yesterday and I just wanted to say I hope you’ve all done your homework and you’ve read West on Nothing: Absolutely Crucial Phenomenology of Spirit. And Žižek did promise us yesterday that he was going to engage with all the Hegelian batters and the liberal critique of Hegel yesterday like Brandom and Pippin. We didn't have that much of that, but we'll have some more today. And today you are going to engage with the liberal reading of
Welcome to the second lecture of Hegelian Batters. I think Jacqueline already introduced Žižek yesterday and I just wanted to say I hope you’ve all done your homework and you’ve read West on Nothing: Absolutely Crucial Phenomenology of Spirit. And Žižek did promise us yesterday that he was going to engage with all the Hegelian batters and the liberal critique of Hegel yesterday like Brandom and Pippin. We didn't have that much of that, but we'll have some more today. And today you are going to engage with the liberal reading of
Slavoj Žižek
well I wouldn't say that Brandom is a fascist in spite
well I wouldn't say that Brandom is a fascist in spite
unknown
of my yesterday not Brandom Schiller
of my yesterday not Brandom Schiller
Slavoj Žižek
well no no no that's what I announced but as I explained yesterday I will skip Schiller because it's simply you can enjoy it only if you know Schiller.
well no no no that's what I announced but as I explained yesterday I will skip Schiller because it's simply you can enjoy it only if you know Schiller.
unknown
Alright can I offer another provocation actually which is closer to home another reading and I'm thinking of the director of the Institute of Humanities who is actually now a SYRIZA MP and he just brought out an article in a Greek radical newspaper called Kokkino which means red and the title the article Costas Douzinas is entitled The Cunning of History and is precisely using Hegel to suggest that any of us who are suggesting that Tsipras should not have cave in and the SYRIZA government should not be imposing anti-austerity measures are actually behaving like beautiful souls and we should all buckle up behind Tsipras. So he’s using Hegel to say that all the critics of SYRIZA are behaving like you know beautiful souls and we don’t want to get our hands dirty. So it’s another thing that you could address maybe tomorrow. Okay
Alright can I offer another provocation actually which is closer to home another reading and I'm thinking of the director of the Institute of Humanities who is actually now a SYRIZA MP and he just brought out an article in a Greek radical newspaper called Kokkino which means red and the title the article Costas Douzinas is entitled The Cunning of History and is precisely using Hegel to suggest that any of us who are suggesting that Tsipras should not have cave in and the SYRIZA government should not be imposing anti-austerity measures are actually behaving like beautiful souls and we should all buckle up behind Tsipras. So he’s using Hegel to say that all the critics of SYRIZA are behaving like you know beautiful souls and we don’t want to get our hands dirty. So it’s another thing that you could address maybe tomorrow. Okay
Slavoj Žižek
no no no I decided because I got some murmurs back from you from some of you my anonymous spies who told me that like some of you were dissatisfied and in a quite justified way like where is Hegel. I'm just giving you these confused political stories okay I decided then fuck you up yours today and tomorrow you get only Hegel and a lot of Hegel you know. But nonetheless nonetheless I would just like to reply something because I want precisely to share this with you. As if he is maybe he has also spies here. Are you a double-changed agent? Are you also Costas’s spy? Because this morning I got a long email from Costas claiming that I should come to Athens appear publicly with Tsipras I hope he hopes I’m still theirs and that I don’t believe these lies by Varoufakis and so on and so on. Now what I wanted to doubt but now I learned from you and from others I checked it up something which is even much worse at least for my taste. Okay maybe I don't agree with it you can justify surrendering to EU my god they can ruin you whatever. But in the last weeks the Greek government especially Tsipras did some things which I find really intolerable and which has nothing to do which have nothing to do with pressures of some European technocrats. First he recently visited Israel spent three days with Netanyahu and proclaimed publicly that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people something that even pro-Israeli Western countries do not do. And also you told me and others that he concluded some shady deals about shared military maneuvers and so on. Now you know that I am often critical of Palestinians' anti-Semitism and so on. I have a certain understanding for the Jewish position but to do this it’s going a little bit too far. To become friendly with the well-known Holocaust revisionist Netanyahu no as I told yesterday this is simply too far. Second thing I don’t like how he’s playing what I see on the horizon is what in European terms we would have called a historical compromise between radical left and radical right. More and more often it sounds like this economic nationalism. You have connections with the church all the time you can see Tsipras with that patriarch of the Greek church and Greek church played in Greece very problematic extremely national position. I was triggered I become attentive with it already half a year ago even more when Tsipras visited Serbia. Nothing against but the things he did there appearing with Serb Orthodox patriarch who is a well-known Serb extreme nationalist and making statements which are to put it mildly absolutely not neutral. Now I can understand in some vague way why he did this. He knows that he can be attacked from the right as non-patriot as usually leftists are so how do you say it in these football or whatever terms he want to protect his right-wing flank or whatever you know. But nonetheless to play this game where effectively I think at the end of a horizon it's Marine Le Pen. I predict you if it will go this way at the end we will have the two big you know that's the the big pro-worker because also Marine Le Pen her entire rhetorics is now pro-working class rhetoric. This is the big danger now. Because of this experiences with Europe bad experiences we withdraw to some pseudo working class subtly anti-immigrant nationalism. And the more and more I notice in SYRIZA this nationalist temptation. This is why you know when they attacked other this is what I noticed already before I mean when SYRIZA was coming to power how insensitive they were to these arguments which you can answer them. But again my old motive these are the worries of ordinary people that you have to respond to. For example in many post-communist East European countries including mine which are politically bullshit I’m ashamed to be from that part of the world. But they asked some questions which of course from the standpoint of ordinary people are reasonable. Like the Greeks went off strike of for they want how to put it to to make longer to move forwards the age when you can take retirement but okay of course all the right-wingers with us immediately pointed out then in Slovenia the age of when you can retire is still much higher than the age proposed now by Greece and that the average retirement pension although the prices are higher in Slovenia the prices are practically the same as Austria and Italy and the how do you call it pensions retirement what you get on average is still in spite of all these reductions lower than in Greece. Now you can answer this. Varoufakis gave me a nice answer which is just because of a specific situation of Greece where you have many people unemployed mid-generation and he claimed there are over million million cases of this and that there are again over million of families which now all have to rely on on pension. Because you know the old retired people have to somehow okay but you should reply to this you know. Otherwise and no they like when I mentioned this to Costas he started to shout at me in his way you know uh you’re you’re listening to your Catholic fascist propaganda and so on and so on. You know like they they should have shown a little bit more of sensibility towards these post-communist countries which are effectively even a little bit more miserable than Greece. You know like this is solidarity you know. Greece maybe tried to play too much of this role of you know exemplary victims how should I put it they were the big victim of Europe. Yes they were the shock was incredible I admit it no other country in Europe had such a sudden drop in the standard of living. But you know like it’s not as simple as that. Okay with this I will conclude you know. Now let’s finally finally go to do some real work. But I warn you there will be a price you will pay for it. Practically if I remember correctly no joke especially no dirty jokes and so on you know so that’s life no. All I can tell you is if you have free time to watch TV download you can do it from kickass or what’s the other one the big one Pirate Bay for free. You know The Man in the High Castle that famous Ballard science fiction novel alternate reality Germany and Japan won World War II and United States are divided. Eastern part German state pro-German state Western part a Japanese state in the middle some kind of a buffer zone. And it’s a pretty good series I know they did it in this new Netflix way I like it that they released all of a sudden the entire season ten times one hour. And here you can see that Julian Assange is not a total idiot. When I visited him two years ago two days ago what is this Freudian slip I don’t know we debated it and he told me he also saw it and knew the novel that in the novel there is an extremely subtle trick because you know the whole game is this one it’s of course this typical postmodern almost today self-reference that within this universe there is in the novel a novelist he is the man on the high castle and in the TV series they made it into some mysterious movie maker who distributes documentaries pseudo documentaries which tell what is for us the true story of the World War II that you know Germany lost all the stuff like our real history. Now of course the obvious question is and you have to wait till the end of the novel and here they didn’t yet decide what is reality is it that we will learn that this alternate reality where Germany won and so on is just a dream or is our world and Assange gave me a formula which helped me it’s a totally different one is that if you listen carefully at least in the novel to what that novel within the novel written by man in the high castle says it’s not simply our reality there are subtle differences. It’s neither of course it’s not that reality of the novel Japan and Germany won but it’s also not our reality. It’s a third reality totally fictitious. And I’m tempted to read it in Lacanian way that’s the real. It’s an inexistent virtual real and it is as if this is the Platonic real the ideal true world and our miserable our reality is one reality. The alternate reality imagined is another one but we are all miserable copies of the real which is that world which again is it doesn’t exist. I mean it’s it’s a good reading so again maybe Assange is because now he is so desperate he told me what can he do in that fucking Ecuador embassy I mean all my gratitude to Ecuador. By fucking I mean it’s really a not even a large apartment you know and he says poor Julian he started to watch TV series you know he knows everything Homeland this and so on no. So this is it. Okay sorry now we go to real work and okay enough of jokes Hegel. Hegel is a notoriously that’s the rumor difficult writer although if you read Kant you may have noticed also Kant Kant Critique of Pure Reason and so on you may have noticed that grammatically Hegel is relatively easy that grammatically Kant is a nightmare which is why as many German interpreters of Kant admit you by you I mean the English-speaking thinkers or whatever have the luck of having excellent especially David Kemp Smith and others translation of Kant which are to cut a long story short better than the German original. You know because Kant is like Kleist in literature his sentences are always one page the entire page no. And Kemp Smith in a masterful way cut them short into three four sentences not only not losing anything in the logic but making it making it even clearer. With Hegel it’s on the contrary usually the grammatical structure is pretty much a simple one but the thought eludes you so a difficult writer. Many of his statements we know this run against our common sense and cannot but appear as crazy speculations. So as I already hinted at yesterday Brandom attempts to let's call this re-normalize Hegel to demonstrate how Hegel's even Hegel's most extravagant formulations when properly re-interpreted make sense in our common space of meaning. Again as I emphasized yesterday I highly appreciate Brandom's attempt. It is a model of clear argumentative reasoning. Like she was mad yesterday when I said you are evil because you are not stupid or whatever I said yesterday no. I mean Brandom even more he is not a complete idiot. I I don’t mean that we are some who are not idiots there are only two kinds of people everybody knows complete idiots and not complete idiots there is no third kind but nonetheless I think that this domestication of Hegel doesn't work. Yes we should translate Hegel into and it can be done wonderfully we should translate Hegel into our somehow to render it clear okay but not by way of losing his madness. Certain excess is getting reduced there. If we will have time tomorrow but I want to give you a hint of this. Sometimes things are even very simple here the old example that I use of what Hegel calls infinite judgment where the subject and predicate are totally at odds you simply don’t see the connection. For example an extremely simple example der Geist ist ein Knochen spirit that I use all the time spirit is a bone. And Hegel says that this is not just some kind of dialectical contrast like in reality we know spirit is the most ethereal movable thing spirit is not just a bone. No Hegel's point because then if this is true why why do we have to pass through this paradox? Why don't we directly say spirit is the opposite of a bone? A bone as the most stupid lifeless inert part of the human body. Why so why not saying it directly? Spirit is the very opposite of bone bone is dead inert spirit is pure self-relating flexibility and so on and so on. Why is this an infinite judgment? Well the answer of Hegel is very simple here it’s that I will give you also then the next answer which raises. What as Hegel says in a very Derridean way and Derrida was not as some of his stupid followers Derrida was well aware he once said this is wonderful I repeat I said this here openly that there is nothing as close to what he calls deconstruction as the Hegelian Aufhebung sublation and so on. Derrida was fully aware of the almost infinite proximity between what he is doing and Hegel. Derrida was far from this dismissing Hegel as some crazy idealist who thinks everything is in his thought or whatever. So again you know the Derridean motive of failure repetition and so on and Hegel says this literally an infinite judgment is a judgment which stops you it its first experience is necessarily a failure. It doesn't work like spirit is you expect some high definition the most developed part of nature the effect of extremely complex blah blah then you get spirit is a bone. It doesn't work. It’s a radical gap. And what would be here Hegelian answer? Again what you experience as a radical gap impossibility and so on this gap is subject. You know literally then you get all these wonderful speculative formulas in what sense spirit if it's own self-negation and so on and so I hope you will get it now it’s an extremely simple example but nonetheless. Why is then do we have to begin with spirit is a bone? Why not saying spirit is the very opposite of a bone? Because if you just say spirit is the very opposite of a bone you automatically presuppose a certain field of reality where there are different objects. And you know spirit is one type of object totally different bone is another type of object. But Hegel is here materialist when he says spirit is a bone. Or as Lacan put it somewhere in subject is what is not an object. But this negation is inherent to the object. It’s a very subtle point. It’s not that object is here subject is there. Object cannot be fully an object and this inner break disparity however we call it of object is subject. This is what you lose when you go directly at it and said spirit is not a bone. No the truth of the subject is not or spirit is not spirit is not a bone but you have to say spirit is a bone and then you experience the absurdity of this statement and this absurdity is what Hegel calls negativity and so on and so on. You know it’s this wonderful logic that I developed in all my books repeating old joke which is I will do now where you you arrive at a result only through the failure. The failure is never simply a failure. It’s a failure but it’s a like the old joke I must have tell tell it but I still like it from it was Yugoslav army joke you know a guy pretends to be a madman and he what is his symptom that whenever he wherever he goes he looks at every paper and says this is not that. To ni ono or in Serbo-Croat Ce n'est pas ça this is not that this is not that. Then they say oh my god he appears crazy okay a group of doctors examined him again there in the he says this is not that looks all the papers and then okay you know the joke probably at the end they get him the paper which excuses him from military with service. He looks at it and says this is that you know. It’s so stupid but you see the point the object that is that emerges only through his this is not that and so on. This is I think the best metaphor maybe of the Hegelian speculative process. Or another example that I often mentioned here sorry if I’m repeating old points it's my old story with Judith Butler and she doesn't like me repeating it which is why I’m repeating it of course I’m an evil guy. The problem of apologizing you know the story I repeat a couple how once I was a little bit rude towards Judith and then later I called her and apologized and she told me Slavoj I know what you are you didn't mean it bad you need not to apologize. And my immediate temptation was to say okay then I withdraw my apology and but of course but you see the subtlety of it this is in a way what Hegel is about. Yes for her to say Slavoj you don’t really I don’t really you don’t really need to apologize was a nice way to accept the apology because you get the subtlety if she were to say yes fuck you you were so rude I deserve an apology this would have meant that he really she really did not pardon me that she is still bitter. So the para you see the nice paradox something appears at the end as superfluous you didn't need to apologize me. But you have to do a thing for it to appear superfluous. Like you cannot go directly to it. So you know this is I hope you sense this a totally different logic from this common sense evolutionism there are necessary stages of evolution. No apology is not simply a necessary step. It is necessary but the whole trick is that retroactively it appears superfluous. And it’s the same we will talk about this when we will debate hopefully later today all this Hegelian topic of necessary unnecessary consequences. Because for example people often don't get this in Hegel in Hegel's critique of French Revolution I’m sorry another old motive by me they think it like this. Stupid Frenchmen have chosen revolutionary terror which means death abstract negativity self-destruction. Rational Germans go for state of reason organic structure blah blah. But that’s not Hegel's point. Of course he admits revolutionary terror I doubt this it’s more complex was a deadlock. But Hegel's point is that you know like I put it like this that's the elegance of Hegel. In