Zizek Studies Conference
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2018-05-19 · 1:01:00 · 7,343 words
ideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticssexuality-genderphilosophy-generalcapitalismliberalism-political-correctnesstechnology-ai-cyberspaceecology-climatefascism-populism
Žižek opens with his health problems before ranging across several interlinked philosophical and political themes: the limits of historicist/transcendental thought (Foucault, Heidegger, OOO) versus a Hegelian-Lacanian ontology; the two 'new opiums of the people' (drugs and populist 'the people'); gender fluidity, transgender, MeToo and objectification; and the ideological function of video games and precarious labour. The talk is structured as a free-form lecture-improvisation building toward a Lacanian account of subjectivity grounded in hysterical questioning and antagonism rather than fluid identity-play.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 27
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Foucault's historically specified discursive formation that sets the horizon within which questions can be meaningfully raised, invoked here as the limit Žižek wants to break past.
as “transcendental horizon”
The shared structure of Heidegger, deconstruction, and Foucauldian historicism: the claim that we can only ever describe the historical-discursive field within which things appear, never reality as it is independently.
Heidegger's term for the ontological event or disclosure of being, cited to show Heidegger himself acknowledged he never addressed how things are outside such horizons.
as “Object Oriented Ontology”
Graham Harman's flat-ontology position that humans are just one among many objects; Žižek critiques it for secretly re-assuming a view from nowhere.
as “new materialism”
Jane Bennett's approach to describing the impersonal agency of non-human assemblages, critiqued by Žižek as covertly anthropomorphic.
Marx's formula for religion as authentic self-produced consolation, taken as the template for Žižek's two new opiums.
Implicit in the discussion of how ideology operates through enjoyment (drugs, populism); not named explicitly but underlies the 'opium' analysis.
Referenced implicitly in the discussion of ideological interpellation and the populist 'people' as an imaginary unity that masks antagonism.
Marx's phrase from the Communist Manifesto for capitalism's dissolution of traditional relations, extended by Žižek to cover sexual identity and nature itself under the Anthropocene.
The epoch in which human activity has destabilised nature as a stable background, used to argue there is no natural balance to return to.
Butler's thesis that sexual identity is not given but is the contingent result of discursive and bodily performative practices, which Žižek reads as the dominant form of late-capitalist subjectivity rather than a subversive one.
as “late capitalist mode of subjectivity”
Žižek's characterisation of fluid, self-reinventing, performatively constructed identity as the predominant form of subjectivity under late capitalism rather than a subversive one.
as “unconscious choice”
Drawing on Schelling via German idealism, the idea that the most radical existential choices, sexual identity, political commitment, are experienced as fate, not as deliberate selection from a menu.
Hegelian sublation, implicit in the discussion of the '+' and the move beyond binary identity without mere addition.
as “the plus in LGBTQ+”
Žižek re-reads the '+' not as an open-ended list of further identities but as a direct marker of subjectivity itself, the human subject IS a plus, an irreducible excess beyond any identity.
Žižek's core claim that sexuality is constitutively split and non-totalizable, so no expanded list of identities can ever cover it; the 'questioning' position is not an option within sexuality but its structure.
as “metonymy of desire”
The infinite sliding of desire along the chain of objects, invoked to gloss the hysterical 'what kind of object am I?' question.
as “perverse supplement of power”
Every power edifice needs a hidden perverse underside to reproduce itself; far from being subversive, perversion is the secret prop of domination.
as “hysteria as the founding gesture of subjectivity”
Against the '68 celebration of perversion, Žižek recovers the Freudian-Lacanian position that the hysterical question ('what kind of object am I?') is the origin of subjectivity and the critical attitude, not a problem to be overcome.
as “master discourse / university discourse / hysteric discourse / analyst discourse”
Lacan's four discourses, used to argue that hysteria and analysis form the 'feminine couple' while master and university form the 'male couple', and that hysterical questioning is the source of new knowledge.
as “discourse of the analyst”
In Lacan's typology the analyst functions as a stupid object of transference (not a subject of knowledge), enabling the patient-hysteric's productive questioning, used to underscore that creativity comes from hysteria, not the analyst.
Underlying the discussion of sexuality as inherently antagonistic and the sadistic supplement of power, though not invoked by name here.
as “enforced subjectivisation”
Žižek's counter to the MeToo framework of 'objectification': the real mechanism of sexist and sadistic domination is not treating the other as an object but forcing her to perform her subjectivity, her shame, suffering, or pleasure, for the dominator's gaze.
Hegel's category (as Žižek reads it) of humor that is not the subject displaying wit over a target but humor inherent in reality itself, used to explain why liberal mockery of Trump fails: Trump is already his own joke.
as “self-entrepreneur”
The ideological rebranding of precarious, contract-to-contract labour as individual freedom and self-reinvention, which Žižek reads as a cynical joke: your slavery is presented as your freedom.
as “pre-Oedipal / un-dead video-game subjectivity”
Žižek's label for the mode of selfhood promoted by video games: death is reversible, identity is re-playable, structurally analogous to Sade's indestructible heroines.
as “un-dead subjectivity”
A form of subjectivity exemplified by video games (you die and restart) and the figures in Sade (indestructible across scenes of torture), where the subject is never finally extinguished, a pre- or post-Oedipal loop.
Stories he reaches for 3
A caller asks Radio Yerevan if it's true that Rabinovich won a car in the state lottery. The radio replies: in principle yes, but it wasn't a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn't win it, it was stolen from him. Used as template: 'Is Marx still actual? In principle yes, but...'
“Is it true that the Jew Rabinovich won a new car on state lottery? In principle it's true, just it wasn't a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn't win it, it was stolen from him.”
Mesoamerican civilisations sacrificed not to correct anomalies (no rain) but to ensure the most regular things, sunrise, would keep happening, which Žižek reads as proto-ecological wisdom: natural regularity is not guaranteed.
“They sacrificed so that sun will rise next morning. In some sense they were right.”
The eternal feminine question 'Tell me why you love me' is not neurotic nagging but the radical Lacanian question 'what kind of object am I for you?', the origin of all genuine subjective questioning.
“Tell me why do you love me. It's an authentic question, the question is precisely what kind of an object I am for you.”
Works invoked 8
Communist Manifesto book
Marx's 'everything solid melts into air' is used to argue capitalism dissolves not just traditional social relations but sexual identity and nature itself.
Goldfinger film
Used in passing as a joking self-deprecating reference, Žižek wishes Antonio could press the Bond ejector-seat button to stop him talking.
Gender Trouble book
Butler's foundational text on performative sexual identity; Žižek reads it as an accurate description of late-capitalist subjectivity rather than a subversive alternative.
Juliette book
Sade's novel is cited as a literary instance of un-dead subjectivity (the heroine survives every scene of torture intact), structurally homologous to video-game restart logic.
Žižek calls it a very good book despite its oddly limited academic circulation; notes Foucault provides a historical genesis of power relations there, introducing a productive oscillation in his thought.
Vibrant Matter book
Jane Bennett's new-materialist work; admired for the richness of its descriptions but critiqued as covertly anthropomorphic in its attempt to describe non-human agency.
History of Sexuality book
Foucault's late series; Žižek cites it for the methodological claim that 'every history is the history of the present', a partial escape from pure historicism.
Žižek clarifies the 'pervert' in the title was Sophie Fiennes's commercial suggestion, not a self-description, and that he does not endorse perversion as subversive.
People invoked 26
Catherine Deneuve negative
Mentioned as a critic of MeToo for being 'too radical', a position Žižek rejects, he thinks MeToo is not radical enough.
