XLII Sigmund Freud Lecture by Slavoj Žižek: Theology, Negativity, and the Death-Drive
Lecture · Sigmund Freud Museum ·
2015 · 1:49:50 · 14,046 words
psychoanalysisreligion-theologyideologyphilosophy-generaleveryday-lifecinema-art-culturesexuality-gendercapitalismfascism-populism
Žižek argues that psychoanalysis aims not at alleviating suffering but at opening a void in subjectivity, linking this to a materialist theology where the divine is defined by inconsistency and 'out-of-jointness' rather than positive attributes. He reinterprets the Freudian death drive not as a wish for death (Nirvana principle) but as an 'obscene infinity' or 'undeadness' that insists beyond biological life, illustrated by Wagnerian heroes and zombies. Finally, he critiques modern 'enlightened hedonism' and regulation, defending the capacity for perversity and self-sabotage, and praises Protestantism's 'irrational capriciousness' over Catholic ritual, citing the Book of Job as the first critique of ideology. Žižek analyzes the Book of Job to argue that God is not a just judge but an incompetent, chaotic force, a view he extends to predestination and the Last Judgment as a 'material mechanic-materialist theory of grace.' He applies this 'comedy of horror' to the Holocaust, arguing that the true horror is the lack of ennobling tragedy, illustrated by Primo Levi and survivor anecdotes. Using the film The Rapture, he posits that even if God exists, He is evil, leading to a Lacanian reading of atheism as 'God is unconscious.' He concludes by linking the 'chicken joke' to Marx’s commodity fetishism, arguing that ideology operates not despite our knowledge, but through our unconscious actions. Žižek argues that ideology functions through 'interpassivity,' where social beliefs operate in practice even when individuals consciously disbelieve them, illustrated by the Niels Bohr horseshoe joke and the chicken/God anecdote. He connects this to psychoanalysis, positing that the modern superego commands enjoyment rather than prohibiting it, making the failure to enjoy the source of guilt. Finally, he introduces Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s theory of counterfactuals to explain how contingency becomes retroactively necessary, using examples from Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Polanski’s Ghost, and Kabbalistic theology to argue that 'necessary lies' are required to access truth. Žižek critiques contemporary sexuality as a 'superego sex' mediated by technology, arguing that modern hedonism avoids the traumatic 'fall' of genuine encounter, leading to a void filled by fundamentalism. He links this to the 'Bologna University reform' and the replacement of intellectuals with experts, concluding with a joke about Lenin to illustrate the need for 'useless' radical learning.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 36
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Psychoanalytic insight that must be discarded to open a void in subjectivity, rather than dwelled upon as self-knowledge.
The core openness or lack in the subject that allows for change and love, rather than a fixed identity.
as “authentic negative theology”
Not defining God by what He is not, but locating negativity/inconsistency within God Himself as the experience of the world being 'out of joint'.
The human capacity for self-sabotage, addiction, and irrational behavior that resists liberal rationalization and regulation.
as “enlightened hedonism”
The modern ideology that permits pleasure only insofar as it serves healthy reproduction and social utility, regulating life through expert knowledge.
Reinterpreted by Žižek not as a wish for death/Nirvana, but as an 'obscene life' or 'immortality' that insists and repeats beyond biological death.
The compulsion to repeat, which for Žižek reveals the death drive as a persistence of life/obscenity rather than a desire for cessation.
as “obscene bodily infinity”
Kant's concept of the 'undead' (neither alive nor dead) as a materialist infinity that persists beyond life and death, opposed to noble spiritual infinity.
The classical Freudian concept of returning to immobility, which Žižek rejects as the definition of the death drive.
Excessive enjoyment that is impossible to fully attain but impossible to get rid of, invested in the rituals of obsessional neurosis.
as “Zwangsneurose”
Obsessional neurosis, where rituals meant to protect from desire become the very site of enjoyment (jouissance).
Identified by Žižek as beginning with the Book of Job, where the 'sacred' God is revealed as qualitatively base and ignorant.
as “ideology at its zero level”
The baseline state of ideological belief where subjects desperately cling to the idea that suffering has a deep, justifiable meaning, as seen in Job's friends.
A reading of Malebranche’s predestination where divine grace is distributed with the contingent, arbitrary indifference of natural forces (like rain), completely divorced from human virtue.
as “comedy of pure horror”
The structural form of the Holocaust, where the sheer contingency and arbitrariness of death transform the event from tragedy into a terrifying, non-ennobling comedy.
as “Selbstvernichtung”
Heidegger’s concept of the 'self-destruction' of the Jews, which Žižek cites as an obscene attempt to impose tragic agency on the contingent horror of the Holocaust.
Lacan’s counterfactual atheism: the true formula is not 'God doesn't exist' but 'God is unconscious,' meaning the symbolic order functions as if God exists regardless of His reality.
as “counterfactuals”
Conditional propositions regarding what might have happened, which Jean-Pierre Dupuy argues can retroactively determine the necessity of actual events.
Marx’s concept where social relations appear as relations between things; Žižek argues the 'theological' illusion is not in our conscious belief but in our unconscious material practice.
as “touch of the real”
The promise of terrorism, which offers a violent, traumatic encounter with reality as a reaction to the sterile, virtual nature of global capitalism.
as “Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es”
Marx’s formula for ideology: 'They do not know it, but they are doing it,' meaning the ideological illusion structures our actual behavior, not just our conscious thoughts.
The pragmatic utility of maintaining ideological fictions (like God) in social reality, regardless of their factual truth.
A concept by Robert Pfaller where others act or believe on our behalf, allowing us to disbelieve consciously while maintaining the social function of belief.
The superego figure who solicits enjoyment rather than prohibiting it, contrasting with the prohibitive father of classical psychoanalysis.
as “pressure to enjoy”
The modern superego command that generates guilt when one fails to experience pleasure, replacing the guilt of prohibited transgression.
as “God in inexistence”
The mode of existence of ideological fiction in the postmodern era: God is officially dead but continues to structure reality through its denial.
The process by which a contingent event, once it occurs, restructures the past to appear as if it were historically necessary.
A factually false premise that provides a true insight into social antagonisms, such as Marx's concept of Communism as 'capitalism without capital.'
as “broken vessel”
A Kabbalistic metaphor used by Walter Benjamin for translation, where the original and translation are fragments of a broken whole, revealing what is missing in the original.
A plastic vagina device for men, used by Žižek as a final example of the technological mediation of sexuality and the failure of romance.
Sexuality regulated by the duty to enjoy, where machines perform the act so the subject is relieved of the obligation to engage in the traumatic encounter of real sex.
The moment of surprise, void, and openness in love (from the French 'tomber'); modern dating agencies seek to enable love 'without the fall' by controlling the outcome.
A form of hedonism that results in less sex and more virtual/artificial stimulation because encountering a real human being is too traumatic.
God as the possibility of radical otherness and the possibility for things to be radically different, a concept Žižek uses to define his 'materialist Christianity'.
as “Bologna University reform”
An attack on the 'public use of reason' that replaces intellectuals with 'experts' who merely solve problems presented to them rather than questioning the formulation of the problem.
as “useless knowledge”
Knowledge that is not instrumental or problem-solving, which is necessary for true intellectual reflection and resistance to capitalist utility.
Stories he reaches for 16
Physicist Niels Bohr keeps a superstitious horseshoe above his door. When asked why, he replies that he doesn't believe in it, but believes it works even if he doesn't believe in it.
“I'm not stupid, of course I don't believe in it... but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”
Dating agencies advertise enabling you to 'find yourself in love without the fall,' avoiding the surprise and void of genuine encounter.
“The idea is we will enable you to find yourself in love without the fall.”
Marx wants a wife, Engels a mistress, but Lenin wants both so he can lie to each about being with the other; when asked what he actually does, he says 'learn, learn and learn.'
“When I was young under communism... Lenin's advice to young people: 'learn, learn and learn.'”
Žižek jokes that his own obsessional neurosis is visible in his face; the rituals meant to protect from desire become the site of enjoyment (jouissance).
“if you look at me for more than five seconds and you don't get that I'm obsessional neurotic then I am sorry for you.”
The 'comedy' of Auschwitz selection: prisoners used absurd strategies (pinching faces to look healthy) to survive a split-second decision by an SS doctor, mirroring the contingency of predestination.
“All the comical details like when prisoners were preparing themselves for this test... it's comedy. But it's precisely the comedy which is exactly structurally the same as the comedy of predestination.”
Director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s version of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, where Isolde never arrives, and Tristan dies imagining her, revealing the pain of the 'Liebestod' and the absence of the object.
“Tristan is dying alone... the final appearance of Isolde is just his dream.”
Description of 'stamina training units' (plastic vaginas for men) as the ultimate example of the failure of romance and the technological mediation of sexuality in the contemporary era.
“We have now more and more also the feminine counterpart of the vibrator: plastic vaginas... stamina training unit.”
A myth in Socialist Yugoslavia that the secret police invented political jokes to release public frustration. Žižek argues the myth is false but contains a truth about the constructive role of jokes in maintaining the system.
“There was no secret secret department fabricating jokes. But there is a truth in this lie.”
Catholicism allows sin if confessed (playful); Protestantism demands guilt while sinning. Žižek prefers Protestantism's 'irrational capriciousness' and a God who is not good.
“The Protestant version is you can do whatever you want just in so far as you feel a little bit guilty while while you are doing it.”
Freud finds his patient forgot everything about the analysis; this forgetting opens the void in subjectivity, linking analysis to love.
“Rat Man has forgotten everything about the analysis, didn't remember anything.”
Wagner's heroes (Flying Dutchman, Amfortas) and zombies/vampires embody the death drive: an 'obscene life' that insists and repeats beyond death, remaining 'undead'.
“It's a weird obscene life which insists even after its biological death.”
Jesus’ 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani' is interpreted not as an 'animal soul' error but as God Himself ceasing to believe in God, mirroring the chicken joke’s requirement that the Other acknowledge the truth.
“if Christ meant it seriously, it means God himself stopped to believing God.”
Modern films like James Bond and The Da Vinci Code lack sex at the end; Žižek reads this as a Freudian cover-up for the fact that there is no sex, reflecting a societal obsession with avoiding the 'fall' of love.
“It's the first James Bond without sex at the end... why does the poor God himself have to have sex to cover up the fact that here there is no sex?”
In Michael Tolkin’s film, Sharon is raptured to Purgatory; her 'ethical act' is refusing to say 'I love Jesus' to an evil God, choosing eternal suffering over lying.
“Sharon says 'no I will not do it.' Sharon says 'I cannot say I love God who was so cruel towards me... I will not do it.'”
Zapffe describes Job's God not as intellectually superior but as a 'grotesque primitiveness, a comic cave dweller, a braggart and a blusterer' of qualitative baseness.
“Job finds himself confronted with a world ruler of grotesque primitiveness, a comic cave dweller, a braggart and a blusterer.”
Scientists propose using a drug to make prisoners experience two years as one hour, paying their debt subjectively while remaining useful to society; Žižek finds this sad, noting his first thought was using it for sex.
“I claim wouldn't it be a great loss for society to lose me for two years? So why wouldn't they just give me that drug”
Works invoked 21
Capital book
Cited for the chapter on commodity fetishism, specifically the idea that ideology structures our action, not just our belief.
Vertigo film
Used as a primary example of counterfactuals; the revelation that Madeleine never existed changes the past counterfactually.
The Da Vinci Code book
Described as 'kitsch' but used to illustrate how modern culture covers up the lack of sex; the film adaptation also lacks sex.
The Book of Job book
Identified by Žižek as the 'first work of critique of ideology' due to the revelation of God's base, irrational nature.
Parsifal opera
Wagner's opera featuring Amfortas, whose wound makes him immortal, embodying the death drive.
Quantum of Solace film
Cited as the first James Bond film without sex at the end, used to illustrate the societal avoidance of the 'fall' of love.
Tristan und Isolde opera
Referenced via Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's Bayreuth production, specifically the ending where Isolde never arrives, revealing the 'Liebestod' as a dream.
If This Is a Man book
Used to illustrate the 'comedy of pure horror' in Auschwitz through the contingency of selection.
Star Wars film
Referenced metaphorically to describe Vienna as 'the center of the known universe' during the Vienna Renaissance.
Angels and Demons film
Cited as having sex in the novel but no sex in the film, further illustrating the trend of removing sex from modern media.
Criticized for being a 'pathetic' tragedy disguised as comedy; Žižek proposes a 'true tragedy' alternative.
Criticized as 'terrible' and 'obscene' for linearizing Christ's last words.
The Rapture film
Loved by Žižek for its theological irony and its depiction of an ethical refusal to love an evil God.
Lord of the Rings book
Tolkien's work used as an example of a materialist, immanent universe without transcendent Gods.
The Ghost Writer film
Described as 'not a great film but interesting'; used to illustrate how a factually false premise (Blair being a CIA plant) explains political truth.
Spheres journal
United Airlines magazine article cited as an example of 'enlightened hedonism' promoting sex for health reasons.
Dostoevsky's work cited by Rowan Williams to discuss the 'capacity for perversity' and irrational human needs.
Freud's work introducing the death drive and Wiederholungszwang, reinterpreted by Žižek as 'immortality'.
The Flying Dutchman opera
Wagner's opera featuring a hero who wants to die but is kept alive by his wound, embodying the death drive.
Christ (Zeffirelli) film
Criticized as 'terrible' and 'vulgar' for linearizing Christ's last words.
The Rat Man book
Freud's case study used to illustrate 'knowledge to be forgotten' and the opening of a void.
People invoked 44
Marcel Proust positive
Cited by Phillips as an example of knowing people as a way to manage the anxiety of not controlling them.
Mel Gibson negative
Criticized for his film The Passion of the Christ, which linearizes Christ's last words in an 'obscene and vulgar' way.
Primo Levi positive
Cited for his description of Auschwitz as 'comical' due to the contingency of selection.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as a 'good friend, French theoretician of catastrophes'; his distinction between types of conditional propositions (counterfactuals) is central to the argument.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as a 'good friend Slovene Lacanian'; Žižek borrows her example of the terrorist atheist society to illustrate interpassivity.
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle positive
Described as a 'great opera director' who did not like him personally, but whose Bayreuth Tristan ending is praised as 'ingenious' for revealing the pain of the Liebestod.
Vladimir Lenin negative
Used in a joke to represent the 'existing system' (the wife) that conceals transgression (the mistress) to maintain the status quo of 'learning' (the system).
Richard Wagner positive
Cited for heroes (Flying Dutchman, Amfortas) who embody the death drive as an 'obscene life' that keeps them alive/immortal despite their wounds.
Actress in Quantum of Solace, cited in the context of the film lacking sex.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for the concept of 'jouissance' and the idea that excessive enjoyment is impossible but impossible to get rid of.
Job positive
Biblical figure whose story is identified by Žižek as the 'first work of critique of ideology' due to the revelation of God's base nature.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Cited as Žižek's 'favorite' theologian for interpreting God’s answer to Job as an admission of divine incompetence/mess.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Representative of the notion of absolute self-immanence, opposed by Žižek.
Robert Pfaller positive
Cited as a 'great philosopher' who developed the concept of interpassivity, specifically regarding how others can be passive for us.
Actor in The Da Vinci Code, cited in the context of the film lacking sex.
Nicolas Malebranche positive
Cited for his 'ingenious' materialist theory of grace, dividing grace from virtue.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as 'my good friend'; Badiou's observation about dating agencies enabling love 'without the fall' is cited to support Žižek's argument.
Author of the novel on which Polanski's Ghost Writer is based.
Appears in the Lenin joke as the 'bon vivant' who prefers a mistress.
Benedictus de Spinoza negative
Representative of the notion of absolute self-immanence and fullness of reality, which Žižek opposes with the idea of inconsistency/lack.
Stephen King positive
Cited as an example of 'living dead' literature that illustrates the concept of the 'undead' (neither alive nor dead).
Michel Foucault negative
Representative of the notion of absolute self-immanence, opposed by Žižek.
Richard Dawkins negative
Cited as an example of 'aggressive atheists' whose fashionable views ignore the truth in religion.
Actor in Quantum of Solace, cited in the context of the film lacking sex.
Adam Phillips positive
Cited for the view that analysis aims to open a void, not alleviate suffering; knowledge is to be forgotten.
Martin Heidegger negative
Criticized for the 'obscenity' of claiming the Holocaust was a 'Selbstvernichtung' (self-destruction) of the Jews.
Rowan Williams positive
Described as a 'good friend' and 'ex-Archbishop of Canterbury'; cited for defining religious experience as 'incongruity' and 'out-of-jointness'.
Roman Polanski positive
Cited for Ghost Writer, which illustrates how a 'necessary lie' can explain political reality.
Franco Zeffirelli negative
Described as an 'Italian fascist' and 'neo-fascist extreme right-winger'; criticized for his film version of Christ which linearizes the last words.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited for his reference to Kabbalah and the notion of the 'broken vessel' in translation theory.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
One of Žižek's 'favorites'; cited for defining God as 'a possibility of radical otherness' and 'radically different'.