the choice between terror and rational state of course terror is a false choice. But you have to begin through it. You cannot go directly at the rational state. So this is a beautiful position Hegel was not the liberal who whose notion is to cut it short we want we want against you know the first phase of the French Revolution was okay then when for me at least all the fun began chop chop you know. No you know why I say all fun began? Because look just at the statistics how many people died. The whole problem of revolutionary terror was they they chopped off some of the heads of those up there the rich. If you look at how many ordinary people were killed of three the three weeks of Thermidor after it was after Robespierre and Jacobins were overthrown more people were killed but nobody notices nobody knows that it’s all but okay what I want to say is that you see here the subtlety. Yes terror was a blind alley unnecessary. But at the same time you have to go through it. You have like it’s a wrong choice it’s like that it is not that that paper only through the wrong choice the true choice sorry the truth disappears. Is this subtle paradox which to put it more in Lacanian terms are you aware that in this way temporality is involved in logic? The point is that the moment you are dealing with this choice you don’t simply you don’t simply have a choice. But you can only do it with a double choice you know. Like you can you make the right choice but only after the wrong choice. Because only the wrong choice establishes the conditions for the right choice. And in the same way I claim Stalinism and Leninism if I will have time I will return to this later today if not today tomorrow should be read. The way I’m jumping ahead now. The way Brandom reads Hegel in this question is he refers in a very elegant way he refers to to to sorry to is distinction between the Greek antique notion of fate and the modern Kantian notion. You know that in Greece in Greece universe Oedipus something happens which is Oedipus is guilty although it was not his intention. He is nonetheless guilty. It was your fate. You didn’t have a choice. He didn’t know he is killing his father screwing his mother but nonetheless he is guilty. You are guilty even if you don’t know it. That is to say you are guilty responsible also for the objective non-intended consequences of your act. The Kantian logic at least superficially is the opposite one is the famous internalization. You are guilty only for what your intention was. Like for Kant to cut a long story short Oedipus was innocent. He thought there is just an annoying okay maybe it was not totally just but he was not certainly guilty of for certain guilty of killing his father. You know it was just he saw a stranger there the stranger behaved in a rude way or I even forgot who was rude there but he killed so but and then Brandom tries to play both game this is his naive Hegelian idealism. He claims that in prin- he wants to do a synthesis of the two. That yes we are directly responsible only for intended consequences but that in the larger scheme of things I do something and something unexpected turns out that I did not intend but he claims that up to a point he is right but not really that Hegel's wager as it were is that nonetheless through all these failures I wanted this another thing happens at the end I establish how I was nonetheless instrument of a higher rational reason. How precisely through my precisely my failure to achieve my explicit goal realizes a higher goal. In this sense you can have historical reconciliation. Okay my problem here with Brandom is is that he is not Hegelian enough. Why? First the example he uses is a very interesting one. First he is anti-Freudian. For him Freudian psychoanalysis is an example of hermeneutics of suspicion where you the you dismiss subjective self-awareness as simply secondary a tool instrument of some other objective processes. Like his reading is totally wrong substantialist. Freud asserts the unconscious as some objective trans-subjective domain we have a master outside ourselves which controls us and for him for Brandom it’s the same with Marx. Economy social being determines consciousness which means what we think just comes secondary is just an effect of objective social processes and so on and so on. I will not go into it why this is wrong reading a wrong reading I claim both of Marx and of Freud. With regard to Marx eh eh eh. The whole point of Capital critique of political economy is that the Marxist point is not to establish some objective economic domain which controls us which is some kind of substantial other but to show how this domain is also the domain of class struggle which means of subjective engagement. You know this crucial detail here that the very last page of Capital where the manuscript breaks is class struggle at the end of what is now appears as volume And okay I will not go into it I repeated this often in my books how it’s exactly the same with the Freudian unconscious. It’s not some kind of external substantiality. Freudian unconscious is an even higher degree of what Hegel calls self-consciousness. I will not go into it now. What I want to say is this that where Brandom fails is how because of this look Oedipus I’m sorry to tell you we are here with we are here in Freudian waters incest and so on and he he doesn’t he doesn’t even touch upon this problem what if you intend something but you were nonetheless somehow responsible for unintended consequences because let’s call it like this the standard naive psychoanalytic reading they were part of your unconscious motivations even if you are not expe- no wonder then that Brandom uses an extremely stupid example here. He says and I like it let’s say I visit a friend and I press the button. The intention of me is just to ring the bell obviously no. But let’s say and I think this example is not neutral it’s so stupid in the spirit of our times. But there is an evil terrorist who unknown to me connected that button to some dynamite explosion. So I press the button and the whole house explodes. And of course here it’s easy to make the case how I’m responsible only for the intentional part of my act. I cannot be responsible for the bomb for the explosion but just for what was my intention. But you know this is I claim a totally wrong example because as Hegel would have put it the two levels my intention and the result this is simply a radical external contingency. You know what but what about I you know that I still assert October Revolution but nonetheless we should talk about these things. Isn't it too easy to say as many honest communists would have put it they meant well at the beginning they meant really a new form of freedom but the unintended consequence was Stalinist terror. Eh here things get complicated. I think that even if they really wanted just more freedom the early Bolsheviks and even Lenin in his late writings become aware of it or others isn't it that somehow at least the potential for Stalinism was there? You know that’s the true tragedy that the terrifying result you cannot simply say oh I wanted it good I’m not responsible. At some sense it can be shown that you that you are responsible. And then another problem here where again he ignores this topic Brandom another topic that he ignores is even more interesting one the topic of so-called excessive economy. You know basically Brandom's position is that of naive Hegelianism. Horrible things happen but at the end of the story we see how they serve a good purpose. Okay I’m here cynical let's apply this to I’m sorry this eternally same examples we could have used others Gulag colonial brutality and so on. Uh uh what would we do with Holocaust Auschwitz and so on? Would you be ready to say that that it was a tragedy but in the higher sense it's a part of a larger narrative where it serves a good purpose? Well some Zionist may have put it like this and there are I met them. They claim it’s very brutal reasoning that without Holocaust there wouldn’t have been a Jewish state of Israel. So I told them okay draw this to the end and put a monument to Hitler in Tel Aviv. Because isn't it in some naive sense true? Probably maybe not but probably without Hitler and the horror of Holocaust international community would not have pushed supported supported Israel. Uh now isn't it that such a logic in this way you can justify everything. Stalinist Gulag where it served the purpose of awakening us to a idea of more human socialism or whatever you can play this game. But isn't it a little bit too brutal game and I claim it’s not the proper Hegelian game. The proper Hegelian game is that the story the narrative which justifies an event always come afterwards. So we are never in a from the strict Hegelian point the mistake of this reasoning is that you impute to history a kind of eternal abstract reason which from its teleological overview decides Holocaust hm well it’s risky many people will die but on the other hand there will be more awareness of the dangers of anti-Semitism Jews if god is pro-Jewish that’s another debate Jews will get their state or whatever so let’s allow it. No this is not what Hegel says. He is fully aware that the story comes with a delay afterwards. So Hegel's point is not that you can you can justify it retroactively but you should underline retro- retroactively. Horrors happen and then we try to deal with them retroactively. But even this is too much for Brandom. He does something terrible here totally non-Hegelian. He claims that Hegelian history which retroactively afterwards tries to tell the rational narrative that it doesn't report on all contingent events but only on the rationally necessary events. Like it’s kind of a histoire raisonnée how do they put it in French you know history freed of its contingent excesses where only the the necessity of reason is rendered. But if you do this you know what then remains of the 20th century? You simply proclaim what Holocaust and Gulag and colonial horrors it all began we know in in whatever Belgian Congo other colonies you simply say these were excesses but in the rational order of things colonization happened the progress of civilization or stupid things like this. Uh I reject Brandom's version because but also for another reason. Hegel doesn't ever Hegel's strategy it’s not simply true what he is saying is not to dismiss these extreme points as irrelevant. No Hegel for Hegel these extreme catastrophes are always the truth of like if Hegel of a movement like if Hegel were to be alive in his logic would not have been oh Holocaust was an accident and so on but Holocaust brought out the inner destructive ability which was from the very beginning in fascism and so on. For Hegel the extreme catastrophe always has the function of the truth. He never he never he never escapes from it. Which is why Hegel's view of history is very pessimistic precisely when he asserts apparently optimism. At the very end of the last famous last paragraph of Phenomenology you know when he said all of here history is how do you call this in German Schädel Schädel the site of skulls of death bones like that history is history of catastrophes basically. So Hegel is not a naive optimist in the sense of whatever catastrophes we have somehow they will be disclosed to be part of a global reason. No Hegel's point is rather the opposite one whatever we do we can be sure that things will turn wrong in some way you know and from this gap maybe some third thing can emerge but there is no no a priori guarantee that will emerge. Hegel writes this somewhere he is well aware for example that when Mongols or whoever maybe I’m too Eurocentric here but strategically I accept it here that that there was a deeper meaning in the Mongol invasion of Arab world you know and Eastern Europe. No there was no deeper meaning there. Nothing emerged out of there just destruction and so on. Okay but let me follow the line here back to the beginnings. What Brandom leaves behind this is a first more difficult philosophical point. What Brandom leaves behind in his re-normalization of Hegel is primarily the dimension of self-relating which is absolutely fundamental for Hegel in German Selbstbeziehung. Let’s take two basic Hegelian concepts bestimmte Negation determinate negation and mediation Vermittlung. Brandom interprets them as simply the series of exclusions and inclusions that constitute the identity of every object. Like determinate negation means that if the chair I’m sitting on is made of plastic then it is not made of metal or of wood and so on. It’s simply that having some actual particular property excludes other properties within the same species. Like again if metallic then not wooden then not plastic and so on. Or if blue then not brown then not gray and so on and so on. And mediation in Brandom's reading simply relates to the the intricate relation of this object to other objects and processes. For example let’s return to the case of this chair. Of course the truth of this chair is not simply that it’s this particular chair. But how was this chair possible? It presupposes the development of human industry probably it presupposes I don’t know from where the parts come the mines probably a vast network of international relations and so on and so on. Probably even some colonial stuff and so on. So the point is that to see what a particular thing is you have to see it in its mediation. Or a more an example which is more easy for me to to to present I smoke a cigarette. I don’t but my wife does and I love her for that because she is like two to three packages per day you know. And speaking about Greece we should turn a big propaganda for how do you call Kreta Crete the island. I read some statistics that people of Crete have lived the longest age in Greece on average over eighty and they are the greatest smokers you know. Like fuck the politically correct attack on no I really hate leftists who are totally against smoking. I am I know tobacco but then almost in the same breath they want total freedom decriminalization of drugs. I mean whatever drugs are they are a little bit more dangerous than than smoke you know. This is another I claim weird strategy of. Okay but let me go on. Okay so you got it this is how Brandom reads the Hegelian mediation. That it’s simply each thing to get it what it really is has to be located in like we all know correct me if I’m wrong but I think so that tobacco came from America Latin America no. So in other words no tobacco without colonization and the story of Latin America is wonderful here. You know that tomato comes from Latin America. And you know why it was introduced? War. The big popularizer of tomato was Friedrich der Große Frederick the Great. After the catastrophes of war they discovered that tomato grows sorry not tomato potato of course I rewrite history in a stalinist way or that potato. You know if you have a desolate countryside and you have to feed fast to feed population the fastest way is with potato. It’s as simple as that which is why again Germans become potato eaters and they really are. I discovered in Berlin because I like potato three kartoffel restaurants you know where you get like dishes all it’s like some perverts guide de Sade you know you can fuck in this way in that way there you can do perversions of of potato you know. So but okay we have colonization we have European wars you see all the historical background which is needed to account for this stupid object potato. I claim that this is not enough. First concerning this inclusion and exclusion. What Brandom it’s shocking totally misses is again the relationship of of self- what Hegel calls self-exclusion. Like the whole problem Hegel is struggling with is that in the second chapter of phenomenology on das Ding the thing and its properties is that the thing let’s say this table it’s a thing an object. It’s one. And it has multiple properties. Wood wooden top or this is rather some shitty plastic metal legs or whatever. So Hegel's problem is precisely the relationship between one and multiple. And his point is that it’s not simply what is excluded is not simply other properties. Like if this color if the color of this table is gray it excludes red brown or blue or whatever. If it’s metallic it excludes wood and so on. No what interests Hegel is self-exclusion in the sense of the relative autonomy of the one against with regard to its own properties. An autonomy which is actualized precisely in the oneness being one of the human person. Hegel's point is that you are one as a human person when you are reduced to that Cartesian Cogito I am the one where you abstract all properties. So the idea is no to what extent we have in every object this structure of self-exclusion of the tension between its being one and its multiple properties. This dimension is totally missing and it’s the same with mediation. Brandom like Pippin unfortunately remains in this eternal oscillation between Vermittlung and Unmittelbares between mediation and immediacy. The of course with every immediate object immediacy is let’s remain at the level of common sense what we immediately perceive. With in relation with every immediate object of course we first immediately perceive it as self-identical. This table is here. Then we do that bullshit of mediation that I explained to you. This table is here but it presupposes forest industry mining human developing factories world market whatever. But as Brandom points out here he is correct but doesn’t develop the line of thought to the end. But this immediacy in this mediation in order to work has to refer to other immediacies like I this table is dependent on mining. Okay then I have the immediacy of mining of a certain mine or whatever you know or I don’t know forest. Okay then you know what I mean like you never get at the at the network of mediation the network which just stands in the air. That you have this multiple play every immediacy can be resolved in a network of mediations but this network of mediations mediations are always mediations between this and that. They again have to point at certain immediacies and Brandom and Pippin simply complain and conclude that Hegel reaches here a deadlock. It’s kind of endless play every immediacy points to mediation every mediation to immediacy. What they don’t see is that the crucial point for Hegel is what he calls directly the immediacy of mediation. That is to say that mediation can come to itself not in the form of other particular objects but what. Again think about the ego. Here is a passage from Hegel's phenomenology Vorrede preface. The ego or becoming in general this process of mediating is because of its being simply just immediacy coming to be and this immediacy itself. So Hegel's point is that what is our spirit our ego is just a pure process of mediating the process of thinking. But the moment we perceive it as I we don’t return to another simple immediacy. That would have been only I don’t know if you identify neurons if you but when we feel ourselves are self as self-identical this is immediacy of the process of mediation itself. Or to put it in another way what Brandom it’s strange how he doesn’t see it is how if we go to the other notion determinate negation Brandom almost literally quotes this formula of signifier by Saussure how the identity of each object consists just of the series of its differences towards other objects. You know this classical definition of signifier Saussure did it that a signifier is its identity resides only in the network of its differences. But Brandom's point is simple but these differences has to be differences from other self-identical objects. Because the whole of it cannot just hang in the air. You know if for example I don’t know how this goes I was never good at it how does go this structure of differential opposition. But if if high is opposed to low then also you have to return to low as another immediacy and so on and you cannot just have all of it hanging in the air. But Hegel sorry Brandom again just remains at this point. What he doesn't see is how again there are paradoxical objects which are just negation embodied. In the sense that they are not