The director who suggested the title 'The Pervert's Guide', Žižek notes he accepted it for commercial reasons and doesn't actually endorse the 'pervert' label for himself.
Germaine Greer negative
Same context as Deneuve, cited as arguing MeToo should be more pragmatic, which Žižek rejects.
Jane Bennett negative
Žižek admires her description of the trash-site as an impersonal assemblage but argues new materialism is covertly anthropomorphic; credits her for herself acknowledging this limitation.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Co-member of the Ljubljana Lacanian school; described as collaborating on the turn toward basic ontological problems.
Marquis de Sade positive
His Juliette is cited as a literary instance of un-dead subjectivity, indestructible across scenes of violence, paralleling the video-game logic of restart-after-death.
Žižek's favourite Hollywood femme fatale in Fritz Lang films, mentioned as the reason he keeps confusing Jane Bennett's name.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical resource throughout: on the four discourses (hysteric/analyst as feminine couple), on the hysterical question as origin of subjectivity, on metonymy of desire, and on reading Hegel through Lacan as the path to a new ontology.
John Oliver negative
Same as Jon Stewart, the 'eternal sport of American liberals making fun of Trump all the time'.
Jon Stewart negative
Exemplifies the ineffective liberal strategy of satirising Trump with subjective wit, which Žižek argues fails because Trump is already objective humor.
Judith Butler negative
In personal good relations; but Žižek consistently argues her performativity theory describes late-capitalist subjectivity rather than subverting it, and that her appeal to Foucault to block ontological questions is evasive.
Used as the exemplary case of 'objective humor', a reality so absurd that liberal satirical wit cannot compete with it; also mentioned as more complex than simple populism.
Tim Cook negative
Same function as Zuckerberg in the LGBT/capitalism argument.
Raymond Kurzweil negative
Named in the context of post-human singularity and the idea that sexuality will be transcended in a post-human state; Žižek treats this as a symptom of asexual ideology.
Graham Harman negative
OOO's claim that 'we humans are just one among objects' is critiqued as secretly reinstating a God's-eye view, you must step outside your skin to say that, which is impossible.
Elon Musk negative
Same function as Zuckerberg in the LGBT/capitalism argument (noted at the time of the talk; Žižek does not distinguish his later positions).
Mark Zuckerberg negative
Cited as an example of Big Tech immediately endorsing LGBT rights, used to show gender fluidity is compatible with, not subversive of, capitalism.
Mladen Dolar positive
Co-member of the Ljubljana group; named alongside Zupančič as focusing on ontological philosophical problems.
Michel Foucault negative
A great thinker whose épistémé framework Žižek critiques as ultimately inconsistent: it cannot answer whether power or discursive formations are trans-historical constants or historically specific. Foucault's late remark 'every history is the history of the present' is cited as a partial admission.
Martin Heidegger negative
Grouped with Foucault and deconstructionists as a transcendentalist who traps us within a horizon of being; cited for his late admission (Heraclitus seminar) that he never formulated how things are outside their horizon, a self-identified weakness.
Bill Gates negative
Same function as Zuckerberg in the LGBT/capitalism argument.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Invoked for the concept of the highest act of freedom as an unconscious choice, the idea that the most radical existential choices are experienced as fate, applied to sexual identity and political commitment.
Jordan Peterson negative
Named as paradigmatic of the populist move that locates the enemy in an external ideological construct ('cultural Marxism') rather than immanent social antagonism.
Karl Marx positive
The occasion is the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth; Žižek argues Marx is still actual 'in principle, but', updating the opium formula and the 'everything solid melts' thesis while noting his limits on the question of the emancipatory subject.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the claim that the unconscious is maximally hidden in perversion (not exposed), and as a co-authority with Lacan that true psychoanalysis never dismisses hysterical questioning.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Objective humor is a Hegelian category; the LGBTQ+ plus is read as 'Hegel in practice'; reading Hegel through Lacan is Žižek's declared path beyond the transcendental horizon.
What it argues
limits of historicist/transcendental philosophyHegelian-Lacanian ontology as alternative to OOO and deconstructiondrugs and populism as two new opiums of the peoplesexual identity, performativity, and the antagonism of sexualityobjectification vs. enforced subjectivisation in sadism and pornographyhysteria as the founding gesture of subjectivityprecarious labour packaged as freedomvideo games and un-dead subjectivity
Dialectical moves 12
“The two new opiums of the people are precisely opium and the people.”
By literalising Marx's metaphor, Žižek shows that drugs and populist identity have taken over religion's ideological function as anaesthetic.
“Far from being subversive, performative gender fluidity is the predominant form of late-capitalist subjectivity.”
What Butler presents as transgression is revealed as the norm of consumer capitalism, where identity is a commodity to be reinvented.
“The plus in LGBTQ+ is not simply a shorthand for all new identities to be discovered — what if we can be a plus directly?”
The open residue of the list is not empirical incompleteness but the mark of subjectivity itself, which exceeds every positive identity.
“The most radical act of freedom is an unconscious choice — you discover you are already in love, already committed.”
The highest freedom is experienced not as deliberate selection but as necessity, inverting the liberal picture of autonomous choice.
“I hope men objectivise women — and each other — as much as possible, because true sadist domination is not objectivisation but terrifying fake violent subjectivisation.”
The real harm in domination is not treating the other as a thing but forcing them to perform their subjective suffering for the dominator's gaze.
“Far from being subversive, perversion is really a hidden part of a power edifice — every power to reproduce itself needs a hidden perverse supplement.”
The '68 celebration of perversion as liberation is inverted: perversion sustains rather than subverts the master.
“Hysteria — normally dismissed as feminine disorder — is the founding gesture of subjectivity and the origin of critique of ideology.”
What classical psychiatry and '68 radicalism alike dismissed as weakness is the structural precondition of all genuine questioning and new knowledge.
“You cannot beat Trump with satire — Trump is already his own humor.”
Liberal satirical wit (subjective humor) is disarmed when reality itself has absorbed the comic reversal (objective humor).
“Your very freedom is the form of your additional slavery — the self-entrepreneur sells you your precarity as liberation.”
Capitalist ideology inverts unfreedom into its opposite, making the very mechanism of exploitation appear as individual autonomy.
“The question is not how reality is independently of us, but how we fit into reality — how something like human thought is possible in reality.”
Instead of a god's-eye view of reality, Žižek proposes the proper question is our immanence in and emergence from the Real.
“Earth is maybe our mother, but it's a dirty bitch of a mother — there is no natural balance to return to.”
The ecological fantasy of a pristine homeostasis undisturbed by humans is false; geological history was always catastrophic.
“Nowhere is our unconscious more hidden and inaccessible than in perversion.”
Inverting the common assumption that perverts enact unconscious desires openly, Žižek follows Freud in saying perversion is maximum repression.