Used in a joke to illustrate interpassivity; described as a 'genius' physicist.
The interviewer who asked Phillips if he feels he failed when patients feel better.
Dan Brown positive
Author of The Da Vinci Code, described as 'worst lowest of the lowest of modern kitsch,' but used to illustrate the lack of sex in modern culture.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Cited for Vertigo, which serves as a key example of counterfactual change and retroactive necessity.
Aristotle negative
Cited as the source of the 'primitive ontology' (animal soul) used by Catholic commentators to dismiss Christ’s cry on the cross.
J. R. R. Tolkien positive
Žižek dislikes the books but uses them as an example of a materialist, immanent universe without transcendent Gods.
Karl Marx positive
Cited as the originator of the concept of commodity fetishism and the animistic metaphor of commodities speaking; Žižek identifies as a communist but critiques Marx's ideal.
Mentioned only as Malebranche’s teacher/follower.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the Rat Man case and the concept of the death drive, which Žižek reinterprets as 'immortality' or 'obscene life' rather than Nirvana.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for the distinction between 'negating a predicate' and 'affirming a non-predicate,' which Žižek uses to define the 'undead' and 'obscene infinity.'
Friedrich Nietzsche negative
Representative of the notion of absolute self-immanence and immanent life force, opposed by Žižek.
Referenced in the context of Polanski's Ghost Writer, where the character Adam Lang is a stand-in for Blair, illustrating the 'necessary lie'.
Peter Wessel Zapffe positive
Norwegian theologian cited for his commentary on Job, revealing God's 'qualitative baseness' and 'grotesque primitiveness.'
Transcript 7 turns
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Verehrtes Publikum, mein Name ist Amely Haag, ich bin Dramaturgin am Haus und möchte mich kurz bedanken im Namen von Karin Bergmann bei der Direktorin des Sigmund Freud Museums Monica Pessler, die aufgrund ihrer Kooperation diese Veranstaltung initiiert hat, dass das Denktheater des Philosophen und Psychoanalytikers Žižek auf dieser Bühne hier genau richtig ist werden wir sicherlich gleich gemeinsam erleben. Dankeschön.
Verehrtes Publikum, mein Name ist Amely Haag, ich bin Dramaturgin am Haus und möchte mich kurz bedanken im Namen von Karin Bergmann bei der Direktorin des Sigmund Freud Museums Monica Pessler, die aufgrund ihrer Kooperation diese Veranstaltung initiiert hat, dass das Denktheater des Philosophen und Psychoanalytikers Žižek auf dieser Bühne hier genau richtig ist werden wir sicherlich gleich gemeinsam erleben. Dankeschön.
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Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 42nd Sigmund Freud Lecture that we have the honor to hold this year in this special venue so steeped in tradition, the Vienna Burgtheater. I'm delighted that the lecture that has been holds for so many years once again met such a great public interest and I'm so happy to welcome you very warmly at this special stage. My special thanks of course goes to Karin Bergmann for her kind hospitality and also for her spontaneously agreeing to cooperate with us and also to the team of the Burgtheater for this excellent cooperation. I also would like to extend a warm welcome on this special occasion to the City Councillor for Culture and Science Dr. Mailath-Pokorny, thank you very much for coming here and thank you for your interest. Above all I thank our scientific advisory board and it's for me really with particular pleasure to welcome Viktor Mazin who will be say some words about the lecture in a moment at this venue that we thought is such a ideal setting for Slavoj Žižek to express his thoughts on the topic of theology, negativity, and death drive. And dear Slavoj, thank you very much for coming, so great to welcome you here in Vienna, it's a great pleasure and honor for us, thank you very much. Good evening, I'm not Slavoj Žižek, it's not a time to upload yet. I have almost an impossible task to introduce my friend Slavoj Žižek whom I know for more than years and whom I read and listen more than
Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 42nd Sigmund Freud Lecture that we have the honor to hold this year in this special venue so steeped in tradition, the Vienna Burgtheater. I'm delighted that the lecture that has been holds for so many years once again met such a great public interest and I'm so happy to welcome you very warmly at this special stage. My special thanks of course goes to Karin Bergmann for her kind hospitality and also for her spontaneously agreeing to cooperate with us and also to the team of the Burgtheater for this excellent cooperation. I also would like to extend a warm welcome on this special occasion to the City Councillor for Culture and Science Dr. Mailath-Pokorny, thank you very much for coming here and thank you for your interest. Above all I thank our scientific advisory board and it's for me really with particular pleasure to welcome Viktor Mazin who will be say some words about the lecture in a moment at this venue that we thought is such a ideal setting for Slavoj Žižek to express his thoughts on the topic of theology, negativity, and death drive. And dear Slavoj, thank you very much for coming, so great to welcome you here in Vienna, it's a great pleasure and honor for us, thank you very much. Good evening, I'm not Slavoj Žižek, it's not a time to upload yet. I have almost an impossible task to introduce my friend Slavoj Žižek whom I know for more than years and whom I read and listen more than
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years. I have to do it in three or four minutes. More than that, Slavoj made me yesterday another impossible task, he said "Please don't tell anything good about me, tell to people how bad I am." So I don't know actually how to do it and I would like in few words just to tell why Slavoj Žižek is so important to me personally. And first of all, he is important for me because he is a man who is full of surprises. He surprises all the time and this is actually a distinguished trait of psychoanalysis and for me this is more than important. In psychoanalysis we always move to the future which is unknown, it's unpredictable, it's coming and we don't know what exactly is coming. So this openness to the future, to avenir if to use a French word, is a special trait of psychoanalysis and as well it's a special trait of all the Slavoj's books and his talks. I mean that we never know what would be the next turn and it amazes us and it captures us and it makes a special effect and I think I have two references in the mind concerning this effect. One reference is to cinema when we don't know what will be in the next shot, what will happen next and it catches us and this lack of our knowledge is bringing us to the next shot without any idea what will happen next. And another reference of this openness of the future is psychoanalytic one because in the free association or as Freud called them Einfall, which is more correct of course, we never know what will be the next thought which comes to our head. And of
years. I have to do it in three or four minutes. More than that, Slavoj made me yesterday another impossible task, he said "Please don't tell anything good about me, tell to people how bad I am." So I don't know actually how to do it and I would like in few words just to tell why Slavoj Žižek is so important to me personally. And first of all, he is important for me because he is a man who is full of surprises. He surprises all the time and this is actually a distinguished trait of psychoanalysis and for me this is more than important. In psychoanalysis we always move to the future which is unknown, it's unpredictable, it's coming and we don't know what exactly is coming. So this openness to the future, to avenir if to use a French word, is a special trait of psychoanalysis and as well it's a special trait of all the Slavoj's books and his talks. I mean that we never know what would be the next turn and it amazes us and it captures us and it makes a special effect and I think I have two references in the mind concerning this effect. One reference is to cinema when we don't know what will be in the next shot, what will happen next and it catches us and this lack of our knowledge is bringing us to the next shot without any idea what will happen next. And another reference of this openness of the future is psychoanalytic one because in the free association or as Freud called them Einfall, which is more correct of course, we never know what will be the next thought which comes to our head. And of
unknown
course today there is a special subject, there is a theme and I know that the only thing which I know that Slavoj will be talking about the death drive, theology and some other psychoanalytic important things, but how and what will be the turn and what will be the next I I don't really know and for me it's a real surprise. And of course Slavoj asked me also to make a joke but I don't know how to make them so probably the only one joke I could make it it would be not a Kinder Surprise which is very popular in Slavoj's writing, it would be more like adult surprise. And also what is unimaginable for me, what surprises me is the velocity of Slavoj's activism, of how fast he is moving around the planet bringing in our times knowledge to the people and again he is bringing this knowledge not in the raw or ready form, it's because of this cinematographic thinking I would say, we never we never have the complete knowledge and this is highly important because we have to construct ourselves to fill up the lack in the knowledge and to move on and on and on without any particular target, without any particular aim because it should be open. I know that maybe only in cinema and psychoanalysis and especially in Slavoj Žižek's writings and in his talks we have the same effect and I hope we will get real real knowledge without open the open knowledge tonight. Thank you very much. Ich kann Deutsch sprechen, aber nicht gut genug um einen Vortrag zu halten. So if you excuse me I will have to change into English. I hope I will not disappoint you because I've decided not to treat you as idiots which mean I will really like to develop a coherent line of thought. But since we are in Vienna let me begin by of course a reference to Freud, to psychoanalyse. I want to begin by destroying or criticizing at least a certain common place about psychoanalytic treatment. According to this common place, psychoanalysis has a double goal: first to release us from suffering and second goal to bring about our self-knowledge by making part of our unconscious accessible to consciousness. These two dimensions are of course connected. We suffer precisely because we don't really know ourselves or as the old Platonic and Gnostic formula says: suffering is caused by our ignorance. Now I reject this view totally. Why? In a recently published interview with Paul Holdengräber, Adam Phillips, the British psychoanalyst, said, a quote: "Analysts are people, psychoanalysts of course, who don't speak on the patient's behalf. They don't speak for someone, unlike parents, teachers, doctors and politicians. Analysis should do two things that are linked together: it should be about the recovery of appetite and the need not to know yourself. Symptoms are forms of self-knowledge. When you think 'I'm agoraphobic, I'm a shy person,' whatever it may be, these are forms of self-knowledge. What psychoanalysis at its best does is to cure you of your self-knowledge and of your wish to know yourself in that coherent narrative way. You can only recover your appetite if you can allow yourself to be unknown to yourself." End of quote. Now this point is crucial. Psychoanalysis does not aim at replacing the false, distorted, ciphered self-knowledge with the real one, so that instead of confused symptoms you immediately become aware of what you really are or want. It aims at getting rid of this very need for self-knowledge, at enabling the patient to act without self-knowledge. Now an
course today there is a special subject, there is a theme and I know that the only thing which I know that Slavoj will be talking about the death drive, theology and some other psychoanalytic important things, but how and what will be the turn and what will be the next I I don't really know and for me it's a real surprise. And of course Slavoj asked me also to make a joke but I don't know how to make them so probably the only one joke I could make it it would be not a Kinder Surprise which is very popular in Slavoj's writing, it would be more like adult surprise. And also what is unimaginable for me, what surprises me is the velocity of Slavoj's activism, of how fast he is moving around the planet bringing in our times knowledge to the people and again he is bringing this knowledge not in the raw or ready form, it's because of this cinematographic thinking I would say, we never we never have the complete knowledge and this is highly important because we have to construct ourselves to fill up the lack in the knowledge and to move on and on and on without any particular target, without any particular aim because it should be open. I know that maybe only in cinema and psychoanalysis and especially in Slavoj Žižek's writings and in his talks we have the same effect and I hope we will get real real knowledge without open the open knowledge tonight. Thank you very much. Ich kann Deutsch sprechen, aber nicht gut genug um einen Vortrag zu halten. So if you excuse me I will have to change into English. I hope I will not disappoint you because I've decided not to treat you as idiots which mean I will really like to develop a coherent line of thought. But since we are in Vienna let me begin by of course a reference to Freud, to psychoanalyse. I want to begin by destroying or criticizing at least a certain common place about psychoanalytic treatment. According to this common place, psychoanalysis has a double goal: first to release us from suffering and second goal to bring about our self-knowledge by making part of our unconscious accessible to consciousness. These two dimensions are of course connected. We suffer precisely because we don't really know ourselves or as the old Platonic and Gnostic formula says: suffering is caused by our ignorance. Now I reject this view totally. Why? In a recently published interview with Paul Holdengräber, Adam Phillips, the British psychoanalyst, said, a quote: "Analysts are people, psychoanalysts of course, who don't speak on the patient's behalf. They don't speak for someone, unlike parents, teachers, doctors and politicians. Analysis should do two things that are linked together: it should be about the recovery of appetite and the need not to know yourself. Symptoms are forms of self-knowledge. When you think 'I'm agoraphobic, I'm a shy person,' whatever it may be, these are forms of self-knowledge. What psychoanalysis at its best does is to cure you of your self-knowledge and of your wish to know yourself in that coherent narrative way. You can only recover your appetite if you can allow yourself to be unknown to yourself." End of quote. Now this point is crucial. Psychoanalysis does not aim at replacing the false, distorted, ciphered self-knowledge with the real one, so that instead of confused symptoms you immediately become aware of what you really are or want. It aims at getting rid of this very need for self-knowledge, at enabling the patient to act without self-knowledge. Now an
Slavoj Žižek
immediate critical reproach: does this not bring us back to the ancient platitude or wisdom "just do it, don't think about it"? I think no. Why? Here I would again like to refer to Adam Phillips to the second point he makes about suffering. Again a quote from Phillips's interview: "Patients come because they are suffering from something. They want that suffering to be alleviated. Ideally in the process of doing analysis they might find their suffering is alleviated or modified. But also they might discover that there are more important things than to alleviate one's suffering." Here Phillips is interrupted by the guy who did this interview, Paul Holdengräber, who says: "Do you feel in some way that you have failed when a patient leaves your office feeling better?" The answer of Adam Phillips: "I don't think the project is to make people feel better, nor is it to make people feel worse. It's not to make them feel anything. It's simply to allow them to see what it is they do feel." End of quote. And I think this is a wonderful point. Every authentic psychoanalyst when at the end of the psychoanalytic session when he sees that the patient feels much better, is full of joy and so on, optimism, he must be horrified, like "what did I do wrong?" But does Phillips not contradict himself here? Is making people see what it is they do feel not bringing about a kind of self-knowledge? The answer is that knowledge gained in psychoanalysis is a knowledge to be forgotten, discarded. Once I see what it is that I feel I don't go on dwelling in it, I just leave it behind. Why? Not and incidentally you can find a wonderful example in Freud here when he reports in his Rat Man analysis text that when he met Rat Man some years later he was surprised to discover that Rat Man has forgotten everything about the analysis, didn't remember anything. So why? Not because of some decisionist mystique like I just have to act, don't think, but because the true task of analysis is to open up a void in the midst of our subjectivity. When we discard the knowledge gained in analysis we open ourselves to this void. Therein resides even I claim the link between psychoanalysis and love. In love, the last quote from Adam Phillips: "We really do know the other person in some profound sense and also we really don't know him or her. And you could think that the fantasy of knowing is spurred or prompted by something like 'this person has a powerful effect on me and it's so overwhelming that I'm going to manage this through a fantasy of knowledge.' For Proust for example, knowing people is often very much about dealing with the anxiety that one cannot control them." End of quote. So you see the message is not here just epistemological one "I cannot ever fully know another person or myself." It's more ontological. We cannot know the other because the other the other's identity is cracked open, constructed around a void. In the very core of our subjectivity there is a void, an openness towards future. And the difficult thing is to accept that, that openness, that void in the heart of the other. It is into this void that then alternatives, possible alternatives how to change your identity are located, into this void. Which is why I think that one of the best definitions of a rich life is that it comprises not only what you actually do or experience but also all the missed failed opportunities, what you didn't do but might have done. To know myself is not only to know about what I did, it should include what I failed to do. And maybe in my person this takes an especially perverse form because I like to go to a great city like Vienna or Venice, Venezia, or New York and precisely stay in my hotel and don't go out. People tell me "but why didn't you simply stay at home?" No, I said, the pleasure is precisely like to stay in a nice hotel on on Grand Canal in Venice and precisely, look it's out there, I look through the window, I may have gone there but I didn't. I this is often a much more lively experience I claim. And now things will be slowly getting a little bit more serious because I claim that this brings us to theology. In what sense? To avoid any misunderstanding, I am a total card-carrying atheist. I don't play these games which are popular today about you know how "okay God is dead, God as some primitive entity, but in this void of the absence of God some voice is addressing us" and so on, you know this so-called post-secular theology. No, I am an atheist, but still I think there is some truth in religion totally ignored by the aggressive atheists which are now fashionable from Richard Dawkins to to to all other best-selling authors. What what is let's call it the core of religious experience? I will refer here to my, I'm honored to say this, my good friend the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams who, commenting on the work of four British Catholic novelists, O'Connor, Percy, Spark and Ellis, recently wrote, quote from Rowan Williams: "All four create a world in which the secular majority account of what is going on is severely relativized. But there is no simple alternative that anyone can step into by a single decision. The religious dimension of these fictions lies in the existent sense of incongruity, unmistakable even if no one within the fiction can say what we should be congruent with." End of quote. So this is for me the authentic negative theology. The term negative theology is usually used to designate the idea that God as the absolute beyond cannot be described by any positive determinations. So we can only circumscribe the place of God in a negative way: God is neither infinite nor finite, neither ideal nor real, neither being nor non-being and so on. But what if in contrast to this notion of God as a pure in-itself beyond all categorial determinations we locate negativity into God himself? Positing that the experience of the divine is at its most elementary a negative experience in the sense described by Rowan Williams: the experience of how our lives are, to refer to Shakespeare what Hamlet says, out of joint. At its most radical, religion is thus not the opium for the people. The opium of and for the people is today as we all know more and more opium itself, drugs. But an awareness of incongruity or inexistence, sorry, inconsistency of our reality. The core of religious experience resides in the insight into the broken character of our world, its inconsistency. The basic religious experience is thus opposed not only to the naive scientific materialism but also to the notion of reality which runs from Spinoza through Nietzsche