simply positive immediate objects but they are objects which the which in a self-relating way directly embody negation itself. Here dialectic begins an example. I will not use my old examples but and you don’t have to agree with it it’s just an example of a logic. This is how for example Spinoza and I’m not a Spinozian dismisses the usual personal notion of God. For Spinoza God is another name for nature for the rational order of the universe and the personal notion of God goes as the old wise man with a beard sitting somewhere up there as Spinoza put it is just an embodiment a name for our ignorance. When you reach the limit of your knowledge there is a domain that you don’t know and the only truth of the notion of personal God is the embodiment of that ignorance. It appears to be something but it’s actually just something that fills in the void. And then of course you have endless series of these examples for example you know my stories for example in in Marx my eternal example how the Asiatic mode of production seems to be one among the modes of production but it really is just an empty envelope covering all that did not fit other modes of production. You know Asiatic mode of production is like in that I always use this example I’m sorry if you know it in that you know the famous Borges story referred to by Michel Foucault in the beginning of the Order a crazy categorization of dogs these dog those dogs and at the end a last sub-species all the dogs which are not included into this list. You know this this paradox of a positive entity whose substantial truth is just negation it’s literally the embodiment of nothing. This is also for Lacan and for Hegel a subject this level of self-relating is something that simply to put it simply that Brandom ignores. So now this was just a general outlook now let’s begin at the beginning now things will get maybe a little bit more interesting. Brandom begins his reading of phenomenology Hegel's phenomenology with an interpretation of the notion of experience Erfahrung the experience what Hegel calls the experience of consciousness. And Hegel's paradoxical claim here we come to the first of these great re-normalizations simplifications of Hegel sorry by Brandom Hegel claims something crazy and paradoxical that you have a certain experience of an object and then you perceive a certain object experience occurs when you discover the falsity of your idea of object of your representation of object. But Brandom sorry Hegel's claim is paradoxical it is that what changes in an authentic experience is not just your idea of an object but is this object itself. You know like as Hegel puts it when your idea is proven wrong misleading with regard to the object whose idea it is you don’t have to change only your idea but also the object itself. Now this appears subjectivist madness or whatever and now I will first tell you how Brandom tries to squeeze out of this reintroducing a standard realism. He takes a very weird non-Hegelian example. Let’s say you have a a straight stick you know then you drown it half into water and because of all this shitty perspective optical stuff about which I know nothing the the the the stick will appear broken. Okay then this is what you let’s say immediately see the broken stick. Then you pull it out and it appears as what it really is the straight stick. So this is Brandom's even basic example. So how does he interpret it? In a very subtle way but I think it’s deeply misleading. His point is that we have here three levels not two levels. We have the stick the way it appears to me at the beginning which is if it’s half in water it appears as a cracked broken stick then we have my idea of how the stick really is what in Hegelian terms would have been called the in-itself for me because if I’m an idiot I think that the stick really is broken. I know that I only have an appearance of the stick but and then we have the way the stick really is in itself. Okay Brandom claims that what changes in the experience is not the stick in itself which was all the time the same fucking straight stick but it’s just what I took it to be the stick in itself. For for for so that again at the beginning if I was an idiot I thought the stick in itself the way it really is is also a broken stick. When I pull it out I see that that was just my subjective misperception because of optical laws whatever how the the light breaks in water whatever but that really this is the stick. But in all this process the stick in itself remains the way it is. So Brandom's point is that the in-itself which changes through experience it’s not the true in-itself. The stick is outside the process all the time out there it’s just the in-itself for me what I took to be the in-itself. And maybe another example would be more more practical here. Let’s say a certain planet appears to us in a certain way. If you look at it at the telescope what maybe you can even see it the for-us is the way that stupid celestial body appears to us. We are fully aware that this is not how the planet really is this is just how it appears to us. Okay through through good through closer observations satellites and so on we get an idea of how that planet really is. So we have in our everyday experience already the difference between how something appears to us and how it really is. But let’s say that there is now a tremendous new discovery which shows us that even if the planet of course it still appears to us as the same planet it’s not really what we took it to be in itself. You get it it’s like we thought it’s composed of those metals with some fires inside whatever we discover no there are no fires inside it’s different metals and so on and so on. What changes here is not the immediate appearance of the object. We look at it through telescope even it’s the same. What changes is the in-itself of the object but the way it was for us. We thought this appears like this it’s really like that. Through the experience we learned no the in-itself is different. But there is a third in-itself which is the object itself out there and that one and that one remains the same. Now this is of course a consistent naive this is of course the consistent naive realist way to perceive things. But what would Hegel have replied here? The first consequence here is that all the all the movement is on the side of condition not the movement of the object but the movement of condition. We were describing a certain process like getting to know an object better and better. But you know all the movement was in our condition. The object appears like this we presume how it is in itself and through our experience the way we presume the object is in itself changes. But in all this the object in this case the stupid planet remains the way it is in itself. And here I think Brandom does something catastrophic and totally non-Hegelian. He draws here a distinction between impossible and inappropriate. In the sense that how does our experience progress? For example we examine a certain object we have an idea of that object then when our conclusions are contradictory of that object we know that we are wrong and we try to correct our knowledge because let’s say a stupid example the object cannot be at the same time okay red blue is not a good example because we know that colors at least to the naive modern epistemology colors are subjective they don’t exist objectively. So but let’s say take any one we thought it’s composed of this atoms we discover there are also other type of atoms which should be there so for Brandom this contradiction can only be can only exist in our knowledge. Contradiction means the co-presence in our idea of an object of mutually exclusive properties. When we stumble upon a contradiction we know that ontologically it is impossible to have an actually existing contradiction so we have to correct our perception. Again one of the two choices if we have incompatible properties one of them has to be false or maybe both are false and there is a third option or whatever. So we have here not really Hegel but a kind of Karl Popper without without aggressiveness ontology. You know there is infinite reality out there we never know how it really is but we gradually progress towards it through resolving inconsistencies in our knowledge and so on and so on. The key point being that contradictions are only in our knowledge. Because I can endorse subjectively incompatible contradictory thoughts. But this cannot exist in reality in reality it’s impossible for things to be self- contradictory. And here is a quote from Brandom. Here how things objectively are or are in themselves means always already are anyway in the sense that how they are in themselves swings free of how they are for the subject. The sort of independence is presupposed by their functioning as a normative standard for assessment of appearances. The keyword here is normative. Because for Brandom reality is out there the way it is. There is no normativity there an object cannot be wrong an object is what it is. Normativity is only in our knowledge our knowledge we can measure it normatively. It can be right or wrong. Our knowledge of an object can be right or wrong but the object itself cannot be right or wrong. For example throughout history of humanity people talk about water while it all the time changes our notion of what water we is in itself you know for example only at a certain point we became through development of chemistry aware that water is in H2O etc. So we are approaching what water is in itself. But when we discover that water is that the chemical composition of water is H2O this doesn't mean that at that point water became H2O water always already was this we just were not aware of this. Here I think this is again naive ontology. But I think the whole point of Hegel is to undermine it. How it’s okay we you may not agree with Hegel here. I’m just saying that Brandom totally misses the point of Hegel here. Because the basic absolutely crucial point of Hegel the ABC of Hegel is that contradictions are in things themselves. What does this mean here? For example this is the entire trust of Hegel's critique of Kantian antinomies that when somebody something is antinomic specific sense of contradiction in Kant it cannot both poles of antinomy cannot be objectively true it has to be our transcendental illusion our misperception and so on and Hegel uses here a wonderful word that Kant shows a tenderness for the things of this world as if you know let’s not press too much on things things cannot be self-contradictory. What does Hegel mean here? How to what does Hegel mean here? Now comes the point. For Hegel precisely again you may disagree with it but the whole point of Hegel is that the basic feature of let’s call it dialectical process is that there is a certain normativity gap between what a thing effectively is and what it should have been with regard to its notion in reality itself. Now this may sound crazy but let me give you let me give you let me give you some simple examples. First ontologically as Hegel says the usual notion of truth is the adequation of our intellect idea to to things like I don’t know I claim the car outside this building is blue this is my idea it’s true if you go out and see the car which is nearest to this building is really blue. But for Hegel there is another higher form of truth and precisely I want to claim it’s not necessarily an idealist notion in the bad sense that but for Hegel the problem is not just this truth does reality fit my subjective ideas but does reality but do things it’s not does an idea in my mind fit reality but does a reality fit its own idea that there is an inherent normativity. What does he mean by this? For example for Hegel the problem is not is this a table? But I mean the problem is not I have an idea of a table and oh my god look this really is a table. The problem is is this table really a table? You know this and for Hegel and that’s I think he is right here even for example it may appear ridiculous but the whole point first let’s take simple examples I say simple because obviously there is a normativity there. Hegel's theory of state is not simply what a state truly is. But his idea is that the whole history of states sorry not states like states of things but state like Staat in German like Persian state Greek state and so on that state emerged to put it very naively to play a certain role to fulfill a certain function to organize harmonious functioning of whatever you want of society to bring harmony and so on and so on. And Hegel's point almost a Marxist one is that if you look at the history each form of the state fell apart because it it didn’t meet correspond to its own notion. For example first there were so-called primitive but by primitive they were not so primitive the big despotic states like ancient Egypt and so on they didn’t succeed in introducing social harmony they fell apart then ancient Greek state they fell apart like the idea is that you see the point of Hegel here the very fact that there were in each state antagonisms and tensions means that this normative tension was immanent to the notion of state. It’s an irreducible contradiction between between what the state actually is and what it was supposed to do. Hegel's critique of the market would have been and is the same market is destined to organize spontaneously the exchange and so on and so on. Does it really do this? Does it fit its own notion? Now you will say do we get at the end the ideal state? No you see in which simple sense when our experience changes the object itself changes. Once people let’s say ancient Greeks perceived that their state doesn’t work that it’s not truly what it is supposed to be. They didn’t just change their notion of the state. They changed the state itself another reality emerges. This would be I think or even in the history of art whatever you take and Hegel here does something now you can problematize Hegel but I think he is right when he applies the same logic to entire reality for example for Hegel it’s crazy reading but I’m tempted based on latest evolutionary biology to claim that this is the only way to explain the passage from very simplified talk from plants to animals. Plants try to be something they fail because then Hegel and then through this failure animals emerge because Hegel has a wonderful idea here it’s madness that you know how he defines plants? Animals whose intestines are outside themselves in the earth down and so on you know. So what I’m saying is that this is the proper dialectical tension a thing doesn’t fit its notion. And now we come to the point at the end we don’t get finally the rational state Prussian state of Hegel's time which fits its notion. No no no Hegel is radical here at the end the final point of history of political history is that state as such cannot be a true state. So you have to move to another dimension for Hegel you have past to religion that what but this is not the last stage you know Hegel's point what state wanted to be a harmonious community resolving antagonisms in its very notion it cannot be that. So that’s the beautiful paradox if you want a true state it should no longer be a state it should be a religious community. Okay then things get caught up again and again but but I think that again if you abstract this sorry if you abstract this dimension from state this inner tension which points towards again a normativity of reality itself you know it’s not simply that we expect a state to be that to resolve social antagonisms etc. in a way state is there to resolve antagonisms so when a state fails it’s not simply that our idea of a state fails. The state itself fails. So this brings us to another sorry I got a little bit confused here for another problem this you have here a wonderful formulation by Brandom when he says that but he doesn’t again he is not radical enough he introduces the difference between objects which are what they are independently of our notion like that stupid stick and then objects which change when their for-itself or for-us the way they are perceived when it changes. A crucial quote from Brandom. For such a being can change what it is in itself by changing what it is for itself. And he calls this goes only for self-conscious beings. That you cannot simply oppose in a human being what you think you are the way you perceive yourself and what you really are. When you change your self-perception in a way you change the way things really are. But what Brandom does not do here he should have done this I’m returning to his stick imagine a stick and that would be I think the best metaphor for ideology imagine a stick which remains straight in reality in itself only insofar as it appears to us as a bent stick. You know that its being misperceived as what it is not is a condition of its being what it is in itself. So that if you erase the illusion if you learn what the stick really is in itself the stick will no longer be what it is in itself. Now of course this doesn't hold for the stupid stick but it’s a perfect definition of I don’t like this term but alienated society as Marx emphasized again and again we don’t have ideological illusions about society and then the real society illusions are the innermost constituent of this society to put it in naive terms. Commodity fetishism and so on is not something you can see through and then you see how society really is. The moment you get rid the illusion the mystification you lose the reality which was mystified in this way. And isn't it that something the same was at work in Freud in the Freudian notion of symptom at least in the early naive Freud where he thought that the symptom only persists as a symptom insofar as its meaning is unknown as it’s mystified. When you fully interpret a system a symptom sorry a symptom disappears. So okay things are becoming here more complex and so on but I want to give you again just to make this clear another another example that I am repeating all the time of what this contradiction means. Like for Brandom this would be the best way to condense what I’m saying fuck it I talk a lot that’s life. For Brandom the progress of knowledge consists in resolving contradictions. First in stating contradictions and then resolving them. Like I analyze an object I discover it’s composed of this and this elements whatever then I do another analysis the result is incompatible with the first one. Oh it means I have to move forward. Either choose one of the two versions or a third one whatever. So again the progress of knowledge is getting rid of contradictions. Knowledge progresses through contradiction but they are just in our knowledge process. For Hegel it’s exactly the opposite. That progress of knowledge is precisely when what you thought it was only a contradiction in your mind subjective contradiction appears when you become aware that what you thought is your subjective illusion that you become aware that this is the feature of the thing itself. Now you will say this is nonsensical mysticism. Of course the Hegelian notion of contradiction we don’t have time for that it’s a very refined one. It’s not simply I can be a man and a woman at the same time or all this that the murderer is or whatever is a saint at the same time although with many Christian saints maybe this goes quite well you know. Ah yeah another thing now I just for a moment I will come back. Did you tell me this or somebody else? No I only mentioned Tsipras and that did I mention also here? Yes I did yes sorry Netanyahu Tsipras and Netanyahu yes at the beginning yes that part of like Jerusalem is the eternal I mean okay let’s go on. So let me give you a simple example of this. A classical one that I used about six seven times in my book but I think it’s a clear one. That old Adorno idea of society that we have two basic notions of society the individualist liberal notion where society appears as secondary the starting point are individuals individuals interact and their interaction acquires a certain alienated autonomy in objective reality. So individual interaction and society as an objective trans-individual entity comes second. And then we have the opposite view Émile Durkheim