Claims 18
rejects
The historicist-transcendental position (Foucault, Heidegger, deconstruction) is ultimately philosophically inconsistent because it cannot coherently answer whether its own account is trans-historical or merely historically specific.historicism / transcendental philosophy
rejects
Object Oriented Ontology secretly re-installs a view from nowhere by claiming humans are 'just one among objects', without accounting for the position from which that claim is made.Object Oriented Ontology / Graham Harman
asserts
The correct Hegelian-Lacanian move is not to ask 'how is reality independently of us?' but 'how do we fit into reality?', finding our contact with the in-itself in the very fact of thought's emergence from matter.Hegelian-Lacanian ontology
asserts
Today religion has been supplemented by two new opiums of the people: literal and pharmaceutical drugs, and the populist fantasy of 'the people' as an undivided unity.ideology / Marx's opium formula
asserts
Capitalism has dissolved not only patriarchal social relations but sexual identity itself and even nature as a stable background, going further than Marx anticipated.capitalism / Anthropocene / sexual fluidity
rejects
Butler's performative theory of sexual identity describes the dominant form of late-capitalist subjectivity, not a subversive alternative to it.Judith Butler / performativity as subversion
rejects
There is no natural ecological balance to return to; even pre-human geological history was a series of catastrophes, so anthropocentric ecology's 'homeostasis' is a myth.ecology / Anthropocene / naturalistic homeostasis
asserts
The most radical existential choices — including sexual orientation and political commitment — are experienced as fate rather than deliberate selection, drawing on Schelling's notion of the highest act of freedom as unconscious.freedom / sexual identity / German idealism
reframes
The '+' in LGBTQ+ should be read not as an open list of further identities but as a marker for subjectivity itself — the human subject is constitutively a plus that exceeds any identity.LGBTQ+ / subjectivity / Hegelian logic
asserts
Sexuality is constitutively antagonistic, so no expanded catalogue of identities can ever be complete; the 'questioning' stance is the structure of sexuality as such, not one option within it.sexual identity / LGBTQ+ politics
reframes
The dominant ideology of MeToo is wrong to frame male domination as 'objectification'; the real mechanism is enforced subjectivisation — compelling the other to perform her subjectivity (shame, pleasure, suffering) for the dominator.MeToo / objectification / sadism
reframes
Perversion is not subversive but is the hidden supplement that sustains power; hysteria — hysterical questioning — is the true founding gesture of subjectivity and the source of new knowledge.hysteria vs. perversion / subjectivity
reframes
In pornography and sadism the woman is not objectified but brutally subjectivised — forced to bear witness to her own pleasure or humiliation as a subject, while the man is the instrumentalised object.pornography / sadism / objectification
rejects
Liberal satirical mockery of Trump (Jon Stewart, John Oliver) fails because Trump is already his own joke — objective humor in reality defeats subjective wit.liberal politics / satire / Trump
asserts
Precarious labour is ideologically sold as freedom and self-entrepreneurship, making your additional slavery the form of your freedom — a cynical joke of late-capitalist ideology.precarious labour / capitalism / ideology
asserts
Video games are now the central ideological apparatus, turning over more money than film and TV combined, and producing a specific 'un-dead' subjectivity in which death is always reversible.video games / ideology / subjectivity
rejects
Jane Bennett's new materialism, despite its sympathetic description of non-human assemblages, is covertly anthropomorphic — precisely when we try to step outside the human we project human qualities onto things.new materialism / Jane Bennett / anthropomorphism
asserts
Nowhere is the unconscious more hidden than in perversion; contrary to '68 libidinal radicalism, the pervert's certainty about what is good for the other is the structure of domination, not liberation.perversion / Freud / unconscious
Quotes 12
“The two new opiums of the people are precisely opium and the people.”Slavoj Žižek · two new opiums of the people
“Earth is maybe our mother, but it's a dirty bitch of a mother.”Slavoj Žižek · no natural ecological balance
“Your very freedom is the form of your additional slavery.”Slavoj Žižek · precarious labour as ideology
“You cannot beat Trump here — Trump is already his own humor.”Slavoj Žižek · objective humor / limits of liberal satire
“I hope they do objectivize each other as much as possible. True sadist domination is not objectivizing, but a terrifying fake violent subjectivization.”Slavoj Žižek · enforced subjectivisation vs. objectification
“Nowhere is our unconscious more hidden, inaccessible than in perversion.”Slavoj Žižek · perversion hides the unconscious
“Far from being subversive, perversion is really a hidden part of a power edifice. Every power to reproduce itself needs a hidden perverse supplement.”Slavoj Žižek · perverse supplement of power
“Hysterical questioning is the origin of it all, even the origin of critique of ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · hysteria as founding gesture of subjectivity
“What if plus is not simply just a shorthand for all new identities to be discovered — what if we can be a plus directly? Human subjectivity basically is a plus.”Slavoj Žižek · subjectivity as the LGBTQ+ plus
“The highest act of freedom, the most radical choice is an unconscious choice — you all of a sudden discover that you are already in love. You assume the choice already made.”Slavoj Žižek · unconscious choice / freedom as fate
“Every history is ultimately the history of the present.”Slavoj Žižek · Foucault on historiography
“The problem is not how is reality independently of us, but how do we fit reality — how is something like human thought possible in reality.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian-Lacanian ontological question
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I got that nerve inflammation you can feel when I speak even now. First they suspected that it's a stroke then, so that I don't forget something, then I got some heart problems and they already thought they will have to, how do you call it, they put in some plastic object so that the vein doesn't get narrow. It was not that but they were in a total panic. Then, let's go down, my prostate turned bad, then my diabetes turned bad and now I already feel I go to my diabetician doctor. How she, it's an old lady, looks at my feet like, oh, oh, you will soon be mine, we will have to cut them off. So it was—ah, yeah, also, sorry, I forgot something in the middle. In the middle of it, they discovered that I have cancer on my right kidney. And I had to do an operation. It was really bad. Now it's getting better but okay, I simply have physical limitations. Jet lag and I cannot be socially active for more than two, three hours then I just get that tired. So my sincere apologies to you. You should have organized this fifteen years earlier, then you would have me for all the day just talking. You know, because I still, since I talk too much, I still find it incredible how from time to time when I give some classes, a student approaches me: would you be my analyst? You know. My answer is double. First, listen, can you imagine me just sitting there for more than thirty seconds and listening to you? Just the guy. But more seriously, it's said to be odd but another thing that I want to explain and we can go on into it later in the debate. I was a little bit in a panic because I wasn't sure what type of a public will be here. So I will try to mix social topic with philosophy, not pure philosophy, but what I and my gang from Slovenia, my two co-friends, Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar, we are more and more focusing now on basic ontological philosophical problems. I philosophically oppose to that, how should I call it, historicist deconstructive turn, which basically means forget about these naive old-fashioned philosophical questions: what is reality, how does the world exist independently of us, are we free and all that stuff. Did you notice how now we get generally a turn towards these basic questions? But till a couple of years ago, we had a certain type of historicism, discursive historicism, predominating. For me, the model of this, and he's a great thinker, I don't doubt, is Michel Foucault. For him, the ultimate horizon of thinking is what he calls épistémé, a historically specified discursive formation. So, and I'm not kidding, it's literally like this. If you were—a friend of mine did that even once—if you were to ask Michel Foucault: do I have an immortal soul? His answer would have been: this question can only be meaningful within a certain historical formation of knowledge. So all we can do is describe that formation of knowledge which makes this type of question meaningful. So you are not even allowed to raise a direct naive ontological question like, okay, okay, but do I really have a soul? And it's a legitimate operation. It's a very strong argument for them to say you never ask such questions out of nowhere. We always talk out of or against the background of a certain historical formation of