up to Foucault and Deleuze, the notion of reality which emphasizes the absolute self-immanence of reality. The idea is that there is no lack in reality, reality is the fullness of the productive process of life. The absolute according to this view is not a transcendent entity but the immanent life force of the wealth of reality and all appearances of some transcendent power which controls, regulates or oppresses the immanent flow of life are engendered by the contradictions of this life process itself. Such view is not even necessarily materialist. The immanent absolute can also be spiritualized. For example, I don't like the books but they are well known, Tolkien's Middle-earth books, Lord of the Rings and so on. I think his Tolkien's world is materialist. It is an enchanted world full of magic forces, evil and good spirits and so on, but strangely I hope you noticed this, at least if you saw the best-selling films, strangely without Gods. There are no transcendent divine entities in Tolkien's universe. All magic is immanent to matter, a spiritual power which dwells in our terrestrial world. And the opposite also holds. The basic religious experience of the out-of-jointness of our world does not necessarily imply the assertion of some higher spiritual reality. It can also be formulated in materialist terms. And I think primarily it even is a materialist experience. In what sense? I hope you got my point. It's not that there is God and when as they say God dies, withdraws, we feel a void. I think in a Hegelian way the void comes first and the God positive divinity comes in a second step to fill in that void. What is the name of that void? Let me again quote Rowan Williams who wrote apropos Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, a longer quote from Rowan Williams: "The right-minded liberal of his time assumes that when human beings are authoritatively shown what is good for them they will want it and choose it. But the fact is that human beings are not so constructed. People will not readily accept any would-be definitive account of what is in their interest. In other words, part of the distinctively human existence is the capacity for perversity, addiction, self-sacrifice, self-destruction and the whole range of rationally indefensible behaviors. Remove this capacity and two things result: the distinctively human dimension disappears and is replaced by a pattern of ordered but mechanical interactions and violence is canonized as the means of social rationalization because the amputation of irrational human needs or wants can only be effected by force." End of quote. Naive and simplistic as this view may seem it fully resonates with today's predominant normativity of enlightened hedonism. Today pleasures are allowed, promoted even, in so far as they serve healthy reproduction. For example, we are being told "yes make love, engage in sex because" and this for me at least ruins everything, "because sex is good for health" and so on and so on. Like I was horrified on a recent flight to United States, I didn't have anything to do so I read that Spheres or what, the magazine of United Airlines, and I found there a text promoting sex. But it's the most depressing text I read. It says "it's good to make love because it's good for your muscles, you will be much more fit when you are It also advises you to do a lot of deep French kissing because it's good for the strength of your lips so that when you are old you will not ruin saliva and so on and so on. So then we get experts who know what is good for us and are thereby justified in regulating our lives. A regulation which can go up to the amputation of those of our needs which are perceived as irrational or dysfunctional. Just think about the anti-smoking legislation. To avoid a misunderstanding, I don't smoke, I think yes, tobacco company should be punished and so on. But I still insist there is something deeply suspicious ideologically in our obsession with the dangers of smoking. For example, recently American all American big airline companies together prohibited even electronic e-smoking, e-cigarettes. With a very strange reasoning. Not they didn't claim we still don't know maybe e-smoking is also dangerous. The reasoning was purely moralistic. They claimed that when in front of other people you use an e-cigarette you in this way display the weakness of your will, that you cannot restrain from it and in this way you give a bad example to others. I found this logic terrifying if you ask me. So the dimension which resists this regulation, what Rowan Williams designates as the capacity for perversity, addiction, self-sacrifice and so on, is the very dimension of self-sabotaging, of the pursuit of unhappiness that Freud designated as the domain of the death drive. And here I will not go too much into it I just want to say that we should be very careful about what Freud designates as death drive. We should be very careful because Freud himself I think wasn't fully aware of what he produced as a concept. It always happened with great inventors you know, when you discover it you don't really know what you discovered because you try automatically to translate it into previous old terminology. Did you notice this paradox that if you really read Freud closely, what he describes as a death drive is basically a name almost for its very opposite? I claim death drive is Freudian name for immortality even. Why? Do you remember how Freud in his Jenseits des Lustprinzips how he introduces death drive? The fundamental dimension is that of Wiederholungszwang. Why do we repeat experiences which are often or as a rule unpleasant even terrifying and so on and so on? So again in the very core of the notion of death drive is not the will to disappear "oh I want to disappear to die," but exactly the opposite. It's a weird obscene life which insists even after its biological death. It's this obscenity which is why I claim that if there are figures which embody clearly what Freud aimed at with his notion of death drive, it is rather I know of two examples, maybe they are even connected, Wagnerian opera, not Otto Wagner, not the architect, Wagnerian heroes and zombies and the living dead in horror movies and literature. Why? You know what is the problem of great Wagnerian heroes? From Fliegende Holländer to Amfortas in Parsifal. It's not that the death drive is not their wish to die, but it's precisely what keeps them alive forever. You know this like what does Fliegende Holländer want? He just wants to die in peace. And he tries for it, Amfortas again in Parsifal. The problem is that he simply, the true wound is the wound which makes you immortal. It's something which obscenely insists, repeats itself beyond life and death. It's the same with zombies and others, vampires who are precisely undead. And I claim it's very important how all these horrible images, zombies, living dead emerged precisely in the epoch of German idealism through Kant. Why? Kant himself provides the key with a wonderful crucial distinction between as he calls it a negating a predicate and affirming a non-predicate. Like if you say about someone, and here we enter Stephen King territory of living dead, I hope you will get the distinction, if we say about someone he he isn't dead, this means simply he is alive, no mistake. But if we say about someone he is undead, it's something totally different. It's someone who is neither alive nor dead but who is alive remains alive at this obscene ghost which returns even while he is or she is dead. This is for Kant the domain of infinity and it's a very mysterious infinity because it's not the noble infinity of a pure spirit, it's an obscene bodily infinity. A bodily existence which persists beyond life and death. And that's what always fascinated me, this other infinity. I think the materialist answer to to spiritualism is not "no we are only finite beings" but "there is another infinity, much more uncanny one, this as it were obscene infinity of pure undeadness, something that insists beyond life and death." And again it's clear from Freud that this is what he was really aiming at. So the Freudian death drive I claim has nothing to do with so-called Nirvana principle "we want to return to immobility." No, it's precisely some weird mobility, some existence of life which again it goes on, you cannot kill it, it goes on beyond life and death. And this is even at a certain level more generally, I don't have time to go into it now, Freud's fundamental discovery. Namely, you know, sometimes even in Lacanian circles a certain negative theology in a bad sense predominates, as if the big message of psychoanalysis is incest, full enjoyment is impossible. You know, this all this poetry of lack, "we you never get the object, you always miss it, we are just caught in this endless shifting of desire from one object to another, the big incestuous object that would fully satisfy me always is always already lost" and so on. Yes, this is one lesson of Freud, of psychoanalysis. But at the same time but this what Lacan calls jouissance, this excessive enjoyment, is not only impossible but at the same time impossible to get rid of. You cannot get rid of it. You know, the classical example here would be the economy of Zwangsneurose, of obsessional neurosis, where let's say you have a certain desire, you are ashamed of it, you want to get rid of it. How? The obsessional neurotic strategy, this is very elementary what I'm telling you, the obsessional neurotic strategy is of course to establish rituals which will protect you from it. But what happens then? Every obsessional neurotic knows it and you could believe me because I am obviously the one like if you look at me for more than five seconds and you don't get that I'm obsessional neurotic then I am sorry for you. Okay. So what I want to say is that you know but then the very measures, rituals destined to protect you from obscene pleasures get invested by this same pleasure. You start to enjoy the very rituals. This is close to what I call death drive. It's something that the more you try to squash it, you know, you destroy it here it comes up there, it just insists on and on and on. So now back to my main line. Here I just wanted to complicate a little bit the view of death drive. So the first move towards what I am tempted to call materialist theology should be to discern identify this dimension of death drive in God himself. How? Now you will say "ah now we know where we are, again Žižek's old postmodern paradoxes." No, it's more complicated. Postmodern philosophers from Nietzsche onwards as a rule prefer Catholicism over Protestantism. The idea is that Catholicism is a culture of external playful rituals in contrast to the inner sense of guilt and the pressure of authenticity that characterizes Protestantism. You know this, the best definition that I know of the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism: in both religious orientations you can do whatever you want. The Catholic addition is just you can do whatever you want just so that you just so that you confess it in your in your say you tell talk about it in your confession at the end of the week. The Protestant version is you can do whatever you want just in so far as you feel a little bit guilty while while you are doing it, no. However, I think I'm here more on a Protestant side. This playfulness of Catholicism should not deceive us. Catholicism tries to save the divine big other in his goodness, while what I immensely admire in Protestantism is predestination, precisely predestination in its irrational capricious nature. It's what we get and that's what I think is the secret of Protestantism, is a God who is is all-powerful but ultimately not good. It is stained by an indelible suspicion of being stupid, arbitrary or even outright evil. You know who developed this point in a wonderful way? A very important up there, we don't know him here which is sad, Norwegian theologian Peter Wessel Zapffe, who, back in 1930s wrote a wonderful commentary on the Book of Job, Job, you know the guy who well got screwed up. And he wrote he described Zapffe in wonderful terms the perplexity of Job when God himself finally appeared to him. Expecting a sacred and pure God whose intellect is infinitely superior to ours, Job, quote now from Zapffe, Job finds himself confronted with a world ruler of grotesque primitiveness, a comic cave dweller, a braggart and a blusterer, almost agreeable in his total ignorance of spiritual culture. What is new for Job is not God's greatness in quantifiable terms, that he knew fully in advance. What is new is the qualitative baseness of God, of God, sorry. And I think this is the original authentic moment of Christianity although I'm well aware we are still here in Judaism in ancient Testament. If you whenever student ask me "my God you talk about so much about critique of ideology, could you tell us some of great work by other writers?" I tell them Book of Job in the Bible, the first work of critique of ideology. Why? You know what happens, things look bad for Job, you know because of the bet between God and Devil Job loses everything: family, house, animals and so on. And then what happens then when Job gets desperate? Three theological friends come and each of them, that's ideology at its zero level, each of them tries to convince Job that his suffering is justified. Because read it closely the Bible, Job, Hiob, does not say "I am innocent." What he says is just "I didn't deserve this suffering. It has no meaning." The first theological friend says something like God is just, so if you don't know what you did wrong just look deeper into yourself you will find it. The second theological friend said something slightly different, like God is testing you. You are just on a trial here blah blah. So you see the point is that all of them just desperately cling to the idea that there is a deep meaning in this suffering. And then the first mega moment happens, you remember when God himself finally arrives and says directly "all that the three theological friends are saying is bullshit, all complaint of Job are justified, he spoke the truth." Then comes the most surprising moment because then Job nonetheless asks God "okay but if all this suffering of mine didn't have any deeper meaning, why then did you do it to me?" And now comes a wonderful moment which I claim is totally misread regularly, namely where God starts to boast, you know those famous lines of "where were you when I created those dragons, those creatures" and so on and so on. This is usually read as the affirmation of the infinite abyss that separates God from us common mortals, no. The idea is that God is simply moves at another dimension, we cannot even get it what God is aiming at. I think this is a totally wrong reading. I much prefer the reading of some radical even Catholic theologians like Gilbert Keith Chesterton, my favorite one, who said no that if you read in detail God's answer to Job, its message is really something like "you think you are in trouble, but you are not alone, look at the universe, I screwed up everything, it's all one big mess." It's basically the recognition of the divine if you want stupidity, impotence and so on. Which is why I will here go even a step further, problematic to some of you, when I read the accounts of not only of predestination but also of the Last Judgment. If you combine Last Judgment with predestination you get a terrifying idea: we were condemned before we even existed. So it was a total arbitrary play like we will suffer eternally not because we did something wrong but precisely because we were not touched by grace. And here there is an ingenious French theologian Malebranche, a pupil, follower of Descartes, who was the first to propose something that one cannot but call literally the material mechanic-materialist theory of grace. Following the Jansenist line although he wasn't one of them, Malebranche strictly divided grace and virtue. And this is the logic of predestination no like you can be virtuous doing good things, it doesn't matter, if in predestination you are condemned, you are not touched by grace, you will suffer. And the opposite: you may be filthy, corrupted, but by chance you are touched by divine grace, you are redeemed forever. And so that you will not think that I'm falsifying it, Malebranche even uses literally this metaphor. He said "imagine two farmers. One is diligently working all the time on his field, the other one just throws some some corn, some semen there and basically is doing nothing. But then it can happen in nature that for some contingent reasons, the lazy one gets all the rain and the good one who was working like crazy gets nothing, loses everything." And he says "it's exactly like this with divine grace. It has nothing to do with your virtuous behavior, what you are doing and so on and so on." So this idea came to me here: when you have this radical gap between your inner virtue and your tragic terrifying fate external, it no longer is a tragedy, it turns into comedy. What I am advocating advocating here is maybe a view maybe problematic to you but I think it's deeply true, that when things are really horrible you move from tragedy to comedy again. And my ultimate proof would have been here, I've written about this, I don't have time to develop it now, Primo Levi's description of Auschwitz in his famous book If This Is a Man. So many scenes there cannot but appear as comical. Okay, it's not a comedy where you laugh. It's a comedy of pure horror. For example, Primo Levi describes what he calls what was called in the camps Selektion, selection. You know, once every two months, whatever, all the prisoners were called in front of an SS doctor and it was literally a question of one second, maybe two. The doctor had a list, numbers of inmates, you were called there and let's say I'm the doctor, you run in front of me naked, just quickly for one second. And then I had as a doctor had a list with two entries: yes or no, which meant you live or you go to gas chamber. And in that split second your fate is sealed. Now the way Primo Levi describes this terrifying scene is, and that's the horror of it, it's as a weird comedy. All the comical details like when prisoners were preparing themselves for this test, they shared these secrets, you know, the point was how in that split second how to appear as strong and healthy as possible. So there were strategies of pinching your your your face, you know to appear more red and so on, all the strategies, and all the commonness of how the doctor may put you into the wrong category, he confused your number and so on and so on, it's comedy. But it's precisely the comedy which is exactly structurally the same as the comedy of as the comedy of predestination. Imagine SS Protestant God is something like this SS doctor. In a totally contingent way it barely matters what you did, you are put into redeemed or condemned for eternity. This is why I have another proof of this, this is why it's not it shouldn't surprise us, I hope you noticed this, that all good films about Holocaust are comedies. I think there is a deep insight in this. You cannot do a tragedy. Why not? Because the basic feature of tragedy is your own involvement, the tragedy of character. You know, Oedipus, you are accused of something, you discover that you yourself are part of the force that destroyed you, that it's your own character flaw or whatever, of which you were not aware, that it destroyed you. Now it's of course an ozbscenity to read to read Holocaust in this way, that you know, in Holocaust Jews met their own fate, they are ultimately responsible for it. The only guy who advocated this, I learned now, is Heidegger in his Schwarze Hefte. Where he claimed that Holocaust was a Selbstvernichtung of the Jews. That's another story. What I want to say is that imagine a Holocaust tragedy: you have a Jewish prisoner and while being tortured by the Nazis he proudly says "no kill me but you will never kill my spirit" or whatever, that's an obscenity because it already diminishes the true horror of Auschwitz. You know to act as a hero you already have to be in a situation where you are allowed to retain let's call it the minimum of dignity. The true horror of Auschwitz, Auschwitz and others, the ethical horror is precisely that it wasn't this ennobling suffering you know, if you survive Holocaust you you emerged as a wise man. I forgot her name, there is one Ruth something, sorry I forgot the name, old professor in America, she died recently, Holocaust survivor, and she has in her book of memoirs a wonderful detail. She remembers after the war in the 60s travelling to Israel with another Auschwitz survivor and they encounter there some Palestinians and this other Nazi survivor started to shout at Palestinians in the worst racist terms: "you have animals, we should kill you out of Israel" and so on. And this other person also was the proper again Auschwitz survivor with numbers tattooed and so on. And then Ruth, the heroine, said that after going through the first surprise the sad lesson got to her, that this is the true horror of Auschwitz: it did those who survived it did not emerge as some angels "oh now I know what is the ultimate suffering, now I can understand everything." No, it most of the people who survived Auschwitz, and this to avoid a misunderstanding is not a critique of survivors, but the critique of the horror of Auschwitz, survived as egotist monsters basically. You know, that's the horror. It didn't destroy you only physically, even if you survived, most of the people with few exceptions were ruined even were ruined even at this level. That's why even all Auschwitz comedies are not good comedies. To give you an example, I don't like Benigni's La vita bella. I hope you know the film and the story. You know why not? The basic idea is nice one, comedy of Auschwitz. But what I don't like is that at the very you know the story, father and son are arrested, sent to Auschwitz, and to make it easier for his son father invents a story: this is not really a prison, it's just a big competition, we are free to leave at any moment we want, but if we persist till the end we will get some big prize whatever. But