was its main protagonist where society as an objective trans-subjective system comes first and individuals are just tiny bits or whatever something that is predetermined by society. And Adorno asks it’s a too simple example but just for you to get the logic Adorno then asks but how to bring these two together? And he mocks perfectly the easy pseudo-dialectical solution you know to say it’s neither one nor the other. Society is an objective totality but totality which is kept alive only through subjective interaction. No no Adorno's answer is not some kind of a synthesis. Adorno's answer is a much simpler one. Yes there is a radical antinomy between these two notions of society and there is no higher unity. But his point is his point is simply but this antinomy is what characterizes our society. This antinomy is not simply to be dismissed and this antinomy where on the one hand it’s blatantly true today although it’s a very naive antinomy on the one hand we are individualized we never were so individualized you know always your experience count be what you truly are and all that bullshit and so on. I don’t want to be like I like more alienation like if I look at myself in a mirror what a stupid boring guy I mean the most refreshing thing for me is to forget that I am what I am you know what I mean like to to alienate myself from myself. I always found the most disgusting thing imaginable like be truly yourself. My god I’m even afraid that’s why I hate psychoanalysis I mean you just discover all the shit that is in yourself no thanks I want to be alienated you know. Okay but let’s go on. You see the nicety here. What we first experience what it appeared to us as our subjective antinomy my god is the individualist approach proper to society or the objectivist approach. Which is true? When you become aware that as Hegel put it somewhere in a wonderful way the problem is its own solution. The antinomy should not be resolved but simply you resolve it by transposing it into reality itself. And the same thing is developed by Adorno for example apropos of the relationship between psychological ideological level psychological level and objective social processes. Adorno again claims that the gap between Adorno claims that yes you cannot in some phenomenological way develop the notion of objective society out of psychological intentionality interactions and the opposite doesn’t go at all. But again the truth is this antinomy the truth is this antinomy is this antinomy itself. Okay so again okay this was the first point I wanted to make and I would like to go a little bit forward now I want to go maybe to what I the second part how from this ontological topic of knowledge how we arrive at reality where you got the basic point of Hegel move contradictions into the thing itself and the crazy idealist idea which can be read in a materialist way of a certain normative tension normativity inscribed into reality itself. Which is why also Hegel rejects this modern contrast between objective reality where things simply are what they are and our subjectivity where we have normative claims tensions and so on. No normativity is already in reality itself. Then the same tension reproduces itself as I already improvised at the beginning in notions of action how action. So again now comes yes sorry the truly interesting part if you allow me to go a little bit forward I’ll jump to the end not to lose too much time. So for Brandom the dialectical process is the process of I simplify it very much of forgiveness and reconciliation like at the end like moving back to the beginning where I said how you intend to do something it fails and so on. For Brandom the Hegelian wager is that at the end you can tell a story of how you can reconcile with your failures of how through the failures some higher social goal was achieved and you get the reconciliation and so on and so on. But Brandom does something so absolutely non-Hegelian here. He does two things he defines what Hegel calls absolute knowing as an ideal that we can just be approaching. He says but we are not yet there. We are telling a story but our story and our world can again trigger some irreconcilable conflicts and so on and so on. And for for Brandom the basic Hegelian utopian wager is that in the same way that we retroactively redeemed past generations like no what you were doing is not all nonsense you served a larger purpose that future generations will do it to us. This trust into the future. So he openly claimed that for example he gives a detailed interpretation of how Hegel opposes the ancient world of its substantial unity ethical world and modern world of individualist morality and then he shows how the Hegelian reconciliation is imagining a new world where the usual bullshit individuals reconciled with society the two extremes are united and so on and so on. But then he does something horrible. He claims that Hegel is here announcing pointing forward to some future ideal form which didn’t yet arrive. Quote from Brandom: Unlike the earlier stories, this one the story about absolute knowing and reconciled society outlines something that hasn't happened yet, a future development of spirit of which Hegel is the prophet. The making explicit of something already implicit implicit and so on and so on. So the idea is that what Hegel is describing at the end as absolute knowing reconciliation is a vision of a future futuristic society that Hegel is pointing towards the future. I claim this precisely is what Hegel absolutely does not do. On the and also this because for Hegel reconciliation is something much more if you want tragic. It’s not in the future there will be reconciliation but reconciliation is a reconciliation with the shit we are in now and here. You know it’s it because even you know what what what sorry I don’t want to bore you with the quotes but endlessly Hegel repeats this point that when he speaks about reconciliation for example this passage the result is that is that and the result it needs not to wait upon us. It’s already by implication as well as full actuality accomplished. So Hegel the basic premise of Hegel is that what he describes as reconciliation is not some big change in future like now we are not reconciled we will become reconciled through some. No for Hegel reconciliation is to see that we it’s always this already are to establish that we are already reconciled. Now I don’t have time to go into this now because it may appear to you that this means some kind of a crazy conformism like Hegel doesn't want social change he just preaches reconciliation with the world it is. No things are much more paradoxical. For Hegel Hegel here has this unique dialectic whose point is that to really change things paradoxically you have to presuppose that the change is already here that at the virtual level the change already has to happen. This is why Hegel is a Christian because you know this is I think the deepest Christian insight. It’s not like in Judaism Messiah will come. No Messiah did come the true Messiah God Christ. But this does not mean we have to do nothing. This is I think the ultimate subtlety of Hegel. Okay let’s not lose time into going in detail how it is. I’m also saying that what Brandom doesn't see is the following thing. His formula of reconciliation is this one. On the one hand this is the crucial social point we have the ancient Greek and so on traditional alienated societies where a certain ethical order is always presupposed as given and then you as an individual are faithful or not faithful to this order but this substantial ethical order is given in advance. Then we have the modern view in which there is no objective normative order prior to our subjective activity. Through our social interaction we produce we create this order. And in this sense we can change it and so on so the only ultimate reality is our subjective reality of constant change struggles and so on and every objective ethical order is just a kind of a reification objectivization the result of our subjective activity. Now Brandom provides here a nice speculative formulation nonetheless where he says that in this postmodern third stage where we will have final reconciliation finding and making finding means traditional societies where they act as if you simply find already an established ethical order finding and making making in the sense of we create our ethical order show up as two sides of one coin two aspects of one process living forward and comprehending backwards each both makings and findings. Again the idea is clear traditional culture accepts norms as substantially given they pre-exist us we just have to find them modern culture of alienation reduces norms to an expression of our subjective attitudes. What is needed is a synthetic view. And then I think that now here here Brandom is right when he insists that there is a certain tension that remains in Hegelian reconciliation. Let’s say a quote from Brandom: spirit exists insofar as we make it exist by taking it to exist. He points out here to the fundamental paradox of Lacanian big Other which is and that would be maybe the correct reconciliation you know like as Lacan put it there is no big Other there is no objective normative order given in advance. But nonetheless for every normative order or symbolic system as such we cannot simply say we are creating it. For it to function you know it’s that you produce something only through the illusion that it already exists. That’s the core of it. No? You cannot have it both ways I’m just a free individual I’m producing a order this this necessity of always already here. Like let me give you an extremely stupid example. Let’s say that you follow a certain political idea. Communism fascism whatever you want I don’t care. Of course you are aware that this idea exists only through your subjective activity. If nobody fights for communism fascism whatever there is no communism fascism. But nonetheless when you fight for it it only works through the illusion that you are fighting for something which in some sense it is there. The illusion is necessary. You cannot you cannot cheat here. So again the point is the status of this illusion. And here I’m so sorry again I don’t have time to to go in it into more detail but here things get extraordinarily complex and Brandom misses the point. In what sense? Brandom can explain in what sense substantial ethical reality is out there only as the result of our activity. But I claim he doesn't really explain the necessity of this illusion. He just you know like why is it that the only way to do it is to the only way to achieve to make something exist is to act as if it already exists. And I claim that this brings us back to a much more radical level in the sense of it’s not enough when we have an alienated substance like an ethical system which we perceive as independent of us. It’s not enough for us to become aware how we really produced that system and so on. Something much more mysterious has to happen I don’t want to go now into all this in detail which I designate as the Christian moment where the divine figure like it’s not enough to say we produce objective spirit but the the split has to be introduced into objective spirit itself where you have a subject like Jesus Christ who is objective spirit itself as a subject and so on. Okay so let’s drop this things get maybe too complex for this confused talk here but again the key point is that this central paradox that you can change that the real change is not the change of the future but the change of the past in a way. Of course not I’m not talking about magic. I’m talking about to put it naively a new image of what the past was. You know this idea that yes as Marx put it we have to change reality but to change it we have to redefine it to see it I’m tempted to say to the first step towards change is a totally different interpretation. Before you change it reality has to appear to you in a totally different way. In in this precise subtle sense the only way to change things is to perceive assume them as already changed. Let me give you here an example of feminism. It’s not simply to say women were oppressed and then they started to liberate themselves. No something crucial had to happen before. The problem before modernity was not just that women were oppressed but that they didn’t even experience their being as oppressed. You know the first step in feminist struggle is not to fight oppression but to even become aware of the oppression and that’s where the real change happens. This would be Hegel's insight. The real change is when you say fuck it no I’m not by nature woman as part of some holistic yin-yang by nature the dark element feminine element you have to change the entire story. Even a Hegelian Marxist like Herbert Marcuse pointed this in a wonderful way when he said that freedom is a condition of liberation in the sense as you must already in a certain way be free in order to fight for liberation. You know that’s the that’s the this subtle point. Again back to feminism. This is the crucial point and it’s not easy at all. This point of not just this you have of course in already in traditional times these crazy women witches who were free outside order. But you know this let’s call it a woman who becomes shocked at the injustice of the and so on. This is not just an insight. The very entity of being a woman changes radically once you become aware of this that it’s not that it’s not that it’s not natural that you are oppressed and so on and so on. This is the true change. That you know the whole history appears in a new way. It’s no longer the history of progress but the history of oppression of women. And it’s the same for racism and so on. You don’t just rebel. Okay slaves did rebel. But it’s not a great the point was when they started to rebel on behalf of their whatever you call it freedom human rights and so on which means that you get a radical rewriting of the past. Things have to change symbolic and I will give you maybe another example here a very naive one from my not great dissident but this gap that I’m talking about. This fascinated me all the time in late communist society and all the time I’m asking my friends the same question. Like okay communism fell down at that point Berlin Wall Ceaușescu fled on a helicopter but when did you know that the game is over really? How much be- because at a certain point this is for me the most mysterious point of it even while the system still goes on and rules in a way everyone knows that the game is over. I remember for example I report on this in some of my early books I’m sorry if I repeat myself Ryszard Kapuściński the great Polish political journalist. He was in Iran when Shah was overthrown. And he tells a wonderful story how there were conflicts demonstrations and then at a certain crossing in Tehran something happened. People were gathering to demonstrate police came and the policeman stepped forward and started to shout at the person who was on the head of the demonstrators. Disperse enough fun disperse. The man didn’t move. The policeman shouted again the man didn’t move. Embarrassed the policeman turned around and left. And even if this didn’t really happen but the fascinating thing is that in a couple of hours all Tehran so he claimed was talking about this and in a way even wait a minute the battles went on for half a year but in some sense everyone knew the game is over. In some sense even those in power still in power knew. And again this fascinates me so much when did this moment happen? You know this is what I’m talking about that this almost mystical moment like shift in the symbolic order when you learn that that things are over before they are and in a way the game is over. And again Hegel is fully fully aware of it. Of this this gap is crucial that you don’t win directly in the sense of fighting and we win. You win by paradoxically when you establish through this kind of a magic moment that you’ve already won. Oh we are now just fighting second- admit it the game is over you know. And I wonder how this happened although all things about the limits of liberation should be taken into account here. Like at one point in South Africa did the apartheid guys this established because it was a wonderful moment I admire it. You know I remember reading newspapers following it at a certain moment even when he was still in jail and here Mandela was great in spite of all compromises he had to make later you know this magic moment when everyone knew the way he was treated Mandela won it’s over. I remember how even where who was before de Klerk Botha or who was the previous still racist but he invited Mandela for a talk. When Mandela was still in prison and the the journalist reported on the talk were very mysterious. Mandela stepped out and said no we didn’t talk politics we are just two old wise men who has a who had a nice chat and so on. It was a wonderful understatement of the year you know. But you see what I’m saying? Everybody knew the game is over you know. And this would be for me if you ask me a proper atheist Christian politics. No it’s not just oh we are fighting maybe we will be in it ha ha the game is over you just don’t know it you know. Although in what sense the game is over I don’t know because things are getting even worse what I learned yesterday from Turkey you know what I was telling you before this totally scandalous Turkish policy. I’m more and more convinced I repeat my line from yesterday the beginning that all this war on terror the problem is not that it’s too militaristic let’s not bomb it’s not a serious war at all. It’s just a cover up for two different conflicts Shia-Sunni conflict and Russia-Western conflict. And it’s like they don’t really mean it. Like as many journalists noted up put pressure on Syria and Saudi Arabia and without any bombing ISIS disappears in two three months to the utmost. I’m really worried that maybe the game is over but in a much darker sense you know in the opposite sense. Sorry. Maybe I didn’t want to stop you because it was going it was amazing today. No fuck it it was too simple I lo- I promise you the same thing as usual. I wasn’t satisfied I simplified it I got lost at the end. Again who is the boss by boss I mean something very fuck you up yours by boss I mean something very democratic the one who has emails. Ah still Julia Julia is here for another couple of weeks. Okay then I promise that at least this part if you’re interested I will email to her and you can to Julia and you will get from her this text because at the end I got lost when things go who who are you to say you think that we are in Islam you think that I am Mohammed and you are Khadijah? No seriously this is a great part of Islam you know that it’s inherent to Islam that a man tells the truth but it becomes truth only through woman’s mediation. If I did yeah exactly. Yeah but I but not in my Christian universe. Aren’t we going to take questions today or are you saving them for tomorrow? I save it for tomorrow fuck life. Okay well thanks very much. No thank you for your patience and tomorrow I will try to do it in a more but listen I talk too much so please this is not an empty rhetorical claim really not it’s not this my old joke a claim to be rejected please the only way to do it with me is if you want to ask something don’t wait for the end simply there is no end is end. You are getting sorry if we can perfect we can. But my point is nonetheless that you know you see now I will tell you something just as stupid fun you gave me the idea you know the best argument against feminine liberation is this one that a nice conservative told me women were really oppressed but they’re unfair if we confess to women that we oppress them they will take advantage of this in an unfair way you know. This is the ugliest disgusting version that I can imagine. Okay anyway we come back tomorrow at I you I hope you got my point that I am just a weak guy scared like shit of women no and all that remains to me is to act out these stupid jokes. Okay tomorrow we go to the end in Hegel we can begin by the way okay ah you were the one secret police who was doing it yes I have to sorry let’s do it.
no no no I decided because I got some murmurs back from you from some of you my anonymous spies who told me that like some of you were dissatisfied and in a quite justified way like where is Hegel. I'm just giving you these confused political stories okay I decided then fuck you up yours today and tomorrow you get only Hegel and a lot of Hegel you know. But nonetheless nonetheless I would just like to reply something because I want precisely to share this with you. As if he is maybe he has also spies here. Are you a double-changed agent? Are you also Costas’s spy? Because this morning I got a long email from Costas claiming that I should come to Athens appear publicly with Tsipras I hope he hopes I’m still theirs and that I don’t believe these lies by Varoufakis and so on and so on. Now what I wanted to doubt but now I learned from you and from others I checked it up something which is even much worse at least for my taste. Okay maybe I don't agree with it you can justify surrendering to EU my god they can ruin you whatever. But in the last weeks the Greek government especially Tsipras did some things which I find really intolerable and which has nothing to do which have nothing to do with pressures of some European technocrats. First he recently visited Israel spent three days with Netanyahu and proclaimed publicly that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people something that even pro-Israeli Western countries do not do. And also you told me and others that he concluded some shady deals about shared military maneuvers and so on. Now you know that I am often critical of Palestinians' anti-Semitism and so on. I have a certain understanding for the Jewish position but to do this it’s going a little bit too far. To become friendly with the well-known Holocaust revisionist Netanyahu no as I told yesterday this is simply too far. Second thing I don’t like how he’s playing what I see on the horizon is what in European terms we would have called a historical compromise between radical left and radical right. More and more often it sounds like this economic nationalism. You have connections with the church all the time you can see Tsipras with that patriarch of the Greek church and Greek church played in Greece very problematic extremely national position. I was triggered I become attentive with it already half a year ago even more when Tsipras visited Serbia. Nothing against but the things he did there appearing with Serb Orthodox patriarch who is a well-known Serb extreme nationalist and making statements which are to put it mildly absolutely not neutral. Now I can understand in some vague way why he did this. He knows that he can be attacked from the right as non-patriot as usually leftists are so how do you say it in these football or whatever terms he want to protect his right-wing flank or whatever you know. But nonetheless to play this game where effectively I think at the end of a horizon it's Marine Le Pen. I predict you if it will go this way at the end we will have the two big you know that's the the big pro-worker because also Marine Le Pen her entire rhetorics is now pro-working class rhetoric. This is the big danger now. Because of this experiences with Europe bad experiences we withdraw to some pseudo working class subtly anti-immigrant nationalism. And the more and more I notice in SYRIZA this nationalist temptation. This is why you know when they attacked other this is what I noticed already before I mean when SYRIZA was coming to power how insensitive they were to these arguments which you can answer them. But again my old motive these are the worries of ordinary people that you have to respond to. For example in many post-communist East European countries including mine which are politically bullshit I’m ashamed to be from that part of the world. But they asked some questions which of course from the standpoint of ordinary people are reasonable. Like the Greeks went off strike of for they want how to put it to to make longer to move forwards the age when you can take retirement but okay of course all the right-wingers with us immediately pointed out then in Slovenia the age of when you can retire is still much higher than the age proposed now by Greece and that the average retirement pension although the prices are higher in Slovenia the prices are practically the same as Austria and Italy and the how do you call it pensions retirement what you get on average is still in spite of all these reductions lower than in Greece. Now you can answer this. Varoufakis gave me a nice answer which is just because of a specific situation of Greece where you have many people unemployed mid-generation and he claimed there are over million million cases of this and that there are again over million of families which now all have to rely on on pension. Because you know the old retired people have to somehow okay but you should reply to this you know. Otherwise and no they like when I mentioned this to Costas he started to shout at me in his way you know uh you’re you’re listening to your Catholic fascist propaganda and so on and so on. You know like they they should have shown a little bit more of sensibility towards these post-communist countries which are effectively even a little bit more miserable than Greece. You know like this is solidarity you know. Greece maybe tried to play too much of this role of you know exemplary victims how should I put it they were the big victim of Europe. Yes they were the shock was incredible I admit it no other country in Europe had such a sudden drop in the standard of living. But you know like it’s not as simple as that. Okay with this I will conclude you know. Now let’s finally finally go to do some real work. But I warn you there will be a price you will pay for it. Practically if I remember correctly no joke especially no dirty jokes and so on you know so that’s life no. All I can tell you is if you have free time to watch TV download you can do it from kickass or what’s the other one the big one Pirate Bay for free. You know The Man in the High Castle that famous Ballard science fiction novel alternate reality Germany and Japan won World War II and United States are divided. Eastern part German state pro-German state Western part a Japanese state in the middle some kind of a buffer zone. And it’s a pretty good series I know they did it in this new Netflix way I like it that they released all of a sudden the entire season ten times one hour. And here you can see that Julian Assange is not a total idiot. When I visited him two years ago two days ago what is this Freudian slip I don’t know we debated it and he told me he also saw it and knew the novel that in the novel there is an extremely subtle trick because you know the whole game is this one it’s of course this typical postmodern almost today self-reference that within this universe there is in the novel a novelist he is the man on the high castle and in the TV series they made it into some mysterious movie maker who distributes documentaries pseudo documentaries which tell what is for us the true story of the World War II that you know Germany lost all the stuff like our real history. Now of course the obvious question is and you have to wait till the end of the novel and here they didn’t yet decide what is reality is it that we will learn that this alternate reality where Germany won and so on is just a dream or is our world and Assange gave me a formula which helped me it’s a totally different one is that if you listen carefully at least in the novel to what that novel within the novel written by man in the high castle says it’s not simply our reality there are subtle differences. It’s neither of course it’s not that reality of the novel Japan and Germany won but it’s also not our reality. It’s a third reality totally fictitious. And I’m tempted to read it in Lacanian way that’s the real. It’s an inexistent virtual real and it is as if this is the Platonic real the ideal true world and our miserable our reality is one reality. The alternate reality imagined is another one but we are all miserable copies of the real which is that world which again is it doesn’t exist. I mean it’s it’s a good reading so again maybe Assange is because now he is so desperate he told me what can he do in that fucking Ecuador embassy I mean all my gratitude to Ecuador. By fucking I mean it’s really a not even a large apartment you know and he says poor Julian he started to watch TV series you know he knows everything Homeland this and so on no. So this is it. Okay sorry now we go to real work and okay enough of jokes Hegel. Hegel is a notoriously that’s the rumor difficult writer although if you read Kant you may have noticed also Kant Kant Critique of Pure Reason and so on you may have noticed that grammatically Hegel is relatively easy that grammatically Kant is a nightmare which is why as many German interpreters of Kant admit you by you I mean the English-speaking thinkers or whatever have the luck of having excellent especially David Kemp Smith and others translation of Kant which are to cut a long story short better than the German original. You know because Kant is like Kleist in literature his sentences are always one page the entire page no. And Kemp Smith in a masterful way cut them short into three four sentences not only not losing anything in the logic but making it making it even clearer. With Hegel it’s on the contrary usually the grammatical structure is pretty much a simple one but the thought eludes you so a difficult writer. Many of his statements we know this run against our common sense and cannot but appear as crazy speculations. So as I already hinted at yesterday Brandom attempts to let's call this re-normalize Hegel to demonstrate how Hegel's even Hegel's most extravagant formulations when properly re-interpreted make sense in our common space of meaning. Again as I emphasized yesterday I highly appreciate Brandom's attempt. It is a model of clear argumentative reasoning. Like she was mad yesterday when I said you are evil because you are not stupid or whatever I said yesterday no. I mean Brandom even more he is not a complete idiot. I I don’t mean that we are some who are not idiots there are only two kinds of people everybody knows complete idiots and not complete idiots there is no third kind but nonetheless I think that this domestication of Hegel doesn't work. Yes we should translate Hegel into and it can be done wonderfully we should translate Hegel into our somehow to render it clear okay but not by way of losing his madness. Certain excess is getting reduced there. If we will have time tomorrow but I want to give you a hint of this. Sometimes things are even very simple here the old example that I use of what Hegel calls infinite judgment where the subject and predicate are totally at odds you simply don’t see the connection. For example an extremely simple example der Geist ist ein Knochen spirit that I use all the time spirit is a bone. And Hegel says that this is not just some kind of dialectical contrast like in reality we know spirit is the most ethereal movable thing spirit is not just a bone. No Hegel's point because then if this is true why why do we have to pass through this paradox? Why don't we directly say spirit is the opposite of a bone? A bone as the most stupid lifeless inert part of the human body. Why so why not saying it directly? Spirit is the very opposite of bone bone is dead inert spirit is pure self-relating flexibility and so on and so on. Why is this an infinite judgment? Well the answer of Hegel is very simple here it’s that I will give you also then the next answer which raises. What as Hegel says in a very Derridean way and Derrida was not as some of his stupid followers Derrida was well aware he once said this is wonderful I repeat I said this here openly that there is nothing as close to what he calls deconstruction as the Hegelian Aufhebung sublation and so on. Derrida was fully aware of the almost infinite proximity between what he is doing and Hegel. Derrida was far from this dismissing Hegel as some crazy idealist who thinks everything is in his thought or whatever. So again you know the Derridean motive of failure repetition and so on and Hegel says this literally an infinite judgment is a judgment which stops you it its first experience is necessarily a failure. It doesn't work like spirit is you expect some high definition the most developed part of nature the effect of extremely complex blah blah then you get spirit is a bone. It doesn't work. It’s a radical gap. And what would be here Hegelian answer? Again what you experience as a radical gap impossibility and so on this gap is subject. You know literally then you get all these wonderful speculative formulas in what sense spirit if it's own self-negation and so on and so I hope you will get it now it’s an extremely simple example but nonetheless. Why is then do we have to begin with spirit is a bone? Why not saying spirit is the very opposite of a bone? Because if you just say spirit is the very opposite of a bone you automatically presuppose a certain field of reality where there are different objects. And you know spirit is one type of object totally different bone is another type of object. But Hegel is here materialist when he says spirit is a bone. Or as Lacan put it somewhere in subject is what is not an object. But this negation is inherent to the object. It’s a very subtle point. It’s not that object is here subject is there. Object cannot be fully an object and this inner break disparity however we call it of object is subject. This is what you lose when you go directly at it and said spirit is not a bone. No the truth of the subject is not or spirit is not spirit is not a bone but you have to say spirit is a bone and then you experience the absurdity of this statement and this absurdity is what Hegel calls negativity and so on and so on. You know it’s this wonderful logic that I developed in all my books repeating old joke which is I will do now where you you arrive at a result only through the failure. The failure is never simply a failure. It’s a failure but it’s a like the old joke I must have tell tell it but I still like it from it was Yugoslav army joke you know a guy pretends to be a madman and he what is his symptom that whenever he wherever he goes he looks at every paper and says this is not that. To ni ono or in Serbo-Croat Ce n'est pas ça this is not that this is not that. Then they say oh my god he appears crazy okay a group of doctors examined him again there in the he says this is not that looks all the papers and then okay you know the joke probably at the end they get him the paper which excuses him from military with service. He looks at it and says this is that you know. It’s so stupid but you see the point the object that is that emerges only through his this is not that and so on. This is I think the best metaphor maybe of the Hegelian speculative process. Or another example that I often mentioned here sorry if I’m repeating old points it's my old story with Judith Butler and she doesn't like me repeating it which is why I’m repeating it of course I’m an evil guy. The problem of apologizing you know the story I repeat a couple how once I was a little bit rude towards Judith and then later I called her and apologized and she told me Slavoj I know what you are you didn't mean it bad you need not to apologize. And my immediate temptation was to say okay then I withdraw my apology and but of course but you see the subtlety of it this is in a way what Hegel is about. Yes for her to say Slavoj you don’t really I don’t really you don’t really need to apologize was a nice way to accept the apology because you get the subtlety if she were to say yes fuck you you were so rude I deserve an apology this would have meant that he really she really did not pardon me that she is still bitter. So the para you see the nice paradox something appears at the end as superfluous you didn't need to apologize me. But you have to do a thing for it to appear superfluous. Like you cannot go directly to it. So you know this is I hope you sense this a totally different logic from this common sense evolutionism there are necessary stages of evolution. No apology is not simply a necessary step. It is necessary but the whole trick is that retroactively it appears superfluous. And it’s the same we will talk about this when we will debate hopefully later today all this Hegelian topic of necessary unnecessary consequences. Because for example people often don't get this in Hegel in Hegel's critique of French Revolution I’m sorry another old motive by me they think it like this. Stupid Frenchmen have chosen revolutionary terror which means death abstract negativity self-destruction. Rational Germans go for state of reason organic structure blah blah. But that’s not Hegel's point. Of course he admits revolutionary terror I doubt this it’s more complex was a deadlock. But Hegel's point is that you know like I put it like this that's the elegance of Hegel. In the choice between terror and rational state of course terror is a false choice. But you have to begin through it. You cannot go directly at the rational state. So this is a beautiful position Hegel was not the liberal who whose notion is to cut it short we want we want against you know the first phase of the French Revolution was okay then when for me at least all the fun began chop chop you know. No you know why I say all fun began? Because look just at the statistics how many people died. The whole problem of revolutionary terror was they they chopped off some of the heads of those up there the rich. If you look at how many ordinary people were killed of three the three weeks of Thermidor after it was after Robespierre and Jacobins were overthrown more people were killed but nobody notices nobody knows that it’s all but okay what I want to say is that you see here the subtlety. Yes terror was a blind alley unnecessary. But at the same time you have to go through it. You have like it’s a wrong choice it’s like that it is not that that paper only through the wrong choice the true choice sorry the truth disappears. Is this subtle paradox which to put it more in Lacanian terms are you aware that in this way temporality is involved in logic? The point is that the moment you are dealing with this choice you don’t simply you don’t simply have a choice. But you can only do it with a double choice you know. Like you can you make the right choice but only after the wrong choice. Because only the wrong choice establishes the conditions for the right choice. And in the same way I claim Stalinism and Leninism if I will have time I will return to this later today if not today tomorrow should be read. The way I’m jumping ahead now. The way Brandom reads Hegel in this question is he refers in a very elegant way he refers to to to sorry to is distinction between the Greek antique notion of fate and the modern Kantian notion. You know that in Greece in Greece universe Oedipus something happens which is Oedipus is guilty although it was not his intention. He is nonetheless guilty. It was your fate. You didn’t have a choice. He didn’t know he is killing his father screwing his mother but nonetheless he is guilty. You are guilty even if you don’t know it. That is to say you are guilty responsible also for the objective non-intended consequences of your act. The Kantian logic at least superficially is the opposite one is the famous internalization. You are guilty only for what your intention was. Like for Kant to cut a long story short Oedipus was innocent. He thought there is just an annoying okay maybe it was not totally just but he was not certainly guilty of for certain guilty of killing his father. You know it was just he saw a stranger there the stranger behaved in a rude way or I even forgot who was rude there but he killed so but and then Brandom tries to play both game this is his naive Hegelian idealism. He claims that in prin- he wants to do a synthesis of the two. That yes we are directly responsible only for intended consequences but that in the larger scheme of things I do something and something unexpected turns out that I did not intend but he claims that up to a point he is right but not really that Hegel's wager as it were is that nonetheless through all these failures I wanted this another thing happens at the end I establish how I was nonetheless instrument of a higher rational reason. How precisely through my precisely my failure to achieve my explicit goal realizes a higher goal. In this sense you can have historical reconciliation. Okay my problem here with Brandom is is that he is not Hegelian enough. Why? First the example he uses is a very interesting one. First he is anti-Freudian. For him Freudian psychoanalysis is an example of hermeneutics of suspicion where you the you dismiss subjective self-awareness as simply secondary a tool instrument of some other objective processes. Like his reading is totally wrong substantialist. Freud asserts the unconscious as some objective trans-subjective domain we have a master outside ourselves which controls us and for him for Brandom it’s the same with Marx. Economy social being determines consciousness which means what we think just comes secondary is just an effect of objective social processes and so on and so on. I will not go into it why this is wrong reading a wrong reading I claim both of Marx and of Freud. With regard to Marx eh eh eh. The whole point of Capital critique of political economy is that the Marxist point is not to establish some objective economic domain which controls us which is some kind of substantial other but to show how this domain is also the domain of class struggle which means of subjective engagement. You know this crucial detail here that the very last page of Capital where the manuscript breaks is class struggle at the end of what is now appears as volume And okay I will not go into it I repeated this often in my books how it’s exactly the same with the Freudian unconscious. It’s not some kind of external substantiality. Freudian unconscious is an even higher degree of what Hegel calls self-consciousness. I will not go into it now. What I want to say is this that where Brandom fails is how because of this look Oedipus I’m sorry to tell you we are here with we are here in Freudian waters incest and so on and he he doesn’t he doesn’t even touch upon this problem what if you intend something but you were nonetheless somehow responsible for unintended consequences because let’s call it like this the standard naive psychoanalytic reading they were part of your unconscious motivations even if you are not expe- no wonder then that Brandom uses an extremely stupid example here. He says and I like it let’s say I visit a friend and I press the button. The intention of me is just to ring the bell obviously no. But let’s say and I think this example is not neutral it’s so stupid in the spirit of our times. But there is an evil terrorist who unknown to me connected that button to some dynamite explosion. So I press the button and the whole house explodes. And of course here it’s easy to make the case how I’m responsible only for the intentional part of my act. I cannot be responsible for the bomb for the explosion but just for what was my intention. But you know this is I claim a totally wrong example because as Hegel would have put it the two levels my intention and the result this is simply a radical external contingency. You know what but what about I you know that I still assert October Revolution but nonetheless we should talk about these things. Isn't it too easy to say as many honest communists would have put it they meant well at the beginning they meant really a new form of freedom but the unintended consequence was Stalinist terror. Eh here things get complicated. I think that even if they really wanted just more freedom the early Bolsheviks and even Lenin in his late writings become aware of it or others isn't it that somehow at least the potential for Stalinism was there? You know that’s the true tragedy that the terrifying result you cannot simply say oh I wanted it good I’m not responsible. At some sense it can be shown that you that you are responsible. And then another problem here where again he ignores this topic Brandom another topic that he ignores is even more interesting one the topic of so-called excessive economy. You know basically Brandom's position is that of naive Hegelianism. Horrible things happen but at the end of the story we see how they serve a good purpose. Okay I’m here cynical let's apply this to I’m sorry this eternally same examples we could have used others Gulag colonial brutality and so on. Uh uh what would we do with Holocaust Auschwitz and so on? Would you be ready to say that that it was a tragedy but in the higher sense it's a part of a larger narrative where it serves a good purpose? Well some Zionist may have put it like this and there are I met them. They claim it’s very brutal reasoning that without Holocaust there wouldn’t have been a Jewish state of Israel. So I told them okay draw this to the end and put a monument to Hitler in Tel Aviv. Because isn't it in some naive sense true? Probably maybe not but probably without Hitler and the horror of Holocaust international community would not have pushed supported supported Israel. Uh now isn't it that such a logic in this way you can justify everything. Stalinist Gulag where it served the purpose of awakening us to a idea of more human socialism or whatever you can play this game. But isn't it a little bit too brutal game and I claim it’s not the proper Hegelian game. The proper Hegelian game is that the story the narrative which justifies an event always come afterwards. So we are never in a from the strict Hegelian point the mistake of this reasoning is that you impute to history a kind of eternal abstract reason which from its teleological overview decides Holocaust hm well it’s risky many people will die but on the other hand there will be more awareness of the dangers of anti-Semitism Jews if god is pro-Jewish that’s another debate Jews will get their state or whatever so let’s allow it. No this is not what Hegel says. He is fully aware that the story comes with a delay afterwards. So Hegel's point is not that you can you can justify it retroactively but you should underline retro- retroactively. Horrors happen and then we try to deal with them retroactively. But even this is too much for Brandom. He does something terrible here totally non-Hegelian. He claims that Hegelian history which retroactively afterwards tries to tell the rational narrative that it doesn't report on all contingent events but only on the rationally necessary events. Like it’s kind of a histoire raisonnée how do they put it in French you know history freed of its contingent excesses where only the the necessity of reason is rendered. But if you do this you know what then remains of the 20th century? You simply proclaim what Holocaust and Gulag and colonial horrors it all began we know in in whatever Belgian Congo other colonies you simply say these were excesses but in the rational order of things colonization happened the progress of civilization or stupid things like this. Uh I reject Brandom's version because but also for another reason. Hegel doesn't ever Hegel's strategy it’s not simply true what he is saying is not to dismiss these extreme points as irrelevant. No Hegel for Hegel these extreme catastrophes are always the truth of like if Hegel of a movement like if Hegel were to be alive in his logic would not have been oh Holocaust was an accident and so on but Holocaust brought out the inner destructive ability which was from the very beginning in fascism and so on. For Hegel the extreme catastrophe always has the function of the truth. He never he never he never escapes from it. Which is why Hegel's view of history is very pessimistic precisely when he asserts apparently optimism. At the very end of the last famous last paragraph of Phenomenology you know when he said all of here history is how do you call this in German Schädel Schädel the site of skulls of death bones like that history is history of catastrophes basically. So Hegel is not a naive optimist in the sense of whatever catastrophes we have somehow they will be disclosed to be part of a global reason. No Hegel's point is rather the opposite one whatever we do we can be sure that things will turn wrong in some way you know and from this gap maybe some third thing can emerge but there is no no a priori guarantee that will emerge. Hegel writes this somewhere he is well aware for example that when Mongols or whoever maybe I’m too Eurocentric here but strategically I accept it here that that there was a deeper meaning in the Mongol invasion of Arab world you know and Eastern Europe. No there was no deeper meaning there. Nothing emerged out of there just destruction and so on. Okay but let me follow the line here back to the beginnings. What Brandom leaves behind this is a first more difficult philosophical point. What Brandom leaves behind in his re-normalization of Hegel is primarily the dimension of self-relating which is absolutely fundamental for Hegel in German Selbstbeziehung. Let’s take two basic Hegelian concepts bestimmte Negation determinate negation and mediation Vermittlung. Brandom interprets them as simply the series of exclusions and inclusions that constitute the identity of every object. Like determinate negation means that if the chair I’m sitting on is made of plastic then it is not made of metal or of wood and so on. It’s simply that having some actual particular property excludes other properties within the same species. Like again if metallic then not wooden then not plastic and so on. Or if blue then not brown then not gray and so on and so on. And mediation in Brandom's reading simply relates to the the intricate relation of this object to other objects and processes. For example let’s return to the case of this chair. Of course the truth of this chair is not simply that it’s this particular chair. But how was this chair possible? It presupposes the development of human industry probably it presupposes I don’t know from where the parts come the mines probably a vast network of international relations and so on and so on. Probably even some colonial stuff and so on. So the point is that to see what a particular thing is you have to see it in its mediation. Or a more an example which is more easy for me to to to present I smoke a cigarette. I don’t but my wife does and I love her for that because she is like two to three packages per day you know. And speaking about Greece we should turn a big propaganda for how do you call Kreta Crete the island. I read some statistics that people of Crete have lived the longest age in Greece on average over eighty and they are the greatest smokers you know. Like fuck the politically correct attack on no I really hate leftists who are totally against smoking. I am I know tobacco but then almost in the same breath they want total freedom decriminalization of drugs. I mean whatever drugs are they are a little bit more dangerous than than smoke you know. This is another I claim weird strategy of. Okay but let me go on. Okay so you got it this is how Brandom reads the Hegelian mediation. That it’s simply each thing to get it what it really is has to be located in like we all know correct me if I’m wrong but I think so that tobacco came from America Latin America no. So in other words no tobacco without colonization and the story of Latin America is wonderful here. You know that tomato comes from Latin America. And you know why it was introduced? War. The big popularizer of tomato was Friedrich der Große Frederick the Great. After the catastrophes of war they discovered that tomato grows sorry not tomato potato of course I rewrite history in a stalinist way or that potato. You know if you have a desolate countryside and you have to feed fast to feed population the fastest way is with potato. It’s as simple as that which is why again Germans become potato eaters and they really are. I discovered in Berlin because I like potato three kartoffel restaurants you know where you get like dishes all it’s like some perverts guide de Sade you know you can fuck in this way in that way there you can do perversions of of potato you know. So but okay we have colonization we have European wars you see all the historical background which is needed to account for this stupid object potato. I claim that this is not enough. First concerning this inclusion and exclusion. What Brandom it’s shocking totally misses is again the relationship of of self- what Hegel calls self-exclusion. Like the whole problem Hegel is struggling with is that in the second chapter of phenomenology on das Ding the thing and its properties is that the thing let’s say this table it’s a thing an object. It’s one. And it has multiple properties. Wood wooden top or this is rather some shitty plastic metal legs or whatever. So Hegel's problem is precisely the relationship between one and multiple. And his point is that it’s not simply what is excluded is not simply other properties. Like if this color if the color of this table is gray it excludes red brown or blue or whatever. If it’s metallic it excludes wood and so on. No what interests Hegel is self-exclusion in the sense of the relative autonomy of the one against with regard to its own properties. An autonomy which is actualized precisely in the oneness being one of the human person. Hegel's point is that you are one as a human person when you are reduced to that Cartesian Cogito I am the one where you abstract all properties. So the idea is no to what extent we have in every object this structure of self-exclusion of the tension between its being one and its multiple properties. This dimension is totally missing and it’s the same with mediation. Brandom like Pippin unfortunately remains in this eternal oscillation between Vermittlung and Unmittelbares between mediation and immediacy. The of course with every immediate object immediacy is let’s remain at the level of common sense what we immediately perceive. With in relation with every immediate object of course we first immediately perceive it as self-identical. This table is here. Then we do that bullshit of mediation that I explained to you. This table is here but it presupposes forest industry mining human developing factories world market whatever. But as Brandom points out here he is correct but doesn’t develop the line of thought to the end. But this immediacy in this mediation in order to work has to refer to other immediacies like I this table is dependent on mining. Okay then I have the immediacy of mining of a certain mine or whatever you know or I don’t know forest. Okay then you know what I mean like you never get at the at the network of mediation the network which just stands in the air. That you have this multiple play every immediacy can be resolved in a network of mediations but this network of mediations mediations are always mediations between this and that. They again have to point at certain immediacies and Brandom and Pippin simply complain and conclude that Hegel reaches here a deadlock. It’s kind of endless play every immediacy points to mediation every mediation to immediacy. What they don’t see is that the crucial point for Hegel is what he calls directly the immediacy of mediation. That is to say that mediation can come to itself not in the form of other particular objects but what. Again think about the ego. Here is a passage from Hegel's phenomenology Vorrede preface. The ego or becoming in general this process of mediating is because of its being simply just immediacy coming to be and this immediacy itself. So Hegel's point is that what is our spirit our ego is just a pure process of mediating the process of thinking. But the moment we perceive it as I we don’t return to another simple immediacy. That would have been only I don’t know if you identify neurons if you but when we feel ourselves are self as self-identical this is immediacy of the process of mediation itself. Or to put it in another way what Brandom it’s strange how he doesn’t see it is how if we go to the other notion determinate negation Brandom almost literally quotes this formula of signifier by Saussure how the identity of each object consists just of the series of its differences towards other objects. You know this classical definition of signifier Saussure did it that a signifier is its identity resides only in the network of its differences. But Brandom's point is simple but these differences has to be differences from other self-identical objects. Because the whole of it cannot just hang in the air. You know if for example I don’t know how this goes I was never good at it how does go this structure of differential opposition. But if if high is opposed to low then also you have to return to low as another immediacy and so on and you cannot just have all of it hanging in the air. But Hegel sorry Brandom again just remains at this point. What he doesn't see is how again there are paradoxical objects which are just negation embodied. In the sense that they are not simply positive immediate objects but they are objects which the which in a self-relating way directly embody negation itself. Here dialectic begins an example. I will not use my old examples but and you don’t have to agree with it it’s just an example of a logic. This is how for example Spinoza and I’m not a Spinozian dismisses the usual personal notion of God. For Spinoza God is another name for nature for the rational order of the universe and the personal notion of God goes as the old wise man with a beard sitting somewhere up there as Spinoza put it is just an embodiment a name for our ignorance. When you reach the limit of your knowledge there is a domain that you don’t know and the only truth of the notion of personal God is the embodiment of that ignorance. It appears to be something but it’s actually just something that fills in the void. And then of course you have endless series of these examples for example you know my stories for example in in Marx my eternal example how the Asiatic mode of production seems to be one among the modes of production but it really is just an empty envelope covering all that did not fit other modes of production. You know Asiatic mode of production is like in that I always use this example I’m sorry if you know it in that you know the famous Borges story referred to by Michel Foucault in the beginning of the Order a crazy categorization of dogs these dog those dogs and at the end a last sub-species all the dogs which are not included into this list. You know this this paradox of a positive entity whose substantial truth is just negation it’s literally the embodiment of nothing. This is also for Lacan and for Hegel a subject this level of self-relating is something that simply to put it simply that Brandom ignores. So now this was just a general outlook now let’s begin at the beginning now things will get maybe a little bit more interesting. Brandom begins his reading of phenomenology Hegel's phenomenology with an interpretation of the notion of experience Erfahrung the experience what Hegel calls the experience of consciousness. And Hegel's paradoxical claim here we come to the first of these great re-normalizations simplifications of Hegel sorry by Brandom Hegel claims something crazy and paradoxical that you have a certain experience of an object and then you perceive a certain object experience occurs when you discover the falsity of your idea of object of your representation of object. But Brandom sorry Hegel's claim is paradoxical it is that what changes in an authentic experience is not just your idea of an object but is this object itself. You know like as Hegel puts it when your idea is proven wrong misleading with regard to the object whose idea it is you don’t have to change only your idea but also the object itself. Now this appears subjectivist madness or whatever and now I will first tell you how Brandom tries to squeeze out of this reintroducing a standard realism. He takes a very weird non-Hegelian example. Let’s say you have a a straight stick you know then you drown it half into water and because of all this shitty perspective optical stuff about which I know nothing the the the the stick will appear broken. Okay then this is what you let’s say immediately see the broken stick. Then you pull it out and it appears as what it really is the straight stick. So this is Brandom's even basic example. So how does he interpret it? In a very subtle way but I think it’s deeply misleading. His point is that we have here three levels not two levels. We have the stick the way it appears to me at the beginning which is if it’s half in water it appears as a cracked broken stick then we have my idea of how the stick really is what in Hegelian terms would have been called the in-itself for me because if I’m an idiot I think that the stick really is broken. I know that I only have an appearance of the stick but and then we have the way the stick really is in itself. Okay Brandom claims that what changes in the experience is not the stick in itself which was all the time the same fucking straight stick but it’s just what I took it to be the stick in itself. For for for so that again at the beginning if I was an idiot I thought the stick in itself the way it really is is also a broken stick. When I pull it out I see that that was just my subjective misperception because of optical laws whatever how the the light breaks in water whatever but that really this is the stick. But in all this process the stick in itself remains the way it is. So Brandom's point is that the in-itself which changes through experience it’s not the true in-itself. The stick is outside the process all the time out there it’s just the in-itself for me what I took to be the in-itself. And maybe another example would be more more practical here. Let’s say a certain planet appears to us in a certain way. If you look at it at the telescope what maybe you can even see it the for-us is the way that stupid celestial body appears to us. We are fully aware that this is not how the planet really is this is just how it appears to us. Okay through through good through closer observations satellites and so on we get an idea of how that planet really is. So we have in our everyday experience already the difference between how something appears to us and how it really is. But let’s say that there is now a tremendous new discovery which shows us that even if the planet of course it still appears to us as the same planet it’s not really what we took it to be in itself. You get it it’s like we thought it’s composed of those metals with some fires inside whatever we discover no there are no fires inside it’s different metals and so on and so on. What changes here is not the immediate appearance of the object. We look at it through telescope even it’s the same. What changes is the in-itself of the object but the way it was for us. We thought this appears like this it’s really like that. Through the experience we learned no the in-itself is different. But there is a third in-itself which is the object itself out there and that one and that one remains the same. Now this is of course a consistent naive this is of course the consistent naive realist way to perceive things. But what would Hegel have replied here? The first consequence here is that all the all the movement is on the side of condition not the movement of the object but the movement of condition. We were describing a certain process like getting to know an object better and better. But you know all the movement was in our condition. The object appears like this we presume how it is in itself and through our experience the way we presume the object is in itself changes. But in all this the object in this case the stupid planet remains the way it is in itself. And here I think Brandom does something catastrophic and totally non-Hegelian. He draws here a distinction between impossible and inappropriate. In the sense that how does our experience progress? For example we examine a certain object we have an idea of that object then when our conclusions are contradictory of that object we know that we are wrong and we try to correct our knowledge because let’s say a stupid example the object cannot be at the same time okay red blue is not a good example because we know that colors at least to the naive modern epistemology colors are subjective they don’t exist objectively. So but let’s say take any one we thought it’s composed of this atoms we discover there are also other type of atoms which should be there so for Brandom this contradiction can only be can only exist in our knowledge. Contradiction means the co-presence in our idea of an object of mutually exclusive properties. When we stumble upon a contradiction we know that ontologically it is impossible to have an actually existing contradiction so we have to correct our perception. Again one of the two choices if we have incompatible properties one of them has to be false or maybe both are false and there is a third option or whatever. So we have here not really Hegel but a kind of Karl Popper without without aggressiveness ontology. You know there is infinite reality out there we never know how it really is but we gradually progress towards it through resolving inconsistencies in our knowledge and so on and so on. The key point being that contradictions are only in our knowledge. Because I can endorse subjectively incompatible contradictory thoughts. But this cannot exist in reality in reality it’s impossible for things to be self- contradictory. And here is a quote from Brandom. Here how things objectively are or are in themselves means always already are anyway in the sense that how they are in themselves swings free of how they are for the subject. The sort of independence is presupposed by their functioning as a normative standard for assessment of appearances. The keyword here is normative. Because for Brandom reality is out there the way it is. There is no normativity there an object cannot be wrong an object is what it is. Normativity is only in our knowledge our knowledge we can measure it normatively. It can be right or wrong. Our knowledge of an object can be right or wrong but the object itself cannot be right or wrong. For example throughout history of humanity people talk about water while it all the time changes our notion of what water we is in itself you know for example only at a certain point we became through development of chemistry aware that water is in H2O etc. So we are approaching what water is in itself. But when we discover that water is that the chemical composition of water is H2O this doesn't mean that at that point water became H2O water always already was this we just were not aware of this. Here I think this is again naive ontology. But I think the whole point of Hegel is to undermine it. How it’s okay we you may not agree with Hegel here. I’m just saying that Brandom totally misses the point of Hegel here. Because the basic absolutely crucial point of Hegel the ABC of Hegel is that contradictions are in things themselves. What does this mean here? For example this is the entire trust of Hegel's critique of Kantian antinomies that when somebody something is antinomic specific sense of contradiction in Kant it cannot both poles of antinomy cannot be objectively true it has to be our transcendental illusion our misperception and so on and Hegel uses here a wonderful word that Kant shows a tenderness for the things of this world as if you know let’s not press too much on things things cannot be self-contradictory. What does Hegel mean here? How to what does Hegel mean here? Now comes the point. For Hegel precisely again you may disagree with it but the whole point of Hegel is that the basic feature of let’s call it dialectical process is that there is a certain normativity gap between what a thing effectively is and what it should have been with regard to its notion in reality itself. Now this may sound crazy but let me give you let me give you let me give you some simple examples. First ontologically as Hegel says the usual notion of truth is the adequation of our intellect idea to to things like I don’t know I claim the car outside this building is blue this is my idea it’s true if you go out and see the car which is nearest to this building is really blue. But for Hegel there is another higher form of truth and precisely I want to claim it’s not necessarily an idealist notion in the bad sense that but for Hegel the problem is not just this truth does reality fit my subjective ideas but does reality but do things it’s not does an idea in my mind fit reality but does a reality fit its own idea that there is an inherent normativity. What does he mean by this? For example for Hegel the problem is not is this a table? But I mean the problem is not I have an idea of a table and oh my god look this really is a table. The problem is is this table really a table? You know this and for Hegel and that’s I think he is right here even for example it may appear ridiculous but the whole point first let’s take simple examples I say simple because obviously there is a normativity there. Hegel's theory of state is not simply what a state truly is. But his idea is that the whole history of states sorry not states like states of things but state like Staat in German like Persian state Greek state and so on that state emerged to put it very naively to play a certain role to fulfill a certain function to organize harmonious functioning of whatever you want of society to bring harmony and so on and so on. And Hegel's point almost a Marxist one is that if you look at the history each form of the state fell apart because it it didn’t meet correspond to its own notion. For example first there were so-called primitive but by primitive they were not so primitive the big despotic states like ancient Egypt and so on they didn’t succeed in introducing social harmony they fell apart then ancient Greek state they fell apart like the idea is that you see the point of Hegel here the very fact that there were in each state antagonisms and tensions means that this normative tension was immanent to the notion of state. It’s an irreducible contradiction between between what the state actually is and what it was supposed to do. Hegel's critique of the market would have been and is the same market is destined to organize spontaneously the exchange and so on and so on. Does it really do this? Does it fit its own notion? Now you will say do we get at the end the ideal state? No you see in which simple sense when our experience changes the object itself changes. Once people let’s say ancient Greeks perceived that their state doesn’t work that it’s not truly what it is supposed to be. They didn’t just change their notion of the state. They changed the state itself another reality emerges. This would be I think or even in the history of art whatever you take and Hegel here does something now you can problematize Hegel but I think he is right when he applies the same logic to entire reality for example for Hegel it’s crazy reading but I’m tempted based on latest evolutionary biology to claim that this is the only way to explain the passage from very simplified talk from plants to animals. Plants try to be something they fail because then Hegel and then through this failure animals emerge because Hegel has a wonderful idea here it’s madness that you know how he defines plants? Animals whose intestines are outside themselves in the earth down and so on you know. So what I’m saying is that this is the proper dialectical tension a thing doesn’t fit its notion. And now we come to the point at the end we don’t get finally the rational state Prussian state of Hegel's time which fits its notion. No no no Hegel is radical here at the end the final point of history of political history is that state as such cannot be a true state. So you have to move to another dimension for Hegel you have past to religion that what but this is not the last stage you know Hegel's point what state wanted to be a harmonious community resolving antagonisms in its very notion it cannot be that. So that’s the beautiful paradox if you want a true state it should no longer be a state it should be a religious community. Okay then things get caught up again and again but but I think that again if you abstract this sorry if you abstract this dimension from state this inner tension which points towards again a normativity of reality itself you know it’s not simply that we expect a state to be that to resolve social antagonisms etc. in a way state is there to resolve antagonisms so when a state fails it’s not simply that our idea of a state fails. The state itself fails. So this brings us to another sorry I got a little bit confused here for another problem this you have here a wonderful formulation by Brandom when he says that but he doesn’t again he is not radical enough he introduces the difference between objects which are what they are independently of our notion like that stupid stick and then objects which change when their for-itself or for-us the way they are perceived when it changes. A crucial quote from Brandom. For such a being can change what it is in itself by changing what it is for itself. And he calls this goes only for self-conscious beings. That you cannot simply oppose in a human being what you think you are the way you perceive yourself and what you really are. When you change your self-perception in a way you change the way things really are. But what Brandom does not do here he should have done this I’m returning to his stick imagine a stick and that would be I think the best metaphor for ideology imagine a stick which remains straight in reality in itself only insofar as it appears to us as a bent stick. You know that its being misperceived as what it is not is a condition of its being what it is in itself. So that if you erase the illusion if you learn what the stick really is in itself the stick will no longer be what it is in itself. Now of course this doesn't hold for the stupid stick but it’s a perfect definition of I don’t like this term but alienated society as Marx emphasized again and again we don’t have ideological illusions about society and then the real society illusions are the innermost constituent of this society to put it in naive terms. Commodity fetishism and so on is not something you can see through and then you see how society really is. The moment you get rid the illusion the mystification you lose the reality which was mystified in this way. And isn't it that something the same was at work in Freud in the Freudian notion of symptom at least in the early naive Freud where he thought that the symptom only persists as a symptom insofar as its meaning is unknown as it’s mystified. When you fully interpret a system a symptom sorry a symptom disappears. So okay things are becoming here more complex and so on but I want to give you again just to make this clear another another example that I am repeating all the time of what this contradiction means. Like for Brandom this would be the best way to condense what I’m saying fuck it I talk a lot that’s life. For Brandom the progress of knowledge consists in resolving contradictions. First in stating contradictions and then resolving them. Like I analyze an object I discover it’s composed of this and this elements whatever then I do another analysis the result is incompatible with the first one. Oh it means I have to move forward. Either choose one of the two versions or a third one whatever. So again the progress of knowledge is getting rid of contradictions. Knowledge progresses through contradiction but they are just in our knowledge process. For Hegel it’s exactly the opposite. That progress of knowledge is precisely when what you thought it was only a contradiction in your mind subjective contradiction appears when you become aware that what you thought is your subjective illusion that you become aware that this is the feature of the thing itself. Now you will say this is nonsensical mysticism. Of course the Hegelian notion of contradiction we don’t have time for that it’s a very refined one. It’s not simply I can be a man and a woman at the same time or all this that the murderer is or whatever is a saint at the same time although with many Christian saints maybe this goes quite well you know. Ah yeah another thing now I just for a moment I will come back. Did you tell me this or somebody else? No I only mentioned Tsipras and that did I mention also here? Yes I did yes sorry Netanyahu Tsipras and Netanyahu yes at the beginning yes that part of like Jerusalem is the eternal I mean okay let’s go on. So let me give you a simple example of this. A classical one that I used about six seven times in my book but I think it’s a clear one. That old Adorno idea of society that we have two basic notions of society the individualist liberal notion where society appears as secondary the starting point are individuals individuals interact and their interaction acquires a certain alienated autonomy in objective reality. So individual interaction and society as an objective trans-individual entity comes second. And then we have the opposite view Émile Durkheim was its main protagonist where society as an objective trans-subjective system comes first and individuals are just tiny bits or whatever something that is predetermined by society. And Adorno asks it’s a too simple example but just for you to get the logic Adorno then asks but how to bring these two together? And he mocks perfectly the easy pseudo-dialectical solution you know to say it’s neither one nor the other. Society is an objective totality but totality which is kept alive only through subjective interaction. No no Adorno's answer is not some kind of a synthesis. Adorno's answer is a much simpler one. Yes there is a radical antinomy between these two notions of society and there is no higher unity. But his point is his point is simply but this antinomy is what characterizes our society. This antinomy is not simply to be dismissed and this antinomy where on the one hand it’s blatantly true today although it’s a very naive antinomy on the one hand we are individualized we never were so individualized you know always your experience count be what you truly are and all that bullshit and so on. I don’t want to be like I like more alienation like if I look at myself in a mirror what a stupid boring guy I mean the most refreshing thing for me is to forget that I am what I am you know what I mean like to to alienate myself from myself. I always found the most disgusting thing imaginable like be truly yourself. My god I’m even afraid that’s why I hate psychoanalysis I mean you just discover all the shit that is in yourself no thanks I want to be alienated you know. Okay but let’s go on. You see the nicety here. What we first experience what it appeared to us as our subjective antinomy my god is the individualist approach proper to society or the objectivist approach. Which is true? When you become aware that as Hegel put it somewhere in a wonderful way the problem is its own solution. The antinomy should not be resolved but simply you resolve it by transposing it into reality itself. And the same thing is developed by Adorno for example apropos of the relationship between psychological ideological level psychological level and objective social processes. Adorno again claims that the gap between Adorno claims that yes you cannot in some phenomenological way develop the notion of objective society out of psychological intentionality interactions and the opposite doesn’t go at all. But again the truth is this antinomy the truth is this antinomy is this antinomy itself. Okay so again okay this was the first point I wanted to make and I would like to go a little bit forward now I want to go maybe to what I the second part how from this ontological topic of knowledge how we arrive at reality where you got the basic point of Hegel move contradictions into the thing itself and the crazy idealist idea which can be read in a materialist way of a certain normative tension normativity inscribed into reality itself. Which is why also Hegel rejects this modern contrast between objective reality where things simply are what they are and our subjectivity where we have normative claims tensions and so on. No normativity is already in reality itself. Then the same tension reproduces itself as I already improvised at the beginning in notions of action how action. So again now comes yes sorry the truly interesting part if you allow me to go a little bit forward I’ll jump to the end not to lose too much time. So for Brandom the dialectical process is the process of I simplify it very much of forgiveness and reconciliation like at the end like moving back to the beginning where I said how you intend to do something it fails and so on. For Brandom the Hegelian wager is that at the end you can tell a story of how you can reconcile with your failures of how through the failures some higher social goal was achieved and you get the reconciliation and so on and so on. But Brandom does something so absolutely non-Hegelian here. He does two things he defines what Hegel calls absolute knowing as an ideal that we can just be approaching. He says but we are not yet there. We are telling a story but our story and our world can again trigger some irreconcilable conflicts and so on and so on. And for for Brandom the basic Hegelian utopian wager is that in the same way that we retroactively redeemed past generations like no what you were doing is not all nonsense you served a larger purpose that future generations will do it to us. This trust into the future. So he openly claimed that for example he gives a detailed interpretation of how Hegel opposes the ancient world of its substantial unity ethical world and modern world of individualist morality and then he shows how the Hegelian reconciliation is imagining a new world where the usual bullshit individuals reconciled with society the two extremes are united and so on and so on. But then he does something horrible. He claims that Hegel is here announcing pointing forward to some future ideal form which didn’t yet arrive. Quote from Brandom: Unlike the earlier stories, this one the story about absolute knowing and reconciled society outlines something that hasn't happened yet, a future development of spirit of which Hegel is the prophet. The making explicit of something already implicit implicit and so on and so on. So the idea is that what Hegel is describing at the end as absolute knowing reconciliation is a vision of a future futuristic society that Hegel is pointing towards the future. I claim this precisely is what Hegel absolutely does not do. On the and also this because for Hegel reconciliation is something much more if you want tragic. It’s not in the future there will be reconciliation but reconciliation is a reconciliation with the shit we are in now and here. You know it’s it because even you know what what what sorry I don’t want to bore you with the quotes but endlessly Hegel repeats this point that when he speaks about reconciliation for example this passage the result is that is that and the result it needs not to wait upon us. It’s already by implication as well as full actuality accomplished. So Hegel the basic premise of Hegel is that what he describes as reconciliation is not some big change in future like now we are not reconciled we will become reconciled through some. No for Hegel reconciliation is to see that we it’s always this already are to establish that we are already reconciled. Now I don’t have time to go into this now because it may appear to you that this means some kind of a crazy conformism like Hegel doesn't want social change he just preaches reconciliation with the world it is. No things are much more paradoxical. For Hegel Hegel here has this unique dialectic whose point is that to really change things paradoxically you have to presuppose that the change is already here that at the virtual level the change already has to happen. This is why Hegel is a Christian because you know this is I think the deepest Christian insight. It’s not like in Judaism Messiah will come. No Messiah did come the true Messiah God Christ. But this does not mean we have to do nothing. This is I think the ultimate subtlety of Hegel. Okay let’s not lose time into going in detail how it is. I’m also saying that what Brandom doesn't see is the following thing. His formula of reconciliation is this one. On the one hand this is the crucial social point we have the ancient Greek and so on traditional alienated societies where a certain ethical order is always presupposed as given and then you as an individual are faithful or not faithful to this order but this substantial ethical order is given in advance. Then we have the modern view in which there is no objective normative order prior to our subjective activity. Through our social interaction we produce we create this order. And in this sense we can change it and so on so the only ultimate reality is our subjective reality of constant change struggles and so on and every objective ethical order is just a kind of a reification objectivization the result of our subjective activity. Now Brandom provides here a nice speculative formulation nonetheless where he says that in this postmodern third stage where we will have final reconciliation finding and making finding means traditional societies where they act as if you simply find already an established ethical order finding and making making in the sense of we create our ethical order show up as two sides of one coin two aspects of one process living forward and comprehending backwards each both makings and findings. Again the idea is clear traditional culture accepts norms as substantially given they pre-exist us we just have to find them modern culture of alienation reduces norms to an expression of our subjective attitudes. What is needed is a synthetic view. And then I think that now here here Brandom is right when he insists that there is a certain tension that remains in Hegelian reconciliation. Let’s say a quote from Brandom: spirit exists insofar as we make it exist by taking it to exist. He points out here to the fundamental paradox of Lacanian big Other which is and that would be maybe the correct reconciliation you know like as Lacan put it there is no big Other there is no objective normative order given in advance. But nonetheless for every normative order or symbolic system as such we cannot simply say we are creating it. For it to function you know it’s that you produce something only through the illusion that it already exists. That’s the core of it. No? You cannot have it both ways I’m just a free individual I’m producing a order this this necessity of always already here. Like let me give you an extremely stupid example. Let’s say that you follow a certain political idea. Communism fascism whatever you want I don’t care. Of course you are aware that this idea exists only through your subjective activity. If nobody fights for communism fascism whatever there is no communism fascism. But nonetheless when you fight for it it only works through the illusion that you are fighting for something which in some sense it is there. The illusion is necessary. You cannot you cannot cheat here. So again the point is the status of this illusion. And here I’m so sorry again I don’t have time to to go in it into more detail but here things get extraordinarily complex and Brandom misses the point. In what sense? Brandom can explain in what sense substantial ethical reality is out there only as the result of our activity. But I claim he doesn't really explain the necessity of this illusion. He just you know like why is it that the only way to do it is to the only way to achieve to make something exist is to act as if it already exists. And I claim that this brings us back to a much more radical level in the sense of it’s not enough when we have an alienated substance like an ethical system which we perceive as independent of us. It’s not enough for us to become aware how we really produced that system and so on. Something much more mysterious has to happen I don’t want to go now into all this in detail which I designate as the Christian moment where the divine figure like it’s not enough to say we produce objective spirit but the the split has to be introduced into objective spirit itself where you have a subject like Jesus Christ who is objective spirit itself as a subject and so on. Okay so let’s drop this things get maybe too complex for this confused talk here but again the key point is that this central paradox that you can change that the real change is not the change of the future but the change of the past in a way. Of course not I’m not talking about magic. I’m talking about to put it naively a new image of what the past was. You know this idea that yes as Marx put it we have to change reality but to change it we have to redefine it to see it I’m tempted to say to the first step towards change is a totally different interpretation. Before you change it reality has to appear to you in a totally different way. In in this precise subtle sense the only way to change things is to perceive assume them as already changed. Let me give you here an example of feminism. It’s not simply to say women were oppressed and then they started to liberate themselves. No something crucial had to happen before. The problem before modernity was not just that women were oppressed but that they didn’t even experience their being as oppressed. You know the first step in feminist struggle is not to fight oppression but to even become aware of the oppression and that’s where the real change happens. This would be Hegel's insight. The real change is when you say fuck it no I’m not by nature woman as part of some holistic yin-yang by nature the dark element feminine element you have to change the entire story. Even a Hegelian Marxist like Herbert Marcuse pointed this in a wonderful way when he said that freedom is a condition of liberation in the sense as you must already in a certain way be free in order to fight for liberation. You know that’s the that’s the this subtle point. Again back to feminism. This is the crucial point and it’s not easy at all. This point of not just this you have of course in already in traditional times these crazy women witches who were free outside order. But you know this let’s call it a woman who becomes shocked at the injustice of the and so on. This is not just an insight. The very entity of being a woman changes radically once you become aware of this that it’s not that it’s not that it’s not natural that you are oppressed and so on and so on. This is the true change. That you know the whole history appears in a new way. It’s no longer the history of progress but the history of oppression of women. And it’s the same for racism and so on. You don’t just rebel. Okay slaves did rebel. But it’s not a great the point was when they started to rebel on behalf of their whatever you call it freedom human rights and so on which means that you get a radical rewriting of the past. Things have to change symbolic and I will give you maybe another example here a very naive one from my not great dissident but this gap that I’m talking about. This fascinated me all the time in late communist society and all the time I’m asking my friends the same question. Like okay communism fell down at that point Berlin Wall Ceaușescu fled on a helicopter but when did you know that the game is over really? How much be- because at a certain point this is for me the most mysterious point of it even while the system still goes on and rules in a way everyone knows that the game is over. I remember for example I report on this in some of my early books I’m sorry if I repeat myself Ryszard Kapuściński the great Polish political journalist. He was in Iran when Shah was overthrown. And he tells a wonderful story how there were conflicts demonstrations and then at a certain crossing in Tehran something happened. People were gathering to demonstrate police came and the policeman stepped forward and started to shout at the person who was on the head of the demonstrators. Disperse enough fun disperse. The man didn’t move. The policeman shouted again the man didn’t move. Embarrassed the policeman turned around and left. And even if this didn’t really happen but the fascinating thing is that in a couple of hours all Tehran so he claimed was talking about this and in a way even wait a minute the battles went on for half a year but in some sense everyone knew the game is over. In some sense even those in power still in power knew. And again this fascinates me so much when did this moment happen? You know this is what I’m talking about that this almost mystical moment like shift in the symbolic order when you learn that that things are over before they are and in a way the game is over. And again Hegel is fully fully aware of it. Of this this gap is crucial that you don’t win directly in the sense of fighting and we win. You win by paradoxically when you establish through this kind of a magic moment that you’ve already won. Oh we are now just fighting second- admit it the game is over you know. And I wonder how this happened although all things about the limits of liberation should be taken into account here. Like at one point in South Africa did the apartheid guys this established because it was a wonderful moment I admire it. You know I remember reading newspapers following it at a certain moment even when he was still in jail and here Mandela was great in spite of all compromises he had to make later you know this magic moment when everyone knew the way he was treated Mandela won it’s over. I remember how even where who was before de Klerk Botha or who was the previous still racist but he invited Mandela for a talk. When Mandela was still in prison and the the journalist reported on the talk were very mysterious. Mandela stepped out and said no we didn’t talk politics we are just two old wise men who has a who had a nice chat and so on. It was a wonderful understatement of the year you know. But you see what I’m saying? Everybody knew the game is over you know. And this would be for me if you ask me a proper atheist Christian politics. No it’s not just oh we are fighting maybe we will be in it ha ha the game is over you just don’t know it you know. Although in what sense the game is over I don’t know because things are getting even worse what I learned yesterday from Turkey you know what I was telling you before this totally scandalous Turkish policy. I’m more and more convinced I repeat my line from yesterday the beginning that all this war on terror the problem is not that it’s too militaristic let’s not bomb it’s not a serious war at all. It’s just a cover up for two different conflicts Shia-Sunni conflict and Russia-Western conflict. And it’s like they don’t really mean it. Like as many journalists noted up put pressure on Syria and Saudi Arabia and without any bombing ISIS disappears in two three months to the utmost. I’m really worried that maybe the game is over but in a much darker sense you know in the opposite sense. Sorry. Maybe I didn’t want to stop you because it was going it was amazing today. No fuck it it was too simple I lo- I promise you the same thing as usual. I wasn’t satisfied I simplified it I got lost at the end. Again who is the boss by boss I mean something very fuck you up yours by boss I mean something very democratic the one who has emails. Ah still Julia Julia is here for another couple of weeks. Okay then I promise that at least this part if you’re interested I will email to her and you can to Julia and you will get from her this text because at the end I got lost when things go who who are you to say you think that we are in Islam you think that I am Mohammed and you are Khadijah? No seriously this is a great part of Islam you know that it’s inherent to Islam that a man tells the truth but it becomes truth only through woman’s mediation. If I did yeah exactly. Yeah but I but not in my Christian universe. Aren’t we going to take questions today or are you saving them for tomorrow? I save it for tomorrow fuck life. Okay well thanks very much. No thank you for your patience and tomorrow I will try to do it in a more but listen I talk too much so please this is not an empty rhetorical claim really not it’s not this my old joke a claim to be rejected please the only way to do it with me is if you want to ask something don’t wait for the end simply there is no end is end. You are getting sorry if we can perfect we can. But my point is nonetheless that you know you see now I will tell you something just as stupid fun you gave me the idea you know the best argument against feminine liberation is this one that a nice conservative told me women were really oppressed but they’re unfair if we confess to women that we oppress them they will take advantage of this in an unfair way you know. This is the ugliest disgusting version that I can imagine. Okay anyway we come back tomorrow at I you I hope you got my point that I am just a weak guy scared like shit of women no and all that remains to me is to act out these stupid jokes. Okay tomorrow we go to the end in Hegel we can begin by the way okay ah you were the one secret police who was doing it yes I have to sorry let’s do it.