knowledge. And I think this position is nonetheless ultimately for philosophical reasons inconsistent. For example, in my long-standing debates—personally, I'm in good relations with her—with Judith Butler, we always end up at this point. She accuses me of being a not historicist enough Kantian, like formulas of sexuation, this is a kind of a transcendental a priori, I should historicize more. Then my counter-argument to her is always: you are describing a certain, let's call it, functioning of sexuality. We don't have fixed sexual identities, our sexual identity is a matter of performative, is a performative result of our discursive and bodily practices and so on and so on, it's ultimately contingent, not inscribed in any nature and so on and so on. And I'm—let me now make, before I go into these improvisations, something very clear—I'm not bluffing here when I ask her and you this type of question. It's very sincere, naively. I ask her a naive question, which nonetheless I think perplexed her a little bit. This notion articulated long ago, okay, quarter of a century ago, a little bit more, in Gender Trouble, this, let's call it, theory of sexual identity as performatively constructed, ultimately contingent and so on and so on. Is this an eternal fact so that you can say the caveman was already discursively constructing his, her, its identity? Or are you describing something that really holds only for our time? Is your own this model of sexuality as historically contingently constructed, is it itself historically specified? But then you need another meta-theory, you know, to account—or is it simply that, to put it in very brutal terms, it was all the time like this also for the cavemen, they were just, I will be very blunt, stupid and didn't know it? So that we live in a unique historical moment when we finally see something that was true all the time. And I remember I was a little bit shocked. Her answer to me was: Michel Foucault prohibits even to raise such questions. Well, he doesn't, I claim, because he always emphasized, he knew what he was talking, Michel Foucault, when he in his last series of books, with all those History of Sexuality Part and describing Ancient Greek, early Roman logic of pleasures and so on, he said something very important. He said: every history is ultimately the history of the present. That is to say, it's not just that we step on our shoulder and look into Ancient Greece the way it really was. There must be something in our own epoch—and Foucault described this, the end of psychoanalysis or this paradigm of sexuality and so on and so on, the uncertainties, openness of our time—this is the experience from which we can see what he saw there. So again, my point is that nonetheless we cannot—or with Foucault is the same problem if you read him with his notion of power. The axis of his late teaching is, of course, knowledge and power. Strategies of power and so on and so on. Again, a naive question: is this a trans-historical constant or something specific to our time? And it's nice to see how Foucault is ambiguous here. Sometimes he talks as if, again to put it naively, the entire human history is the history of power strategies and so on and so on. But sometimes, in his early very popular book, which I think it's a very good book although—and this is significant—it was never really popular, although it was very popular but in theory, Les mots et les choses, which was here as translated as—how was it here the title of his... The Order of Things. The Order of Things. It's a good title. Do you know that? I read somewhere that Foucault first wanted to give it L’ordre des choses in original and then publisher opposed it and he—okay, there he does something incredible. He basically provides a historical genesis of how this functioning of power came to be. So he is oscillating here. Now, I'm not—this is a very complex problem. Can we break out of this, I call it, transcendental approach, which is ultimately something that unites such opposite phenomena like Martin Heidegger's thought, deconstructionists and so on? This idea that all we can ultimately do is to describe a historical discursive practice or, as Heidegger would have put it, disclosure of being, the horizon of meaning within which things appear to us in a certain way. Is this all? So that, again, whenever you try to—sorry for vulgar metaphor—whenever you try to grab a philosopher, to squeeze his balls or, I don't know what would be the feminine version of this metaphor, I don't enter it, he can always say no, we cannot go beyond. And this is basically also, for example, Heidegger's attitude towards modern science. That, yeah, we learn wonderful things there, but in order to do a scientific research, nature already appears to you as an empirical entity ruled by mathematical laws and so on and so on. You are always within a certain horizon of being. My naive question is: is this all? So is ontology, in the naive sense of describing reality the way it is, independently of this transcendental place, is this a legitimate question or no? To my surprise, I discovered that Heidegger himself was aware of this. In his late seminar on Heraclitus from mid-sixties, the late last years of his life, he says openly that this question: how are things outside their horizon of being? He was well aware. He wasn't an idealist, Heidegger. He didn't claim that the ontological event, Ereignis, horizon of being empirically creates things. It just makes things, reality appear within a certain horizon of meaning. How are things independently of this? He said: this is the great weakness of my thinking, I never tried even to formulate the question. And what I'm really trying to do—not just me, but in different ways Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar and so on and so on—is to raise this question without regressing into naive realism. And that's, we don't have time to go into it now, but that's my big reproach to Object Oriented Ontology. They precisely pretend to, as it were, step out from our own skin and describe as Graham Harman puts it: we humans are just one among the objects in the world. We can be a more important object or whatever. Okay, it's totally legitimate, I think, to raise here the question: where do you stand when you say this? In order to be able to say this, you are no longer just a human being. It is as if you can step out from where and look at reality the way it really is. And I so—I think I don't buy that turn towards simple objective realism. Let's describe reality the way it is. I think this may surprise you that the girl—not girl, lady, I don't know how old she is and I apologize, I didn't mean it in a patronizing way—Jane or Jane, I always confuse Pride and Prejudice with her, who wrote Vibrant Matter and new materialism... Jane Bennett. Jane Bennett, yes. Ah, I know why I'm making this mistake. Joan Bennett is my favorite Hollywood femme fatale, you know, in Fritz Lang movies, the dirty one. But now, she is—I pretty much admire her description of, let us say, a trash site as a impersonal complex of its own where human debris, remainders interact with poisons, with insects, whatever and so on and so on. But I think it's clearly anthropomorphic. Precisely when we try to describe in this sympathetic way reality the way it is, we are usually very deep in anthropomorphizing it. And she is aware of it. I quote her. She is—she is deeply aware of it. She admits it. So how to solve this problem? How to break out of the transcendental horizon without regressing into some type of ultimately pre-modern naive realism? I will not bore you with this. Read my last books. I claim that on the path of Hegel, reading Hegel through Lacan and so on and so on, we can find a unique original way here, a way which does the job. It's, to put it very simple just to give you the code, it's wrong to answer how is reality independently of us. The true problem is: how can—how do we fit reality? How is something like human thought possible in reality? Our contact with reality, the way it is in itself—whatever we call it—is not erase yourself and present an objective image like in quantum physics and so on and so on. No, the problem is precisely—the problem is precisely to see basically what do we humans mean for reality? How do we fit in it? That moment, I will not get lost here, it would have meant too much. I repeatedly address this in all of my last books. So, now let me go finally to the topic and I propose Antonio, this is okay for you, I will simply go on talking, improvising and then at a certain level—I'm sorry that you don't have, I think the only way to contain me is to do—did you see—okay, it's an old one, it's not for most of you a movie of your generation, of course—the—the—the third, I think, James Bond movie, Goldfinger. You know where Goldfinger drives a car—no, sorry, James Bond. It has that famous red button. He presses it and, you know. Maybe next time you allow me to talk here, Antonio, to put some control when I talk too much, but I'm—okay. So, I will just go on. I would like to begin with something—I warn you there will be some provocations, but consciously I would like to solicit the debate a little bit along the lines of what we improvised briefly in the morning. Two hundred years of the birth of Marx. Okay, but we should ask the naive question: is Marx still alive? Which is a wrong arrogant question. Marx is alive if not if we find something in him but if he—he can tell us something about ourselves. The trick is: if we read our modern society through the eyes of Marx, does this still tell us something? My—I'm not a naive Marxist. My answer is yes and no. Why? I'm sorry if you heard this joke applied to Marx. I used it in a short text published and—it's an old joke. I think the greatest legacy of communism cultural were political jokes, which disappeared now. And it's one of the classical Soviet jokes about the Jew Rabinovich and they had a legendary radio station—in jokes only, there is a real Radio Yerevan, it's a capital of Georgia—I think—no, or doesn't matter. So—the—the joke is that people ask their questions and the radio always answers in the same way: in principle yes, but. The most famous answer is: somebody calls radio station and says is it true that the Jew Rabinovich won a new car on state lottery? And the radio answers: in principle it's true, just it wasn't a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn't win it, it was stolen from him. I think unfortunately pretty much the same with Marx. Is Marx still actual? In principle yes, but. And I will just try to elaborate today some of these buts. Others are obvious, like the whole problem of which is the proletarian subject, the emancipatory subject today and so on and so on. One would have been—you know Marx's well-known definition of religion as the opium of the people. Marx is more subtle than it may appear here. He doesn't say for the people because this implies a naive position as if there are some evil servants of those in power who manipulate and offer, produce religion. No, religion is opium of the people, authentically experienced by them. So the first thing we can in a very productive way, I claim, elaborate here is that Marx has to be supplemented that, okay, with some fundamentalisms and so on, religion is still to some extent the opium of the people. But isn't it today we have two other opiums of the people? And if you know some of my latest comments, you know the joke that's coming. These two new opiums of the people are precisely opium and the people. Opium is getting—by opium I don't mean just literally opium, but the whole industry of drugs in both senses: medical drugs and drugs like opium, crack or whatever. It is as if—and it's not limited to a narrow one or two percent—I read somewhere already ten years ago that in American academia generally, around six—seven—sixty to seventy percent of people there, professors, students, use either Xanax or whatever some kind of drugs. And this is a wonderful paradox. At the same time, how do these drugs function? First, if we are over-excited, bombarded by experiences, too excited, some threats traumatic, they calm us down. But then they are used also for exactly the opposite purpose. When you're depressed, inactive, to resuscitate you again. Okay, that's another topic. What interests me also, this is the first opium of the people, opium as the name for all the drugs. The second one is 'people' itself. This is the new right-wing, alt-right, whatever populism. We have it in Europe and so on. Precisely 'people' are for populists the opium for the people. This imaginary representation: we are one united people, whose function is to drug you, to make you ignore all the antagonisms that cut across the people because in populism as a rule the enemy always comes from somewhere outside. It's for Trump fundamentalists and so on, either, I don't know, the corrupted New Left cultural, like for Jordan Peterson it's cultural Marxism, some external, or is the immigrant threat and so on and so on. Things get get more complex, but I think that's the first thing to do. The second thing about Marx: you know the famous description in Communist Manifesto—and Marx means it basically almost in a positive way, that that's the great result of capitalism—that as Marx puts it, it dissolve—everything solid melts into the air. Capitalism resolves all traditional, patriarchal, authoritarian social relations and so on and so on and so on. I think that the problem with Marx here is that he was more right than he could have imagined. Isn't the whole LGBT movement—and please to avoid the misunderstanding, I will this time not make fun of it, this is a great achievement—that—I think that LGBT+ also Q and so on, and ecology today prove that it's not only all patriarchal social relations that melt into thin air, they lose their natural-given character and stability. Also our innermost sexual identity and even nature itself. The result of today's technology and so on is that nature itself—that's what Anthropocene means—we can—nature is no longer what it was till now in human history, the stable background that somehow will put things back in balance and we always said: okay, we can pollute this river, do this, do that, but somehow all of it will find a new—we could count on nature being remaining the same. I think, although I hate these references to some original wisdom, I admire here nonetheless ancient—I don't know who did this, I think both Aztecs or Incas who saw that it's not as simple as that. You know Jacques Lacan noticed somewhere what's so surprising about those ritual they had with human sacrifices and so on. For what were they sacrificing? Not what you would have expected: that so that something out of order would be—for example, you don't get rain, let's kill fifty children or prisoners or whatever virgins and maybe there will be rain. No, they sacrificed, they feel the need to make human sacrifices so that the most ordinary, regular things would—to make it sure that they will happen again and again. They sacrifice so that sun will rise next—next morning and so on. In some sense they were right, I claim. In what sense? From today's ecological experience, it's not just that we screwed nature—I mean screwed it up in the sense of destabilizing it—but we can see retroactively that there never was a true natural balance. I am opposed to this anthropocentric ecology: it says basically nature has its balance, stability, homeostasis, and then we arrogant humans screwed it up. If you look at the history, even of life of our earth, think about what? Think about just our main sources still of energy, coal and oil. Can you even imagine what kind of mega-ecological catastrophes must have happened on our earth so that earth produce this reserve? So earth maybe our mother, but it's a dirty bitch of a mother. It is crazy. There is—we don't have any natural balance to return to. Going back to this fluidity of sexual identities, here I again had a very friendly debate with Judith Butler. The problem years ago, the problem was this one: that I told her and again she probably thinks she gave me a good answer, I don't think. Namely, my question to her was the following one: she describes a certain constitution of subjectivity, it's no longer patriarchal, stable, fixed identities, it's fluid, everybody can you can reconstruct yourself, play performative games, all that stuff. My—I—yes, he simply she doesn't agree with my diagnosis, but I agree with myself. It's that what she is describing, the type of subjectivity, this fluid reinventing itself, deconstructing and so on itself, changing identities, that it's nothing subversive. It's—she is simply, for example in Gender Trouble, describing the predominant form of, let's use this bombastic term, late capitalist mode of subjectivity. Then she exploded and said: what about Trump, alt-right, neo-conservative, Christian fundamentalist? My answer is, maybe I'm wrong: yes, but they are a reactive phenomenon. In a way, as LGBT demonstrate, what fascinated me with LGBT—and this isn't an argument against, although maybe a little bit—is did you notice how LGBT was instantly accepted by top businesses? Name them: Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, all were instantly for it. Now, I'm not saying this is bad, I'm not saying that if they support it, it must be reactionary and so on. I'm just saying that—that in this project of denaturalizing human sexuality, making it something contingently constructed and so on and so on, first, I don't believe in the revolutionary potential of it. I can imagine a late capitalist society with all this fluidity, reconstruct identity and so on, where precisely all these abilities of yours to reconstruct yourself, change your identity, are perfectly commodified and so on. I don't believe there is something very subversive in it. But I have two, three other problems, very respectful ones, in the sense that I'm not making fun of LGBT, but that's precisely my point. Let's go through it. My first problem with LGBT is sometimes they engage in what Judith Butler is not doing, she is very intelligent. But sometimes, you know, what interests me how a certain ideology gets popular, starts to work. You have this idea that LGBT means that we should playfully change our identities, you know today you are gay, tomorrow you are bisexual and so on and so on. Now, here I react with all my theoretical respect, I will immediately make—made it clear why I react on behalf of LGBT people. Yes, in some sense we are free, our sexual orientation, identity is not given to us. But here I remember again the legacy of German idealism, Schelling, not Hegel, who developed in a wonderful way how the highest act of freedom, the most radical choice is an unconscious choice. You know choice at the most radical level of existential choice, where it's not the choice, let's go to sweet store, do I want strawberry cake or chocolate cake, it's the choice of who I am. This choice is never done in this easy way: oh, let's look around, let's—today this week I will play being gay, then I'm bisexual, then I'm, I don't know, screw animals, whatever you want. No, it's—it's like the structure of love. If there is a free choice, it's love in the sense of you don't really—you—love cannot be enforced, nobody can order you fall in love. Love is free. But did you notice if you're truly in love how exactly like that love, you experience it as your fate? You never are in a moment where you say—I'm sorry for the obscenity, don't take it personally—okay, I want to fall in love, let's look around—I'm sorry since I'm heterosexual—a nice girl there, a nice girl there, there, but I like her hair, I like her breasts, I like her eyes, let's make a list and the... you don't fall in you all of a sudden in your subjective experience, you all of a sudden discover that you are already in love. You assume the choice already made. And I think even at the deepest level this is how great political choices happen. For example, the big choice: your country's occupied. Will I fight or not? If you decide to fight, you do it because you experience the pressure to fight for freedom as your innermost necessity. I wouldn't like to die but I cannot live with myself, I cannot look into the mirror in the morning if I don't join the fight. So where does transgender enter here? I met some transgender people with whom incidentally I have very good relations, seriously, and they told me that this exactly is was hold for them. Can you imagine for example when you do a transgender operation? This is extremely painful, you suffer and so on. So if they still insist on doing it, it's because the change of sex or whatever is for them experienced precisely as a free choice as a tremendous pressure. They are ready to literally cut their body in order to actualize the identity that they have chosen. So first let's not play with it as this, you know, the lesson of transgender is it's all one happy dance we change identities and so on and so on. It's a very tough thing. The second thing nonetheless: when we have this fluidity of multiple sexual or whatever—gender—it's not the same, but I will not bore you with this here—identities and so on and so on, I want to repeat here closely a line of thought which is already my last book but it will be more expansively in my next book. The illusion that I sometimes detect there is how—okay, they are totally right, I agree with it, there is no fixed sexual identity and so on and so on. But they read this in the following way: the binary sexual identity, male identity, masculine identity, feminine identity, they are hegemonic in our patriarchal societies and the idea is—I simplify it but this is how it functions—I that is supposed to be the original trans—LGBTQ+ whatever experience, I don't cannot recognize myself in any of these identities, I don't cannot adopt as my existential choice to be a man or a woman the way they are defined by our predominant ideology. I totally subscribe to this. But then they try to supplement this with a wider description, like I got list of identities: butch, queer, transgender, asexual, bisexual, trisexual, whatever. Of course you have to have some kind of identity, I accept this. Just I claim that sexuality is in itself antagonistic. So let's not replace one identity with a wider identity and then say if we just enlarge the list, you know if instead of two gender identities we have then everything will be okay, everyone can choose. And here the infamous plus enters, which I think is the most interesting part of LGBTQ+ movement. I'm really for them here. This is Hegel in practice. We just should not read it in an empiricist way. The empiricist way is simply: okay, we give a list of LGBT whatever, identities but this empiricist way of classification, we cannot ever be sure did we cover all of them? So it's like maybe other—we shouldn't be oppressive—maybe other identities will emerge. So let's leave it open, you know, it's like when you enumerate all things in a certain category, you add etcetera, you know, like let's leave it open. My paradoxical solution here, a Hegelian one—and interestingly enough I know some LGBT, especially transgender people who are aware of this, they are my Hegelian friends—is: what about to be, what if plus is not simply just a shorthand for all new identities to be discovered, what if we can be a plus directly? And I think human subjectivity basically is a plus. Or to put it in another way: in the last list of identities proposed that I've read, I noticed there are three categories which obviously stick out. Asexual, allied and questioning. First they cheat with allied: it's not really a sexual or gender identity, it simply means straight old normative heterosexual people who are sympathetic towards us, open to us. They cheat here. This is just saying not all heterosexual are bad, there are some who are allies. Then you have asexual. It's interesting because with all the paradoxes that is involved. They are right: to be asexual is an immanent part of being sexual. Sexuality precisely as antagonistic always has an option of asexuality. This is how—and we had this already in Soviet Union in that utopian era of 1920s and now it's returning—this idea that the ultimate result of the struggle for the liberation of sexuality will be liberation from sexuality. You have now people who claim that—in Ray Kurzweil style of—of—of—of—that unique post-human state singularity where we'll be all one but also more applied ways how we are entering a new stage of post-humanity where reproduction will be done in non-sexual way and it's an open question what remains of sexuality and more and more people simply advocate the end of sexuality, claiming sexuality as such is objectifying, means objectifying another human being and so on and so on. So it's a legitimate topic. And the last one, questioning, like basically you don't know what you are, you are questioning your identity. What I claim is that this questioning attitude is part of sexuality as such. Sexuality functions only through such questioning. Sexual identity as a man or as a—I wouldn't say even as a man—masculine, feminine, is just different type of questioning. And we should keep this—we should keep this absolutely open. Why? Because—and here I would like to react what was said this morning a little bit benevolently that my identity is pervert and so on and so on. Maybe, but I'm not responsible for the title of those movies Pervert's Guide to... It's Sophie Fiennes who suggested this to me and I said okay if it works well commercially, fuck it. But I'm not that. I think and this is one of the dark legacies of '68 liberation, sexual, where I remember I was very young then, the idea was this one—this is the subtle anti-feminist aspect of it—women are hysterical which means they—they just provoke the master secretly they want a new master, a stronger master. The truly heroic position is a pervert. A pervert, as they say, actually does what hysterical and pervert is basically a man—there is a great debate in psychoanalysis if feminine perversion exists at all. The idea is that a pervert subject does again what hysterical subjects only dream about in an ambiguous way. I think that both Freud and Lacan totally opposed this version. That, you know, hysteria is the position of questioning. And for Lacan and Freud already, they never—true psychoanalysis never dismisses feminine hysteria as you know a man should come to set in order the house confused, questioning and so on and so on. No, hysterical questioning is the origin of it all, even the origin of critique of ideology because as Lacan points out so nicely: what is the original hysterical question? It's not I don't know what I desire, nothing empirical such, no, it's which object is my true object and then we have this infinite metonymy, metonymy sorry, never there. The original hysterical question is: what kind of object I am? Even in the most naive, it may sound anti-feminist way, we get this with this eternal feminine question—and it's an authentic question, you know, which some men find annoying—woman says you say you love me, but tell me why do you love me. This eternal: tell me why do you love me. It's an authentic question, the question is precisely what kind of an object I am for you. It's radical questioning in contrast to a pervert who never questions. A pervert knows what's good for you, he knows better than you what's good for you, that's why he can—this is the basic pervert structure. I torture you because I know better than you what's good for you so I torture you really to help you, better for you and so on. So to go on—that's why already Freud says something very interesting. He says that it's not true that in perversion we lay our unconscious bare. No, he says: nowhere is our unconscious more hidden, inaccessible than in perversion. First result. Second result: as Lacan puts it nicely, far from being subversive, perversion is really a hidden part of a power edifice. Every power to reproduce itself needs a hidden perverse supplement. Okay, sometimes this supplement comes open like you in the United States with Trump, it's—Trump is a bit more complex. But what I want—what I want to say is that it's time maybe to adopt this old-fashioned position and to—to celebrate hysteria which is basically feminine as the founding gesture of subjectivity. In contrast to those who think man is subject, woman is an object. No, Lacan knew it well. This hysterical self-questioning is, as it were, the origin of subjectivity. And Lacan makes this clear when in his type different discourses, you know, master, university, analyst, he claims that only the hysterical subject through questioning really produces new knowledge. University is then the classification and so on of the established knowledge but at its creative moment science is definitely hysterical. Now you will say but nonetheless there is an analyst. Analyst is absolutely not sexed as male. If you want to sexualize Lacan's four types of discourses, it is clear that we have the male couple: master and university, and we have the feminine couple: hysteric and analyst. But remember for Lacan, it's not that the analyst is the ultimate goal, the analyst is basically non-productive. The analyst is just a stupid object of transference, a screen which allows the productivity—the productivity of the—of the subject. Okay, let's go on, I'm a little bit losing time. The next thing I wanted to develop if you allow me is something—now comes the trigger warning. It will be something maybe it will offend you a little bit, very problematic, but please give me, trust me at the end the turn will be critical and absolutely pro-feminist. But I say this to provoke you. I—precisely because subjectivity is I am a subject only on condition that I don't know what for an object I am, what for an object of desire precisely. And now this brings us to the problem of objectification. I think that one of the confusions in MeToo—and again, I totally support MeToo. I'm not one of those Catherine Deneuve and I don't know Germaine Greer who claim they are too radical now MeToo, we should be more pragmatic and so on. No, I think the problem with MeToo is again that it's not radical enough. You know one of these standard complaints is men objectivize women. I'm tempted to say: I hope they do and I hope that they objectivize each other as much as possible. True sadist domination is not objectivizing, but is a terrifying fake violent subjectivization. I will try to explain. First let me tell you something totally naive. Sexuality involves objectivization. If you are a girl, it's totally legitimate if you are heterosexual, if you are lesbian even better, of course you want to seduce a guy. And of course you want to appear attractive to him. And of course you in this sense objectivize yourself. I don't see anything anti-feminist, humiliating in this. Men are doing the same and so on. The trick is: are you allowed to objectivize yourself as part of your strategy? If you look at ideological fundamentalism, why do they, for example—for example, but I don't want to go into Islamophobia, this is not my position—but why this covering up of women in much of Islam? Precisely their ultimate horror is that the women will objectivize themselves, appear active sexual agents, not under male control. What I mean in this way, what I mean, let me now—here comes the trigger warning now you should plug it in, include it. Once I spoke with friends about something—I'm sorry if it will hurt you—about something pretty obscene. What would have been—and please believe me not because only I'm old—I never really watch hardcore pornography. Not because I am conservative or whatever, but it's for me—it's always was sexually so depressive, you know. Like for me, although the contrary, if you think too much about sexuality, I would say download a really cheap depressing hardcore movie and it will turn you off like... But I debated with friends who had more experience in this about what would have been the—let's call it very naively—the typical archetypal hardcore male heterosexual hardcore scene. And we, my friends who know the stuff, told me: there is one precise shot which fits it. It's like this—here I apologize again for the fourth time—imagine a woman is lying on bed with her legs up, spread, a man is penetrating her. You see—this is why it's so complicated how deconstructed it must be, it must be very unpleasant probably. You have to see penetration but now comes the crucial point, you will always find it, be careful for it if you watch this shit: through her legs, that's why man has to be a little bit on the side, you should see her face, she looks into the camera, displaying her pleasure. She breaks this basic rule of fiction cinema: you know that the actor if it's not a subjective shot, the actor shouldn't look into the camera. She does it. And her duty is to bear witness of her—I cannot imitate that, oh okay, the sounds, you know that—that she is really enjoying. So let's in a very simple way analyze this scene. The man is the one who is truly objectivized, instrumentalized. You—I was shown some short movies where you literally don't even see the man's face. Fuck him, he is nothing, his duty is hard on, bam-bam-bam, that's it. And at the end through ejaculation he has to prove that it's for the real. The only subjectivity, in a very active sense, in the sense addressing you as another subject, you, the male—the male viewer, is the woman. The woman is not an object but it's something much worse, it's an enforced brutally imposed subjectivization. And that's how also sadism works. Sadism even when it appears just to torture you, objectivize you, no, it objectivizes you in order to humiliate you as a subject. The whole pleasure of—of sadism is not: you are an object for me. But you are an object for me and that is horrible for you as a subject and I want to see your shame, your suffering and so on and so on. So I claim that the whole point of religious oppression or this sexism and so on, it's always this—this surplus of enforced subjectivization. No male chauvinist wants a woman just as an object, in the simple sense of enjoying and so on. No, you want this to see how this makes her feel humiliated and so on. You want to see her broken, her broken subjectivity. Okay, now I will censor myself. We started at six—okay, I still have time, I'm not yet there, because I have many more things to say. So, okay, the next thing, I will jump out of this, I jump to my next point, I will jump a little bit here. Then this crazy situation: what type of ideology, how should we reply to it? Now I would like to introduce another, but I will be very brief here, I don't want to lose time, a wonderful Hegelian category of objective humor. Hegel criticizes very violently what he calls subjective humor, which for Hegel means you want to be wiser than your target and you just display your brilliance, making fun of and so on and so on. Hegel rejects this, but he's not simply saying: now we must see reality. We must see all these humorous reversals and so on in reality itself. What if reality itself is crazy enough? I will not go into it, I don't have time, I want to conclude soon. Just to give you an idea. That's why I think I find so problematic all these Jon Stewart, John Oliver, eternal sport of American liberals, making fun of Trump all the time. I mean, you cannot beat Trump here, Trump is already his own humor. What he is—let's focus just on what Trump is doing and you get the biggest joke if you want to see. And I—for me, our late capitalist reality is in some sense full of comical reversals. One big joke. For example, one of the biggest jokes in unemployment. How—and this is a genius of today's ideology. I don't know how it is in United States, but in my country, Slovenia, almost half of the workers are already precarious workers. You don't have a permanent job, you have to care for contracts every—every couple of month and so on. You know what's the genius of the ruling ideology? This which is for you at least basically, if you are not a successful artist or what, it's a source of permanent anxiety. They sell you this as your freedom. No, we are all self-entrepreneur. Oh, you have—you can reinvent yourself with the new contract every... Isn't this something a wonderful cynical joke? Your very freedom is the form of your, as it were, additional—additional slavery and so on and so on. Let me go on, I'm just now giving you short insights so that I will somehow cover it all. My next topic is that something is happening today which is the technological background, if you want, on this permanent fluidity of sexual identities. That's why I find very interesting video games. No, I'm too stupid, too old, I don't play them, my son leads me in—instantly. And here I have a kind of a friendly, they're my best friends, but mockingly racist attitude: beware of Koreans, they are the best in the world. My son who plays this through the web with all around the world, he said the moment Koreans enter the game, we are lost. But what I want to say is that—and are you aware even how important this is? It's incredibly important, these games. Because are you aware that these games already turn around more money than movies and TV combined? It's the central ideological apparatus. And what interests me is that a certain type of subjectivity emerges there. It's what I call a pre-Oedipal, although it's not really pre-Oedipal, un-dead subjectivity. You know the basic logic of video games is you die, you can start again. It's really what I described all the time in my work like this identity that you find in Marquis de Sade, where you have the same un-deadness. You know like Juliette is tortured, in the next scene she is again there in all beauty and so on. You find a little bit of this even in hardcore pornography where... did you know...
I got that nerve inflammation you can feel when I speak even now. First they suspected that it's a stroke then, so that I don't forget something, then I got some heart problems and they already thought they will have to, how do you call it, they put in some plastic object so that the vein doesn't get narrow. It was not that but they were in a total panic. Then, let's go down, my prostate turned bad, then my diabetes turned bad and now I already feel I go to my diabetician doctor. How she, it's an old lady, looks at my feet like, oh, oh, you will soon be mine, we will have to cut them off. So it was—ah, yeah, also, sorry, I forgot something in the middle. In the middle of it, they discovered that I have cancer on my right kidney. And I had to do an operation. It was really bad. Now it's getting better but okay, I simply have physical limitations. Jet lag and I cannot be socially active for more than two, three hours then I just get that tired. So my sincere apologies to you. You should have organized this fifteen years earlier, then you would have me for all the day just talking. You know, because I still, since I talk too much, I still find it incredible how from time to time when I give some classes, a student approaches me: would you be my analyst? You know. My answer is double. First, listen, can you imagine me just sitting there for more than thirty seconds and listening to you? Just the guy. But more seriously, it's said to be odd but another thing that I want to explain and we can go on into it later in the debate. I was a little bit in a panic because I wasn't sure what type of a public will be here. So I will try to mix social topic with philosophy, not pure philosophy, but what I and my gang from Slovenia, my two co-friends, Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar, we are more and more focusing now on basic ontological philosophical problems. I philosophically oppose to that, how should I call it, historicist deconstructive turn, which basically means forget about these naive old-fashioned philosophical questions: what is reality, how does the world exist independently of us, are we free and all that stuff. Did you notice how now we get generally a turn towards these basic questions? But till a couple of years ago, we had a certain type of historicism, discursive historicism, predominating. For me, the model of this, and he's a great thinker, I don't doubt, is Michel Foucault. For him, the ultimate horizon of thinking is what he calls épistémé, a historically specified discursive formation. So, and I'm not kidding, it's literally like this. If you were—a friend of mine did that even once—if you were to ask Michel Foucault: do I have an immortal soul? His answer would have been: this question can only be meaningful within a certain historical formation of knowledge. So all we can do is describe that formation of knowledge which makes this type of question meaningful. So you are not even allowed to raise a direct naive ontological question like, okay, okay, but do I really have a soul? And it's a legitimate operation. It's a very strong argument for them to say you never ask such questions out of nowhere. We always talk out of or against the background of a certain historical formation of knowledge. And I think this position is nonetheless ultimately for philosophical reasons inconsistent. For example, in my long-standing debates—personally, I'm in good relations with her—with Judith Butler, we always end up at this point. She accuses me of being a not historicist enough Kantian, like formulas of sexuation, this is a kind of a transcendental a priori, I should historicize more. Then my counter-argument to her is always: you are describing a certain, let's call it, functioning of sexuality. We don't have fixed sexual identities, our sexual identity is a matter of performative, is a performative result of our discursive and bodily practices and so on and so on, it's ultimately contingent, not inscribed in any nature and so on and so on. And I'm—let me now make, before I go into these improvisations, something very clear—I'm not bluffing here when I ask her and you this type of question. It's very sincere, naively. I ask her a naive question, which nonetheless I think perplexed her a little bit. This notion articulated long ago, okay, quarter of a century ago, a little bit more, in Gender Trouble, this, let's call it, theory of sexual identity as performatively constructed, ultimately contingent and so on and so on. Is this an eternal fact so that you can say the caveman was already discursively constructing his, her, its identity? Or are you describing something that really holds only for our time? Is your own this model of sexuality as historically contingently constructed, is it itself historically specified? But then you need another meta-theory, you know, to account—or is it simply that, to put it in very brutal terms, it was all the time like this also for the cavemen, they were just, I will be very blunt, stupid and didn't know it? So that we live in a unique historical moment when we finally see something that was true all the time. And I remember I was a little bit shocked. Her answer to me was: Michel Foucault prohibits even to raise such questions. Well, he doesn't, I claim, because he always emphasized, he knew what he was talking, Michel Foucault, when he in his last series of books, with all those History of Sexuality Part and describing Ancient Greek, early Roman logic of pleasures and so on, he said something very important. He said: every history is ultimately the history of the present. That is to say, it's not just that we step on our shoulder and look into Ancient Greece the way it really was. There must be something in our own epoch—and Foucault described this, the end of psychoanalysis or this paradigm of sexuality and so on and so on, the uncertainties, openness of our time—this is the experience from which we can see what he saw there. So again, my point is that nonetheless we cannot—or with Foucault is the same problem if you read him with his notion of power. The axis of his late teaching is, of course, knowledge and power. Strategies of power and so on and so on. Again, a naive question: is this a trans-historical constant or something specific to our time? And it's nice to see how Foucault is ambiguous here. Sometimes he talks as if, again to put it naively, the entire human history is the history of power strategies and so on and so on. But sometimes, in his early very popular book, which I think it's a very good book although—and this is significant—it was never really popular, although it was very popular but in theory, Les mots et les choses, which was here as translated as—how was it here the title of his... The Order of Things. The Order of Things. It's a good title. Do you know that? I read somewhere that Foucault first wanted to give it L’ordre des choses in original and then publisher opposed it and he—okay, there he does something incredible. He basically provides a historical genesis of how this functioning of power came to be. So he is oscillating here. Now, I'm not—this is a very complex problem. Can we break out of this, I call it, transcendental approach, which is ultimately something that unites such opposite phenomena like Martin Heidegger's thought, deconstructionists and so on? This idea that all we can ultimately do is to describe a historical discursive practice or, as Heidegger would have put it, disclosure of being, the horizon of meaning within which things appear to us in a certain way. Is this all? So that, again, whenever you try to—sorry for vulgar metaphor—whenever you try to grab a philosopher, to squeeze his balls or, I don't know what would be the feminine version of this metaphor, I don't enter it, he can always say no, we cannot go beyond. And this is basically also, for example, Heidegger's attitude towards modern science. That, yeah, we learn wonderful things there, but in order to do a scientific research, nature already appears to you as an empirical entity ruled by mathematical laws and so on and so on. You are always within a certain horizon of being. My naive question is: is this all? So is ontology, in the naive sense of describing reality the way it is, independently of this transcendental place, is this a legitimate question or no? To my surprise, I discovered that Heidegger himself was aware of this. In his late seminar on Heraclitus from mid-sixties, the late last years of his life, he says openly that this question: how are things outside their horizon of being? He was well aware. He wasn't an idealist, Heidegger. He didn't claim that the ontological event, Ereignis, horizon of being empirically creates things. It just makes things, reality appear within a certain horizon of meaning. How are things independently of this? He said: this is the great weakness of my thinking, I never tried even to formulate the question. And what I'm really trying to do—not just me, but in different ways Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar and so on and so on—is to raise this question without regressing into naive realism. And that's, we don't have time to go into it now, but that's my big reproach to Object Oriented Ontology. They precisely pretend to, as it were, step out from our own skin and describe as Graham Harman puts it: we humans are just one among the objects in the world. We can be a more important object or whatever. Okay, it's totally legitimate, I think, to raise here the question: where do you stand when you say this? In order to be able to say this, you are no longer just a human being. It is as if you can step out from where and look at reality the way it really is. And I so—I think I don't buy that turn towards simple objective realism. Let's describe reality the way it is. I think this may surprise you that the girl—not girl, lady, I don't know how old she is and I apologize, I didn't mean it in a patronizing way—Jane or Jane, I always confuse Pride and Prejudice with her, who wrote Vibrant Matter and new materialism... Jane Bennett. Jane Bennett, yes. Ah, I know why I'm making this mistake. Joan Bennett is my favorite Hollywood femme fatale, you know, in Fritz Lang movies, the dirty one. But now, she is—I pretty much admire her description of, let us say, a trash site as a impersonal complex of its own where human debris, remainders interact with poisons, with insects, whatever and so on and so on. But I think it's clearly anthropomorphic. Precisely when we try to describe in this sympathetic way reality the way it is, we are usually very deep in anthropomorphizing it. And she is aware of it. I quote her. She is—she is deeply aware of it. She admits it. So how to solve this problem? How to break out of the transcendental horizon without regressing into some type of ultimately pre-modern naive realism? I will not bore you with this. Read my last books. I claim that on the path of Hegel, reading Hegel through Lacan and so on and so on, we can find a unique original way here, a way which does the job. It's, to put it very simple just to give you the code, it's wrong to answer how is reality independently of us. The true problem is: how can—how do we fit reality? How is something like human thought possible in reality? Our contact with reality, the way it is in itself—whatever we call it—is not erase yourself and present an objective image like in quantum physics and so on and so on. No, the problem is precisely—the problem is precisely to see basically what do we humans mean for reality? How do we fit in it? That moment, I will not get lost here, it would have meant too much. I repeatedly address this in all of my last books. So, now let me go finally to the topic and I propose Antonio, this is okay for you, I will simply go on talking, improvising and then at a certain level—I'm sorry that you don't have, I think the only way to contain me is to do—did you see—okay, it's an old one, it's not for most of you a movie of your generation, of course—the—the—the third, I think, James Bond movie, Goldfinger. You know where Goldfinger drives a car—no, sorry, James Bond. It has that famous red button. He presses it and, you know. Maybe next time you allow me to talk here, