Why Todestrieb is a Philosophical Concept
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-03-06 · 1:29:44 · 12,275 words
psychoanalysishegel-dialecticsideologyreligion-theologycapitalismethicsconsciousness-mindscience-physicscinema-art-culturephilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a philosophical lecture at ICI Berlin on the ethics of psychoanalysis, working through Lacan's maxim 'do not compromise your desire' against hedonism, immoral ethics (Nietzsche/Stalin), Western Buddhism, and Kantian duty. The talk's central aim is to arrive at a precise account of Freud's Todestrieb (death drive) as distinct from both the Nirvana principle and Schopenhauerian Will, drawing analogies from quantum physics (Higgs field, Heisenberg uncertainty), video games, ballet, and fairy tales. A Q&A session covers the relation between death drive and capital, surplus-jouissance, and the limitations of Lacan's discourse theory.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 31
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Lacan's ethical maxim, 'do not compromise your desire', used here as the entry point to distinguish genuine ethical fidelity from hedonism, immoral ethics, and Buddhist detachment.
Žižek's ironic label for the dominant ideological stance today, a vague hedonist pseudo-Orientalism (exemplified by Dalai Lama's popularity) that promises inner peace while perfectly compatible with postmodern capitalism.
as “Dalai Lama meets Hollywood ethics”
Žižek's sardonic formula for the fusion of Buddhist-inflected self-help ethics and celebrity culture, the dominant ideological form today that promises more pleasure through minimal spiritual effort.
Žižek's term for the form of capitalism that absorbed the creative, anti-hierarchical, desire-liberating language of '68 and made it the idiom of corporate flexibility and interactive consumerism.
Žižek's satirical reference to the academic institutionalization of happiness as a goal, symptom of an ideology that legitimizes pleasure-seeking as life's aim, producing more anxiety than ever.
as “Ideologiekritik sunglasses”
Žižek's term for the sunglasses in Carpenter's They Live that reveal ideology's hidden message beneath advertising; used as a thought-experiment for charity ads and commodity fetishism.
Freud's pleasure principle and reality principle, treated here as two sides of the same coin, the reality principle is the prolongation of the pleasure principle, not its opposite, so Lacanian desire exceeds both.
as “big Other”
Lacan's notion of the symbolic guarantee or ultimate arbiter of meaning; Žižek uses 'il n'y a pas de grand Autre' to argue that genuine ethics must relinquish any reference to a last-judgment perspective.
as “perspective of the last judgment”
Žižek's label for the Stalinist (and broadly ideological) claim that some historical subject, the Party, already knows the objective meaning of your acts from the standpoint of the future verdict; Lacanian ethics prohibits this.
Stalinist ideological category in which one can be innocent in intention yet guilty in objective historical effect; the Party determines objective meaning, exemplifying the theological structure of Stalinism Žižek critiques.
Lacan's thesis that the big Other does not exist, invoked by Žižek as the core of psychoanalytic ethics: one must act without recourse to any external guarantor of the meaning of one's acts.
Kant's maxim 'you can because you must', which Žižek supplements with its uncanny inversion: 'there is no excuse for doing your duty', invoking duty as an excuse is itself ethically prohibited.
Lacanian concept of moving through and beyond the fundamental fantasy; Žižek uses it to mark the point where, unlike Buddhism, psychoanalysis insists something (the drive) still remains after the illusions of desire are dissolved.
Lacan's concept of the ego as the product of identification with a fixed external image, cited via Mark Epstein to show a structural parallel between psychoanalysis and Buddhism: both deny a substantial self.
The Buddhist wheel of false passions and craving; Žižek's key challenge to Buddhism is the question of how Samsara arose from Nirvana in the first place, a question he maps onto the problem of drive.
Galileo's legendary phrase repurposed by Žižek as the formula of the death drive: even after traversing fantasy and reaching the Buddhist void, something still moves, that residual movement is the drive.
as “Higgs field analogy”
Žižek uses the Higgs field, a physical something that costs less energy than the vacuum state, to explain how the death drive is 'less than nothing': it is cheaper to persist in something than to dwell in absolute void.
Freud's concept that every life-system tends toward the lowest level of tension and ultimately toward nothingness; Žižek distinguishes it sharply from the death drive by arguing that the Higgs-field analogy shows zero is not the lowest energy state.
Žižek's formulation of the paradox at the heart of the death drive: using the Higgs-field analogy, drive is that which has even less energy than nothingness, the void is not the lowest possible state.
Schopenhauer's metaphysical Will as the noumenal life-substance; Žižek distinguishes it from the Freudian drive, Will is pure life energy persisting without representation, whereas drive persists even when Will is suspended (like dancers continuing after music stops).
Star Wars concept adapted by Žižek to articulate the Buddhist problem: something can go wrong at the level of Nirvana itself, before Samsara, and that pre-ontological disturbance is the drive.
as “indefinite (infinite) judgment”
Kant's logical category, as opposed to negative judgment ('he is not dead'), indefinite judgment affirms a non-predicate ('he is undead'), producing a monstrous third domain; Žižek uses this as the ontological figure for the death drive.
as “undead”
Žižek's figure, drawn from horror, Grimm fairy tales, and Kant's indefinite judgment, for the domain of death drive: neither alive nor dead, an obscene immortality that persists beyond natural life and death.
The concept from German Idealism, the subject's capacity to negate itself, which Žižek identifies as the proper philosophical dignity of the death drive, where the talk ends.
Derrida's concept from Spectres of Marx, discussed critically: Žižek argues Derrida's move from the irreducibility of spectrality to capital's irreducibility is an illegitimate ontological short-circuit.
as “passage from substance to subject”
Marx's account in Capital of how money becomes capital, formulated in explicitly Hegelian terms as the passage from substance (money as embodied value) to subject (capital as self-relating process).
as “schlechte Unendlichkeit”
Hegel's 'bad infinity', mere endless repetition without genuine self-sublation; Žižek uses it to probe the paradox of capital, which behaves like self-relating Vernunft but endlessly repeats like schlechter Verstand.
as “Todestrieb (death drive)”
For Žižek following Freud and Lacan, the death drive is not the desire for annihilation but a persistence, an 'e pur si muove', that continues even when the will and the Nirvana-level void are suspended; it is the psychoanalytic name for an obscene immortality.
as “Wiederholungszwang (compulsion to repeat)”
Freud's repetition compulsion, invoked briefly as a dimension of what makes capital's movement and the death drive structurally similar as automatic self-relating processes.
as “plus-de-jouir / surplus enjoyment”
Lacan's concept (discussed in seminars XVI–XVII) that parallels Marxian surplus-value; raised by an audience member as an alternative frame for understanding capital, which Žižek engages but does not fully endorse over the drive framework.
In desire, objet a functions as the metonymic cause of desire circling around a void; in drive, Žižek argues it functions differently, as the minimal formal twist or 'curvature' that accounts for the Spannung (tension) rather than as an object one is after.
Stories he reaches for 13
In John Carpenter's They Live, sunglasses reveal the hidden ideological message beneath advertising. Žižek asks: what would we see if we put such glasses on charity ads ('give €3/month to save a child')? The hidden messages are: 'here's an easy way to assuage your guilt' and 'stop thinking politically, just act'.
“These are literally Ideologiekritik sunglasses. If you put these sunglasses on, you can see like the real message.”
When old Stalin received generals who gave him a medal, the applause went on for half an hour because no one dared be the first to stop. One general collapsed. Stalin coldly observed it, then said 'Okay, stop'. Žižek tells it as a personal fantasy, his dream of such commanding authority.
“There were not many and nobody dared to be the first to stop the applause. And it was so painful, it went on for half an hour.”
Starbucks sells coffee by claiming to help Guatemalan families; Ethos water donates 5 cents from a $2.50 bottle to bring water to desert regions. Žižek argues this fuses consumption with ethical self-image, masking profit while making consumers feel good.
“The problem of course is that they earn even more because the water costs two dollars and a half... you give five cents and so on.”
In Mozart's Don Giovanni, the stone guest offers redemption; Don Giovanni refuses even knowing he will burn in hell, not for pleasure but out of principle, as fidelity to his chosen life. This is immoral ethics at its purest.
“Don Giovanni heroically refuses to repent, although he is well aware that he has nothing to gain except eternal suffering for his persistence.”
In a George Balanchine ballet set to Anton Webern, after the music ends the dancers continue moving in silence for some time, like cartoon characters walking off a cliff. This is Žižek's figure for the death drive as distinct from Will.
“After the music was over... the dancers continued to dance for some time in complete silence, as if they did not notice that music that provided the substance for their dance is already over.”
In Fight Club, Ed Norton's fist becomes autonomous and beats his own boss, like the arm in Grimm's fairy tale. Žižek reads this as death drive at its purest: an organ that rebels against the subject's own will.
“His fist hand, like in Grimm fairy tale, gets autonomous and starts to — he starts to beat himself. This is death drive at its purest.”
In Lynch's Mulholland Drive, a singer collapses but the song continues (it was playback). For a brief moment there is confusion, the source of voice disappears yet the singing goes on, figuring the excess of life beyond embodiment.
“She collapses, the song goes on... as if the source of voice disappears, the singing goes on.”
Einstein first thought matter curves space, then had the more ingenious idea that matter is nothing but an effect of space curving. Žižek uses this to explain objet a in drive: not a positive substance but the minimal formal twist (curvature) that accounts for the Spannung.
“Matter is nothing but an effect of the curving the space... in drive, object a is that which accounts for the Spannung.”
Three historical modes of publicity map onto Lacan's Real/Symbolic/Imaginary: (1) real qualities of the product, (2) social status signaled, (3) postmodern experiential mode, 'this car will make your life meaningful'. The third mode is the dominant ideology today.
“Do you feel oppressed in your daily life? Have this car and you will feel your life energy, your life will be meaningful.”
Žižek offers a vulgar example: if instead of shaking someone's hand once he simply clung and squeezed it again and again, the repetition itself would be perceived as sexual, showing how the death drive's insistence is as such sexualizing.
“The very fact that I just repeatedly insisted on a gesture will be sexualized.”
In Tarkovsky's Stalker, the sacred experience occurs with the hero's head down in mud, not looking up. Žižek takes this as Tarkovsky's materialist aesthetic principle: the closer to rotten matter, the more spiritualized.
“In Stalker, how the guy has this sacred experience when he is lying down in mud, even with his head down.”
A willful child dies and is buried, but his little arm keeps emerging from the grave no matter how many times it is pressed back. The mother must beat it with a switch for it to rest. Žižek reads this as the purest image of the death drive's obscene insistence.
“His little arm suddenly came forth and reached up. And it didn't help when they put it back in and put fresh earth over it, for the little arm always came out again.”
After Stalin's death, a copy of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism was found with a note in Stalin's red pencil: weakness, idleness, and stupidity are the only vices; strength, activity, and cleverness make one good regardless of other vices. Žižek reads this as the perfect formulation of immoral ethics.
“Weakness, idleness, stupidity. These are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else, in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue.”
Works invoked 21
Capital book
Marx's Capital cited for the chapter on the passage from money to capital, formulated in Hegelian terms as substance becoming subject, the basis for Žižek's reading of capital as death drive.
They Live film
Described as 'one of the great Hollywood leftist films'; the Ideologiekritik sunglasses scene is Žižek's central device for illustrating ideology critique and charity's depoliticizing function.
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book; referenced for its treatment of commodities and the death drive (raised by an audience member) and for its first chapter's discussion of objet a in desire vs. drive.
Fight Club film
Used as a test of genuine leftism vs. liberalism; Ed Norton's autonomous fist is death drive at its purest, an organ rebelling against the subject's own will.
Star Wars film
Episode III fails miserably to explain how Anakin became Darth Vader; yet the concept of 'disturbance in the field of force' is useful as a figure for drive arising within Nirvana.
Don Giovanni opera
Mozart's opera used to illustrate immoral ethics at its purest: Don Giovanni's refusal to repent and his heroic fidelity to his chosen life even unto hell.
The Mask film
Jim Carrey's character wearing the mask becomes undead and cartoon-like, indestructible, plastic, always recomposing, illustrating the death drive.
Lenin's book mentioned only as the volume in which Stalin wrote his infamous immoral-ethics marginal note found after his death.
Mulholland Drive film
Lynch's film cited for the singer who collapses while the (playback) song continues, another figure of life-substance (Will) exceeding its embodied source.
Stalker film
Described as Tarkovsky's masterpiece; the hero's face-down-in-mud sacred experience illustrates Žižek's thesis on the inversion of materialism and spiritualism.
Leone's film provides the image of a phone ringing after the receiver is picked up, figure of Schopenhauerian Will (pure life-force exceeding its visual container).
The Red Shoes other
Andersen's fairy tale cited as a figure of the death drive, compulsive dancing beyond the subject's will.
Carmen opera
Bizet's opera cited as the feminine case of immoral ethics, Carmen faithful to her path unto death; also noted as an object of Nietzsche's admiration.
Humanism and Terror book
Merleau-Ponty's justification of Stalinist terror as a Pascalian wager on the future, described as 'probably the most intelligent legitimation' but ultimately a theological error relying on the big Other of last judgment.
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason cited for the distinction between negative and indefinite (infinite) judgment, which Žižek uses to define the ontological status of the undead / death drive.
Grimm's shortest fairy tale, read in full; the arm that keeps emerging from the grave is Žižek's central figure for Todestrieb as unstoppable insistence.
Nietzsche's title cited to mark the distinction between Moral (symmetry with others) and ethics (fidelity to one's own desire/principle).
The Spectre of Marx book
Derrida's book criticized for conflating spectrality as such with capitalist spectrality, thereby ontologizing capital's irreducibility, a move Žižek rejects.
Lacan's seminar on ethics; the source of the two core epigraphs and the framework for the entire talk.
Halloween film
Mentioned only to identify John Carpenter as the director, before introducing They Live as the more philosophically significant film.
Raised by an audience member as the Lacanian source for capitalist discourse and surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir); Žižek engages this but argues Lacan was still searching for the right formula there.
People invoked 34
John Carpenter positive
They Live is described as 'one of the great Hollywood leftist films', a modest sci-fi film that functions as a perfect allegory for ideology critique (Ideologiekritik sunglasses).
His book on Buddhism and psychoanalysis is cited for its comparison of Buddhist no-self with Lacan's mirror stage, a useful alignment Žižek engages before marking the limit of the Buddhist-psychoanalytic parallel.
Brothers Grimm positive
The Willful Child (the arm that keeps emerging from the grave) is Žižek's central fairy-tale figure for the death drive; also mentions Max und Moritz.
Referenced for the structure of the wager (le pari), which Merleau-Ponty uses to justify Stalinist terror theologically.
Jacques Derrida negative
Žižek criticizes Derrida's Spectres of Marx for falling into the trap of elevating capitalist spectrality into an irreducible ontological condition, an illegitimate ontological Kurzschluss.
Materialism and Empirio-criticism mentioned only as the book in which Stalin wrote his notorious immoral-ethics note.
Cited in the Q&A for the observation (attributed to 'at least Adorno') that modernity has two aspects: disciplinary administration and capitalist dynamics.
Once Upon a Time in America is cited for the scene of the phone ringing after the receiver is picked up, used as a figure of Schopenhauerian Will exceeding its visual container.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority for the talk; Žižek develops Lacan's ethical maxim, his distinction of drive from desire, and il n'y a pas de grand Autre as the core of a rigorous ethics.
Tenzin Gyatso negative
Žižek mocks the Dalai Lama's 'purpose of life is to be happy' as ignorant of Freud and exemplary of the pseudo-Orientalist hedonist ideology that makes him popular with figures like Richard Gere.
Mentioned as composer of the short orchestral piece used in the Balanchine ballet that figures the death drive.
Mulholland Drive's scene of the singer collapsing while the song continues is cited as another figure of life-substance (Will) exceeding its embodied source.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty negative
Cited for his Humanism and Terror, which Žižek calls the most intelligent legitimation of Stalinist terror, using a Pascalian wager structure (present horror redeemed by future communist outcome).
Cited as the negative example of Kantian ethics misused: claimed to be following orders as duty, which Žižek argues Kant's ethical autonomy explicitly prohibits.
George Balanchine positive
A Balanchine ballet set to Webern provides Žižek's key figure for the death drive: dancers continuing in silence after the music ends.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited approvingly for the thesis that although certain impossibilities remain, their status can change radically, illustrated by imaginary numbers being integrated into mathematics without being dissolved.
Named as part of the tradition (Buddhism–Plato–Spinoza) holding the ethical primacy of knowledge: one cannot truly know the good and be evil.
Cited for his theory of music as direct access to the Will/Ding an sich (noumenal life substance), used by Žižek to distinguish Will from the death drive; Webern/Balanchine example refutes Schopenhauer's conflation of the two.
Werner Heisenberg positive
Cited alongside Bohr for interpreting the uncertainty principle as pointing to ontological incompleteness of quantum reality itself, not merely epistemic limitation, the interpretation Žižek endorses.
Briefly referenced alongside Adorno and Lacan for the point that modernity has two aspects, central administration (surveiller et punir) and capitalist dynamics, which no theory has yet fully synthesized.