at the end when father sacrifices himself you get a pathetic moment. You don't laugh there. That's the weakness. Let me make a mental experiment and tell you how I would have changed the film to make it much more desperate. Imagine that at the very end when father goes to is taken away by German soldiers to be shot in the last hours of Auschwitz before it was liberated, the son, father would become aware that not only was he cheating the son, but the son was also cheating him. That the son knew all the time that this is Auschwitz, the horror, but he pretended to believe his father to make it easier for his father. You know, wouldn't this be a true tragedy, that they were just deceiving each other? That unfortunately the film is what the film does not do. But so now I come to my central example of what does all this idea which may appear crazy of an evil God, what does it mean? Isn't all this, you will say, a mental experiment? If I'm an atheist, what does it matter is God evil or bad? There is no God. I will try to demonstrate that precisely it matters. I would like to refer to a film which is a bad film but it shocked me and I love it. It's a film called The Rapture from '91, like years ago, directed by Michael Tolkin. It's a film about Sharon, a young Los Angeles woman who works during the day as a phone operator endlessly repeating the same stupid question in a small cubicle and in the evening she engages in swinging orgies. But she gets bored, dissatisfied by this empty life, so she becomes a member of a sect which preaches that the end of times is near. So she turns into a passionate believer, begins to practice a new religious lifestyle, gets married with Randy, one of her previous swinging partners, and has a daughter, Mary, with him. Then six years later when Randy her husband, also a devoted Christian, is shot to death by a madman, this meaningless catastrophe makes her and her daughter even more convinced that the Rapture, end of times when we will be taken up into heaven or hell, is soon approaching. Sharon believes God told her to go with Mary to a nearby desert camping place and wait there until the two of them will be taken into heaven. Mary the daughter gets impatient and proposes her mother that they simply kill themselves in order to join their father in heaven quickly. After a couple of weeks Sharon does it. She kills her daughter, then wants to kill herself but cannot do it because she knows that if you committed suicide you will not be allowed into heaven, so she breaks down. She surrenders to police, admits "I did horrible things" and it's totally broken down. Up to this point the film is a standard film. You can well imagine this tragic ending, a woman who is totally broken down, all her dreams shattered and so on. But then strange things began to happen. It's an ingenious film. If you want you can download it freely because it was a commercial failure on YouTube without problem. While she is in prison, real Rapture happens, miracle. All of a sudden the prison bars fall away, two angels appear, then Sharon escapes from prison in a car and then the four riders of the Apocalypse emerge and run around the car. I find this a wonderful theological irony. The message of the director is what? He makes fun of our ordinary religious attitude which is "you know the Bible is just a metaphor, you shouldn't take the four riders literally, it's just an a plastic indication of a deeper spiritual content." The message here of God to us is: "you read the Bible and you idiot you thought I'm joking, that these are metaphors. Sorry, not metaphors, it's literally true." Then things take the final even more strange turn. Then finally Sharon is raptured, taken into another reality and she finds herself in a purgatory-like landscape. She sees Paradise somewhere far, wonderful buildings, and from there Mary her daughter approaches her and tells her that she, Mary her daughter, and Randy her husband, that they are both waiting for her, for Sharon, in Paradise. She just have to say "Jesus I love you" and she will be there. And now comes the authentically ethical heroic act. Sharon says "no I will not do it." Sharon says "I cannot say I love God who was so cruel towards me and my family. I don't love God. I will not do it." Then the last seconds of the film, the daughter asks her "but do you know how long if you don't say you love Jesus how long you will be confined to the Purgatory here, just looking at Paradise but never entering it?" And Sharon replies "I know. Forever." The end of the film. Now if this is not a strange film. I love it. Why? Because you know I claim that the true temptation to be resisted is to declare our love for a God even if a God who doesn't deserve it, even if he is real. In other words, the message of this film for me is precisely what Jacques Lacan tried to say when he wrote that the true formula of atheism is not "God doesn't exist" but but "God is unconscious." So you know it's a counterfactual question: even if God doesn't exist, it matters which is the God who doesn't exist. I think that the truly radical thing, and I am not anti-Christian here, I think that's the ultimate message even of Christianity, it's to ask the question which is the God like to avoid the usual benevolent atheist answer which is what? God doesn't exist but my God it is a beautiful dream, it expresses all that is most noble in us, so even if God doesn't exist we should follow God as an impossible ideal and so on. I think that so again the message is "I know there is no God, but he God is nonetheless a noble uplifting illusion." I think this is the worst version. We should say exactly the opposite. God not only doesn't exist, but if he exists, he is evil. What why what does this mean? Ah, now comes the central part and then some concluding concluding remarks. I'm very sorry now I will do something that I hate to do but it's unfortunately crucial. I will repeat a joke which I according to my account I quoted in my books around times. And it's such a well-known joke that I'm sure that you all know it. But nonetheless you are not obliged to laugh but I will tell it because it's a central one, especially for how ideology functions today and it directly bears on what I just developed about divine inexistence. The joke, I'm so ashamed I'm sorry, you know, the joke about that madman who thought that he is a piece of grain, corn. and he is cured of it and is is left from psychiatric hospital but quickly comes running back. The psychiatrist asking him "why did you come back?" and the guy says "because I encountered a chicken and I was afraid that the chicken will eat me," no. And the doctor tells him "but now you know you are not a piece of corn, you are human," and you know the joke, no. The the patient says "I know it, that I'm no longer a piece of corn but a human, but does the chicken know it?" I and this idea of "does the chicken know it?" so that it's not enough for me to know it, the chicken also has to know it. This is I think the very basic premise of what Marx calls commodity fetishism. Even in psychoanalysis, chicken stands for your unconscious. It's not enough for your conscious ego for you to know. Of course we all know it. You know, this is why as Freud warns us, the most dangerous patients are the patients who immediately accept it, you know like "oh you say that woman whom I want to screw is my my mother? No problem, of course," and so on, you know. It means simply your interpretation didn't touch the real in the patient. So again, it's not enough for you to know, it's for your unconscious, for the chicken to learn to accept it. Or applied to God, but I will come to this immediately later, it's not enough for you to know that there is no God. God himself in the fiction has to accept his non-existence. And I claim this happens only in Christianity with Eli Eli lama sabachthani, you know that moment when Christ says "Father why have you forsaken me?" And I did my theological groundwork here. I asked so many of my friends, even some bishops, some American Methodist theologians, a very simple question: when Jesus complains on the cross just before dying that "Father why have you forsaken me?", is he joking or is he serious? I wasn't able to get a consistent answer. Why? Because if he is joking, then the crucifixion was just a spectacle to impress us humans, you know. That's horrible. But if Christ meant it seriously, it means God himself stopped to believing God. He thought he is, you know, how could God himself believe that he is abandoned by God and so on? So you know that the most stupid way to squeeze out I found in some Catholic commentary, it's incredible what I mean I really think that the greatest threat to authentic Christianity is the church itself. You know what they wrote there? That when Christ become embodied in human body, that they refer to this primitive Aristotelian ontology, that every body has an animal soul which is just the soul organizing, controlling the body. So that the voice which says "Father, Father why have you forsaken me?", it's not the true Christ but his animal soul, bodily soul. I mean it's total obscenity. But I want to say if this, let's go on, that isn't something exactly similar that Marx says about commodity fetishism? Here is how the famous final subchapter of the chapter one of Capital, subchapter on the fetishism, Warenfetischismus, and its secret begins, quote: "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." End of quote. Are you aware how surprising these lines are? Marx is not claiming in our everyday life we are caught in fetishist religious illusions while in reality these mysteries are just produced by actual production process, our real social life. He says almost the exact opposite. He says that in our self-perception, conscious, we think that we live in ordinary reality. But what we are not aware are precisely the theological dimension, the illusions which structure our actual life. You have to be very careful here. When Marx proposes this formula for ideology in his Capital: Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es. It doesn't simply mean they don't know what they are doing. It means they don't know what illusions they they follow in their actual life. You see the subtlety. We know it. For example, that's the point of Marx. The illusion is not in what I think but in it is in how I act in reality. The illusion structures my actual life. For example, an ordinary bourgeois subject, of course he knows there is nothing mysterious about money, it's just a piece of paper which gives me right to a certain part of social product and so on and so on. The point of Marx is that in the actuality of exchange you follow illusions. Fetishism is in how you act in your social reality, not in how you not in what you think. And Marx even invents here a wonderful animistic metaphor where in order to describe the logic of commodities he says: "if commodities could speak they would say this." So you know the illusion is there in how commodities relate relate to each other. And my so this is why as Marx points out, it's not enough for us to know that commodity fetishism is an illusion. We can be fully aware that it's an illusion but we still follow it in real life. To go back to my joke, the chicken or the commodities should learn. Which means we should change our actual social practice. Or to give you another example here which I borrowed from my good friend Slovene Lacanian Alenka Zupančič. You can imagine the same example as of a chicken apropos God. Imagine some terrorist atheist society where if you believe in God you are brought into an institute where they teach you to be an atheist. Okay, then you see there is no God, you are set free, and you come running back claiming that you are afraid that that that God will punish you. And then your professor terrorist tells you "but you know now that God doesn't exist." And your answer should be "of course I know that God doesn't exist, but does God know that now?" You know the beauty of this you see is the efficiency of illusions. Here I would like to refer to one of your great philosophers, you are not afraid what great philosopher you are not aware, sorry, of what great philosophers you have among yourselves, your own Robert Pfaller, who developed wonderfully these ideas through his term interpassivity. How it's not only that others can be active for us, others can also be passive for us. And especially he developed this wonderfully at the level of beliefs. Nobody wants to believe in first person today. We live in a cynical society but nonetheless I claim our society is perhaps less atheist than any previous one because we believe interpassively through others. Like I always ask my Jewish friends, but the same goes for all of them, for like or for example all those kosher rules. Do you really believe that they are divine rules? The answer that they usually get is something like "no I don't believe it, but my parents believe it and not to offend them I do it," and so on. And we can go here endlessly on. Ask a normal parent today "do you believe in Santa Claus?" They they would say "of course not, I'm not an idiot, I I buy the the presents." But then ask the children. And they will say "of course not, but I pretend to not to hurt my parents and to get the presents." So that's absolutely crucial. You have a certain social belief which functions in social actuality even if nobody believes in it. There are beliefs which function although nobody believes. And allow me here to to to give you another last my last example in this series, again a joke that I used times, but it's a perfect one, I'm sorry for those of you who know it, about Niels Bohr, you know Copenhagen quantum physics. Niels Bohr I read this in a biography of Niels Bohr, had a small country house in Sealand in in close to Copenhagen and there one weekend a friend scientist friend visited him and saw above the entrance a a horseshoe. You know in our European society horseshoe as far as I'm aware is a superstitious item allegedly preventing evil spirits to enter the home. And the shocked friend asks him, Niels Bohr, "but you are a scientist, do you believe in this?" And of course Niels Bohr says "I'm not stupid, of course I don't believe in it." Then the friend asks him "but why then do you have it there?" Bohr was a genius. You know what was his answer? "Of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." You know, isn't this how ideology functions today? Nobody believes in democracy, in justice and so on and I would but you know we behave as if it somehow works even we don't believe in it. Even I claim with regard to sexuality we function more and more like that today. Like it shouldn't deceive you the apparent promiscuity, like parents although now it's disappearing, at least in the 60s, 70s it was swinging orgies and so on. But I was told this by an American psychiatrist who looked into it. It's so interesting how practically all of adults who were doing this had to have a point of ignorance: their children, their grandparents, who shouldn't know about it. You know, this other stood for the big other, the social authority. You can do it but it must be ignored by the big other. And this is how I think the truth of our so-called permissive times. That's why you should be still proud of Freud, don't buy the bullshit which tells you that in our permissive era who needs psychoanalysis and so on. Now we need it more than ever because the problem of Freud is not "I want free sex but some paternal authority prohibits it so I have to get rid of this authority." No, to cut a long story short, if you read Freud really carefully, the true trauma is not the prohibitive father. If you have that kind of father, it's okay, you will rebel against him, it the father who makes you impotent is precisely the one who even solicits you, who tells you "are you a boy? Did you already fuck some girls?" and so on. You know, this obscene father who solicits you. So the problem today is not that enjoyments are prohibited, it's that we feel guilty if we are not able to enjoy. And again many of my psychoanalytic friends are telling me the same story: people don't feel guilty today, most of the patients, like "I am an I am a deeply religious Christian but I have weird desires, I feel guilty." No, you feel guilty if you cannot enjoy. And I think that psycho the task of psychoanalysis today is not to enable you to freely enjoy but to enable you to free yourself from this über-ich pressure to enjoy. What psychoanalyst should learn you, should teach you today is to see how not "you cannot enjoy," it's not oppression, but you are not obliged to enjoy. That's a very important distinction. So again now my last line of thought, so you see again my central point now, that even if God is officially dead, this is I think the best definition of our postmodern cynical era, it continues to exist precisely as inexistence in this mode of denial. There is no God but back to psychoanalysis sorry. You know what is one proof of how actual Freud is? Again we apparently live in permissive era, but did you notice how the elementary lesson of Freud which is infantile sexuality almost totally disappeared. It's I think that this is the other side of our permissive era, this elevation of pedophilia into the ultimate crime. Children are desexualized again. So my point is don't believe in all this stuff that Freud is outdated and so on and so on. Only today we confront the paradoxes which really bothered Sigmund Freud. Like the paradoxes of permissivity, the paradoxes of how precisely in our era which presents itself as an era of hedonist permissivity we have more impotence and frigidity than ever and so on and so on. You know, the true problem is not "I prohibit you something." It's why the best way to sabotage it is precisely ordering you to enjoy it, this superego über-ich dimension of enjoyment. So in this sense, the point of it matters what God is even if there is no God, is precisely the point of the problem is to convince the chicken, you know, that is to say it's not enough for us to know that God doesn't exist. God stands here generally for ideological illusion and so on. The important thing is that the fiction of God no longer structures our reality. But is this possible? Now of course the last complication. I think we should read all these paradoxes that I developed against the background of a wonderful distinction elaborated by my good friend, French theoretician of catastrophes Jean-Pierre Dupuy, D-U-P-U-Y, I wonder why he isn't more translated into German. His idea of counterfactuals, things which are not factually true and how they can operate. The starting point of Dupuy is this distinction between two types of conditional propositions. If you say "if Shakespeare did not write Hamlet, someone else did it," this is obviously true because we have Hamlet as a text, somebody had to write it, if not Shakespeare then some someone else. But be careful here, listen. If you say "if Shakespeare had not written Hamlet, someone else would have done it," this is much more problematic. It basically involves a kind of historical determinism, like even if Shakespeare if Hamlet the idea is that there was some kind of a historical tendency towards a play like Hamlet and if were not for Shakespeare then another writer would have probably written something similar. It's the same, this is also for example a rather vulgar traditional Marxist theory of Napoleon. The idea is that there was a general historical necessity in the French Revolution of passage from radical revolution to Empire and it happened by Napoleon. If not Napoleon, another guy would have to play the same role. Here how so is it contingency, just things happen, or is there a deeper necessity behind? Here Dupuy proposes a wonderful version. His idea is that there is contingency, things happen contingently, but once they happen they become retroactively necessary. It's like love. You know, you contingently fall in love. I don't know, you slip on the street, you broke your leg, you are taken to an emergency room and then you encounter there a guy or a girl, the love of your life, and of course then you restructure all your life into "all my life I was waiting for that moment" and so on and so on. Or the big historical element: Caesar crossing the Rubicon. It wasn't his fate, he could have well decided otherwise, but once he did it, it was his fate. Retroactively you know, this subtle idea of retroactively changing the past. Okay, this is an elaborate notion, I don't want to talk too long about it, so I will just give you another example if for those of you I hope it's all of you who love cinema and know Hitchcock's Vertigo. There you have a nice example of this. When when Madeleine dies throwing herself from the tower, so it appears, Scottie the hero is desperate, he lost her. But something much more mysterious happens when towards the end of the film Scottie learns that the Judy, the vulgar girl, was the one who played Madeleine before, that the true Madeleine never existed. Here in a way not at factual level but counterfactually the past itself changes. What he experiences is not only that Madeleine is dead, but that Madeleine never existed. You know, the idea is we can change past, of course not factually but counterfactually, with regard to what might have happened, we can change the past. I will not go too much into it, just to conclude two points. The first point would have been that the paradoxical lesson of this notion of counterfactuals, how we can change the past counterfactually its status of contingency necessity and so on, the lesson is that not only one can deduce true statement from a false premise, Stoics already knew it, but in a very precisely defined way we can only arrive at truth sometimes if we select the right lie. Let me give you an example. Did you see the film, it's not a great film but interesting, Polanski's Ghost, based on the novel by Robert Harris? It's basically a film about Tony Blair. Okay, it's another name that it used. The idea is that a writer who is hired to write a fake autobiography of Tony Blair, in the film called Adam Lang, discovers that Tony Blair was from the beginning his wife was CIA agents, planted by CIA to make it sure that even if the Labour wins elections they will have a pro-American president. And an a British journalist in Observer reviewing the film said something wonderful. He said that although we know this is not true, if it were true it would explain everything. You see the paradox. Sometimes you can only see the truth by from the perspective of what is factually a lie. There is another example similar that I like from my own past. I remember in Socialist ex-Yugoslavia as well as so I was told by my friends in most communist countries there was a a myth, a very popular all-pervasive myth that there is an ultra-secret department in the secret police whose function was not to collect but to invent and put in circulation political jokes making fun of their own communist politicians. Why? The idea is that they were well aware and I guarantee you it's true, that you know people were dissatisfied, furious and if you offer them jokes to laugh at you, it's an easy way for them to release their frustrations, they will not make demonstration and so on. Now this is for theoretical reasons, it's clear for me, this is not true. There was no secret secret department fabricating jokes. But there is a truth in this lie, an insight into the let's call it falsely subversive constructive role of political jokes. And here then the true analysis begins. Now I will even go to the end here and claim that maybe even the idea of Communism, at least the way it was elaborated by Marx, and I am saying this as still some kind of a communist, is such a lie. A lie in the sense that it's clear for me, at least from today's experience, that the communism of Marx is a kind of inherent ideal of capitalism itself. What Marx really dreamt about was capitalism without capitalism. That is to say a society which would maintain all the basic characteristics of capitalism, while developing productive forces, expanding, progress without capital. He literally wanted capitalist dynamics without capital. So although it's a lie, it's nonetheless the a necessary lie, a lie which allows you to diagnose the antagonisms of capitalism. So in other words, if we want to move really out of capitalism, we should move beyond this Marxian notion of Communism and a step further and so on and so on. The the next thing that I would like if you allow me just a little bit of time to develop here is oh my god this is such a beautiful topic but it would have been a lesson of its own. How how this notion that I am referring to implicitly throughout my talk of different versions, alternatives as immanent to reality, you remember already at beginning when I mentioned how to how the wealth of our life is not just what we experienced but the missed opportunities, is the whole panoply of what might have happened and what didn't, of what did happen to us and what might have happened but didn't happen to us. And it's the same with counterfactuals: to understand what happened you have to understand what didn't happen in order that that what happened happened. Counterfactual possibilities if and so on are part of the identity of what happened. So my points would have been that that in this way we should approach again literature and theology. For example, I always loved this idea which is usually dismissed as postmodern procedure of imagining a work of art but with a different ending where events took a different turn. I think these are not just postmodern games. Sometimes a change like this allows you to see the work of art in a totally new way. I'm here, I don't have time to develop it. I'm here referring if you know Walter Benjamin to his wonderful reference to Kabbalah to the notion of broken vessel and how comparing using this metaphor for the work of translation where basically what Benjamin is saying is that a true translator doesn't imitate the original in the sense of coming as close as possible to it, but a true translator as he puts it treats original and his translation as two fragments of a broken vessel. In other words, if you are a truly good translator you discover what is missing in the original and you try to bring out that. Which is why I claim again even a better example would have been these different endings. For example, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, who died, was a great opera director. I don't like him especially but one thing he did was ingenious. In his famous Bayreuth version of Tristan, he just introduced a small change in Act Isolde never arrives. The idea is simply that Tristan is dying alone and the final appearance of Isolde is just his dream, so that he can die in peace thinking that she is there. In reality Isolde had an adventure and then said "well life is life, let me stay with my husband," no. And it's so incredibly painful, you know. The final Liebestod of Isolde is staged so that Tristan looks into the audience and behind him as seen in the audience is strongly lighted like a kind of a spectral figure of Isolde singing, and then when she stops singing, you have two three seconds of silence. At that time all the lights are turned off and then they are turned on and you see everything is gray, Tristan is alone there. I think that this is a totally new look on it. And I would go to the end here and apply the same onto Gospel itself. The seven words of Christ, they are a the only way to read them is in this counterfactual way. The most stupid thing you can do, my God if we were to still live in medieval times I would say you should burn them, are two terrible films about Christ, Mel Gibson's Passion and and that Italian fascist, my god, Zeffirelli literally he was, you know, a fascist member of parliament, neo-fascist, extreme right-winger. What they did is that you know the last words of Christ: "I'm finished," "Father why did you abandon me," all of them, you know. He tries to both try to reconstruct them into a linear narrative. You know, as if Christ said first this then that. And the effect is extremely obscene and vulgar. The effect is that you know just before saying Eli Eli lama sabachthani Christ or after that Christ said "I'm thirsty" and then "now it's finished," no. It's as if Christ said "Father why have you forsaken me?" then he feels thirst "oh I'm thirsty," he gets drunk he says "okay now it's finished, Father I'm..." you know it's extreme. The whole point is that, you know, it's like what in quantum physics even they call superposition. All of them are true at the same time. It's we have to have this openness to be ready to imagine change. And in this sense again that would be the deepest lesson of Judeo-Christianity for me. God himself is not all truth. God himself is part of a broken vessel. It's not, you see the catch, it's not that we finite human beings are broken and try to approach God. No, there is reality because God is broken in himself. This is the terrifying insight of of Kabbalah. So the final joke, again maybe some of you know it, I cannot help it, world is finite. What I am against is precisely this pragmatic notion and that should be the lesson the Freudian lesson for us today, pragmatic notion as of sexuality as something which simply concerns our pleasures, how to be perfectly satisfied and so on and so on. I claim that if you follow this line, you end up where? Now comes the story that I used many times but not here in Austria so I hope it will be new to at least some of you. About two years ago I was asked by Guardian magazine what is happening with romance today, is it still possible? And I made the following proposal. You know that we have today not only plastic penises for women with battery so that they shake and so on, dildos or how you call them. We have now more and more also the feminine counterpart of the vibrator: plastic vaginas. They are called officially, I love this, the weird name is stamina training unit. It looks like a big battery so that you are not embarrassed carrying it, and then you take off the cup and there is a hole there. Then now comes the beauty: you can put different plastic covers on the hole: anal, mouth, vagina, with different quantity of hair and so on and so on. And then you can regulate the tightness and the strength of shaking and you put it on and it works, you know. So what would be then the ideal couple today? Well, if you have dirty imagination you already have the clear picture. Let's say I'm flirting with a lady and we both want to do it perfect. Okay. So we make a date. But what happens there is that each of us comes with his or her plastic counterpart. She comes with her vibrator, I come with my plastic vagina and what we did, this is almost a notion of paradise for me, maybe because I'm so old already. First we put both machines on and then we simply push her vibrator into my vagina and you know the machines are enjoying out there, buzzing and so on, and I can have a nice tea with the lady you know. We are relieved of this über-ich duty to enjoy, machines are doing the duty for us. And where is here a chance for sex? Maybe just maybe here. We talk nicely, maybe when I pour some tea for her and she to me, our hands marginally meet and oh my god we hold each other hands too long, it goes on, and that would have been the true sex if then we end up in bed because it wouldn't be this superego sex you know, the machines already covered that. We have no duty, it would be real pure sex again where the machines already enjoyed for us, we don't have to enjoy. And that's I claim more and more difficult for us to imagine today in our societies. We live in very sad times. How can I prove this? Did you notice something strange in the one before the last which was Quantum of Solace James Bond film? It's the first James Bond without sex at the end. Did you notice this? Olga Kurylenko and Daniel Craig at the end they just embrace each other, they are traumatized, they split. The same happens in the worst lowest of the lowest of modern kitsch, Dan Brown novels. Did you notice how already in The Da Vinci Code no sex. How can you screw Jesus's grand-granddaughter? and I think that's the proper Freudian way to read The Da Vinci Code. Why do they what's the big news of the movie, what every idiot knows, that Jesus and Mary whatever Magdalene were married. But the way I read it is why does the poor God himself have to have sex to cover up the fact that here there is no sex? You remember between who is the actress I forgot who played the grand-granddaughter of Jesus and Robert Langdon, Tom Hanks, no sex here. In the next film Angels Demons, which is a previous novel, it's even more weird. There is sex in the novel at the end, but no sex in the film. And I don't think there is anything anti-sexist redemptive in it. I think this is a moment of a very sad development in our societies. We are so deeply in narcissistic obsessed with harassment stance that already to truly passionately fall in love, it's considered dangerous. This is why as my good friend Alain Badiou draw my attention to this, this is why we more and more have resort to dating agencies, marriage agencies and so on. You know, in not in German but in French and English, no sorry just yes, we use the term fall, to fall in love, tomber. This is what we are afraid, which is why as Alain Badiou told me, he found some advertisement for marriage agencies and dating and I found them them in England where they directly play on this: the idea is we will enable you to find yourself in love without the fall. The fall is precisely that moment of encounter you know, you're surprised, you the the void, the openness. No, we want to control this, we want to be sure in advance. And the result is where we are. We live in hedonism, but hedonism which is a self-defeating hedonism. I I claim that the tragedy of today's hedonism is that and even some psychologists and sociologists told me, you know that there is less and less sex for example even among adolescents recently. We are more and more within this logic of artificial gadgets and so on. We are more and more in virtual sex. To encounter a real human being it's simply too traumatic, to open ourselves to it. And I think this is maybe one of the things which engenders so-called terrorism. Terrorism promises the touch of the real. Of course I not don't in any way support it, but what I'm saying is that to conclude with this political insight, it's that I'm unconditionally against terrorism. No sympathy for them. I even don't care if you accuse me of I'm often accused now of Islamophobia, you know. No, one should criticize them. All I'm saying is that what we should do is raise another question, which is why did global capitalism give rise to fundamentalism? Because if there is something that is clear, it's that this rise of new religious fundamentalism, it's not something reactionary in the sense of something from ancient time resisting, it's purely a contemporary phenomenon. It's one of the weird reactions immanent to it to the process of capitalist globalization. So my point is simply that we don't realize that the problem is how difficult it is today to imagine really an alternative. Let me conclude with one of the saddest stories that I've read. I read somewhere that that cognitive scientists are already experimenting with drugs which can change your perception of time. Like in reality it passes only let's say minutes, but you experience it as half a year, one year. Now what depresses me is how the institute which is developing this drug tried to get finances, money for it. The first application that they thought of was prisons. Let's say I'm a great scientist but I do a crime and they claim and I'm condemned to two years. I claim wouldn't it be a great loss for society to lose me for two years? So why wouldn't they just give me that drug and in reality it would take one one hour, two, but I would have experienced it as two years. So you know I would have paid my debt subjectively but I would remain of great service to society. Isn't it so sad that such a big invention, and the first maybe I'm a dirty old man, but my first association was why not use it in sex? You go on for minutes it feels like two years, you know like. Why why you know we are not aware of how difficult it is to imagine really an alternative today. The ultimate proof for me are precisely science fiction movies where you know the more they try to paint another world the more you see we cannot we cannot get out. That's why we should stick to in the terms that I developed here, the divine dimension and Kierkegaard, another of my favorite ones, put it nicely, he said God simply means a possibility of radical otherness in the sense of a possibility for things to be radically different. This is the way in which I am a materialist Christian as I say. You know, to we should keep just this most elementary notion of religious experience which is totally materialist for me and deeply Freudian, because if death drive means something it's precisely that we are never at home in our environment, that there is always a gap. And that's our only hope. I was too long I know but on the other hand what could you have done? You were obliged to listen to me. Thanks very much. No, no, stop, stop. I will now repeat the last of my old jokes. I'm a communist, I warn you. When we will take over you will be obliged to applaud, so keep your energy for that time, no. Thanks very much, I'm honored to be here and I really think that what you, my God, I hope just that there will be at some point the second Vienna Renaissance. Do you know that like years ago you were as they put it in Star Wars the center of the known universe, no. I mean everything that was here, name it, Freud, Schönberg and so on. Who knows maybe this time will come again. I hope it will because precisely you are not in the center. I never trust big cities, even like in United States I'm often there, forget about Harvard and so on. These are today at least in my field, social sciences, totally corrupted non-productive universities. Interesting things happen in small so you here are in a good position because you are rich enough to resist the true horror which is called Bologna University reform which is one big attack on what Kant calls public use of reason. The idea of Bologna reform is basically we need experts to solve real problems. No, to be an intellectual is something totally different. It's not simply to solve problems the way they are presented to you by others. The task of intellectual when somebody says "we have a problem today" is to see to what extent the way we formulate problem a problem is already part of a problem. You know, for example they tell us "today we find fundamentalism." I say "okay but let's see to what extent we are complicit in creating a situation which generates fundamentalism." You see this dimension of proper intellectual reflection is missing. They want experts. I was in a debate in France where some member of a a state committee put things wonderfully. He said "we have [you remember those cars which were burning in the suburbs of Paris some three-four years ago] he told me this minister or whatever, vice-minister, that "you see now we have a problem. We need you specialists, we need urbanists to tell us how to restructure suburbs so that it's easier to dominate demonstrations, we need psychologists to" and so on and so on. That's the nightmare. This is the end of intellectual life. We need precisely a totally useless knowledge. So to conclude this, sorry, the last joke. You know it probably most of you, but I love it so much that I will repeat it. When I was young under communism in most of our school classes rooms there were those famous words by Lenin, you know, Lenin's advice to young people: "learn, learn and learn." And we had a wonderful obscene joke about this: that three they gathered them together of course it's a nonsensical joke Marx, Engels and Lenin and asked them what would you prefer to have: wife or a mistress? Marx, conservative, says "a wife." Engels, more bon vivant, says "a mistress." Lenin answers "both." And they are surprised like the ascetic Lenin what if he a pervert. And they ask him why and Lenin he said "well so that I can tell my wife that I am with my mistress and I can tell my mistress that I am with my wife." And then they ask Lenin: "okay but what do you really do then?" And the answer is: "learn, learn and learn." Thank you very much, this is why Žižek stands for existing system and mistress for transgression. We should do exactly this. We should find a time to withdraw and learn, learn and learn. With this I've really finished. Thank you. If I'm so popular here then I already advise here, we can organize next meeting but make prices much more higher and we split the profit, no? Okay, it's a good
immediate critical reproach: does this not bring us back to the ancient platitude or wisdom "just do it, don't think about it"? I think no. Why? Here I would again like to refer to Adam Phillips to the second point he makes about suffering. Again a quote from Phillips's interview: "Patients come because they are suffering from something. They want that suffering to be alleviated. Ideally in the process of doing analysis they might find their suffering is alleviated or modified. But also they might discover that there are more important things than to alleviate one's suffering." Here Phillips is interrupted by the guy who did this interview, Paul Holdengräber, who says: "Do you feel in some way that you have failed when a patient leaves your office feeling better?" The answer of Adam Phillips: "I don't think the project is to make people feel better, nor is it to make people feel worse. It's not to make them feel anything. It's simply to allow them to see what it is they do feel." End of quote. And I think this is a wonderful point. Every authentic psychoanalyst when at the end of the psychoanalytic session when he sees that the patient feels much better, is full of joy and so on, optimism, he must be horrified, like "what did I do wrong?" But does Phillips not contradict himself here? Is making people see what it is they do feel not bringing about a kind of self-knowledge? The answer is that knowledge gained in psychoanalysis is a knowledge to be forgotten, discarded. Once I see what it is that I feel I don't go on dwelling in it, I just leave it behind. Why? Not and incidentally you can find a wonderful example in Freud here when he reports in his Rat Man analysis text that when he met Rat Man some years later he was surprised to discover that Rat Man has forgotten everything about the analysis, didn't remember anything. So why? Not because of some decisionist mystique like I just have to act, don't think, but because the true task of analysis is to open up a void in the midst of our subjectivity. When we discard the knowledge gained in analysis we open ourselves to this void. Therein resides even I claim the link between psychoanalysis and love. In love, the last quote from Adam Phillips: "We really do know the other person in some profound sense and also we really don't know him or her. And you could think that the fantasy of knowing is spurred or prompted by something like 'this person has a powerful effect on me and it's so overwhelming that I'm going to manage this through a fantasy of knowledge.' For Proust for example, knowing people is often very much about dealing with the anxiety that one cannot control them." End of quote. So you see the message is not here just epistemological one "I cannot ever fully know another person or myself." It's more ontological. We cannot know the other because the other the other's identity is cracked open, constructed around a void. In the very core of our subjectivity there is a void, an openness towards future. And the difficult thing is to accept that, that openness, that void in the heart of the other. It is into this void that then alternatives, possible alternatives how to change your identity are located, into this void. Which is why I think that one of the best definitions of a rich life is that it comprises not only what you actually do or experience but also all the missed failed opportunities, what you didn't do but might have done. To know myself is not only to know about what I did, it should include what I failed to do. And