Cited as the celebrity type who likes Dalai Lama because the message is compatible with a pleasurable, meaningful life; a cultural symptom rather than a serious interlocutor.
Bill Gates negative
Cited as exemplar of depoliticization rhetoric: Gates says 'forget left-right struggles, people are starving, let's all work together', the humanitarian emergency that replaces political analysis.
Hans Christian Andersen positive
The Red Shoes is cited as a figure of the death drive, compulsive dancing beyond the subject's will.
Hannah Arendt negative
Žižek criticizes Arendt for accepting Eichmann's self-description as a Kantian following orders; Žižek argues Kant's ethics of autonomy precisely prohibits this maneuver.
Niels Bohr positive
Paired with Heisenberg in endorsing the ontological interpretation of quantum incompleteness against Einstein's hidden-variables view.
Andrei Tarkovsky positive
Described as the most aesthetically admirable yet ostensibly 'spiritualist' director, who is simultaneously the most radical materialist because sacred experience in his films occurs in mud and matter, illustrating the inversion of materialism/spiritualism.
Žižek uses Stalin's marginalia in Lenin's book as the perfect formulation of immoral ethics, then argues Stalinism is in fact secretly too moral because it relies on the big Other of historical last judgment.
Referenced for the tradition of ethical primacy of knowledge (knowing the good = being good); also invoked humorously as the model for Žižek's ideal 'dialogue', one person talks, the other says 'Yes, by Zeus'.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek invokes Marx's account of the passage from money to capital (substance to subject) as the framework for understanding capital's death-drive logic; also inverts Marx's Eleventh Thesis on interpretation vs. change.
Sigmund Freud positive
Žižek defends Freud's concept of Todestrieb against both Nirvana-principle and Eros/Thanatos readings, while criticizing Freud's own Eros-Thanatos dualism as 'Freud at his worst', a self-misrecognition of his own discovery.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek defends Hegel as a greater materialist than Marx, arguing Hegel prohibits the Stalinist position of claiming to act from the standpoint of historical necessity; also uses Hegel's passage from substance to subject to frame Marx on capital.
Immanuel Kant positive
Žižek defends Kant's categorical imperative as providing ethical autonomy and uses the indefinite/infinite judgment to define the ontological status of the death drive; also defends Kant against Arendt's reading of Eichmann.
Friedrich Nietzsche positive
Cited as philosopher of immoral ethics and admirer of Carmen; Žižek distinguishes Nietzsche's Moral from ethics and uses his resentment critique, but does not position Nietzsche as the answer to Lacanian ethics.
Cited twice: first for believing quantum incompleteness proved hidden variables (a view Žižek rejects in favor of Bohr/Heisenberg), then positively for the idea that matter is an effect of space curvature, used to explain objet a in drive.
What it argues
Lacanian ethics and the maxim 'do not compromise your desire'death drive (Todestrieb) as ontological ground distinct from Nirvana principlecritique of hedonist ideology and Western Buddhismthe undead as figure of drivequantum physics and the incompleteness of realitycapital as death-drive logicKantian autonomy and the impossibility of duty as excuse
Dialectical moves 12
“Far from being the opposite of the pleasure principle, the reality principle is an inherent prolongation of the pleasure principle.”
The standard opposition of Lust- and Realitätsprinzip dissolves: they are on the same side, which is why Lacanian desire has to exceed both.
“There is no excuse for not doing your duty — but equally, there is no excuse for doing your duty.”
Žižek inverts Kant's maxim: using duty as the reason to do something is precisely what ethical autonomy prohibits; you must own what you chose as duty.
“Stalinism is not too immoral — it is secretly all too moral, still relying on the figure of the big Other.”
What looks like ruthless amorality is revealed as a disguised moralism: the Party acts as historical last-judge, a theological structure.
“The true materialism today must be precisely a mathematical materialism without matter.”
Traditional materialism identified matter with bodily concreteness; the genuinely materialist position now is abstract-mathematical, accepting ontological incompleteness.
“It is today only the most radical vulgar materialists — cyberspace utopians — who speak of immortality, while spiritualists emphasize our finitude.”
The historical roles of materialism and spiritualism have traded places: transcendence belongs to the techno-materialists, immanence to the spiritualists.
“The question is not how to break out of Samsara into Nirvana — the real question is how we fell into Samsara from Nirvana in the first place.”
Žižek reverses Buddhism's entire problematic: not escape from illusion but the origin of illusion within the void is the philosophical problem, and Freud's drive answers it.
“Drive is not what persists when there is no representation — that would be Will. Drive is what persists even when the Will is suspended.”
Drives are ontologically more minimal than Schopenhauerian Will: they are the dancers continuing after the music (Will) has already stopped.
“Zero is not the lowest. The death drive is less than nothing — there is something which costs less energy than the void.”
Using the Higgs-field analogy, Žižek shows the Nirvana principle mistakes nothingness for the minimum; the drive occupies a more primordial sub-zero level.
“'He is not dead' means he is alive — but 'he is undead' produces a third monstrous domain: neither alive nor dead.”
Kant's indefinite judgment (affirming a non-predicate) captures the ontological status of drive as undead persistence beyond both life and death.
“Todestrieb — the death drive — is paradoxically Freud's psychoanalytic name for immortality.”
What is called the death drive is not a pull toward annihilation but an obscene insistence that exceeds both life and death, a spectral form of immortality.
“We tried only to change the world too much — it is time to interpret it again.”
Inverts Marx's Eleventh Thesis: against the false urgency of charitable doing, Žižek advocates shameless theoretical withdrawal.
“Hegel is a greater materialist than Marx.”
Hegel's dialectics, unlike Stalinist Marxism, prohibits the claim to occupy the point of view of historical necessity, making Hegel more truly materialist.
Claims 18
asserts
The dominant ideology today is not explicit political command but a vague hedonist injunction — 'be truly yourself, realize yourself' — which emerged from the ruling class's re-appropriation of '68.contemporary ideology / Western Buddhism
asserts
Lacanian ethics is not hedonism: the reality principle is merely the prolongation of the pleasure principle, and desire for Lacan functions like a Kantian duty — it disturbs homeostatic balance rather than maximizing pleasure.Lacanian ethics vs hedonism
asserts
Charity and ethical consumerism (organic food, Starbucks, Ethos water) are mechanisms of depoliticization: they let consumers participate symbolically without challenging the structural causes of injustice.charity / ethical consumption / depoliticization
asserts
Today one should be shamelessly against doing — it is time to interpret the world again rather than change it, inverting Marx's Eleventh Thesis.activism vs. critical analysis
asserts
Stalin's note in Lenin's book — strength, activity, and capability make someone good regardless of other vices — is immoral ethics at its purest, yet Stalinism secretly remains too moral by relying on the big Other of historical judgment.Stalinist ethics / immoral ethics
asserts
Kant's ethics implicitly demands not only 'you can because you must' but its inversion: 'there is no excuse for doing your duty' — citing duty as a cover for one's acts is precisely what ethical autonomy prohibits.Kantian ethical autonomy
asserts
Hegel is a greater materialist than Marx: Hegel prohibits the position of a historical agent who already knows the objective meaning of its acts, which is exactly what the Stalinist Party claimed.Hegel vs Marx / Stalinist teleology
asserts
The lesson of quantum physics — that reality itself is ontologically incomplete — is the genuine materialist challenge today, more radical than any spiritualist vision.materialism / quantum ontology
asserts
Buddhism's blind spot is the origin of Samsara: it cannot explain how false desire arose from Nirvana in the first place, and Freud's drive is the answer to precisely this question.Buddhism vs psychoanalysis / origin of desire
asserts
The Freudian death drive is not the same as the Nirvana principle: using the Higgs-field analogy, the drive is 'less than nothing' — it costs less energy to persist in something than to dwell in the void.Todestrieb vs Nirvana principle
rejects
The death drive is not another name for Schopenhauerian Will: Will is pure life-energy persisting beyond representation, whereas drive is what persists even after the will is suspended — like dancers continuing without music.identity of drive and Will
asserts
There is ultimately only one drive, which is the death drive — the Freudian Eros/Thanatos opposition is Freud at his worst, since sexuality itself is already radically destructive in its excess.Eros-Thanatos duality
rejects
Derrida's Spectres of Marx falls into the trap of identifying spectrality as such with capitalist spectrality and concluding that capital is irreducible — an illegitimate ontological short-circuit.Derrida on spectrality and capital
asserts
The movement of capital follows the logic of the death drive: Marx's account of money becoming capital is formulated in Hegelian terms of substance becoming subject, making the goal pure circular self-repetition.capital as death drive
rejects
Lacan was searching for the right formulation of capitalism's discourse and had limitations — the discourse-theory framework (capitalist discourse, surplus-jouissance) does not fully resolve the questions the drive-framework raises.Lacan's discourse theory as sufficient account of capitalism
rejects
Hannah Arendt is wrong to accept Eichmann's self-description as a Kantian following orders — Kant's ethics of autonomy precisely prohibits using duty as an excuse for one's acts.Arendt on Eichmann and Kantian ethics
asserts
Today it is the radical vulgar materialists (cyberspace utopians) who dream of immortality by escaping the body, while spiritualists emphasize finitude — the roles of materialism and spiritualism have inverted.inversion of materialism and spiritualism
asserts
Tarkovsky is the most obscurantist-spiritualist filmmaker and simultaneously the most radical materialist — his heroes' sacred experiences occur in mud and rotten matter, not in transcendent upward gazing.Tarkovsky / materialism and spiritualism
Quotes 15
“The purpose of life is to be happy. My God, my reaction is, hasn't this guy heard of Freud?”Slavoj Žižek · critique of Dalai Lama's hedonist ethics
“One should be precisely shamelessly against doing. Maybe we tried only to change the world too much, it's time to interpret it again.”Slavoj Žižek · inversion of Marx's Eleventh Thesis; against activist depoliticization
“There is no excuse for not accomplishing one's duty — but, implicitly, there is also no excuse for doing your duty.”Slavoj Žižek · Kantian autonomy: duty cannot be used as an alibi
“Weakness, idleness, stupidity. These are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else, in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue.”Slavoj Žižek · Stalin's note: immoral ethics at its purest
“If a man is: strong (spiritually), active, clever or capable, then he is good regardless of any other vices.”Slavoj Žižek · Stalinist immoral ethics — Stalin's marginalia
“God was simply a slightly lazy programmer. He went up to the quantum level, then he underestimated us. He thought: why should I bother with this velocity of atoms, humans are too stupid to reach further.”Slavoj Žižek · quantum incompleteness of reality / God as lazy programmer
“Zero is not the lowest. There is something which is even less than zero — that's the Higgs field. And I think this is what Lacan aims at when he emphasizes the difference between Freud's Todestrieb and the Nirvana principle.”Slavoj Žižek · death drive as less than nothing / Higgs field analogy
“Todestrieb is this evil insistence which goes on beyond life and death. What Freud calls Todestrieb is paradoxically his psychoanalytic name for immortality.”Slavoj Žižek · death drive = obscene immortality
“Not only should one analyze resistances but ultimately there is nothing but resistances to be analyzed. There is no true self waiting in the wings to be released.”Slavoj Žižek · no substantial self; Buddhism and psychoanalysis agree
“The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's ethical maxim — guilt = compromising desire
“It is cheaper, it costs the system less energy, it's cheaper as it were to persist in something than to dwell in nothing at the lowest level of tension.”Slavoj Žižek · death drive is less than nothing — energetic paradox of the drive
“Drive is a persistence which goes on even when the will disappears or is suspended.”Slavoj Žižek · drive distinguished from Schopenhauerian Will
“We have to be very precise not to elevate impossibilities which are specifically capitalist into some kind of external ontological condition.”Slavoj Žižek · against ontologizing capitalist spectrality
“There is only one drive which is death drive and which is as such sexualized.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of Eros-Thanatos dualism
“The very fact that I just repeatedly insisted on a gesture will be sexualized. So death drive is not opposed to sexuality but as such sexualizes things.”Slavoj Žižek · repetition/drive as inherently sexualizing
Transcript 14 turns
unknown
Ja, guten Tag, meine Damen und Herren, und herzlich willkommen im ICI Kulturlabor Berlin. Wie angekündigt wird das heute auf Englisch stattfinden, dann mache ich gleich auf Englisch weiter. A very warm welcome to the Institute for Cultural Inquiry. I'm really very feel very glad, very privileged to be able to welcome Slavoj Žižek here today. We just had the privilege of having a smaller colloquium upstairs and I would like to thank you very much for already the very intense discussion, also for really going directly from one event to the next, and I also understand that you will have to leave really on time because there's another event later on this evening. So, I was going to say Slavoj Žižek really needs no introduction. I think this one says that often, or one always hears that in presentations of speakers, but I think for him it’s really true, and also if I see how many of you are here today, we’ve never had this room this full, I mean, I am confirmed that really I don’t need to introduce you. I think it’s equally superfluous in a way to say why we are very happy that he is here, that his work and thought is very important in particular for the ICI Berlin in general and for our tension project in particular. And although this would assume that you know a little bit about the ICI, so let me just say two things about that. One is, as we already just also discussed above, is that one important element for us, for the basic idea of the idea of the ICI, is to bring about productive or see ways of productively confronting different cultures, different systems, different disciplines, different also cultures of knowledge. And I think that's one of the things one of the many things that Slavoj Žižek does also superbly in a most productive and prolific manner, with philosophy, psychoanalysis, religion, science, politics, and of course also art and culture, both high and popular. And more specifically, I think also what why we feel he is very important has very important things for us to say is his focus on gaps, on paradoxes, on bringing about provocative alignments and reversals. Also, a kind of suspicion against all too systematic and harmonizing approaches of finding common ground, suggesting for instance that bridging the gap between different fields may be the wrong task, the aim rather being to formulate the gap as such. And I'm thinking here in particular of a passage in the recent book, *The Parallax View*, where the context is, for instance, the debate between the humanities and cognitive science and the gaps involved are between nature and culture, or biology and lived experience. And in particular, I think also this book is and has already we've seen is particularly important also for our attention project, but I don't want to take any more actually of your precious time to go into that. So let me just thank you very much again for being here and, yes, we look forward to your to your talk presentation. There'll be a short session afterwards for discussion and then we will have to leave on time, but there will be a small, I mean really tiny especially seeing the number, a tiny reception upstairs. But I understand that you have to [unintelligible]. Thank you very much. Danke für Ihre Anwesenheit hier. Leider ist meine deutsche Sprache so-so, einige Probleme, und so muss ich leider, wirklich leider, auf Englisch fortsetzen. Okay, now we are back at the language of imperialism. So, I'm just afraid that this will be a misunderstanding in the sense that, you know, when I was invited here, I thought that I can afford that I can step out of this role which is often attributed to me and that I'm
Ja, guten Tag, meine Damen und Herren, und herzlich willkommen im ICI Kulturlabor Berlin. Wie angekündigt wird das heute auf Englisch stattfinden, dann mache ich gleich auf Englisch weiter. A very warm welcome to the Institute for Cultural Inquiry. I'm really very feel very glad, very privileged to be able to welcome Slavoj Žižek here today. We just had the privilege of having a smaller colloquium upstairs and I would like to thank you very much for already the very intense discussion, also for really going directly from one event to the next, and I also understand that you will have to leave really on time because there's another event later on this evening. So, I was going to say Slavoj Žižek really needs no introduction. I think this one says that often, or one always hears that in presentations of speakers, but I think for him it’s really true, and also if I see how many of you are here today, we’ve never had this room this full, I mean, I am confirmed that really I don’t need to introduce you. I think it’s equally superfluous in a way to say why we are very happy that he is here, that his work and thought is very important in particular for the ICI Berlin in general and for our tension project in particular. And although this would assume that you know a little bit about the ICI, so let me just say two things about that. One is, as we already just also discussed above, is that one important element for us, for the basic idea of the idea of the ICI, is to bring about productive or see ways of productively confronting different cultures, different systems, different disciplines, different also cultures of knowledge. And I think that's one of the things one of the many things that Slavoj Žižek does also superbly in a most productive and prolific manner, with philosophy, psychoanalysis, religion, science, politics, and of course also art and culture, both high and popular. And more specifically, I think also what why we feel he is very important has very important things for us to say is his focus on gaps, on paradoxes, on bringing about provocative alignments and reversals. Also, a kind of suspicion against all too systematic and harmonizing approaches of finding common ground, suggesting for instance that bridging the gap between different fields may be the wrong task, the aim rather being to formulate the gap as such. And I'm thinking here in particular of a passage in the recent book, *The Parallax View*, where the context is, for instance, the debate between the humanities and cognitive science and the gaps involved are between nature and culture, or biology and lived experience. And in particular, I think also this book is and has already we've seen is particularly important also for our attention project, but I don't want to take any more actually of your precious time to go into that. So let me just thank you very much again for being here and, yes, we look forward to your to your talk presentation. There'll be a short session afterwards for discussion and then we will have to leave on time, but there will be a small, I mean really tiny especially seeing the number, a tiny reception upstairs. But I understand that you have to [unintelligible]. Thank you very much. Danke für Ihre Anwesenheit hier. Leider ist meine deutsche Sprache so-so, einige Probleme, und so muss ich leider, wirklich leider, auf Englisch fortsetzen. Okay, now we are back at the language of imperialism. So, I'm just afraid that this will be a misunderstanding in the sense that, you know, when I was invited here, I thought that I can afford that I can step out of this role which is often attributed to me and that I'm
Slavoj Žižek
really starting to hate this, you know, "Oh, he will tell some dirty jokes, clown and so on," no? And I prepared a rather more purely philosophical talk. So I hope you will not be, my God, disappointed. I mean, it's really about philosophy. It’s still elementary, but I try to arrive at the notion of *Todestrieb*, death drive, through a detailed analysis of what Lacan, Jacques Lacan, meant by his famous ethical motto, which he defines as the motto of ethics of psychoanalysis, which is *ne pas céder sur son désir*, do not compromise your desire, do not give way with regard to your desire. And I want to arrive finally at what *Todestrieb* is about, because for me, what Freud called *Todestrieb* is kind of a not in itself an ethical agency, but a kind of, to put it in naive terms, a priori transcendental ground for all possible ethics and so on. So again, you got my warning. It's philosophy. First, I will quote this famous passage from Jacques Lacan's—it’s translated into German also of course—*Ethik der Psychoanalyse*. Quote: "It is because we know better than those who went before how to recognize the nature of desire, which is at the heart of our experience, that a reconsideration of ethics is possible, that a form of ethical judgment is possible, of a kind that gives this question the force of a last judgment: have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?" End of quote. This is Lacan's maxim of the ethics of psychoanalysis. Another quote: "The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire." End of quote. This maxim, simple and clear as it appears, becomes elusive the moment one tries to specify its meaning. How does it stand with regard to the panoply of today's ethical options? It seems to fit three of its main versions: liberal tolerant hedonism, immoral ethics, and what I ironically call Western Buddhism. You know, you can understand again, be faithful to your desire, as this general vague ethics which we have today, a kind of Dalai Lama meets Hollywood ethics, you know, this attitude of—we really live in strange times where we are no longer interpellated, addressed by ideology with the command "sacrifice your life, be a good whatever, democrat, communist," but a kind of vague hedonist injunction: be truly yourself, realize yourself, make something out of your life. And I think that, I’m so sad I don’t have more time to go into this, I think that this vaguely hedonist injunction, which incidentally is also the reason why I think somebody like Dalai Lama is so popular. You should read his books, at least the first page where I stop. He always makes this weird statement which is, I quote you one version: "The purpose of life is to be happy." My God, my reaction is, hasn’t this guy heard of Freud and so on? Like, this is why people like Richard Gere like Dalai Lama, no? Because the message is: do a little bit of Buddhist training and so on and you will have even more pleasurable life and so on and so on. So my thesis is that this vaguely hedonist pseudo-Orientalist whatever ethics is effectively the predominant form of ideology today and even it’s something which emerged out of our embracing of '68. '68 by '68 I mean the student movement and so on. I think that this was the greatest success of ruling ideology, how all the motives of '68, which was nonetheless, it’s totally forgotten today almost, the radical questioning of capitalist society, it was re-appropriated as some kind of liberating our desire, anti-bureaucratic creativity and so on. And as you probably know best than me, better than me, all this was then perfectly incorporated by this new, however we call it, postmodern capitalism which pretends to be, you know, no longer hierarchic, bureaucratic, but creative, interactive, autopoietic and so on whatever. I think that one way to see where we are today, how ideology functions, this ideology of happiness, and it’s a deep indication of where we are, that in the last years in the United States—do you know this?—that happiness studies are established as a academic category. We have happiness studies functioning, how people make happy and so on. In other words, it is legitimate to make happiness the goal of your life. Of course, the result is then we know which one, that percent of academics are taking Prozac in United States, you have more anxiety than ever and so on and so on. But what I want to say is that another indication, maybe the best one of this shift, would be—I always like these superficial phenomena which serves as indicators—how publicity functions today. I noticed how—okay, we have two traditional modes of publicity, but today we are approaching a third mode of publicity. The basic form of publicity is—and these three forms interestingly enough fit the Lacanian triad of real, symbolic, imaginary—where the publicity refers to your to the so-called, even if imagined, but nonetheless real qualities of the object. Let’s say you want to have a Land Rover, a car. This traditional *Reklamen* publicity would emphasize, you know, it doesn't take much it doesn't consume too much too much too much fuel, it can go up the steep mountain, whatever the real qualities are. Then we have the symbolic publicity which focuses on this keeping up with the Joneses competitive factor, like how you will appear. Basically, if you have this car, it you will thereby signal your social status and so on, this aspect. But then today, I think that there is a third mode of publicity which relates not to neither to real qualities of the object nor to the social status it guarantees to you, like if you have this car you will signal your superiority, whatever, but to your experience. How, in what way, this object will make your life meaningful and so on and so on. For example, the second type of publicity for Land Rover would have been: have this car and you will appear macho, you will appear superior, blah-blah. But the third postmodern, post-'68 form of publicity would have been like: do you feel oppressed in your daily life? Have this car and you will feel your life energy, your life will be meaningful, as if the point is the experience rendered by this product. And I think, here I'm a little bit more pessimistic than usual, I think that the same goes even for many progressive causes, so-called, which are typical today. For example, and now I will say something very brutal, why do some of us like to buy organic food? I claim you don't really believe, don't tell me that you really believe that those half-rotten apples who cost more than the genetically manipulated are really more healthy. I also don’t think that you signal some great social status with this. It’s simply, I think it’s just this pathetic sentimental identification: there are problems today in the world and by buying organic food, you know, I participate, I render my life meaningful. It’s not just the stupid consumption, it’s I do something, I care for nature and so on and so on. And this type of manipulation is at its worst, I really hate them, with—you have them unfortunately here already, I saw—Starbucks coffee. Their entire publicity, if you go in, you know, like: buy this coffee and you're helping some stupid Guatemala family, you know, like we buy coffee from poor Guatemalans so... Or they have now even in the United States, they sell water which they call it Ethos, Ethos like ethics. And they claim that drink this water and five percent, percent of the price you pay goes to some special foundation which brings waters to those in desert area, so like, you know, you not only consume an object and so on. The problem of course is that they earn even more because the water costs two dollars and a half. So they charge it fifty cents more and they give five cents and so on. But my point is you see the logic of how consumption is no longer just consumption, it's also a social, ethical experience and so on and so on. Which is why I think charity plays a crucial role today in making something good, us feel good and so on. In what sense? Let’s imagine a simple experiment along the lines of a film that I think should be rediscovered as one of the great Hollywood leftist films. Maybe some of you know it: John Carpenter—yes, the one who did *Halloween*—it's strangely he did a very weird film, I think in the early '90s, called *They Live*. It's a modest science-fiction film about an unemployed worker in Los Angeles who enters an abandoned church looking where to spend the night. He is also homeless and finds a box with strange sunglasses. And he puts the sunglasses on, walks along the street and notices something strange. These are literally *Ideologiekritik* sunglasses. If you put these sunglasses on, you can see like the real message. Like, he looks across the street, there is a big publicity board: Visit, visit Hawaii, have the holiday of your life, enjoy. He puts the glasses on and he sees: Be stupid, enjoy, don't think, just and so on, whatever. So, what—that's the question I'm asking you—if we were, when you see on TV or in the newspapers, you know, these disgustingly manipulative ads, usually it’s this figured child from Africa and then they tell you like: give the price of two-three cappuccinos, euros per month, and you will save a black kid's child or life or whatever. All nice, but what would we have seen if we were to put on this kind of glasses? I claim two messages. The first one is: do you have anxiety about that you lead a lead a relatively good life and people are starving? Fine, we are offering you an easy way out, no? Give euros a month and you can stop worrying, no? We are—the other thing is a deeply conservative, I claim, motive of depoliticization. In the sense of—in what sense? Like, you know, the old left liked the rhetorics of emergency state, in the sense of: we live here on our isolated ivory tower, but are we aware that people are starving out there? But today Bill Gates talks like that. Bill Gates, almost in all his interviews, says something like: let's—and that's the message—let's forget about these old stupid dogmatic struggles, left-right ideology, capitalism. People are starving in Africa, let's all come together, business, private, government, and let's do something and so on. And that's the message, I think: do it, that is to say, don't think, do it. It has precisely the message under this in the terms of this false emergency state of like pushing us towards activity instead of analyzing critically the situation. Which is why I think that today we should be precisely shamelessly against doing. In the sense that I'm almost tempted to say that one should turn around today the Marx's Thesis You know, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, we have also to change it." That maybe we tried only to change the world too much, it's time to interpret it again, like to understand where we stand and so on. We need—we should be absolutely shameless here. So, back to my main point, I didn't lose my thread. So, we have first liberal tolerant hedonism, all these ethics of self-realization and so on. We have a more Nietzschean immoral ethics and we have what I called Western Buddhism. What did Lacan want to say with his maxim? Let’s go through these versions. The first thing to state categorically is that Lacanian ethics is not an ethics of hedonism. Whatever "do not compromise your desire" means, it does not mean the unrestrained rule of what Freud called *Lustprinzip*, the functioning of the psychic apparatus that aims at achieving pleasure. For Lacan, hedonism is in fact the very model of postponing desire on behalf of realistic compromises. In order to attain the greatest amount of pleasure, I have to calculate, economize, I have to sacrifice short-term pleasures for the more intense long-term ones. There is no break between *Lustprinzip* and its counterpart *Realitätsprinzip*. *Realitätsprinzip*, which compels us to take into account the limitations of reality which obstruct our direct access to pleasures, is an inherent prolongation of *Lustprinzip*. And again, as already said, even so-called Western Buddhism is not immune to this trap. But for Lacan, ethical—ethics sorry—desire is an ethical category. It functions—it's not—desire does not mean follow your natural spontaneous inclinations and so on. It functions like the Kantian ethical duty, like a foreign traumatic intruder which from the outside disturbs the subject's homeostatic balance. It is for Lacan, it's desire itself which is *jenseits des Lustprinzips*. Desire means like you follow it even if it brings pain. So hedonism is to be rejected. That's not what Lacan means. Is then Lacanian ethics a version of the heroic immoral ethics which enjoins us to remain faithful to oneself, to persist on our chosen path beyond good and evil? Think about Don Giovanni in the last act of Mozart's opera, where the stone guest confronts Don Giovanni with a choice. He is near death, but if he repents for his sins, he can still be redeemed. If, however, he does not renounce his sinful life, he will burn in hell forever. Don Giovanni heroically refuses to repent, although he is well aware that he has nothing to gain except eternal suffering for his persistence. Why does he do it? Obviously not for any profit or promise of pleasure to come. The only explanation is his utmost fidelity to the dissolute life he has chosen. This is a clear case of immoral ethics. Don Giovanni's life was undoubtedly immoral. However, as his fidelity to himself demonstrates, he was immoral not for pleasure or profit, but out of principle, acting the way he did as part of a fundamental existential choice. Or, to take a feminine example from opera: Georges Bizet's Carmen. Carmen is of course immoral, ruining men's lives, destroying families and so on, but nonetheless truly ethical, faithful to her chosen path to the end, even if this means certain death. Nietzsche, a great admirer of Carmen, was the philosopher of immoral ethics. And we should always remember that the title of Nietzsche's masterpiece is *Genealogie der Moral*, not their ethic. The two are not the same. Morality is concerned with the symmetry of my relations to other humans. Its zero-level rule is: do not do to me what you do not want me to do to you. Incidentally, a good rule to follow for a masochist, no? Where it gets a little bit complicated. Ethics, on the contrary, deals with my consistency with myself, my fidelity to my own desire. Who formulated this immoral ethics in a perfect way? None other than our beloved Comrade Stalin. Namely, on the back of the edition of Lenin's *Materialism and Empirio-criticism*, a copy of this book was found in Stalin's bedroom after his death. It was published a couple of years ago, this note, in some Soviet some Russian journal. It’s pretty terrifying note. Stalin made the following note in red pencil. I quote: weakness, idleness, stupidity. These are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else, in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue. N.B. note, if a man is: strong (spiritually), point active, clever or capable, then he is good regardless of any other vices." That’s, I think, immoral ethics at its purest. This is a concise as ever formulation of immoral ethics. In contrast to it, a weakling who obeys moral rules and worries about his guilt stands for unethical morality, the target of course of Nietzsche's critique of resentment. There is, however, a limit to Stalinism, not that it is too immoral, but that it is secretly all too moral, still relying on what Lacan calls a figure of the big Other. That is to say, in what is probably the most intelligent legitimation of the Stalinist terror, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's *Humanism and Terror* from Stalinist terror is justified as a kind of *le pari* wager on the future, almost in the mode of the theology of Blaise Pascal, who enjoins us to make a bet on God. If the final result of today's horror will be bright communist future, then this outcome will retroactively redeem the terrible things a revolutionary has to do today. Along similar lines, even some Stalinists themselves, when in half-private usually, were forced to admit that many of the victims of the Stalinist purges were innocent and were accused and killed because the Party needed their blood to fortify its unity, they imagine a future moment of final victory at which all the necessary victims will be given their due and their innocence and their highest sacrifice for the cause will be recognized. This is what Lacan in his seminar on ethics of psychoanalysis refers to as the perspective of the last judgment, a perspective even more clearly discernible in one of the key terms of the Stalinist discourse, that of objective guilt or objective meaning of your acts. While you can be an honest individual with most sincere intentions, you are nonetheless objectively guilty if your acts serve reactionary forces. And it is of course the Communist Party which has the direct access to what your acts objectively mean. This is the secret theological dimension of Stalinism, not this teleology "there will be bright communist future," but this perspective of the last judgment. This idea that there is a historical subject, Communist Party, which already today knows what the true meaning of your acts is, which is as it were the direct instrument of the of historical necessity, which can as it were act from the perspective of act already today from the perspective of last judgment. And incidentally, I am tempted to defend Hegel here. I think the time maybe has come, I cannot develop it today of course, to claim that Hegel was a greater materialist than Marx. In what sense? People usually claim that Hegel’s history of philosophy is a kind of a totalitarian one, you know, everything is justified on behalf of the progress of reason and so on. But what Hegel prohibits is precisely this position, the position of someone who while acting in history already controls the meaning of his her their act. For Hegel an agent like the Stalinist Communist Party, which can say "what we are doing is only realization of a higher historical necessity, we are instrument of history" and so on, that’s prohibited, because for Hegel every act retroactively produces its meaning, is is done is done through failure and so on and so on. So again, I think that whatever Hegel is guilty of, he is not guilty of this. But back to Lacan, this is why Lacan's motto *il n'y a pas de grand Autre*, there is no big Other, the big Other doesn't exist, brings us to the very core of the ethical problematic. What Lacan excludes is precisely this perspective of the last judgment. The idea that somewhere, even if it will be as a truly virtual point of reference, even if we concede that we cannot ever occupy this place, that there must be a standard which allows us to take measure of our acts and produce their true meaning, their true ethical status. Even Jacques Derrida's notion of deconstruction as justice, I think, relies on a utopian hope which sustains the specter of infinite justice, forever postponed but nonetheless kept as the ultimate horizon of our activity. You know, this idea that even if it's de facto inaccessible, we must act as if there is a final point where retroactively there will be an objective judgment on the status of our acts. The harshness of the Lacanian ethics is that it demands us to relinquish this reference. And its further thesis is that not only does this abdication not deliver us to an ethical insecurity or relativism, but that renouncing the guarantee of some big Other is the very condition of a truly autonomous ethics. Recall that the dream about Irma's injection, which Freud used as the exemplary case to illustrate his procedure of analyzing dreams, is a dream about responsibility, Freud's own responsibility for the failure of his treatment of Irma. This fact alone indicates that responsibility is a crucial Freudian notion. But how are we to conceive it? How are we to avoid the common misperception that the basic ethical message of psychoanalysis is precisely the one of relieving me of my responsibility, of putting the blame on the Other? You know, as they usually put it: you feel guilty for your unconscious fantasies and then as if the psychoanalyst is telling you, "No, it’s not you, it’s your unconscious, the Other's discourse, don't feel guilty, you are not responsible for it." Lacan himself precisely emphasized that if anything, the lesson of psychoanalysis is that you are even more responsible than you think. You are not only responsible for what you know and consciously decided, you are even responsible as it were for your unconscious. And this brings me now to the first crucial ethical point, in what sense Lacan refers to Kant's philosophy as the crucial antecedent of the psychoanalytic ethics. According to the standard critique which you probably all know, the limitation of the Kantian universalist ethics of categorical imperative, this unconditional injunction to do your duty, resides in its formal indeterminacy. Moral law does not tell me what my duty is, it only tells me that I should accomplish my duty. And so it leaves the space open for the empty voluntarism. Whatever I decide to be my duty is my duty. However, far from being a limitation, this tautological emptiness, I claim, brings us to the core of the Kantian ethical autonomy. It is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation, to derive them from the moral law itself. Which means that the subject himself has to assume the responsibility of translating the abstract injunction "do your duty" into a series of concrete obligations. The full acceptance of this paradox compels us to reject any reference to duty as an excuse. You know, as we usually say: I know this is heavy and painful, but what can I do? This is my duty. Here, I think even Hannah Arendt is wrong when she nonetheless claims that when Adolf Eichmann referred to Kantian ethics, when he tried to justify his role in planning and executing the Holocaust, was acting—he claimed—but I only acted as a Kantian, I did my duty, and my duty was to obey Führer's orders and so on. But I think that Kant precisely prohibits this. You know, we—that is to say, the aim of Kant's emphasis on the subject's moral autonomy is precisely to prevent any such maneuver of putting the blame onto some figure of the big Other. What does this mean? The standard motto of ethical rigor is: there is no excuse for not accomplishing one's duty. Although Kant's well-known maxim *Du kannst, denn du sollst* (you can because you must) seems to offer a new version of this motto, he, I think, implicitly complements it with its much more uncanny inversion: there is no excuse for doing your duty. That is to say, the very reference to duty as the excuse to do your duty should be rejected as hypocritical. Recall the proverbial severe sadistic teacher who subjects his pupils to merciless discipline and torture and his excuse is: I myself find it hard to beat the poor kids, but what can I do? It’s my duty. This is what you are prohibited. You cannot—you cannot say "I have to do it, but I'm not in it." You—you get my point—you are not only responsible to do your duty, you are fully responsible also to choose what your duty is. You cannot cover beneath "Oh, sorry, it was..." That’s ethical autonomy. Not only you are free to do or not to do your duty, you are fully responsible, you have to stand behind what your duty is. You cannot say "Oh sorry, I cannot help it." You can help it. You are fully responsible. The consequences of this ethical, ontological and so on are, I think, tremendous. To cut the long story short and come to the end, the ultimate example of this is kind of indeterministic quantum physics universe. In what sense? Usually Kant is associated with Newtonian physics. People even claim like what Kant elaborated was ethics which should be at the level of modern physics, modern in his time, Newtonian science. I think if we go to the end, it's more. And to what aspect of quantum physics do I refer? To something which is really the most unsettling about it: the so-called principle of uncertainty and its ontological consequences. This principle, as we all know, prohibits us from attaining full knowledge of particles at the quantum level. It’s not possible to determine the velocity and the position of a particle. For Einstein, this principle proves that quantum physics does not provide a full description of reality. There must be some unknown features which escape the quantum physics conceptual apparatus. But Heisenberg, Bohr and others insisted that this incompleteness of our knowledge of quantum reality points towards a strange incompleteness of quantum reality itself. And this is the crucial point, I think, what really is so breathtakingly important and new in quantum physics. This idea that—how to put it?—reality itself is ontologically incomplete. What do I mean by this? Something very strange that I want to explain to you through an example from video games. You know, when you play a video game, how do you create when you simulate reality on the screen? How do you do it? You do not have to go to the end. You just have to reproduce features which make the image realistic for your or spectator's point of view. Say, when you play a video game, there is a house in the background. You do not have to construct, if you are the programmer, through program the house's entire interior since you know that the participant will not want to enter the house, or it’s not part of the game. Or, the construction digital of a virtual person can be limited to this person's exterior. No need to bother with inner organs, bones and so on and so on. It is like—it is like this that the universe is structured there. You remember you know how, for example, when you see in the background stars, they remain blurred, not clear. But it's not that if you come closer you will see them clearly, because there is no program for how stars really look for close, why? Because it's not part of the game that you can come so close. So what’s the idea here? I love this idea developed by some American philosophers. It is that the lesson of quantum physics is that it's exactly the same with our reality. And I love this obscene idea, which is: imagine God as a computer programmer. In the sense of: God programmed the reality that we experience of reality. And God was simply a slightly lazy programmer. He went up to the quantum level, then he underestimated us. He thought: why should I bother with this velocity of atoms, humans are too stupid to reach further than atomic level, so why should I program it to the end? He simply left it open. Unfortunately, we were a little bit too intelligent, we we as it were we went too far, no? And saw this incoherence. So you get the point that reality in itself is incomplete. Now you will tell me, but this is a theological perspective. What if—what if that this only holds if you have a creator who created the artificial universe, but reality in itself has to be complete in order simply to exist? You know, you can have incomplete virtual reality but for that very reason it is only virtual, created by some real-life programmer or whatever. I think that the big challenge for today's materialism is precisely to say: no, we can think reality itself as in itself incomplete, objectively. It's not only it’s a fiction which was not written to the end, in the same way as, for example, when a writer in a novel describes a person he doesn't enumerate all the all the physical details or whatever. Reality in itself can be incomplete in this way. I think, again, this is the true channel challenge, which gives us something very interesting, which gives us I think one of the clues for if you noticed it something very strange that is happening today, where what we usually identify with theology, sorry, with materialism, is more and more the domain of spiritualism and theology. In what sense? In the 19th century or earlier, the idea of "we are here part of this concrete bodily situation, contained in our finite world" was the materialist idea. And spiritualists dreamed about eternal life out there and so on. Today, did you notice the nice paradox that it is only the most radical, almost vulgar materialists like these cyberspace utopian computer programmers who speak about about immortality in the sense of fleeing or escaping the constraints of our finite bodily existence? You know, this idea of: if our soul, psyche, is like a virtual program, we can become immortal by simply registering as a program and downloading it onto another material existence and so on, so we can simply eternally float and reincorporate ourselves in different like we are software which can be repetitively re-copied onto different softwares. While it is all the spiritualists which like today to emphasize how no, we are finite, we are absolutely linked to this singular bodily existence, we cannot step out. Of course, then from this finitude which always leaves a gap, the space for some spiritual otherness is created. So it’s no wonder that, for example, the cinema director who is the most obscurantist if you want spiritualist—although I love him aesthetically—Andrei Tarkovsky is at the same time the most materialist materialist in this sense of, you know, if you know Tarkovsky's films how his heroes—is very nice aesthetic feature—they pray not in this Western way looking up. You know, like in *Stalker*, which I think is Tarkovsky's masterpiece, how the guy has this sacred experience when he is lying down in mud, even with his his with his head in down. So it’s for him the closer you are to earth, to matter in its very bad smell, rotten obscenity, the more you are spiritualized. And I think that the roles have changed here. I I think that the materialism to be reinvented today should be precisely a much more abstract abstract mathematical materialism without matter, if you want this. Now I come to the crucial point. I will try to risk a little bit of dialogue with what I know about—you can correct me my knowledge is limited—but nonetheless with Buddhism, this time not the ridiculous Western Buddhism, but what I know of with my limited knowledge of let’s say the real Buddhism. Namely, why Buddhism? Because I think that the only other thought which fully accepts such an incompleteness of reality, or inexistence of the big Other, is Buddhism. Is then—the solution to be found in Buddhist ethics? Is Lacan—Lacanian ethics a Buddhist ethics? There are some reasons to consider this option. Does Buddhism not lead us to enact a kind of what Lacan calls traversing the fantasy? To overcome the illusions on which our desires are based and to confront the void beneath each object of desire. Furthermore, what psychoanalysis shares with Buddhism is the emphasis that there is no self as a substantive agent of psychic life. No wonder Mark Epstein, in his book on Buddhism and psychoanalysis, refers positively to Lacan's essay on the mirror stage with its notion of the ego as an object, the result of the subject's identification with a fixed image of itself. The self is a fetishized illusion of a substantial core of subjectivity where effectively there is nothing. This is why for Buddhism the point is not to discover one's true self, but to accept that there is none, that the self as such is an illusion, an imposture. To put it in more psychoanalytic terms: not only should one analyze resistances but ultimately there is nothing but resistances to be analyzed. There is no true self waiting in the wings to be released. Self is a disruptive false and as such unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing. When we awaken to knowing, we realize that all that goes on in us is the flow of thoughts without a thinker. The impossibility of figuring out who or what we are is inherent, since there is nothing that we really are, just a void in the core of our being. Consequently, in the process of the Buddhist enlightenment, we do not quit this terrestrial world for another true reality. We just accept the unsubstantial fleeting illusory character of this reality. We undergo the process of going to pieces without falling apart. In the gnostic mode, for Buddhism, ethics is ultimately a question of knowledge and ignorance. Our craving, our desires, our attachment to terrestrial goods is conditioned by our ignorance, so that deliverance comes from proper knowing. What Christian love means is that on the contrary, there is a decision not grounded in true or false knowledge. Christianity, I think, does break with the tradition of the primacy of knowledge, ethical primacy of knowledge, which spans from Buddhism through Plato to Spinoza. You know, this idea that when you are evil, your knowledge is lacking, like you cannot know the good, really know the good, and be evil. The nice point about Christianity is that not only you can, but that that's almost the definition of evil: evil is the one who knows what is good, how the goodness works, better than good people. So, again, crucial for Buddhism is this reflexive shift from object to the thinker himself. First, we isolate the thing, when you confront something traumatic, the thing that bothers us, the cause of our suffering. Then you change not the object, but yourself, the way you relate to what appears as the cause of your suffering. A quote from that Mark Epstein book: "What was extinguished was only the false view of self. What had always been illusory was understood as such. Nothing was changed but the perspective of the observer." This shift involves great pain. It is not only a liberation, a step into the incestuous bliss of the infamous oceanic feeling, but also the violent experience of losing one's ground under one's feet, of being deprived of the most familiar stage of one's being. This is why the best starting point for the Buddhist enlightenment is to focus on the most elementary feeling of injured innocence, of suffering an injustice without a cause. "How could she do this to me? I don't deserve to be treated that way." The next step is then to make the shift to the ego itself, to the subject of these painful emotions, rendering clear its fleeting irrelevant status. The aggression against the object that causes suffering should be turned against the self itself. We do not repair damage, we gain the insight into the illusory nature of that which should be repaired. That’s in my simplistic version the Buddhist view. In what then consists the gap that separates psychoanalysis from Buddhism, at least Lacanian psychoanalysis? In order to answer this question, we should confront what I think is the basic enigma of Buddhism, its blind spot. And okay, maybe some of you is more intelligent, but I was talking with many Buddhists and all of them I'm asking them this same question, I didn't yet get a good answer. The simple question is the following one. It's how did the fall into so-called Samsara, the wheel of life, occur? That is to say, the question that we should raise is the exact opposite of the main Buddhist concern: how can we break out of the wheel of life, of this wheel of false passions and so on, and attain Nirvana? The question is exactly the opposite one for me. It's not: we are caught in this, you know, false reality, can we break out of it and attain the void? The question is: how did we fall into it in the first place? It's incidentally precisely Hegel's question. Because for Hegel—and here you have Hegel's genius—the problem is not this boring metaphysical problem, pseudo like: are we caught in our world of appearances or can we penetrate to true reality? The true problem is the opposite one. Of course, reality is nothing special, it’s just stupid reality and so on. The problem is: how does reality appear to itself? That is to say: how is it that in the middle of reality, appearance emerges? How is error possible? How is false appearance possible? So the nature and origin of the impetus by means of which desire, its deception, emerged out of the void is the big unknown in the heart of the Buddhist edifice. And when I asked Buddhist, the ultimate answer I simply got is: it’s a wrong question, Buddhism isn't interested in truth, it’s just an ethics which wants to enable you to step out of suffering, and that that's just abstract intellectual question. That's not Buddha's problem. Buddha's problem is how to get out of the shit in which we are. But again, what interests me is exactly this problem. That is to say, Nirvana as the only absolute reality which is not reality and so on and so on. But how is it possible that within this totally dispersed primordial void of Nirvana, a false appearance emerged? How is it possible that our that we got caught into what Buddhist calls Buddhists calls Samsara, this wheel of life, of passions which enslave you and so on and so on? This question points towards an act that, precisely in the quantum sense maybe, breaks the symmetry within Nirvana itself and thus makes appear something out of nothing. And Freud's answer for this is precisely drive, *Trieb*. Now I want to be here very precise. What Freud calls drive, *Trieb*, is not, as it may appear, the Buddhist wheel of life. You know, this Buddhist idea: we are caught in this false desire, always non-satisfied striving, so the idea is when you achieve Nirvana you are at complete peace. Of course, I am not vulgarizing here Buddhism. It’s not that you are in another spiritual reality. All radical Buddhists know the reality is exactly the same. Everything is the same. You are just no longer phenomenologically caught in this wheel of desire and so on. So I think that the point of Freud is not: "No, we cannot get out, we are forever caught into the wheel of craving which makes us non-satisfied and so on." Drive, on the contrary, is a kind of a—Freudian what Galileo allegedly said after he was forced to confirm that that earth doesn't move—*e pur si muove*. The Freudian ontological wager, *Wette*, or thesis, hypothesis, is that even when you go through fantasy, all the illusions and so on, you are not in Nirvana. Something still moves. *E pur si muove*. There is even at that level still a movement. How—here to make this clear, another surprising analogy with hard sciences can be of some help. The paradox of Freudian *Trieb*, drive, is, I think, perfectly rendered in the hypothesis of so-called Higgs field, widely discussed in contemporary particle physics. It is rendered if I understand it correctly Higgs field—I have some problems here, I'm not saying I do. What's the idea? The idea, if I got it correctly, is the following one. Left to their own devices in an environment to which they can pass their energy, all physical systems will eventually assume a state of lowest energy, you know, like if you need leave a system to itself, slowly it spends energy, it it achieves a sense of a minimum. So, to put it in another way, the more mass we take from a system, the more we lower its energy, till we reach the vacuum state at which the energy is zero. There are, however, phenomena which compel us to posit the hypothesis that there has to be something, some substance, that we cannot take away from a given system without raising the system's energy. And this something is called the Higgs field. Once this field appears in a vessel that has been pumped empty, and whose temperature has been lowered as much as possible, its temperature will be further lowered. The something which does appear is a something which contains less energy than nothing. A something that is characterized by an overall negative energy. You see that’s the paradox, that zero is not the lowest. It’s not you take—there is something which is even less than zero, that’s the Higgs field. And I think this is what Lacan aims at when he emphasizes the difference between Freud's *Todestrieb* and the so-called Nirvana principle, according to which every life system tends towards the lowest level of tension, ultimately towards death. Nothingness, the void, being deprived of all substance and the lowest level of energy, paradoxically no longer coincide. It’s cheaper, it costs the system less energy, it’s cheaper as it were to persist in something than to deal to dwell in nothing at the lowest level of tension, or in the void in the dissolution of all order. And it is this distance that sustains the death drive. Far from being the same as the Nirvana principle, the death drive is precisely that less than nothing. Something that how to put it costs energetically even costs even less than nothing. This also gives, I think, gives another nice answer: how we should answer the the standard philosophical critique of Freudian *Trieb*, which is that isn't Freudian *Trieb*, drive, basically just another version of the post-Hegelian *Wille*, will, first developed by late Schelling and Schopenhauer and then in Nietzsche? Is however the Freudian drive really another name for *Wille*, for the will? A reference to the history of music maybe of some help here. It was Schopenhauer who claimed that music brings us in contact with the *Ding an sich*, the noumenal. It renders directly the drive of the life substance that words can only signify. You know, Schopenhauer in his theory claims that words refer only to *Vorstellungen*, while in music you get directly the taste of the noumenal life substance beneath phenomena. For that reason, music seizes the subject in the real of his or her being, bypassing the detour of meaning. In music, we hear what we cannot see: the vibrating life force beneath the flow of *Vorstellungen*. But—what but? Let me begin with one scene from a film. Recall the nice scene from the beginning of Sergio Leone's *Once Upon a Time in America*, in which we see a phone ringing loudly and when a hand picks up the receiver, the ringing goes on. It's a very mysterious effect. Okay, it's later explained, but the mysterious effect remains. It is as if the musical life force of the sound is too strong to be contained by reality, it persists beyond its limitation. There is incidentally a similar nice scene in David Lynch's *Mulholland Drive*. You remember a singer sings Roy Orbison's "Crying," she collapses, the song goes on. Of course, later we learn it was a playback and so on, but there is for a moment, a brief moment, this confusion, you know, as if the source of voice disappears, the singing goes on. But this would be the excess of life. This is still Schopenhauerian domain. But what happens when this flux of life substance itself is suspended? I want to evoke another—here we have pure life when you hear the ringing without visual counterpart or singing without... here we have this pure life substance energy. But what happens when we have the opposite phenomenon? Like I saw years ago—it deeply impressed me—a ballet staged by George Balanchine based on a short orchestral piece by Anton Webern. They are all short, okay. So that after the music was over, some five minutes of music, the dancers continued to dance for some time in complete silence, as if they did not notice that music that provided the substance for their dance is already over. You know, it’s like the cat in cartoons, Tom and Jerry, who simply continues to walk even when there is no ground like... but it goes magically on. I think this is something, this would be the representation of drive. It’s not *Wille*. It’s not the sound which goes on when you even have no representation to accompany it would be pure *Wille*, pure life energy. But the pure drive as *Todestrieb* would have been precisely these dancers which go on dancing without music. But it still goes on, it is still moving. So I claim that even in this terms, drive is a persistence which goes on even when the will disappears or is suspended. I think that phenomenologically again, it's wrong to read Freud's *Todestrieb* as another expression of *Wille*. *Todestrieb* is precisely something which remains when you suspend the will. Which is why *Todestrieb* is not active, is much more strangely active-passive, how should I put it, ambiguous. It’s a kind of a passivity of *e pur si muove*, it still goes on. And which is why incidentally, again, the question that interests me in Buddhism is to put it in popular culture terms, is the question that unfortunately Star Wars failed to answer. It’s, you know, as all normal people, although they are not such great films, I wanted to see, I craved to see that the third part, which was the last one to be shot, where you finally learn how evil emerged. How did Anakin Skywalker become Darth Vader? And the film fails there, of course, miserably, miserably. But that’s—you know, but nonetheless there is one useful notion that you find in the film: this idea of a, as they put it, disturbance in the in the field of force, no? That is to say, the idea is to put it in Buddhist terms: we don't—and there are some mysterious I know passages in some of Tibetan Buddhist stuff which point in this direction—that how should I put it, it's not simply we have Nirvana and then Samsara, the field of false passions, appearances. Something can go terribly wrong already at the level of Nirvana itself, up there. There is something wrong up there, some pathological disturbance, which is not yet "we are caught in desire, in false craving," and that would be drive, I think. Drive is this the very Nirvana spiritual enlightenment getting wrong. And this is why I think that the basic re-doing, this is my dream, to shoot a new version of Star Wars, where precisely the bad guys would be rehabilitated. And even I am even tempted to put it in Marxist terms, like why should they be bad? I'm like a French Jacobin revolutionary and I would say the Emperor and Darth Vader are a kind of a little bit authoritarian, okay, but a kind of a kind of authoritarian democratic, egalitarian, centralized things. And who are these stupid Jedi? Some corrupted old feudals and so on and so on. It’s kind of a, you know, like French Revolution. It’s like Robespierre crushing Vendée and all all that shit there and so on, no? I would love to do this different version of it, no? So, okay, getting to my main point. I hope now you got—this is again the mystery, which is the deepest mystery, I claim, of Buddhism. And again, there are some speculations in Tibetan Buddhism very unclear. You know where you can find—I will stop immediately, but you know the longer I talk, the less debate afterwards. So I want to hypocritically play this game of "I would so much like to stay longer but unfortunately we don't have time," because you know, don't misunderstand me, I love dialogue, but I love late Plato's dialogues. You know how they look? One guy talks all the time, every minutes the other guy says something like: "Yes, by Zeus, it is so," "You are [unintelligible]." That’s the dialogue I want. Okay, sorry. Let me go on more seriously. What I didn't have time to do, okay, just to hint where I wanted to go on. Where do we find this minimum, minimal almost I'm tempted to say pre-ontological level of *e pur si muove*, it continues to move? What is its ontological status? Again, back to Kant, it is what Kant called indefinite judgment. You probably know that in *Kritik der reinen Vernunft*, Kant opposes negative and indefinite judgment. Let's say we have—okay, to go directly to the example I'm aiming at. Let's take the negative, the positive judgment: he is dead. Let's first do the negative judgment. This is for Kant the judgment which negates the predicate, which is: he isn't dead. No problem, it means he is alive, no? But what if we do what Kant calls infinite or indefinite judgment and we don't negate the predicate, we affirm a non-predicate? We don't say "he isn't dead," we say "he is undead." My God, if you know Stephen King and so on, you know that something totally new emerges. "He isn't dead" is not the same as "he is undead." "He isn't dead" is "he is alive." "He is undead" is the monstrosity of the living dead, neither the one nor the other. And I claim that this precisely, this monstrosity which is precisely the monstrosity—they were like living dead. You remember in the scene that I evoke from Balanchine, the the bodies which go on dancing even if when the music stops and so on and so on. So this is ontologically, if you want, the the domain of drive. This spectral undeadness, in the obscene horror story's term. So if you want to find a figure of *Todestrieb*, maybe like its its its the undead, vampires and so on, this obscene immortality. That’s the message of Freudian *Todestrieb*. That it’s not only the noble sublime immortality, that’s a kind of obscene other immortality. That is to say—that would be my final paradox—that what Freud calls *Todestrieb* is paradoxically his psychoanalytic name for immortality. *Todestrieb* is this evil insistence which goes on beyond life and death. And now to really conclude, believe me or not, just two examples just to make it clear to you or there are many other examples from from cinema, from stories and so on. Now let me read you, I'm sorry that in English, an entire fairy tale. Don't be afraid, it’s just six-seven lines. Maybe you know it. It’s the shortest of Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm's fairy tales. I forgot, my God, I have it only in English. It’s called in English "The Willful Child." You know, it’s just a couple of lines. I will read it to you. Again, don't be afraid, it's short. "Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and did not do what his mother wanted. For this reason, God was displeased with him and caused him to become ill, and no doctor could help him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. He was lowered into a grave and covered with earth, but his little arm suddenly came forth and reached up. And it didn't help when they put it back in and put fresh earth over it, for the little arm always came out again. So the mother herself had to go to the grave and beat the little arm with a switch, and blah-blah-blah, but..." You know, this weird insistence. It’s like—don't you have this wonderful German story of the two Max und Moritz, the two—isn't it that when they die, they are, I think, in some mill for grain? But then the indication is that when they are turned just into dust, the dust still has the form of their grinning faces, you know? They are so evil that the evil exists. Or, you know, this is *Todestrieb*, this insistence. Or, do you know, for example, Andersen, "Red Shoes"? You know, this girl who goes on dancing, cannot help against herself, dance goes on, the dance goes on. Or, of course, of course, it's crucial that here we have the hand as the agent in this Grimm's fairy tale. For example, did you see, I love it, I think this is the true test, are you just a liberal or a true leftist? If you like the film with with Brad Pitt, Ed Norton, *Fight Club*. If you think this is a potentially totalitarian dangerous film, it's—you don't get it. I think the most painful scene of that film, you remember it, when Ed Norton confronts his boss and kind of his fist hand, like in Grimm fairy tale, gets autonomous and starts to he starts to beat himself. This is death drive at its purest, this autonomous organ starting starting to strike back and so on and so on. So, okay, I will stop now, but we can go on, because I think that if we read death drive in this way, as this zero-level almost I'm tempted to say metaphysical dimension... You know where you also find death drive at its purest? Just the last example. It’s a vulgar commercial film, but it’s not as stupid as it may appear, it’s very interesting. Did you see with Jim Carrey, *The Mask*? This idea of—he is an ordinary guy who dreams about being a hero but he's nobody, then he finds a mysterious mask, and when he puts the mask on, he becomes undead. You know, like a character from cartoons, totally plastic, he can he can split himself into two, always decomposed, because I think that precisely in cartoons, *Zeichentrickfilme*, you find death drive and it pure. Death drive is this, you know how it goes: Tom and Jerry, they can be cut into pieces, they always magically reappear, they go on again and again. And so I think this is the properly philosophical dimension of death drive, because I stop here when the real work should begin, which is to demonstrate how what we find in death drive is has to be given the full dignity of a new version of what in German idealism it was called this radical self-relating negativity. I did finish. Thank you very much. Stop, stop, because this reminds me of my beloved. I read somewhere that when Stalin was old, some 40-50—that's important, they were little—generals came to give him some medal, and they were all, you know, just and they applauded. And then, you know, like there were not many and they nobody dared to be the first to stop the applause. And it was so painful, it went on for half an hour. And then one of them dropped down and so on and Stalin just cynically observed it, you know, ah. And then finally he said: "Okay, stop" and so on and so on. That's my dream. It will not happen. Sorry. Now we can have minutes to pretend that we are in a democracy, no? Yeah, that's life. Thank you very much. First and then yes, I open for questions. But, to put it in the terms of your research project here, *Spannung*, tension, death drive would precisely be this radical *Spannung* which is more elementary than void than peace itself, no? I think precisely this that there is a pre-ontological level of *Spannung*. That’s the thesis, that drive has a much more radical status than it may appear. [unintelligible] Sie können Fragen auf Deutsch stellen, wenn das leichter ist. "Exactly, in English." Then you—you I don't have the excuse of claiming "Oh sorry, I didn't understand you," okay. "Thank you, thank you for your lecture. I have a question for you. In *The Parallax View*, you relate this the movement of value and commodities with the *Todestrieb*. And that is with with it looks like you relate the commodities and the movement of commodities with the living death. So it seems to me that the market, the very movement of the market, is related with it with this spectrality. So my question is, what to do with this spectrality that is also found in the market? Is there something to do against it? We have to accept it? We have to accept that market is a type of undead thing? Or is it still possible to do a critique of this spectrality and to find, for example, the worker or exploitation? That’s my question." Oh no, that’s a wonderful question because first, yes, I do something very precise. And I think it works nicely. I claim that if you look at a capitalist as an individual, he has desires. But you know how Marx always emphasized that there is a certain objective logic in the movement of the capital, which cannot be reduced to what capitalists want or whatever. You can be, for example, as a capitalist, a good guy, you can do want this, but there is and I claim that in a very precise way that the logic there is that of a *Trieb*. You know how Marx defines in what is for me a crucial chapter in *Capital*, I think it's the seventh or later, the passage from money to capital, which is formulated in precise Hegelian terms of the passage from substance to subject. Money is simply the embodied substance of value, with capital money becomes subject. It's no longer just the medium of exchange, abstract universality, it becomes subject which divides itself and so on. And then when Marx said how with this simple shift the process becomes precisely undead, because the the goal of circulation is just the repeated circulation itself, it’s a certain undeadness at work here. Now we don't have time to go into philosophical debate which would be extremely interesting: to what extent is this what is not possible for Hegel to get? Because capital is at the same time something monstrous in Hegelian terms. It is not just mechanical, how do you call it, *schlechte Unendlichkeit*, bad infinity. It is some self-relating subjectivity, but nonetheless endless in the sense of just endlessly repeating. It's as if you get, how should I put it, *Vernunft, Selbstvermittlung* itself functioning like this *schlechter Verstand*, or what? It's something very paradoxical. So, but the second point, I agree very much with the critical insinuation, in a good sense, of your question, which is I think this what you indicated is a danger which unfortunately I think Derrida in his—you can correct me—*Spectres of Marx* falls into. Because you know he goes into this spectrality blah-blah and then his idea is: but Marx naively thought that spectrality is just for a certain historical... but since spectrality is irreducible, isn't then capital also irreducible? Like, you know, we can fight it like Hydra but it will forever return and so on and so on. I think that I think that the answer is a very simple one. I don't think one should make this typical ontological *Kurzschluss* and identify spectrality as such with this concrete form of spectrality and so on and so on. I think that if there is a mistake in a certain vulgar ontological type of dialectical materialism, Marxism, is precisely that this image of communism as, you know, totally self-transparent reality, reality onto itself and so on and so on. I think that in this sense, no, I totally oppose this postmodern idea that the very project of stepping out of capitalist spectrality is the greatest metaphysical illusion, we cannot, we are always parts of it and so on and so on. No, how should I put it, the status of spectrality can change and so on. As I developed already before, when we were up there in that more restrained seminar, I am thinking more in this terms. For example, Alain Badiou says something in a very nice way that although a certain impossibility remains, but its status can change radically so that... For example, Badiou's nice simple example: take irrational numbers, the square of minus Of course they are impossible to positivize. But in more traditional mathematics, even Marx here made one of his big stupid mistakes, where in his mathematical manuscripts he just dismisses them "this is total stupidity, meaningless" and so on, no? But what happened then in modern mathematics throughout the 19th century is that they integrated this impossibility. The idea is: yes, it’s impossible, but we use it as a symbol and it works. You can calculating with irrational numbers, sorry, not irrational,
really starting to hate this, you know, "Oh, he will tell some dirty jokes, clown and so on," no? And I prepared a rather more purely philosophical talk. So I hope you will not be, my God, disappointed. I mean, it's really about philosophy. It’s still elementary, but I try to arrive at the notion of *Todestrieb*, death drive, through a detailed analysis of what Lacan, Jacques Lacan, meant by his famous ethical motto, which he defines as the motto of ethics of psychoanalysis, which is *ne pas céder sur son désir*, do not compromise your desire, do not give way with regard to your desire. And I want to arrive finally at what *Todestrieb* is about, because for me, what Freud called *Todestrieb* is kind of a not in itself an ethical agency, but a kind of, to put it in naive terms, a priori transcendental ground for all possible ethics and so on. So again, you got my warning. It's philosophy. First, I will quote this famous passage from Jacques Lacan's—it’s translated into German also of course—*Ethik der Psychoanalyse*. Quote: "It is because we know better than those who went before how to recognize the nature of desire, which is at the heart of our experience, that a reconsideration of ethics is possible, that a form of ethical judgment is possible, of a kind that gives this question the force of a last judgment: have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?" End of quote. This is Lacan's maxim of the ethics of psychoanalysis. Another quote: "The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire." End of quote. This maxim, simple and clear as it appears, becomes elusive the moment one tries to specify its meaning. How does it stand with regard to the panoply of today's ethical options? It seems to fit three of its main versions: liberal tolerant hedonism, immoral ethics, and what I ironically call Western Buddhism. You know, you can understand again, be faithful to your desire, as this general vague ethics which we have today, a kind of Dalai Lama meets Hollywood ethics, you know, this attitude of—we really live in strange times where we are no longer interpellated, addressed by ideology with the command "sacrifice your life, be a good whatever, democrat, communist," but a kind of vague hedonist injunction: be truly yourself, realize yourself, make something out of your life. And I think that, I’m so sad I don’t have more time to go into this, I think that this vaguely hedonist injunction, which incidentally is also the reason why I think somebody like Dalai Lama is so popular. You should read his books, at least the first page where I stop. He always makes this weird statement which is, I quote you one version: "The purpose of life is to be happy." My God, my reaction is, hasn’t this guy heard of Freud and so on? Like, this is why people like Richard Gere like Dalai Lama, no? Because the message is: do a little bit of Buddhist training and so on and you will have even more pleasurable life and so on and so on. So my thesis is that this vaguely hedonist pseudo-Orientalist whatever ethics is effectively the predominant form of ideology today and even it’s something which emerged out of our embracing of '68. '68 by '68 I mean the student movement and so on. I think that this was the greatest success of ruling ideology, how all the motives of '68, which was nonetheless, it’s totally forgotten today almost, the radical questioning of capitalist society, it was re-appropriated as some kind of liberating our desire, anti-bureaucratic creativity and so on. And as you probably know best than me, better than me, all this was then perfectly incorporated by this new, however we call it, postmodern capitalism which pretends to be, you know, no longer hierarchic, bureaucratic, but creative, interactive, autopoietic and so on whatever. I think that one way to see where we are today, how ideology functions, this ideology of happiness, and it’s a deep indication of where we are, that in the last years in the United States—do you know this?—that happiness studies are established as a academic category. We have happiness studies functioning, how people make happy and so on. In other words, it is legitimate to make happiness the goal of your life. Of course, the result is then we know which one, that percent of academics are taking Prozac in United States, you have more anxiety than ever and so on and so on. But what I want to say is that another indication, maybe the best one of this shift, would be—I always like these superficial phenomena which serves as indicators—how publicity functions today. I noticed how—okay, we have two traditional modes of publicity, but today we are approaching a third mode of publicity. The basic form of publicity is—and these three forms interestingly enough fit the Lacanian triad of real, symbolic, imaginary—where the publicity refers to your to the so-called, even if imagined, but nonetheless real qualities of the object. Let’s say you want to have a Land Rover, a car. This traditional *Reklamen* publicity would emphasize, you know, it doesn't take much it doesn't consume too much too much too much fuel, it can go up the steep mountain, whatever the real qualities are. Then we have the symbolic publicity which focuses on this keeping up with the Joneses competitive factor, like how you will appear. Basically, if you have this car, it you will thereby signal your social status and so on, this aspect. But then today, I think that there is a third mode of publicity which relates not to neither to real qualities of the object nor to the social status it guarantees to you, like if you have this car you will signal your superiority, whatever, but to your experience. How, in what way, this object will make your life meaningful and so on and so on. For example, the second type of publicity for Land Rover would have been: have this car and you will appear macho, you will appear superior, blah-blah. But the third postmodern, post-'68 form of publicity would have been like: do you feel oppressed in your daily life? Have this car and you will feel your life energy, your life will be meaningful, as if the point is the experience rendered by this product. And I think, here I'm a little bit more pessimistic than usual, I think that the same goes even for many progressive causes, so-called, which are typical today. For example, and now I will say something very brutal, why do some of us like to buy organic food? I claim you don't really believe, don't tell me that you really believe that those half-rotten apples who cost more than the genetically manipulated are really more healthy. I also don’t think that you signal some great social status with this. It’s simply, I think it’s just this pathetic sentimental identification: there are problems today in the world and by buying organic food, you know, I participate, I render my life meaningful. It’s not just the stupid consumption, it’s I do something, I care for nature and so on and so on. And this type of manipulation is at its worst, I really hate them, with—you have them unfortunately here already, I saw—Starbucks coffee. Their entire publicity, if you go in, you know, like: buy this coffee and you're helping some stupid Guatemala family, you know, like we buy coffee from poor Guatemalans so... Or they have now even in the United States, they sell water which they call it Ethos, Ethos like ethics. And they claim that drink this water and five percent, percent of the price you pay goes to some special foundation which brings waters to those in desert area, so like, you know, you not only consume an object and so on. The problem of course is that they earn even more because the water costs two dollars and a half. So they charge it fifty cents more and they give five cents and so on. But my point is you see the logic of how consumption is no longer just consumption, it's also a social, ethical experience and so on and so on. Which is why I think charity plays a crucial role today in making something good, us feel good and so on. In what sense? Let’s imagine a simple experiment along the lines of a film that I think should be rediscovered as one of the great Hollywood leftist films. Maybe some of you know it: John Carpenter—yes, the one who did *Halloween*—it's strangely he did a very weird film, I think in the early '90s, called *They Live*. It's a modest science-fiction film about an unemployed worker in Los Angeles who enters an abandoned church looking where to spend the night. He is also homeless and finds a box with strange sunglasses. And he puts the sunglasses on, walks along the street and notices something strange. These are literally *Ideologiekritik* sunglasses. If you put these sunglasses on, you can see like the real message. Like, he looks across the street, there is a big publicity board: Visit, visit Hawaii, have the holiday of your life, enjoy. He puts the glasses on and he sees: Be stupid, enjoy, don't think, just and so on, whatever. So, what—that's the question I'm asking you—if we were, when you see on TV or in the newspapers, you know, these disgustingly manipulative ads, usually it’s this figured child from Africa and then they tell you like: give the price of two-three cappuccinos, euros per month, and you will save a black kid's child or life or whatever. All nice, but what would we have seen if we were to put on this kind of glasses? I claim two messages. The first one is: do you have anxiety about that you lead a lead a relatively good life and people are starving? Fine, we are offering you an easy way out, no? Give euros a month and you can stop worrying, no? We are—the other thing is a deeply conservative, I claim, motive of depoliticization. In the sense of—in what sense? Like, you know, the old left liked the rhetorics of emergency state, in the sense of: we live here on our isolated ivory tower, but are we aware that people are starving out there? But today Bill Gates talks like that. Bill Gates, almost in all his interviews, says something like: let's—and that's the message—let's forget about these old stupid dogmatic struggles, left-right ideology, capitalism. People are starving in Africa, let's all come together, business, private, government, and let's do something and so on. And that's the message, I think: do it, that is to say, don't think, do it. It has precisely the message under this in the terms of this false emergency state of like pushing us towards activity instead of analyzing critically the situation. Which is why I think that today we should be precisely shamelessly against doing. In the sense that I'm almost tempted to say that one should turn around today the Marx's Thesis You know, "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, we have also to change it." That maybe we tried only to change the world too much, it's time to interpret it again, like to understand where we stand and so on. We need—we should be absolutely shameless here. So, back to my main point, I didn't lose my thread. So, we have first liberal tolerant hedonism, all these ethics of self-realization and so on. We have a more Nietzschean immoral ethics and we have what I called Western Buddhism. What did Lacan want to say with his maxim? Let’s go through these versions. The first thing to state categorically is that Lacanian ethics is not an ethics of hedonism. Whatever "do not compromise your desire" means, it does not mean the unrestrained rule of what Freud called *Lustprinzip*, the functioning of the psychic apparatus that aims at achieving pleasure. For Lacan, hedonism is in fact the very model of postponing desire on behalf of realistic compromises. In order to attain the greatest amount of pleasure, I have to calculate, economize, I have to sacrifice short-term pleasures for the more intense long-term ones. There is no break between *Lustprinzip* and its counterpart *Realitätsprinzip*. *Realitätsprinzip*, which compels us to take into account the limitations of reality which obstruct our direct access to pleasures, is an inherent prolongation of *Lustprinzip*. And again, as already said, even so-called Western Buddhism is not immune to this trap. But for Lacan, ethical—ethics sorry—desire is an ethical category. It functions—it's not—desire does not mean follow your natural spontaneous inclinations and so on. It functions like the Kantian ethical duty, like a foreign traumatic intruder which from the outside disturbs the subject's homeostatic balance. It is for Lacan, it's desire itself which is *jenseits des Lustprinzips*. Desire means like you follow it even if it brings pain. So hedonism is to be rejected. That's not what Lacan means. Is then Lacanian ethics a version of the heroic immoral ethics which enjoins us to remain faithful to oneself, to persist on our chosen path beyond good and evil? Think about Don Giovanni in the last act of Mozart's opera, where the stone guest confronts Don Giovanni with a choice. He is near death, but if he repents for his sins, he can still be redeemed. If, however, he does not renounce his sinful life, he will burn in hell forever. Don Giovanni heroically refuses to repent, although he is well aware that he has nothing to gain except eternal suffering for his persistence. Why does he do it? Obviously not for any profit or promise of pleasure to come. The only explanation is his utmost fidelity to the dissolute life he has chosen. This is a clear case of immoral ethics. Don Giovanni's life was undoubtedly immoral. However, as his fidelity to himself demonstrates, he was immoral not for pleasure or profit, but out of principle, acting the way he did as part of a fundamental existential choice. Or, to take a feminine example from opera: Georges Bizet's Carmen. Carmen is of course immoral, ruining men's lives, destroying families and so on, but nonetheless truly ethical, faithful to her chosen path to the end, even if this means certain death. Nietzsche, a great admirer of Carmen, was the philosopher of immoral ethics. And we should always remember that the title of Nietzsche's masterpiece is *Genealogie der Moral*, not their ethic. The two are not the same. Morality is concerned with the symmetry of my relations to other humans. Its zero-level rule is: do not do to me what you do not want me to do to you. Incidentally, a good rule to follow for a masochist, no? Where it gets a little bit complicated. Ethics, on the contrary, deals with my consistency with myself, my fidelity to my own desire. Who formulated this immoral ethics in a perfect way? None other than our beloved Comrade Stalin. Namely, on the back of the edition of Lenin's *Materialism and Empirio-criticism*, a copy of this book was found in Stalin's bedroom after his death. It was published a couple of years ago, this note, in some Soviet some Russian journal. It’s pretty terrifying note. Stalin made the following note in red pencil. I quote: weakness, idleness, stupidity. These are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else, in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue. N.B. note, if a man is: strong (spiritually), point active, clever or capable, then he is good regardless of any other vices." That’s, I think, immoral ethics at its purest. This is a concise as ever formulation of immoral ethics. In contrast to it, a weakling who obeys moral rules and worries about his guilt stands for unethical morality, the target of course of Nietzsche's critique of resentment. There is, however, a limit to Stalinism, not that it is too immoral, but that it is secretly all too moral, still relying on what Lacan calls a figure of the big Other. That is to say, in what is probably the most intelligent legitimation of the Stalinist terror, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's *Humanism and Terror* from Stalinist terror is justified as a kind of *le pari* wager on the future, almost in the mode of the theology of Blaise Pascal, who enjoins us to make a bet on God. If the final result of today's horror will be bright communist future, then this outcome will retroactively redeem the terrible things a revolutionary has to do today. Along similar lines, even some Stalinists themselves, when in half-private usually, were forced to admit that many of the victims of the Stalinist purges were innocent and were accused and killed because the Party needed their blood to fortify its unity, they imagine a future moment of final victory at which all the necessary victims will be given their due and their innocence and their highest sacrifice for the cause will be recognized. This is what Lacan in his seminar on ethics of psychoanalysis refers to as the perspective of the last judgment, a perspective even more clearly discernible in one of the key terms of the Stalinist discourse, that of objective guilt or objective meaning of your acts. While you can be an honest individual with most sincere intentions, you are nonetheless objectively guilty if your acts serve reactionary forces. And it is of course the Communist Party which has the direct access to what your acts objectively mean. This is the secret theological dimension of Stalinism, not this teleology "there will be bright communist future," but this perspective of the last judgment. This idea that there is a historical subject, Communist Party, which already today knows what the true meaning of your acts is, which is as it were the direct instrument of the of historical necessity, which can as it were act from the perspective of act already today from the perspective of last judgment. And incidentally, I am tempted to defend Hegel here. I think the time maybe has come, I cannot develop it today of course, to claim that Hegel was a greater materialist than Marx. In what sense? People usually claim that Hegel’s history of philosophy is a kind of a totalitarian one, you know, everything is justified on behalf of the progress of reason and so on. But what Hegel prohibits is precisely this position, the position of someone who while acting in history already controls the meaning of his her their act. For Hegel an agent like the Stalinist Communist Party, which can say "what we are doing is only realization of a higher historical necessity, we are instrument of history" and so on, that’s prohibited, because for Hegel every act retroactively produces its meaning, is is done is done through failure and so on and so on. So again, I think that whatever Hegel is guilty of, he is not guilty of this. But back to Lacan, this is why Lacan's motto *il n'y a pas de grand Autre*, there is no big Other, the big Other doesn't exist, brings us to the very core of the ethical problematic. What Lacan excludes is precisely this perspective of the last judgment. The idea that somewhere, even if it will be as a truly virtual point of reference, even if we concede that we cannot ever occupy this place, that there must be a standard which allows us to take measure of our acts and produce their true meaning, their true ethical status. Even Jacques Derrida's notion of deconstruction as justice, I think, relies on a utopian hope which sustains the specter of infinite justice, forever postponed but nonetheless kept as the ultimate horizon of our activity. You know, this idea that even if it's de facto inaccessible, we must act as if there is a final point where retroactively there will be an objective judgment on the status of our acts. The harshness of the Lacanian ethics is that it demands us to relinquish this reference. And its further thesis is that not only does this abdication not deliver us to an ethical insecurity or relativism, but that renouncing the guarantee of some big Other is the very condition of a truly autonomous ethics. Recall that the dream about Irma's injection, which Freud used as the exemplary case to illustrate his procedure of analyzing dreams, is a dream about responsibility, Freud's own responsibility for the failure of his treatment of Irma. This fact alone indicates that responsibility is a crucial Freudian notion. But how are we to conceive it? How are we to avoid the common misperception that the basic ethical message of psychoanalysis is precisely the one of relieving me of my responsibility, of putting the blame on the Other? You know, as they usually put it: you feel guilty for your unconscious fantasies and then as if the psychoanalyst is telling you, "No, it’s not you, it’s your unconscious, the Other's discourse, don't feel guilty, you are not responsible for it." Lacan himself precisely emphasized that if anything, the lesson of psychoanalysis is that you are even more responsible than you think. You are not only responsible for what you know and consciously decided, you are even responsible as it were for your unconscious. And this brings me now to the first crucial ethical point, in what sense Lacan refers to Kant's philosophy as the crucial antecedent of the psychoanalytic ethics. According to the standard critique which you probably all know, the limitation of the Kantian universalist ethics of categorical imperative, this unconditional injunction to do your duty, resides in its formal indeterminacy. Moral law does not tell me what my duty is, it only tells me that I should accomplish my duty. And so it leaves the space open for the empty voluntarism. Whatever I decide to be my duty is my duty. However, far from being a limitation, this tautological emptiness, I claim, brings us to the core of the Kantian ethical autonomy. It is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation, to derive them from the moral law itself. Which means that the subject himself has to assume the responsibility of translating the abstract injunction "do your duty" into a series of concrete obligations. The full acceptance of this paradox compels us to reject any reference to duty as an excuse. You know, as we usually say: I know this is heavy and painful, but what can I do? This is my duty. Here, I think even Hannah Arendt is wrong when she nonetheless claims that when Adolf Eichmann referred to Kantian ethics, when he tried to justify his role in planning and executing the Holocaust, was acting—he claimed—but I only acted as a Kantian, I did my duty, and my duty was to obey Führer's orders and so on. But I think that Kant precisely prohibits this. You know, we—that is to say, the aim of Kant's emphasis on the subject's moral autonomy is precisely to prevent any such maneuver of putting the blame onto some figure of the big Other. What does this mean? The standard motto of ethical rigor is: there is no excuse for not accomplishing one's duty. Although Kant's well-known maxim *Du kannst, denn du sollst* (you can because you must) seems to offer a new version of this motto, he, I think, implicitly complements it with its much more uncanny inversion: there is no excuse for doing your duty. That is to say, the very reference to duty as the excuse to do your duty should be rejected as hypocritical. Recall the proverbial severe sadistic teacher who subjects his pupils to merciless discipline and torture and his excuse is: I myself find it hard to beat the poor kids, but what can I do? It’s my duty. This is what you are prohibited. You cannot—you cannot say "I have to do it, but I'm not in it." You—you get my point—you are not only responsible to do your duty, you are fully responsible also to choose what your duty is. You cannot cover beneath "Oh, sorry, it was..." That’s ethical autonomy. Not only you are free to do or not to do your duty, you are fully responsible, you have to stand behind what your duty is. You cannot say "Oh sorry, I cannot help it." You can help it. You are fully responsible. The consequences of this ethical, ontological and so on are, I think, tremendous. To cut the long story short and come to the end, the ultimate example of this is kind of indeterministic quantum physics universe. In what sense? Usually Kant is associated with Newtonian physics. People even claim like what Kant elaborated was ethics which should be at the level of modern physics, modern in his time, Newtonian science. I think if we go to the end, it's more. And to what aspect of quantum physics do I refer? To something which is really the most unsettling about it: the so-called principle of uncertainty and its ontological consequences. This principle, as we all know, prohibits us from attaining full knowledge of particles at the quantum level. It’s not possible to determine the velocity and the position of a particle. For Einstein, this principle proves that quantum physics does not provide a full description of reality. There must be some unknown features which escape the quantum physics conceptual apparatus. But Heisenberg, Bohr and others insisted that this incompleteness of our knowledge of quantum reality points towards a strange incompleteness of quantum reality itself. And this is the crucial point, I think, what really is so breathtakingly important and new in quantum physics. This idea that—how to put it?—reality itself is ontologically incomplete. What do I mean by this? Something very strange that I want to explain to you through an example from video games. You know, when you play a video game, how do you create when you simulate reality on the screen? How do you do it? You do not have to go to the end. You just have to reproduce features which make the image realistic for your or spectator's point of view. Say, when you play a video game, there is a house in the background. You do not have to construct, if you are the programmer, through program the house's entire interior since you know that the participant will not want to enter the house, or it’s not part of the game. Or, the construction digital of a virtual person can be limited to this person's exterior. No need to bother with inner organs, bones and so on and so on. It is like—it is like this that the universe is structured there. You remember you know how, for example, when you see in the background stars, they remain blurred, not clear. But it's not that if you come closer you will see them clearly, because there is no program for how stars really look for close, why? Because it's not part of the game that you can come so close. So what’s the idea here? I love this idea developed by some American philosophers. It is that the lesson of quantum physics is that it's exactly the same with our reality. And I love this obscene idea, which is: imagine God as a computer programmer. In the sense of: God programmed the reality that we experience of reality. And God was simply a slightly lazy programmer. He went up to the quantum level, then he underestimated us. He thought: why should I bother with this velocity of atoms, humans are too stupid to reach further than atomic level, so why should I program it to the end? He simply left it open. Unfortunately, we were a little bit too intelligent, we we as it were we went too far, no? And saw this incoherence. So you get the point that reality in itself is incomplete. Now you will tell me, but this is a theological perspective. What if—what if that this only holds if you have a creator who created the artificial universe, but reality in itself has to be complete in order simply to exist? You know, you can have incomplete virtual reality but for that very reason it is only virtual, created by some real-life programmer or whatever. I think that the big challenge for today's materialism is precisely to say: no, we can think reality itself as in itself incomplete, objectively. It's not only it’s a fiction which was not written to the end, in the same way as, for example, when a writer in a novel describes a person he doesn't enumerate all the all the physical details or whatever. Reality in itself can be incomplete in this way. I think, again, this is the true channel challenge, which gives us something very interesting, which gives us I think one of the clues for if you noticed it something very strange that is happening today, where what we usually identify with theology, sorry, with materialism, is more and more the domain of spiritualism and theology. In what sense? In the 19th century or earlier, the idea of "we are here part of this concrete bodily situation, contained in our finite world" was the materialist idea. And spiritualists dreamed about eternal life out there and so on. Today, did you notice the nice paradox that it is only the most radical, almost vulgar materialists like these cyberspace utopian computer programmers who speak about about immortality in the sense of fleeing or escaping the constraints of our finite bodily existence? You know, this idea of: if our soul, psyche, is like a virtual program, we can become immortal by simply registering as a program and downloading it onto another material existence and so on, so we can simply eternally float and reincorporate ourselves in different like we are software which can be repetitively re-copied onto different softwares. While it is all the spiritualists which like today to emphasize how no, we are finite, we are absolutely linked to this singular bodily existence, we cannot step out. Of course, then from this finitude which always leaves a gap, the space for some spiritual otherness is created. So it’s no wonder that, for example, the cinema director who is the most obscurantist if you want spiritualist—although I love him aesthetically—Andrei Tarkovsky is at the same time the most materialist materialist in this sense of, you know, if you know Tarkovsky's films how his heroes—is very nice aesthetic feature—they pray not in this Western way looking up. You know, like in *Stalker*, which I think is Tarkovsky's masterpiece, how the guy has this sacred experience when he is lying down in mud, even with his his with his head in down. So it’s for him the closer you are to earth, to matter in its very bad smell, rotten obscenity, the more you are spiritualized. And I think that the roles have changed here. I I think that the materialism to be reinvented today should be precisely a much more abstract abstract mathematical materialism without matter, if you want this. Now I come to the crucial point. I will try to risk a little bit of dialogue with what I know about—you can correct me my knowledge is limited—but nonetheless with Buddhism, this time not the ridiculous Western Buddhism, but what I know of with my limited knowledge of let’s say the real Buddhism. Namely, why Buddhism? Because I think that the only other thought which fully accepts such an incompleteness of reality, or inexistence of the big Other, is Buddhism. Is then—the solution to be found in Buddhist ethics? Is Lacan—Lacanian ethics a Buddhist ethics? There are some reasons to consider this option. Does Buddhism not lead us to enact a kind of what Lacan calls traversing the fantasy? To overcome the illusions on which our desires are based and to confront the void beneath each object of desire. Furthermore, what psychoanalysis shares with Buddhism is the emphasis that there is no self as a substantive agent of psychic life. No wonder Mark Epstein, in his book on Buddhism and psychoanalysis, refers positively to Lacan's essay on the mirror stage with its notion of the ego as an object, the result of the subject's identification with a fixed image of itself. The self is a fetishized illusion of a substantial core of subjectivity where effectively there is nothing. This is why for Buddhism the point is not to discover one's true self, but to accept that there is none, that the self as such is an illusion, an imposture. To put it in more psychoanalytic terms: not only should one analyze resistances but ultimately there is nothing but resistances to be analyzed. There is no true self waiting in the wings to be released. Self is a disruptive false and as such unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing. When we awaken to knowing, we realize that all that goes on in us is the flow of thoughts without a thinker. The impossibility of figuring out who or what we are is inherent, since there is nothing that we really are, just a void in the core of our being. Consequently, in the process of the Buddhist enlightenment, we do not quit this terrestrial world for another true reality. We just accept the unsubstantial fleeting illusory character of this reality. We undergo the process of going to pieces without falling apart. In the gnostic mode, for Buddhism, ethics is ultimately a question of knowledge and ignorance. Our craving, our desires, our attachment to terrestrial goods is conditioned by our ignorance, so that deliverance comes from proper knowing. What Christian love means is that on the contrary, there is a decision not grounded in true or false knowledge. Christianity, I think, does break with the tradition of the primacy of knowledge, ethical primacy of knowledge, which spans from Buddhism through Plato to Spinoza. You know, this idea that when you are evil, your knowledge is lacking, like you cannot know the good, really know the good, and be evil. The nice point about Christianity is that not only you can, but that that's almost the definition of evil: evil is the one who knows what is good, how the goodness works, better than good people. So, again, crucial for Buddhism is this reflexive shift from object to the thinker himself. First, we isolate the thing, when you confront something traumatic, the thing that bothers us, the cause of our suffering. Then you change not the object, but yourself, the way you relate to what appears as the cause of your suffering. A quote from that Mark Epstein book: "What was extinguished was only the false view of self. What had always been illusory was understood as such. Nothing was changed but the perspective of the observer." This shift involves great pain. It is not only a liberation, a step into the incestuous bliss of the infamous oceanic feeling, but also the violent experience of losing one's ground under one's feet, of being deprived of the most familiar stage of one's being. This is why the best starting point for the Buddhist enlightenment is to focus on the most elementary feeling of injured innocence, of suffering an injustice without a cause. "How could she do this to me? I don't deserve to be treated that way." The next step is then to make the shift to the ego itself, to the subject of these painful emotions, rendering clear its fleeting irrelevant status. The aggression against the object that causes suffering should be turned against the self itself. We do not repair damage, we gain the insight into the illusory nature of that which should be repaired. That’s in my simplistic version the Buddhist view. In what then consists the gap that separates psychoanalysis from Buddhism, at least Lacanian psychoanalysis? In order to answer this question, we should confront what I think is the basic enigma of Buddhism, its blind spot. And okay, maybe some of you is more intelligent, but I was talking with many Buddhists and all of them I'm asking them this same question, I didn't yet get a good answer. The simple question is the following one. It's how did the fall into so-called Samsara, the wheel of life, occur? That is to say, the question that we should raise is the exact opposite of the main Buddhist concern: how can we break out of the wheel of life, of this wheel of false passions and so on, and attain Nirvana? The question is exactly the opposite one for me. It's not: we are caught in this, you know, false reality, can we break out of it and attain the void? The question is: how did we fall into it in the first place? It's incidentally precisely Hegel's question. Because for Hegel—and here you have Hegel's genius—the problem is not this boring metaphysical problem, pseudo like: are we caught in our world of appearances or can we penetrate to true reality? The true problem is the opposite one. Of course, reality is nothing special, it’s just stupid reality and so on. The problem is: how does reality appear to itself? That is to say: how is it that in the middle of reality, appearance emerges? How is error possible? How is false appearance possible? So the nature and origin of the impetus by means of which desire, its deception, emerged out of the void is the big unknown in the heart of the Buddhist edifice. And when I asked Buddhist, the ultimate answer I simply got is: it’s a wrong question, Buddhism isn't interested in truth, it’s just an ethics which wants to enable you to step out of suffering, and that that's just abstract intellectual question. That's not Buddha's problem. Buddha's problem is how to get out of the shit in which we are. But again, what interests me is exactly this problem. That is to say, Nirvana as the only absolute reality which is not reality and so on and so on. But how is it possible that within this totally dispersed primordial void of Nirvana, a false appearance emerged? How is it possible that our that we got caught into what Buddhist calls Buddhists calls Samsara, this wheel of life, of passions which enslave you and so on and so on? This question points towards an act that, precisely in the quantum sense maybe, breaks the symmetry within Nirvana itself and thus makes appear something out of nothing. And Freud's answer for this is precisely drive, *Trieb*. Now I want to be here very precise. What Freud calls drive, *Trieb*, is not, as it may appear, the Buddhist wheel of life. You know, this Buddhist idea: we are caught in this false desire, always non-satisfied striving, so the idea is when you achieve Nirvana you are at complete peace. Of course, I am not vulgarizing here Buddhism. It’s not that you are in another spiritual reality. All radical Buddhists know the reality is exactly the same. Everything is the same. You are just no longer phenomenologically caught in this wheel of desire and so on. So I think that the point of Freud is not: "No, we cannot get out, we are forever caught into the wheel of craving which makes us non-satisfied and so on." Drive, on the contrary, is a kind of a—Freudian what Galileo allegedly said after he was forced to confirm that that earth doesn't move—*e pur si muove*. The Freudian ontological wager, *Wette*, or thesis, hypothesis, is that even when you go through fantasy, all the illusions and so on, you are not in Nirvana. Something still moves. *E pur si muove*. There is even at that level still a movement. How—here to make this clear, another surprising analogy with hard sciences can be of some help. The paradox of Freudian *Trieb*, drive, is, I think, perfectly rendered in the hypothesis of so-called Higgs field, widely discussed in contemporary particle physics. It is rendered if I understand it correctly Higgs field—I have some problems here, I'm not saying I do. What's the idea? The idea, if I got it correctly, is the following one. Left to their own devices in an environment to which they can pass their energy, all physical systems will eventually assume a state of lowest energy, you know, like if you need leave a system to itself, slowly it spends energy, it it achieves a sense of a minimum. So, to put it in another way, the more mass we take from a system, the more we lower its energy, till we reach the vacuum state at which the energy is zero. There are, however, phenomena which compel us to posit the hypothesis that there has to be something, some substance, that we cannot take away from a given system without raising the system's energy. And this something is called the Higgs field. Once this field appears in a vessel that has been pumped empty, and whose temperature has been lowered as much as possible, its temperature will be further lowered. The something which does appear is a something which contains less energy than nothing. A something that is characterized by an overall negative energy. You see that’s the paradox, that zero is not the lowest. It’s not you take—there is something which is even less than zero, that’s the Higgs field. And I think this is what Lacan aims at when he emphasizes the difference between Freud's *Todestrieb* and the so-called Nirvana principle, according to which every life system tends towards the lowest level of tension, ultimately towards death. Nothingness, the void, being deprived of all substance and the lowest level of energy, paradoxically no longer coincide. It’s cheaper, it costs the system less energy, it’s cheaper as it were to persist in something than to deal to dwell in nothing at the lowest level of tension, or in the void in the dissolution of all order. And it is this distance that sustains the death drive. Far from being the same as the Nirvana principle, the death drive is precisely that less than nothing. Something that how to put it costs energetically even costs even less than nothing. This also gives, I think, gives another nice answer: how we should answer the the standard philosophical critique of Freudian *Trieb*, which is that isn't Freudian *Trieb*, drive, basically just another version of the post-Hegelian *Wille*, will, first developed by late Schelling and Schopenhauer and then in Nietzsche? Is however the Freudian drive really another name for *Wille*, for the will? A reference to the history of music maybe of some help here. It was Schopenhauer who claimed that music brings us in contact with the *Ding an sich*, the noumenal. It renders directly the drive of the life substance that words can only signify. You know, Schopenhauer in his theory claims that words refer only to *Vorstellungen*, while in music you get directly the taste of the noumenal life substance beneath phenomena. For that reason, music seizes the subject in the real of his or her being, bypassing the detour of meaning. In music, we hear what we cannot see: the vibrating life force beneath the flow of *Vorstellungen*. But—what but? Let me begin with one scene from a film. Recall the nice scene from the beginning of Sergio Leone's *Once Upon a Time in America*, in which we see a phone ringing loudly and when a hand picks up the receiver, the ringing goes on. It's a very mysterious effect. Okay, it's later explained, but the mysterious effect remains. It is as if the musical life force of the sound is too strong to be contained by reality, it persists beyond its limitation. There is incidentally a similar nice scene in David Lynch's *Mulholland Drive*. You remember a singer sings Roy Orbison's "Crying," she collapses, the song goes on. Of course, later we learn it was a playback and so on, but there is for a moment, a brief moment, this confusion, you know, as if the source of voice disappears, the singing goes on. But this would be the excess of life. This is still Schopenhauerian domain. But what happens when this flux of life substance itself is suspended? I want to evoke another—here we have pure life when you hear the ringing without visual counterpart or singing without... here we have this pure life substance energy. But what happens when we have the opposite phenomenon? Like I saw years ago—it deeply impressed me—a ballet staged by George Balanchine based on a short orchestral piece by Anton Webern. They are all short, okay. So that after the music was over, some five minutes of music, the dancers continued to dance for some time in complete silence, as if they did not notice that music that provided the substance for their dance is already over. You know, it’s like the cat in cartoons, Tom and Jerry, who simply continues to walk even when there is no ground like... but it goes magically on. I think this is something, this would be the representation of drive. It’s not *Wille*. It’s not the sound which goes on when you even have no representation to accompany it would be pure *Wille*, pure life energy. But the pure drive as *Todestrieb* would have been precisely these dancers which go on dancing without music. But it still goes on, it is still moving. So I claim that even in this terms, drive is a persistence which goes on even when the will disappears or is suspended. I think that phenomenologically again, it's wrong to read Freud's *Todestrieb* as another expression of *Wille*. *Todestrieb* is precisely something which remains when you suspend the will. Which is why *Todestrieb* is not active, is much more strangely active-passive, how should I put it, ambiguous. It’s a kind of a passivity of *e pur si muove*, it still goes on. And which is why incidentally, again, the question that interests me in Buddhism is to put it in popular culture terms, is the question that unfortunately Star Wars failed to answer. It’s, you know, as all normal people, although they are not such great films, I wanted to see, I craved to see that the third part, which was the last one to be shot, where you finally learn how evil emerged. How did Anakin Skywalker become Darth Vader? And the film fails there, of course, miserably, miserably. But that’s—you know, but nonetheless there is one useful notion that you find in the film: this idea of a, as they put it, disturbance in the in the field of force, no? That is to say, the idea is to put it in Buddhist terms: we don't—and there are some mysterious I know passages in some of Tibetan Buddhist stuff which point in this direction—that how should I put it, it's not simply we have Nirvana and then Samsara, the field of false passions, appearances. Something can go terribly wrong already at the level of Nirvana itself, up there. There is something wrong up there, some pathological disturbance, which is not yet "we are caught in desire, in false craving," and that would be drive, I think. Drive is this the very Nirvana spiritual enlightenment getting wrong. And this is why I think that the basic re-doing, this is my dream, to shoot a new version of Star Wars, where precisely the bad guys would be rehabilitated. And even I am even tempted to put it in Marxist terms, like why should they be bad? I'm like a French Jacobin revolutionary and I would say the Emperor and Darth Vader are a kind of a little bit authoritarian, okay, but a kind of a kind of authoritarian democratic, egalitarian, centralized things. And who are these stupid Jedi? Some corrupted old feudals and so on and so on. It’s kind of a, you know, like French Revolution. It’s like Robespierre crushing Vendée and all all that shit there and so on, no? I would love to do this different version of it, no? So, okay, getting to my main point. I hope now you got—this is again the mystery, which is the deepest mystery, I claim, of Buddhism. And again, there are some speculations in Tibetan Buddhism very unclear. You know where you can find—I will stop immediately, but you know the longer I talk, the less debate afterwards. So I want to hypocritically play this game of "I would so much like to stay longer but unfortunately we don't have time," because you know, don't misunderstand me, I love dialogue, but I love late Plato's dialogues. You know how they look? One guy talks all the time, every minutes the other guy says something like: "Yes, by Zeus, it is so," "You are [unintelligible]." That’s the dialogue I want. Okay, sorry. Let me go on more seriously. What I didn't have time to do, okay, just to hint where I wanted to go on. Where do we find this minimum, minimal almost I'm tempted to say pre-ontological level of *e pur si muove*, it continues to move? What is its ontological status? Again, back to Kant, it is what Kant called indefinite judgment. You probably know that in *Kritik der reinen Vernunft*, Kant opposes negative and indefinite judgment. Let's say we have—okay, to go directly to the example I'm aiming at. Let's take the negative, the positive judgment: he is dead. Let's first do the negative judgment. This is for Kant the judgment which negates the predicate, which is: he isn't dead. No problem, it means he is alive, no? But what if we do what Kant calls infinite or indefinite judgment and we don't negate the predicate, we affirm a non-predicate? We don't say "he isn't dead," we say "he is undead." My God, if you know Stephen King and so on, you know that something totally new emerges. "He isn't dead" is not the same as "he is undead." "He isn't dead" is "he is alive." "He is undead" is the monstrosity of the living dead, neither the one nor the other. And I claim that this precisely, this monstrosity which is precisely the monstrosity—they were like living dead. You remember in the scene that I evoke from Balanchine, the the bodies which go on dancing even if when the music stops and so on and so on. So this is ontologically, if you want, the the domain of drive. This spectral undeadness, in the obscene horror story's term. So if you want to find a figure of *Todestrieb*, maybe like its its its the undead, vampires and so on, this obscene immortality. That’s the message of Freudian *Todestrieb*. That it’s not only the noble sublime immortality, that’s a kind of obscene other immortality. That is to say—that would be my final paradox—that what Freud calls *Todestrieb* is paradoxically his psychoanalytic name for immortality. *Todestrieb* is this evil insistence which goes on beyond life and death. And now to really conclude, believe me or not, just two examples just to make it clear to you or there are many other examples from from cinema, from stories and so on. Now let me read you, I'm sorry that in English, an entire fairy tale. Don't be afraid, it’s just six-seven lines. Maybe you know it. It’s the shortest of Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm's fairy tales. I forgot, my God, I have it only in English. It’s called in English "The Willful Child." You know, it’s just a couple of lines. I will read it to you. Again, don't be afraid, it's short. "Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and did not do what his mother wanted. For this reason, God was displeased with him and caused him to become ill, and no doctor could help him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. He was lowered into a grave and covered with earth, but his little arm suddenly came forth and reached up. And it didn't help when they put it back in and put fresh earth over it, for the little arm always came out again. So the mother herself had to go to the grave and beat the little arm with a switch, and blah-blah-blah, but..." You know, this weird insistence. It’s like—don't you have this wonderful German story of the two Max und Moritz, the two—isn't it that when they die, they are, I think, in some mill for grain? But then the indication is that when they are turned just into dust, the dust still has the form of their grinning faces, you know? They are so evil that the evil exists. Or, you know, this is *Todestrieb*, this insistence. Or, do you know, for example, Andersen, "Red Shoes"? You know, this girl who goes on dancing, cannot help against herself, dance goes on, the dance goes on. Or, of course, of course, it's crucial that here we have the hand as the agent in this Grimm's fairy tale. For example, did you see, I love it, I think this is the true test, are you just a liberal or a true leftist? If you like the film with with Brad Pitt, Ed Norton, *Fight Club*. If you think this is a potentially totalitarian dangerous film, it's—you don't get it. I think the most painful scene of that film, you remember it, when Ed Norton confronts his boss and kind of his fist hand, like in Grimm fairy tale, gets autonomous and starts to he starts to beat himself. This is death drive at its purest, this autonomous organ starting starting to strike back and so on and so on. So, okay, I will stop now, but we can go on, because I think that if we read death drive in this way, as this zero-level almost I'm tempted to say metaphysical dimension... You know where you also find death drive at its purest? Just the last example. It’s a vulgar commercial film, but it’s not as stupid as it may appear, it’s very interesting. Did you see with Jim Carrey, *The Mask*? This idea of—he is an ordinary guy who dreams about being a hero but he's nobody, then he finds a mysterious mask, and when he puts the mask on, he becomes undead. You know, like a character from cartoons, totally plastic, he can he can split himself into two, always decomposed, because I think that precisely in cartoons, *Zeichentrickfilme*, you find death drive and it pure. Death drive is this, you know how it goes: Tom and Jerry, they can be cut into pieces, they always magically reappear, they go on again and again. And so I think this is the properly philosophical dimension of death drive, because I stop here when the real work should begin, which is to demonstrate how what we find in death drive is has to be given the full dignity of a new version of what in German idealism it was called this radical self-relating negativity. I did finish. Thank you very much. Stop, stop, because this reminds me of my beloved. I read somewhere that when Stalin was old, some 40-50—that's important, they were little—generals came to give him some medal, and they were all, you know, just and they applauded. And then, you know, like there were not many and they nobody dared to be the first to stop the applause. And it was so painful, it went on for half an hour. And then one of them dropped down and so on and Stalin just cynically observed it, you know, ah. And then finally he said: "Okay, stop" and so on and so on. That's my dream. It will not happen. Sorry. Now we can have minutes to pretend that we are in a democracy, no? Yeah, that's life. Thank you very much. First and then yes, I open for questions. But, to put it in the terms of your research project here, *Spannung*, tension, death drive would precisely be this radical *Spannung* which is more elementary than void than peace itself, no? I think precisely this that there is a pre-ontological level of *Spannung*. That’s the thesis, that drive has a much more radical status than it may appear. [unintelligible] Sie können Fragen auf Deutsch stellen, wenn das leichter ist. "Exactly, in English." Then you—you I don't have the excuse of claiming "Oh sorry, I didn't understand you," okay. "Thank you, thank you for your lecture. I have a question for you. In *The Parallax View*, you relate this the movement of value and commodities with the *Todestrieb*. And that is with with it looks like you relate the commodities and the movement of commodities with the living death. So it seems to me that the market, the very movement of the market, is related with it with this spectrality. So my question is, what to do with this spectrality that is also found in the market? Is there something to do against it? We have to accept it? We have to accept that market is a type of undead thing? Or is it still possible to do a critique of this spectrality and to find, for example, the worker or exploitation? That’s my question." Oh no, that’s a wonderful question because first, yes, I do something very precise. And I think it works nicely. I claim that if you look at a capitalist as an individual, he has desires. But you know how Marx always emphasized that there is a certain objective logic in the movement of the capital, which cannot be reduced to what capitalists want or whatever. You can be, for example, as a capitalist, a good guy, you can do want this, but there is and I claim that in a very precise way that the logic there is that of a *Trieb*. You know how Marx defines in what is for me a crucial chapter in *Capital*, I think it's the seventh or later, the passage from money to capital, which is formulated in precise Hegelian terms of the passage from substance to subject. Money is simply the embodied substance of value, with capital money becomes subject. It's no longer just the medium of exchange, abstract universality, it becomes subject which divides itself and so on. And then when Marx said how with this simple shift the process becomes precisely undead, because the the goal of circulation is just the repeated circulation itself, it’s a certain undeadness at work here. Now we don't have time to go into philosophical debate which would be extremely interesting: to what extent is this what is not possible for Hegel to get? Because capital is at the same time something monstrous in Hegelian terms. It is not just mechanical, how do you call it, *schlechte Unendlichkeit*, bad infinity. It is some self-relating subjectivity, but nonetheless endless in the sense of just endlessly repeating. It's as if you get, how should I put it, *Vernunft, Selbstvermittlung* itself functioning like this *schlechter Verstand*, or what? It's something very paradoxical. So, but the second point, I agree very much with the critical insinuation, in a good sense, of your question, which is I think this what you indicated is a danger which unfortunately I think Derrida in his—you can correct me—*Spectres of Marx* falls into. Because you know he goes into this spectrality blah-blah and then his idea is: but Marx naively thought that spectrality is just for a certain historical... but since spectrality is irreducible, isn't then capital also irreducible? Like, you know, we can fight it like Hydra but it will forever return and so on and so on. I think that I think that the answer is a very simple one. I don't think one should make this typical ontological *Kurzschluss* and identify spectrality as such with this concrete form of spectrality and so on and so on. I think that if there is a mistake in a certain vulgar ontological type of dialectical materialism, Marxism, is precisely that this image of communism as, you know, totally self-transparent reality, reality onto itself and so on and so on. I think that in this sense, no, I totally oppose this postmodern idea that the very project of stepping out of capitalist spectrality is the greatest metaphysical illusion, we cannot, we are always parts of it and so on and so on. No, how should I put it, the status of spectrality can change and so on. As I developed already before, when we were up there in that more restrained seminar, I am thinking more in this terms. For example, Alain Badiou says something in a very nice way that although a certain impossibility remains, but its status can change radically so that... For example, Badiou's nice simple example: take irrational numbers, the square of minus Of course they are impossible to positivize. But in more traditional mathematics, even Marx here made one of his big stupid mistakes, where in his mathematical manuscripts he just dismisses them "this is total stupidity, meaningless" and so on, no? But what happened then in modern mathematics throughout the 19th century is that they integrated this impossibility. The idea is: yes, it’s impossible, but we use it as a symbol and it works. You can calculating with irrational numbers, sorry, not irrational,
unknown
imaginary numbers, you can build
imaginary numbers, you can build
Slavoj Žižek
very stable real buildings and so on, no? It works. You see something like this can be done. The it's not that we always—I don't like this postmodern idea: we always need illusions or whatever. I mean, radical changes are possible in the status of illusion, in how illusion deals with reality and so on and so on. So I I agree very much I agree very much with you with you here that one should be very very precise here not to elevate how should I call it impossibilities which are specifically
very stable real buildings and so on, no? It works. You see something like this can be done. The it's not that we always—I don't like this postmodern idea: we always need illusions or whatever. I mean, radical changes are possible in the status of illusion, in how illusion deals with reality and so on and so on. So I I agree very much I agree very much with you with you here that one should be very very precise here not to elevate how should I call it impossibilities which are specifically
unknown
capitalist into some kind of external ontological condition or whatever, no? "I’m wondering how you distinguish death drive from capital and death drive from sexual drive, because I was reminded when you described death drive of similar passages by Freud on the sexual drive, as much on how one refers to the logics of capital." First, I I would have to be here much more precise because I'm well aware of the problem, the "Oh, death drive, now we have a new category and it calls for everything," you know, for sexuality,
capitalist into some kind of external ontological condition or whatever, no? "I’m wondering how you distinguish death drive from capital and death drive from sexual drive, because I was reminded when you described death drive of similar passages by Freud on the sexual drive, as much on how one refers to the logics of capital." First, I I would have to be here much more precise because I'm well aware of the problem, the "Oh, death drive, now we have a new category and it calls for everything," you know, for sexuality,
Slavoj Žižek
for capital and so on. But I don't think we gain—I mean, it's not that we say anything great if we say capital is death drive or whatever, no? Because it’s just means that it’s a certain self-relating automatic process of *Wiederholungszwang* and so on and so on. But the other question is very interesting that you raised now, this sexual. Because I think that this is the greatest *Verkennung* or how I put it of Freud, that he was as it were afraid, withdrew from what he discovered, so he quickly tried to ontologize it in the sense of reinscribing into traditional ontology, which he did with this extra stupidity: this is Freud at his worst, *Eros-Thanatos*. I think there is only one drive which is death drive and which is as such sexualized. I mean, because death drive again doesn't mean "I want to disappear, nothingness." All that Freudian topic of, you know, opposing Eros as uniting, civilizing, death drive as destructive, I think totally false. First, sexuality as such is radically destructive in its excess, excess and so on. So again, my point would have been that there is only one drive and death drive is just how should I put it, is just a kind of a distortion of *Lustprinzip*. Death drive is just this insistence, repetitive insistence, which not only is not opposed to sexuality but as such sexualizes things. Like I took made already this afternoon up there a very vulgar example, I like it. Let’s say I were to shake one of your hands, we shake hands like this. What would have been your impression if I would simply cling to your hand and squeeze it again and again again? You will probably say "Dirty old man, what does he want?" But note the paradox: the very fact that I just repeatedly insisted on a gesture will be sexualized. So we have here many paradoxes and again, I think this is one of the big examples where Freud misrecognized his own achievement. "Is it possible, just one last question... Ah no, sorry, it’s a man, I’m so sorry, I saw—I didn't want to impose some transsexual operation on you. Sorry." "You're welcome. I'll use the chance to ask in German." "Ja, natürlich, ja. Ich bin einsatzbereit auch für solche Fragen, ja, ja." "I would like to ask why I have to resort to the death drive in the description of capitalist systems, if one could rather go to discourse theory with Lacan, in the 16th and 17th seminars, and rather to the movement of surplus-pleasure." "Yes, of course, surplus-pleasure." "Yes, isn't it... it's an emphatic emphasis on the death drive, which is then also in its philosophical and its political dimension, but Lacan does offer a solution, doesn't he? In the 16th and 17th seminars, and there he would actually say that there is a capitalist discourse and there is a psychoanalytic discourse and we can stop this movement with surplus-pleasure analogous to surplus-value, can't we, by hysterisizing it?" "Yes, but... but this is for me very difficult complex question which we touch here. Because you know, you know that Lacan was searching for the right formula. At some point he thought that—how *Mehrwert* functions. At some point he thought that—that this *objet petit a, le plus-de-jouir* is—that it's capitalist discourse is a *Herren*, Master's discourse, which just places change, sometimes that it's hysterical, this... I think that Lacan was searching for the right way there, but I don't think there is an alternative in what I said because, you know, the way to answer you—but we don't have time now—would be to address a very difficult question: this *objet petit a, l'objet petit
for capital and so on. But I don't think we gain—I mean, it's not that we say anything great if we say capital is death drive or whatever, no? Because it’s just means that it’s a certain self-relating automatic process of *Wiederholungszwang* and so on and so on. But the other question is very interesting that you raised now, this sexual. Because I think that this is the greatest *Verkennung* or how I put it of Freud, that he was as it were afraid, withdrew from what he discovered, so he quickly tried to ontologize it in the sense of reinscribing into traditional ontology, which he did with this extra stupidity: this is Freud at his worst, *Eros-Thanatos*. I think there is only one drive which is death drive and which is as such sexualized. I mean, because death drive again doesn't mean "I want to disappear, nothingness." All that Freudian topic of, you know, opposing Eros as uniting, civilizing, death drive as destructive, I think totally false. First, sexuality as such is radically destructive in its excess, excess and so on. So again, my point would have been that there is only one drive and death drive is just how should I put it, is just a kind of a distortion of *Lustprinzip*. Death drive is just this insistence, repetitive insistence, which not only is not opposed to sexuality but as such sexualizes things. Like I took made already this afternoon up there a very vulgar example, I like it. Let’s say I were to shake one of your hands, we shake hands like this. What would have been your impression if I would simply cling to your hand and squeeze it again and again again? You will probably say "Dirty old man, what does he want?" But note the paradox: the very fact that I just repeatedly insisted on a gesture will be sexualized. So we have here many paradoxes and again, I think this is one of the big examples where Freud misrecognized his own achievement. "Is it possible, just one last question... Ah no, sorry, it’s a man, I’m so sorry, I saw—I didn't want to impose some transsexual operation on you. Sorry." "You're welcome. I'll use the chance to ask in German." "Ja, natürlich, ja. Ich bin einsatzbereit auch für solche Fragen, ja, ja." "I would like to ask why I have to resort to the death drive in the description of capitalist systems, if one could rather go to discourse theory with Lacan, in the 16th and 17th seminars, and rather to the movement of surplus-pleasure." "Yes, of course, surplus-pleasure." "Yes, isn't it... it's an emphatic emphasis on the death drive, which is then also in its philosophical and its political dimension, but Lacan does offer a solution, doesn't he? In the 16th and 17th seminars, and there he would actually say that there is a capitalist discourse and there is a psychoanalytic discourse and we can stop this movement with surplus-pleasure analogous to surplus-value, can't we, by hysterisizing it?" "Yes, but... but this is for me very difficult complex question which we touch here. Because you know, you know that Lacan was searching for the right formula. At some point he thought that—how *Mehrwert* functions. At some point he thought that—that this *objet petit a, le plus-de-jouir* is—that it's capitalist discourse is a *Herren*, Master's discourse, which just places change, sometimes that it's hysterical, this... I think that Lacan was searching for the right way there, but I don't think there is an alternative in what I said because, you know, the way to answer you—but we don't have time now—would be to address a very difficult question: this *objet petit a, l'objet petit
unknown
a*, how does it its function change in drive from desire to drive? The standard definition..." "In the void... in nothingness... in the void." "Yeah, but in what sense? In desire it’s
a*, how does it its function change in drive from desire to drive? The standard definition..." "In the void... in nothingness... in the void." "Yeah, but in what sense? In desire it’s
Slavoj Žižek
also the void. Every object is the metonymy of void and so on. I think there is—I don't have time now, I tried to do it towards the end of the first chapter of my *Parallax*, if I remember correctly—that it's a how should I put it, it's a much more refined division here. Because at the level of desire, we are in this Kantian field, you know: there is a void and every object is a metonymy of void and so on and so on. I don't think that the object of *Trieb*, object a, functions there in the same way. It’s not something we are metonymically after, it's more a void like a purely formal twist. How should I put it? Like, the the metaphor that I like to use is again very primitive, I don't know what it means there. You know this wonderful idea of Einstein—you know how Einstein, I use this in all my books—first thought that matter curves, distorts the space. But then he had a much more ingenious idea: that matter is nothing but an effect of the curving the space. So it's not that we have stuff as a positive substance so that empty space would be perfect symmetrical, but it’s that the original fact is curving the space. And I think that in this sense in drive, object a is that which
also the void. Every object is the metonymy of void and so on. I think there is—I don't have time now, I tried to do it towards the end of the first chapter of my *Parallax*, if I remember correctly—that it's a how should I put it, it's a much more refined division here. Because at the level of desire, we are in this Kantian field, you know: there is a void and every object is a metonymy of void and so on and so on. I don't think that the object of *Trieb*, object a, functions there in the same way. It’s not something we are metonymically after, it's more a void like a purely formal twist. How should I put it? Like, the the metaphor that I like to use is again very primitive, I don't know what it means there. You know this wonderful idea of Einstein—you know how Einstein, I use this in all my books—first thought that matter curves, distorts the space. But then he had a much more ingenious idea: that matter is nothing but an effect of the curving the space. So it's not that we have stuff as a positive substance so that empty space would be perfect symmetrical, but it’s that the original fact is curving the space. And I think that in this sense in drive, object a is that which
unknown
accounts
accounts
Slavoj Žižek
for the *Spannung*. It’s this minimal *Spannung*
for the *Spannung*. It’s this minimal *Spannung*
unknown
which is not yet caught
which is not yet caught
Slavoj Žižek
in this endless logic of desire. So I think that in a way,
in this endless logic of desire. So I think that in a way,
unknown
drive, *Trieb*, is if you want ontologically more primordial than desire. But what you know what's the problem here with Lacan, he is like Foucault and others struggling with two, you know, we all know at least already from Adorno that modernity has two aspects. One aspect is this, as Foucault would have put it, *surveiller et punir*, central administration and so on. The other is this
drive, *Trieb*, is if you want ontologically more primordial than desire. But what you know what's the problem here with Lacan, he is like Foucault and others struggling with two, you know, we all know at least already from Adorno that modernity has two aspects. One aspect is this, as Foucault would have put it, *surveiller et punir*, central administration and so on. The other is this
Slavoj Žižek
capitalist dynamics. And I didn't yet find a really good theory of bringing the two dimensions together. So sometimes Lacan flirts more with this Foucauldian view and his thesis is there: modernity is discourse of university, where we no longer have a master, we have knowledge and so on. So but then sometimes he goes more into this hysterical subjectivity and so on and so on. But one has also to be to be critical here in the sense of... Yeah, yeah, Lacan was great but I wouldn't how should I put it, he unfortunately, I must say in my old age I'm coming to this, he had certain limitations, Lacan. I mean, it's very difficult. No, no, no, I’m still theological dogmatic. The one who doesn’t have limitations is Hegel. I’m getting in my old age [unintelligible]. Thank you.
capitalist dynamics. And I didn't yet find a really good theory of bringing the two dimensions together. So sometimes Lacan flirts more with this Foucauldian view and his thesis is there: modernity is discourse of university, where we no longer have a master, we have knowledge and so on. So but then sometimes he goes more into this hysterical subjectivity and so on and so on. But one has also to be to be critical here in the sense of... Yeah, yeah, Lacan was great but I wouldn't how should I put it, he unfortunately, I must say in my old age I'm coming to this, he had certain limitations, Lacan. I mean, it's very difficult. No, no, no, I’m still theological dogmatic. The one who doesn’t have limitations is Hegel. I’m getting in my old age [unintelligible]. Thank you.