maybe in my person this takes an especially perverse form because I like to go to a great city like Vienna or Venice, Venezia, or New York and precisely stay in my hotel and don't go out. People tell me "but why didn't you simply stay at home?" No, I said, the pleasure is precisely like to stay in a nice hotel on on Grand Canal in Venice and precisely, look it's out there, I look through the window, I may have gone there but I didn't. I this is often a much more lively experience I claim. And now things will be slowly getting a little bit more serious because I claim that this brings us to theology. In what sense? To avoid any misunderstanding, I am a total card-carrying atheist. I don't play these games which are popular today about you know how "okay God is dead, God as some primitive entity, but in this void of the absence of God some voice is addressing us" and so on, you know this so-called post-secular theology. No, I am an atheist, but still I think there is some truth in religion totally ignored by the aggressive atheists which are now fashionable from Richard Dawkins to to to all other best-selling authors. What what is let's call it the core of religious experience? I will refer here to my, I'm honored to say this, my good friend the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams who, commenting on the work of four British Catholic novelists, O'Connor, Percy, Spark and Ellis, recently wrote, quote from Rowan Williams: "All four create a world in which the secular majority account of what is going on is severely relativized. But there is no simple alternative that anyone can step into by a single decision. The religious dimension of these fictions lies in the existent sense of incongruity, unmistakable even if no one within the fiction can say what we should be congruent with." End of quote. So this is for me the authentic negative theology. The term negative theology is usually used to designate the idea that God as the absolute beyond cannot be described by any positive determinations. So we can only circumscribe the place of God in a negative way: God is neither infinite nor finite, neither ideal nor real, neither being nor non-being and so on. But what if in contrast to this notion of God as a pure in-itself beyond all categorial determinations we locate negativity into God himself? Positing that the experience of the divine is at its most elementary a negative experience in the sense described by Rowan Williams: the experience of how our lives are, to refer to Shakespeare what Hamlet says, out of joint. At its most radical, religion is thus not the opium for the people. The opium of and for the people is today as we all know more and more opium itself, drugs. But an awareness of incongruity or inexistence, sorry, inconsistency of our reality. The core of religious experience resides in the insight into the broken character of our world, its inconsistency. The basic religious experience is thus opposed not only to the naive scientific materialism but also to the notion of reality which runs from Spinoza through Nietzsche up to Foucault and Deleuze, the notion of reality which emphasizes the absolute self-immanence of reality. The idea is that there is no lack in reality, reality is the fullness of the productive process of life. The absolute according to this view is not a transcendent entity but the immanent life force of the wealth of reality and all appearances of some transcendent power which controls, regulates or oppresses the immanent flow of life are engendered by the contradictions of this life process itself. Such view is not even necessarily materialist. The immanent absolute can also be spiritualized. For example, I don't like the books but they are well known, Tolkien's Middle-earth books, Lord of the Rings and so on. I think his Tolkien's world is materialist. It is an enchanted world full of magic forces, evil and good spirits and so on, but strangely I hope you noticed this, at least if you saw the best-selling films, strangely without Gods. There are no transcendent divine entities in Tolkien's universe. All magic is immanent to matter, a spiritual power which dwells in our terrestrial world. And the opposite also holds. The basic religious experience of the out-of-jointness of our world does not necessarily imply the assertion of some higher spiritual reality. It can also be formulated in materialist terms. And I think primarily it even is a materialist experience. In what sense? I hope you got my point. It's not that there is God and when as they say God dies, withdraws, we feel a void. I think in a Hegelian way the void comes first and the God positive divinity comes in a second step to fill in that void. What is the name of that void? Let me again quote Rowan Williams who wrote apropos Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, a longer quote from Rowan Williams: "The right-minded liberal of his time assumes that when human beings are authoritatively shown what is good for them they will want it and choose it. But the fact is that human beings are not so constructed. People will not readily accept any would-be definitive account of what is in their interest. In other words, part of the distinctively human existence is the capacity for perversity, addiction, self-sacrifice, self-destruction and the whole range of rationally indefensible behaviors. Remove this capacity and two things result: the distinctively human dimension disappears and is replaced by a pattern of ordered but mechanical interactions and violence is canonized as the means of social rationalization because the amputation of irrational human needs or wants can only be effected by force." End of quote. Naive and simplistic as this view may seem it fully resonates with today's predominant normativity of enlightened hedonism. Today pleasures are allowed, promoted even, in so far as they serve healthy reproduction. For example, we are being told "yes make love, engage in sex because" and this for me at least ruins everything, "because sex is good for health" and so on and so on. Like I was horrified on a recent flight to United States, I didn't have anything to do so I read that Spheres or what, the magazine of United Airlines, and I found there a text promoting sex. But it's the most depressing text I read. It says "it's good to make love because it's good for your muscles, you will be much more fit when you are It also advises you to do a lot of deep French kissing because it's good for the strength of your lips so that when you are old you will not ruin saliva and so on and so on. So then we get experts who know what is good for us and are thereby justified in regulating our lives. A regulation which can go up to the amputation of those of our needs which are perceived as irrational or dysfunctional. Just think about the anti-smoking legislation. To avoid a misunderstanding, I don't smoke, I think yes, tobacco company should be punished and so on. But I still insist there is something deeply suspicious ideologically in our obsession with the dangers of smoking. For example, recently American all American big airline companies together prohibited even electronic e-smoking, e-cigarettes. With a very strange reasoning. Not they didn't claim we still don't know maybe e-smoking is also dangerous. The reasoning was purely moralistic. They claimed that when in front of other people you use an e-cigarette you in this way display the weakness of your will, that you cannot restrain from it and in this way you give a bad example to others. I found this logic terrifying if you ask me. So the dimension which resists this regulation, what Rowan Williams designates as the capacity for perversity, addiction, self-sacrifice and so on, is the very dimension of self-sabotaging, of the pursuit of unhappiness that Freud designated as the domain of the death drive. And here I will not go too much into it I just want to say that we should be very careful about what Freud designates as death drive. We should be very careful because Freud himself I think wasn't fully aware of what he produced as a concept. It always happened with great inventors you know, when you discover it you don't really know what you discovered because you try automatically to translate it into previous old terminology. Did you notice this paradox that if you really read Freud closely, what he describes as a death drive is basically a name almost for its very opposite? I claim death drive is Freudian name for immortality even. Why? Do you remember how Freud in his Jenseits des Lustprinzips how he introduces death drive? The fundamental dimension is that of Wiederholungszwang. Why do we repeat experiences which are often or as a rule unpleasant even terrifying and so on and so on? So again in the very core of the notion of death drive is not the will to disappear "oh I want to disappear to die," but exactly the opposite. It's a weird obscene life which insists even after its biological death. It's this obscenity which is why I claim that if there are figures which embody clearly what Freud aimed at with his notion of death drive, it is rather I know of two examples, maybe they are even connected, Wagnerian opera, not Otto Wagner, not the architect, Wagnerian heroes and zombies and the living dead in horror movies and literature. Why? You know what is the problem of great Wagnerian heroes? From Fliegende Holländer to Amfortas in Parsifal. It's not that the death drive is not their wish to die, but it's precisely what keeps them alive forever. You know this like what does Fliegende Holländer want? He just wants to die in peace. And he tries for it, Amfortas again in Parsifal. The problem is that he simply, the true wound is the wound which makes you immortal. It's something which obscenely insists, repeats itself beyond life and death. It's the same with zombies and others, vampires who are precisely undead. And I claim it's very important how all these horrible images, zombies, living dead emerged precisely in the epoch of German idealism through Kant. Why? Kant himself provides the key with a wonderful crucial distinction between as he calls it a negating a predicate and affirming a non-predicate. Like if you say about someone, and here we enter Stephen King territory of living dead, I hope you will get the distinction, if we say about someone he he isn't dead, this means simply he is alive, no mistake. But if we say about someone he is undead, it's something totally different. It's someone who is neither alive nor dead but who is alive remains alive at this obscene ghost which returns even while he is or she is dead. This is for Kant the domain of infinity and it's a very mysterious infinity because it's not the noble infinity of a pure spirit, it's an obscene bodily infinity. A bodily existence which persists beyond life and death. And that's what always fascinated me, this other infinity. I think the materialist answer to to spiritualism is not "no we are only finite beings" but "there is another infinity, much more uncanny one, this as it were obscene infinity of pure undeadness, something that insists beyond life and death." And again it's clear from Freud that this is what he was really aiming at. So the Freudian death drive I claim has nothing to do with so-called Nirvana principle "we want to return to immobility." No, it's precisely some weird mobility, some existence of life which again it goes on, you cannot kill it, it goes on beyond life and death. And this is even at a certain level more generally, I don't have time to go into it now, Freud's fundamental discovery. Namely, you know, sometimes even in Lacanian circles a certain negative theology in a bad sense predominates, as if the big message of psychoanalysis is incest, full enjoyment is impossible. You know, this all this poetry of lack, "we you never get the object, you always miss it, we are just caught in this endless shifting of desire from one object to another, the big incestuous object that would fully satisfy me always is always already lost" and so on. Yes, this is one lesson of Freud, of psychoanalysis. But at the same time but this what Lacan calls jouissance, this excessive enjoyment, is not only impossible but at the same time impossible to get rid of. You cannot get rid of it. You know, the classical example here would be the economy of Zwangsneurose, of obsessional neurosis, where let's say you have a certain desire, you are ashamed of it, you want to get rid of it. How? The obsessional neurotic strategy, this is very elementary what I'm telling you, the obsessional neurotic strategy is of course to establish rituals which will protect you from it. But what happens then? Every obsessional neurotic knows it and you could believe me because I am obviously the one like if you look at me for more than five seconds and you don't get that I'm obsessional neurotic then I am sorry for you. Okay. So what I want to say is that you know but then the very measures, rituals destined to protect you from obscene pleasures get invested by this same pleasure. You start to enjoy the very rituals. This is close to what I call death drive. It's something that the more you try to squash it, you know, you destroy it here it comes up there, it just insists on and on and on. So now back to my main line. Here I just wanted to complicate a little bit the view of death drive. So the first move towards what I am tempted to call materialist theology should be to discern identify this dimension of death drive in God himself. How? Now you will say "ah now we know where we are, again Žižek's old postmodern paradoxes." No, it's more complicated. Postmodern philosophers from Nietzsche onwards as a rule prefer Catholicism over Protestantism. The idea is that Catholicism is a culture of external playful rituals in contrast to the inner sense of guilt and the pressure of authenticity that characterizes Protestantism. You know this, the best definition that I know of the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism: in both religious orientations you can do whatever you want. The Catholic addition is just you can do whatever you want just so that you just so that you confess it in your in your say you tell talk about it in your confession at the end of the week. The Protestant version is you can do whatever you want just in so far as you feel a little bit guilty while while you are doing it, no. However, I think I'm here more on a Protestant side. This playfulness of Catholicism should not deceive us. Catholicism tries to save the divine big other in his goodness, while what I immensely admire in Protestantism is predestination, precisely predestination in its irrational capricious nature. It's what we get and that's what I think is the secret of Protestantism, is a God who is is all-powerful but ultimately not good. It is stained by an indelible suspicion of being stupid, arbitrary or even outright evil. You know who developed this point in a wonderful way? A very important up there, we don't know him here which is sad, Norwegian theologian Peter Wessel Zapffe, who, back in 1930s wrote a wonderful commentary on the Book of Job, Job, you know the guy who well got screwed up. And he wrote he described Zapffe in wonderful terms the perplexity of Job when God himself finally appeared to him. Expecting a sacred and pure God whose intellect is infinitely superior to ours, Job, quote now from Zapffe, Job finds himself confronted with a world ruler of grotesque primitiveness, a comic cave dweller, a braggart and a blusterer, almost agreeable in his total ignorance of spiritual culture. What is new for Job is not God's greatness in quantifiable terms, that he knew fully in advance. What is new is the qualitative baseness of God, of God, sorry. And I think this is the original authentic moment of Christianity although I'm well aware we are still here in Judaism in ancient Testament. If you whenever student ask me "my God you talk about so much about critique of ideology, could you tell us some of great work by other writers?" I tell them Book of Job in the Bible, the first work of critique of ideology. Why? You know what happens, things look bad for Job, you know because of the bet between God and Devil Job loses everything: family, house, animals and so on. And then what happens then when Job gets desperate? Three theological friends come and each of them, that's ideology at its zero level, each of them tries to convince Job that his suffering is justified. Because read it closely the Bible, Job, Hiob, does not say "I am innocent." What he says is just "I didn't deserve this suffering. It has no meaning." The first theological friend says something like God is just, so if you don't know what you did wrong just look deeper into yourself you will find it. The second theological friend said something slightly different, like God is testing you. You are just on a trial here blah blah. So you see the point is that all of them just desperately cling to the idea that there is a deep meaning in this suffering. And then the first mega moment happens, you remember when God himself finally arrives and says directly "all that the three theological friends are saying is bullshit, all complaint of Job are justified, he spoke the truth." Then comes the most surprising moment because then Job nonetheless asks God "okay but if all this suffering of mine didn't have any deeper meaning, why then did you do it to me?" And now comes a wonderful moment which I claim is totally misread regularly, namely where God starts to boast, you know those famous lines of "where were you when I created those dragons, those creatures" and so on and so on. This is usually read as the affirmation of the infinite abyss that separates God from us common mortals, no. The idea is that God is simply moves at another dimension, we cannot even get it what God is aiming at. I think this is a totally wrong reading. I much prefer the reading of some radical even Catholic theologians like Gilbert Keith Chesterton, my favorite one, who said no that if you read in detail God's answer to Job, its message is really something like "you think you are in trouble, but you are not alone, look at the universe, I screwed up everything, it's all one big mess." It's basically the recognition of the divine if you want stupidity, impotence and so on. Which is why I will here go even a step further, problematic to some of you, when I read the accounts of not only of predestination but also of the Last Judgment. If you combine Last Judgment with predestination you get a terrifying idea: we were condemned before we even existed. So it was a total arbitrary play like we will suffer eternally not because we did something wrong but precisely because we were not touched by grace. And here there is an ingenious French theologian Malebranche, a pupil, follower of Descartes, who was the first to propose something that one cannot but call literally the material mechanic-materialist theory of grace. Following the Jansenist line although he wasn't one of them, Malebranche strictly divided grace and virtue. And this is the logic of predestination no like you can be virtuous doing good things, it doesn't matter, if in predestination you are condemned, you are not touched by grace, you will suffer. And the opposite: you may be filthy, corrupted, but by chance you are touched by divine grace, you are redeemed forever. And so that you will not think that I'm falsifying it, Malebranche even uses literally this metaphor. He said "imagine two farmers. One is diligently working all the time on his field, the other one just throws some some corn, some semen there and basically is doing nothing. But then it can happen in nature that for some contingent reasons, the lazy one gets all the rain and the good one who was working like crazy gets nothing, loses everything." And he says "it's exactly like this with divine grace. It has nothing to do with your virtuous behavior, what you are doing and so on and so on." So this idea came to me here: when you have this radical gap between your inner virtue and your tragic terrifying fate external, it no longer is a tragedy, it turns into comedy. What I am advocating advocating here is maybe a view maybe problematic to you but I think it's deeply true, that when things are really horrible you move from tragedy to comedy again. And my ultimate proof would have been here, I've written about this, I don't have time to develop it now, Primo Levi's description of Auschwitz in his famous book If This Is a Man. So many scenes there cannot but appear as comical. Okay, it's not a comedy where you laugh. It's a comedy of pure horror. For example, Primo Levi describes what he calls what was called in the camps Selektion, selection. You know, once every two months, whatever, all the prisoners were called in front of an SS doctor and it was literally a question of one second, maybe two. The doctor had a list, numbers of inmates, you were called there and let's say I'm the doctor, you run in front of me naked, just quickly for one second. And then I had as a doctor had a list with two entries: yes or no, which meant you live or you go to gas chamber. And in that split second your fate is sealed. Now the way Primo Levi describes this terrifying scene is, and that's the horror of it, it's as a weird comedy. All the comical details like when prisoners were preparing themselves for this test, they shared these secrets, you know, the point was how in that split second how to appear as strong and healthy as possible. So there were strategies of pinching your your your face, you know to appear more red and so on, all the strategies, and all the commonness of how the doctor may put you into the wrong category, he confused your number and so on and so on, it's comedy. But it's precisely the comedy which is exactly structurally the same as the comedy of as the comedy of predestination. Imagine SS Protestant God is something like this SS doctor. In a totally contingent way it barely matters what you did, you are put into redeemed or condemned for eternity. This is why I have another proof of this, this is why it's not it shouldn't surprise us, I hope you noticed this, that all good films about Holocaust are comedies. I think there is a deep insight in this. You cannot do a tragedy. Why not? Because the basic feature of tragedy is your own involvement, the tragedy of character. You know, Oedipus, you are accused of something, you discover that you yourself are part of the force that destroyed you, that it's your own character flaw or whatever, of which you were not aware, that it destroyed you. Now it's of course an ozbscenity to read to read Holocaust in this way, that you know, in Holocaust Jews met their own fate, they are ultimately responsible for it. The only guy who advocated this, I learned now, is Heidegger in his Schwarze Hefte. Where he claimed that Holocaust was a Selbstvernichtung of the Jews. That's another story. What I want to say is that imagine a Holocaust tragedy: you have a Jewish prisoner and while being tortured by the Nazis he proudly says "no kill me but you will never kill my spirit" or whatever, that's an obscenity because it already diminishes the true horror of Auschwitz. You know to act as a hero you already have to be in a situation where you are allowed to retain let's call it the minimum of dignity. The true horror of Auschwitz, Auschwitz and others, the ethical horror is precisely that it wasn't this ennobling suffering you know, if you survive Holocaust you you emerged as a wise man. I forgot her name, there is one Ruth something, sorry I forgot the name, old professor in America, she died recently, Holocaust survivor, and she has in her book of memoirs a wonderful detail. She remembers after the war in the 60s travelling to Israel with another Auschwitz survivor and they encounter there some Palestinians and this other Nazi survivor started to shout at Palestinians in the worst racist terms: "you have animals, we should kill you out of Israel" and so on. And this other person also was the proper again Auschwitz survivor with numbers tattooed and so on. And then Ruth, the heroine, said that after going through the first surprise the sad lesson got to her, that this is the true horror of Auschwitz: it did those who survived it did not emerge as some angels "oh now I know what is the ultimate suffering, now I can understand everything." No, it most of the people who survived Auschwitz, and this to avoid a misunderstanding is not a critique of survivors, but the critique of the horror of Auschwitz, survived as egotist monsters basically. You know, that's the horror. It didn't destroy you only physically, even if you survived, most of the people with few exceptions were ruined even were ruined even at this level. That's why even all Auschwitz comedies are not good comedies. To give you an example, I don't like Benigni's La vita bella. I hope you know the film and the story. You know why not? The basic idea is nice one, comedy of Auschwitz. But what I don't like is that at the very you know the story, father and son are arrested, sent to Auschwitz, and to make it easier for his son father invents a story: this is not really a prison, it's just a big competition, we are free to leave at any moment we want, but if we persist till the end we will get some big prize whatever. But at the end when father sacrifices himself you get a pathetic moment. You don't laugh there. That's the weakness. Let me make a mental experiment and tell you how I would have changed the film to make it much more desperate. Imagine that at the very end when father goes to is taken away by German soldiers to be shot in the last hours of Auschwitz before it was liberated, the son, father would become aware that not only was he cheating the son, but the son was also cheating him. That the son knew all the time that this is Auschwitz, the horror, but he pretended to believe his father to make it easier for his father. You know, wouldn't this be a true tragedy, that they were just deceiving each other? That unfortunately the film is what the film does not do. But so now I come to my central example of what does all this idea which may appear crazy of an evil God, what does it mean? Isn't all this, you will say, a mental experiment? If I'm an atheist, what does it matter is God evil or bad? There is no God. I will try to demonstrate that precisely it matters. I would like to refer to a film which is a bad film but it shocked me and I love it. It's a film called The Rapture from '91, like years ago, directed by Michael Tolkin. It's a film about Sharon, a young Los Angeles woman who works during the day as a phone operator endlessly repeating the same stupid question in a small cubicle and in the evening she engages in swinging orgies. But she gets bored, dissatisfied by this empty life, so she becomes a member of a sect which preaches that the end of times is near. So she turns into a passionate believer, begins to practice a new religious lifestyle, gets married with Randy, one of her previous swinging partners, and has a daughter, Mary, with him. Then six years later when Randy her husband, also a devoted Christian, is shot to death by a madman, this meaningless catastrophe makes her and her daughter even more convinced that the Rapture, end of times when we will be taken up into heaven or hell, is soon approaching. Sharon believes God told her to go with Mary to a nearby desert camping place and wait there until the two of them will be taken into heaven. Mary the daughter gets impatient and proposes her mother that they simply kill themselves in order to join their father in heaven quickly. After a couple of weeks Sharon does it. She kills her daughter, then wants to kill herself but cannot do it because she knows that if you committed suicide you will not be allowed into heaven, so she breaks down. She surrenders to police, admits "I did horrible things" and it's totally broken down. Up to this point the film is a standard film. You can well imagine this tragic ending, a woman who is totally broken down, all her dreams shattered and so on. But then strange things began to happen. It's an ingenious film. If you want you can download it freely because it was a commercial failure on YouTube without problem. While she is in prison, real Rapture happens, miracle. All of a sudden the prison bars fall away, two angels appear, then Sharon escapes from prison in a car and then the four riders of the Apocalypse emerge and run around the car. I find this a wonderful theological irony. The message of the director is what? He makes fun of our ordinary religious attitude which is "you know the Bible is just a metaphor, you shouldn't take the four riders literally, it's just an a plastic indication of a deeper spiritual content." The message here of God to us is: "you read the Bible and you idiot you thought I'm joking, that these are metaphors. Sorry, not metaphors, it's literally true." Then things take the final even more strange turn. Then finally Sharon is raptured, taken into another reality and she finds herself in a purgatory-like landscape. She sees Paradise somewhere far, wonderful buildings, and from there Mary her daughter approaches her and tells her that she, Mary her daughter, and Randy her husband, that they are both waiting for her, for Sharon, in Paradise. She just have to say "Jesus I love you" and she will be there. And now comes the authentically ethical heroic act. Sharon says "no I will not do it." Sharon says "I cannot say I love God who was so cruel towards me and my family. I don't love God. I will not do it." Then the last seconds of the film, the daughter asks her "but do you know how long if you don't say you love Jesus how long you will be confined to the Purgatory here, just looking at Paradise but never entering it?" And Sharon replies "I know. Forever." The end of the film. Now if this is not a strange film. I love it. Why? Because you know I claim that the true temptation to be resisted is to declare our love for a God even if a God who doesn't deserve it, even if he is real. In other words, the message of this film for me is precisely what Jacques Lacan tried to say when he wrote that the true formula of atheism is not "God doesn't exist" but but "God is unconscious." So you know it's a counterfactual question: even if God doesn't exist, it matters which is the God who doesn't exist. I think that the truly radical thing, and I am not anti-Christian here, I think that's the ultimate message even of Christianity, it's to ask the question which is the God like to avoid the usual benevolent atheist answer which is what? God doesn't exist but my God it is a beautiful dream, it expresses all that is most noble in us, so even if God doesn't exist we should follow God as an impossible ideal and so on. I think that so again the message is "I know there is no God, but he God is nonetheless a noble uplifting illusion." I think this is the worst version. We should say exactly the opposite. God not only doesn't exist, but if he exists, he is evil. What why what does this mean? Ah, now comes the central part and then some concluding concluding remarks. I'm very sorry now I will do something that I hate to do but it's unfortunately crucial. I will repeat a joke which I according to my account I quoted in my books around times. And it's such a well-known joke that I'm sure that you all know it. But nonetheless you are not obliged to laugh but I will tell it because it's a central one, especially for how ideology functions today and it directly bears on what I just developed about divine inexistence. The joke, I'm so ashamed I'm sorry, you know, the joke about that madman who thought that he is a piece of grain, corn. and he is cured of it and is is left from psychiatric hospital but quickly comes running back. The psychiatrist asking him "why did you come back?" and the guy says "because I encountered a chicken and I was afraid that the chicken will eat me," no. And the doctor tells him "but now you know you are not a piece of corn, you are human," and you know the joke, no. The the patient says "I know it, that I'm no longer a piece of corn but a human, but does the chicken know it?" I and this idea of "does the chicken know it?" so that it's not enough for me to know it, the chicken also has to know it. This is I think the very basic premise of what Marx calls commodity fetishism. Even in psychoanalysis, chicken stands for your unconscious. It's not enough for your conscious ego for you to know. Of course we all know it. You know, this is why as Freud warns us, the most dangerous patients are the patients who immediately accept it, you know like "oh you say that woman whom I want to screw is my my mother? No problem, of course," and so on, you know. It means simply your interpretation didn't touch the real in the patient. So again, it's not enough for you to know, it's for your unconscious, for the chicken to learn to accept it. Or applied to God, but I will come to this immediately later, it's not enough for you to know that there is no God. God himself in the fiction has to accept his non-existence. And I claim this happens only in Christianity with Eli Eli lama sabachthani, you know that moment when Christ says "Father why have you forsaken me?" And I did my theological groundwork here. I asked so many of my friends, even some bishops, some American Methodist theologians, a very simple question: when Jesus complains on the cross just before dying that "Father why have you forsaken me?", is he joking or is he serious? I wasn't able to get a consistent answer. Why? Because if he is joking, then the crucifixion was just a spectacle to impress us humans, you know. That's horrible. But if Christ meant it seriously, it means God himself stopped to believing God. He thought he is, you know, how could God himself believe that he is abandoned by God and so on? So you know that the most stupid way to squeeze out I found in some Catholic commentary, it's incredible what I mean I really think that the greatest threat to authentic Christianity is the church itself. You know what they wrote there? That when Christ become embodied in human body, that they refer to this primitive Aristotelian ontology, that every body has an animal soul which is just the soul organizing, controlling the body. So that the voice which says "Father, Father why have you forsaken me?", it's not the true Christ but his animal soul, bodily soul. I mean it's total obscenity. But I want to say if this, let's go on, that isn't something exactly similar that Marx says about commodity fetishism? Here is how the famous final subchapter of the chapter one of Capital, subchapter on the fetishism, Warenfetischismus, and its secret begins, quote: "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." End of quote. Are you aware how surprising these lines are? Marx is not claiming in our everyday life we are caught in fetishist religious illusions while in reality these mysteries are just produced by actual production process, our real social life. He says almost the exact opposite. He says that in our self-perception, conscious, we think that we live in ordinary reality. But what we are not aware are precisely the theological dimension, the illusions which structure our actual life. You have to be very careful here. When Marx proposes this formula for ideology in his Capital: Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es. It doesn't simply mean they don't know what they are doing. It means they don't know what illusions they they follow in their actual life. You see the subtlety. We know it. For example, that's the point of Marx. The illusion is not in what I think but in it is in how I act in reality. The illusion structures my actual life. For example, an ordinary bourgeois subject, of course he knows there is nothing mysterious about money, it's just a piece of paper which gives me right to a certain part of social product and so on and so on. The point of Marx is that in the actuality of exchange you follow illusions. Fetishism is in how you act in your social reality, not in how you not in what you think. And Marx even invents here a wonderful animistic metaphor where in order to describe the logic of commodities he says: "if commodities could speak they would say this." So you know the illusion is there in how commodities relate relate to each other. And my so this is why as Marx points out, it's not enough for us to know that commodity fetishism is an illusion. We can be fully aware that it's an illusion but we still follow it in real life. To go back to my joke, the chicken or the commodities should learn. Which means we should change our actual social practice. Or to give you another example here which I borrowed from my good friend Slovene Lacanian Alenka Zupančič. You can imagine the same example as of a chicken apropos God. Imagine some terrorist atheist society where if you believe in God you are brought into an institute where they teach you to be an atheist. Okay, then you see there is no God, you are set free, and you come running back claiming that you are afraid that that that God will punish you. And then your professor terrorist tells you "but you know now that God doesn't exist." And your answer should be "of course I know that God doesn't exist, but does God know that now?" You know the beauty of this you see is the efficiency of illusions. Here I would like to refer to one of your great philosophers, you are not afraid what great philosopher you are not aware, sorry, of what great philosophers you have among yourselves, your own Robert Pfaller, who developed wonderfully these ideas through his term interpassivity. How it's not only that others can be active for us, others can also be passive for us. And especially he developed this wonderfully at the level of beliefs. Nobody wants to believe in first person today. We live in a cynical society but nonetheless I claim our society is perhaps less atheist than any previous one because we believe interpassively through others. Like I always ask my Jewish friends, but the same goes for all of them, for like or for example all those kosher rules. Do you really believe that they are divine rules? The answer that they usually get is something like "no I don't believe it, but my parents believe it and not to offend them I do it," and so on. And we can go here endlessly on. Ask a normal parent today "do you believe in Santa Claus?" They they would say "of course not, I'm not an idiot, I I buy the the presents." But then ask the children. And they will say "of course not, but I pretend to not to hurt my parents and to get the presents." So that's absolutely crucial. You have a certain social belief which functions in social actuality even if nobody believes in it. There are beliefs which function although nobody believes. And allow me here to to to give you another last my last example in this series, again a joke that I used times, but it's a perfect one, I'm sorry for those of you who know it, about Niels Bohr, you know Copenhagen quantum physics. Niels Bohr I read this in a biography of Niels Bohr, had a small country house in Sealand in in close to Copenhagen and there one weekend a friend scientist friend visited him and saw above the entrance a a horseshoe. You know in our European society horseshoe as far as I'm aware is a superstitious item allegedly preventing evil spirits to enter the home. And the shocked friend asks him, Niels Bohr, "but you are a scientist, do you believe in this?" And of course Niels Bohr says "I'm not stupid, of course I don't believe in it." Then the friend asks him "but why then do you have it there?" Bohr was a genius. You know what was his answer? "Of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." You know, isn't this how ideology functions today? Nobody believes in democracy, in justice and so on and I would but you know we behave as if it somehow works even we don't believe in it. Even I claim with regard to sexuality we function more and more like that today. Like it shouldn't deceive you the apparent promiscuity, like parents although now it's disappearing, at least in the 60s, 70s it was swinging orgies and so on. But I was told this by an American psychiatrist who looked into it. It's so interesting how practically all of adults who were doing this had to have a point of ignorance: their children, their grandparents, who shouldn't know about it. You know, this other stood for the big other, the social authority. You can do it but it must be ignored by the big other. And this is how I think the truth of our so-called permissive times. That's why you should be still proud of Freud, don't buy the bullshit which tells you that in our permissive era who needs psychoanalysis and so on. Now we need it more than ever because the problem of Freud is not "I want free sex but some paternal authority prohibits it so I have to get rid of this authority." No, to cut a long story short, if you read Freud really carefully, the true trauma is not the prohibitive father. If you have that kind of father, it's okay, you will rebel against him, it the father who makes you impotent is precisely the one who even solicits you, who tells you "are you a boy? Did you already fuck some girls?" and so on. You know, this obscene father who solicits you. So the problem today is not that enjoyments are prohibited, it's that we feel guilty if we are not able to enjoy. And again many of my psychoanalytic friends are telling me the same story: people don't feel guilty today, most of the patients, like "I am an I am a deeply religious Christian but I have weird desires, I feel guilty." No, you feel guilty if you cannot enjoy. And I think that psycho the task of psychoanalysis today is not to enable you to freely enjoy but to enable you to free yourself from this über-ich pressure to enjoy. What psychoanalyst should learn you, should teach you today is to see how not "you cannot enjoy," it's not oppression, but you are not obliged to enjoy. That's a very important distinction. So again now my last line of thought, so you see again my central point now, that even if God is officially dead, this is I think the best definition of our postmodern cynical era, it continues to exist precisely as inexistence in this mode of denial. There is no God but back to psychoanalysis sorry. You know what is one proof of how actual Freud is? Again we apparently live in permissive era, but did you notice how the elementary lesson of Freud which is infantile sexuality almost totally disappeared. It's I think that this is the other side of our permissive era, this elevation of pedophilia into the ultimate crime. Children are desexualized again. So my point is don't believe in all this stuff that Freud is outdated and so on and so on. Only today we confront the paradoxes which really bothered Sigmund Freud. Like the paradoxes of permissivity, the paradoxes of how precisely in our era which presents itself as an era of hedonist permissivity we have more impotence and frigidity than ever and so on and so on. You know, the true problem is not "I prohibit you something." It's why the best way to sabotage it is precisely ordering you to enjoy it, this superego über-ich dimension of enjoyment. So in this sense, the point of it matters what God is even if there is no God, is precisely the point of the problem is to convince the chicken, you know, that is to say it's not enough for us to know that God doesn't exist. God stands here generally for ideological illusion and so on. The important thing is that the fiction of God no longer structures our reality. But is this possible? Now of course the last complication. I think we should read all these paradoxes that I developed against the background of a wonderful distinction elaborated by my good friend, French theoretician of catastrophes Jean-Pierre Dupuy, D-U-P-U-Y, I wonder why he isn't more translated into German. His idea of counterfactuals, things which are not factually true and how they can operate. The starting point of Dupuy is this distinction between two types of conditional propositions. If you say "if Shakespeare did not write Hamlet, someone else did it," this is obviously true because we have Hamlet as a text, somebody had to write it, if not Shakespeare then some someone else. But be careful here, listen. If you say "if Shakespeare had not written Hamlet, someone else would have done it," this is much more problematic. It basically involves a kind of historical determinism, like even if Shakespeare if Hamlet the idea is that there was some kind of a historical tendency towards a play like Hamlet and if were not for Shakespeare then another writer would have probably written something similar. It's the same, this is also for example a rather vulgar traditional Marxist theory of Napoleon. The idea is that there was a general historical necessity in the French Revolution of passage from radical revolution to Empire and it happened by Napoleon. If not Napoleon, another guy would have to play the same role. Here how so is it contingency, just things happen, or is there a deeper necessity behind? Here Dupuy proposes a wonderful version. His idea is that there is contingency, things happen contingently, but once they happen they become retroactively necessary. It's like love. You know, you contingently fall in love. I don't know, you slip on the street, you broke your leg, you are taken to an emergency room and then you encounter there a guy or a girl, the love of your life, and of course then you restructure all your life into "all my life I was waiting for that moment" and so on and so on. Or the big historical element: Caesar crossing the Rubicon. It wasn't his fate, he could have well decided otherwise, but once he did it, it was his fate. Retroactively you know, this subtle idea of retroactively changing the past. Okay, this is an elaborate notion, I don't want to talk too long about it, so I will just give you another example if for those of you I hope it's all of you who love cinema and know Hitchcock's Vertigo. There you have a nice example of this. When when Madeleine dies throwing herself from the tower, so it appears, Scottie the hero is desperate, he lost her. But something much more mysterious happens when towards the end of the film Scottie learns that the Judy, the vulgar girl, was the one who played Madeleine before, that the true Madeleine never existed. Here in a way not at factual level but counterfactually the past itself changes. What he experiences is not only that Madeleine is dead, but that Madeleine never existed. You know, the idea is we can change past, of course not factually but counterfactually, with regard to what might have happened, we can change the past. I will not go too much into it, just to conclude two points. The first point would have been that the paradoxical lesson of this notion of counterfactuals, how we can change the past counterfactually its status of contingency necessity and so on, the lesson is that not only one can deduce true statement from a false premise, Stoics already knew it, but in a very precisely defined way we can only arrive at truth sometimes if we select the right lie. Let me give you an example. Did you see the film, it's not a great film but interesting, Polanski's Ghost, based on the novel by Robert Harris? It's basically a film about Tony Blair. Okay, it's another name that it used. The idea is that a writer who is hired to write a fake autobiography of Tony Blair, in the film called Adam Lang, discovers that Tony Blair was from the beginning his wife was CIA agents, planted by CIA to make it sure that even if the Labour wins elections they will have a pro-American president. And an a British journalist in Observer reviewing the film said something wonderful. He said that although we know this is not true, if it were true it would explain everything. You see the paradox. Sometimes you can only see the truth by from the perspective of what is factually a lie. There is another example similar that I like from my own past. I remember in Socialist ex-Yugoslavia as well as so I was told by my friends in most communist countries there was a a myth, a very popular all-pervasive myth that there is an ultra-secret department in the secret police whose function was not to collect but to invent and put in circulation political jokes making fun of their own communist politicians. Why? The idea is that they were well aware and I guarantee you it's true, that you know people were dissatisfied, furious and if you offer them jokes to laugh at you, it's an easy way for them to release their frustrations, they will not make demonstration and so on. Now this is for theoretical reasons, it's clear for me, this is not true. There was no secret secret department fabricating jokes. But there is a truth in this lie, an insight into the let's call it falsely subversive constructive role of political jokes. And here then the true analysis begins. Now I will even go to the end here and claim that maybe even the idea of Communism, at least the way it was elaborated by Marx, and I am saying this as still some kind of a communist, is such a lie. A lie in the sense that it's clear for me, at least from today's experience, that the communism of Marx is a kind of inherent ideal of capitalism itself. What Marx really dreamt about was capitalism without capitalism. That is to say a society which would maintain all the basic characteristics of capitalism, while developing productive forces, expanding, progress without capital. He literally wanted capitalist dynamics without capital. So although it's a lie, it's nonetheless the a necessary lie, a lie which allows you to diagnose the antagonisms of capitalism. So in other words, if we want to move really out of capitalism, we should move beyond this Marxian notion of Communism and a step further and so on and so on. The the next thing that I would like if you allow me just a little bit of time to develop here is oh my god this is such a beautiful topic but it would have been a lesson of its own. How how this notion that I am referring to implicitly throughout my talk of different versions, alternatives as immanent to reality, you remember already at beginning when I mentioned how to how the wealth of our life is not just what we experienced but the missed opportunities, is the whole panoply of what might have happened and what didn't, of what did happen to us and what might have happened but didn't happen to us. And it's the same with counterfactuals: to understand what happened you have to understand what didn't happen in order that that what happened happened. Counterfactual possibilities if and so on are part of the identity of what happened. So my points would have been that that in this way we should approach again literature and theology. For example, I always loved this idea which is usually dismissed as postmodern procedure of imagining a work of art but with a different ending where events took a different turn. I think these are not just postmodern games. Sometimes a change like this allows you to see the work of art in a totally new way. I'm here, I don't have time to develop it. I'm here referring if you know Walter Benjamin to his wonderful reference to Kabbalah to the notion of broken vessel and how comparing using this metaphor for the work of translation where basically what Benjamin is saying is that a true translator doesn't imitate the original in the sense of coming as close as possible to it, but a true translator as he puts it treats original and his translation as two fragments of a broken vessel. In other words, if you are a truly good translator you discover what is missing in the original and you try to bring out that. Which is why I claim again even a better example would have been these different endings. For example, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, who died, was a great opera director. I don't like him especially but one thing he did was ingenious. In his famous Bayreuth version of Tristan, he just introduced a small change in Act Isolde never arrives. The idea is simply that Tristan is dying alone and the final appearance of Isolde is just his dream, so that he can die in peace thinking that she is there. In reality Isolde had an adventure and then said "well life is life, let me stay with my husband," no. And it's so incredibly painful, you know. The final Liebestod of Isolde is staged so that Tristan looks into the audience and behind him as seen in the audience is strongly lighted like a kind of a spectral figure of Isolde singing, and then when she stops singing, you have two three seconds of silence. At that time all the lights are turned off and then they are turned on and you see everything is gray, Tristan is alone there. I think that this is a totally new look on it. And I would go to the end here and apply the same onto Gospel itself. The seven words of Christ, they are a the only way to read them is in this counterfactual way. The most stupid thing you can do, my God if we were to still live in medieval times I would say you should burn them, are two terrible films about Christ, Mel Gibson's Passion and and that Italian fascist, my god, Zeffirelli literally he was, you know, a fascist member of parliament, neo-fascist, extreme right-winger. What they did is that you know the last words of Christ: "I'm finished," "Father why did you abandon me," all of them, you know. He tries to both try to reconstruct them into a linear narrative. You know, as if Christ said first this then that. And the effect is extremely obscene and vulgar. The effect is that you know just before saying Eli Eli lama sabachthani Christ or after that Christ said "I'm thirsty" and then "now it's finished," no. It's as if Christ said "Father why have you forsaken me?" then he feels thirst "oh I'm thirsty," he gets drunk he says "okay now it's finished, Father I'm..." you know it's extreme. The whole point is that, you know, it's like what in quantum physics even they call superposition. All of them are true at the same time. It's we have to have this openness to be ready to imagine change. And in this sense again that would be the deepest lesson of Judeo-Christianity for me. God himself is not all truth. God himself is part of a broken vessel. It's not, you see the catch, it's not that we finite human beings are broken and try to approach God. No, there is reality because God is broken in himself. This is the terrifying insight of of Kabbalah. So the final joke, again maybe some of you know it, I cannot help it, world is finite. What I am against is precisely this pragmatic notion and that should be the lesson the Freudian lesson for us today, pragmatic notion as of sexuality as something which simply concerns our pleasures, how to be perfectly satisfied and so on and so on. I claim that if you follow this line, you end up where? Now comes the story that I used many times but not here in Austria so I hope it will be new to at least some of you. About two years ago I was asked by Guardian magazine what is happening with romance today, is it still possible? And I made the following proposal. You know that we have today not only plastic penises for women with battery so that they shake and so on, dildos or how you call them. We have now more and more also the feminine counterpart of the vibrator: plastic vaginas. They are called officially, I love this, the weird name is stamina training unit. It looks like a big battery so that you are not embarrassed carrying it, and then you take off the cup and there is a hole there. Then now comes the beauty: you can put different plastic covers on the hole: anal, mouth, vagina, with different quantity of hair and so on and so on. And then you can regulate the tightness and the strength of shaking and you put it on and it works, you know. So what would be then the ideal couple today? Well, if you have dirty imagination you already have the clear picture. Let's say I'm flirting with a lady and we both want to do it perfect. Okay. So we make a date. But what happens there is that each of us comes with his or her plastic counterpart. She comes with her vibrator, I come with my plastic vagina and what we did, this is almost a notion of paradise for me, maybe because I'm so old already. First we put both machines on and then we simply push her vibrator into my vagina and you know the machines are enjoying out there, buzzing and so on, and I can have a nice tea with the lady you know. We are relieved of this über-ich duty to enjoy, machines are doing the duty for us. And where is here a chance for sex? Maybe just maybe here. We talk nicely, maybe when I pour some tea for her and she to me, our hands marginally meet and oh my god we hold each other hands too long, it goes on, and that would have been the true sex if then we end up in bed because it wouldn't be this superego sex you know, the machines already covered that. We have no duty, it would be real pure sex again where the machines already enjoyed for us, we don't have to enjoy. And that's I claim more and more difficult for us to imagine today in our societies. We live in very sad times. How can I prove this? Did you notice something strange in the one before the last which was Quantum of Solace James Bond film? It's the first James Bond without sex at the end. Did you notice this? Olga Kurylenko and Daniel Craig at the end they just embrace each other, they are traumatized, they split. The same happens in the worst lowest of the lowest of modern kitsch, Dan Brown novels. Did you notice how already in The Da Vinci Code no sex. How can you screw Jesus's grand-granddaughter? and I think that's the proper Freudian way to read The Da Vinci Code. Why do they what's the big news of the movie, what every idiot knows, that Jesus and Mary whatever Magdalene were married. But the way I read it is why does the poor God himself have to have sex to cover up the fact that here there is no sex? You remember between who is the actress I forgot who played the grand-granddaughter of Jesus and Robert Langdon, Tom Hanks, no sex here. In the next film Angels Demons, which is a previous novel, it's even more weird. There is sex in the novel at the end, but no sex in the film. And I don't think there is anything anti-sexist redemptive in it. I think this is a moment of a very sad development in our societies. We are so deeply in narcissistic obsessed with harassment stance that already to truly passionately fall in love, it's considered dangerous. This is why as my good friend Alain Badiou draw my attention to this, this is why we more and more have resort to dating agencies, marriage agencies and so on. You know, in not in German but in French and English, no sorry just yes, we use the term fall, to fall in love, tomber. This is what we are afraid, which is why as Alain Badiou told me, he found some advertisement for marriage agencies and dating and I found them them in England where they directly play on this: the idea is we will enable you to find yourself in love without the fall. The fall is precisely that moment of encounter you know, you're surprised, you the the void, the openness. No, we want to control this, we want to be sure in advance. And the result is where we are. We live in hedonism, but hedonism which is a self-defeating hedonism. I I claim that the tragedy of today's hedonism is that and even some psychologists and sociologists told me, you know that there is less and less sex for example even among adolescents recently. We are more and more within this logic of artificial gadgets and so on. We are more and more in virtual sex. To encounter a real human being it's simply too traumatic, to open ourselves to it. And I think this is maybe one of the things which engenders so-called terrorism. Terrorism promises the touch of the real. Of course I not don't in any way support it, but what I'm saying is that to conclude with this political insight, it's that I'm unconditionally against terrorism. No sympathy for them. I even don't care if you accuse me of I'm often accused now of Islamophobia, you know. No, one should criticize them. All I'm saying is that what we should do is raise another question, which is why did global capitalism give rise to fundamentalism? Because if there is something that is clear, it's that this rise of new religious fundamentalism, it's not something reactionary in the sense of something from ancient time resisting, it's purely a contemporary phenomenon. It's one of the weird reactions immanent to it to the process of capitalist globalization. So my point is simply that we don't realize that the problem is how difficult it is today to imagine really an alternative. Let me conclude with one of the saddest stories that I've read. I read somewhere that that cognitive scientists are already experimenting with drugs which can change your perception of time. Like in reality it passes only let's say minutes, but you experience it as half a year, one year. Now what depresses me is how the institute which is developing this drug tried to get finances, money for it. The first application that they thought of was prisons. Let's say I'm a great scientist but I do a crime and they claim and I'm condemned to two years. I claim wouldn't it be a great loss for society to lose me for two years? So why wouldn't they just give me that drug and in reality it would take one one hour, two, but I would have experienced it as two years. So you know I would have paid my debt subjectively but I would remain of great service to society. Isn't it so sad that such a big invention, and the first maybe I'm a dirty old man, but my first association was why not use it in sex? You go on for minutes it feels like two years, you know like. Why why you know we are not aware of how difficult it is to imagine really an alternative today. The ultimate proof for me are precisely science fiction movies where you know the more they try to paint another world the more you see we cannot we cannot get out. That's why we should stick to in the terms that I developed here, the divine dimension and Kierkegaard, another of my favorite ones, put it nicely, he said God simply means a possibility of radical otherness in the sense of a possibility for things to be radically different. This is the way in which I am a materialist Christian as I say. You know, to we should keep just this most elementary notion of religious experience which is totally materialist for me and deeply Freudian, because if death drive means something it's precisely that we are never at home in our environment, that there is always a gap. And that's our only hope. I was too long I know but on the other hand what could you have done? You were obliged to listen to me. Thanks very much. No, no, stop, stop. I will now repeat the last of my old jokes. I'm a communist, I warn you. When we will take over you will be obliged to applaud, so keep your energy for that time, no. Thanks very much, I'm honored to be here and I really think that what you, my God, I hope just that there will be at some point the second Vienna Renaissance. Do you know that like years ago you were as they put it in Star Wars the center of the known universe, no. I mean everything that was here, name it, Freud, Schönberg and so on. Who knows maybe this time will come again. I hope it will because precisely you are not in the center. I never trust big cities, even like in United States I'm often there, forget about Harvard and so on. These are today at least in my field, social sciences, totally corrupted non-productive universities. Interesting things happen in small so you here are in a good position because you are rich enough to resist the true horror which is called Bologna University reform which is one big attack on what Kant calls public use of reason. The idea of Bologna reform is basically we need experts to solve real problems. No, to be an intellectual is something totally different. It's not simply to solve problems the way they are presented to you by others. The task of intellectual when somebody says "we have a problem today" is to see to what extent the way we formulate problem a problem is already part of a problem. You know, for example they tell us "today we find fundamentalism." I say "okay but let's see to what extent we are complicit in creating a situation which generates fundamentalism." You see this dimension of proper intellectual reflection is missing. They want experts. I was in a debate in France where some member of a a state committee put things wonderfully. He said "we have [you remember those cars which were burning in the suburbs of Paris some three-four years ago] he told me this minister or whatever, vice-minister, that "you see now we have a problem. We need you specialists, we need urbanists to tell us how to restructure suburbs so that it's easier to dominate demonstrations, we need psychologists to" and so on and so on. That's the nightmare. This is the end of intellectual life. We need precisely a totally useless knowledge. So to conclude this, sorry, the last joke. You know it probably most of you, but I love it so much that I will repeat it. When I was young under communism in most of our school classes rooms there were those famous words by Lenin, you know, Lenin's advice to young people: "learn, learn and learn." And we had a wonderful obscene joke about this: that three they gathered them together of course it's a nonsensical joke Marx, Engels and Lenin and asked them what would you prefer to have: wife or a mistress? Marx, conservative, says "a wife." Engels, more bon vivant, says "a mistress." Lenin answers "both." And they are surprised like the ascetic Lenin what if he a pervert. And they ask him why and Lenin he said "well so that I can tell my wife that I am with my mistress and I can tell my mistress that I am with my wife." And then they ask Lenin: "okay but what do you really do then?" And the answer is: "learn, learn and learn." Thank you very much, this is why Žižek stands for existing system and mistress for transgression. We should do exactly this. We should find a time to withdraw and learn, learn and learn. With this I've really finished. Thank you. If I'm so popular here then I already advise here, we can organize next meeting but make prices much more higher and we split the profit, no? Okay, it's a good
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idea. Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen, we wish you a very very pleasant evening. Thank you for coming.
idea. Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen, we wish you a very very pleasant evening. Thank you for coming.
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. Okay I I survived it. No but one...
Thank you very much. Okay I I survived it. No but one...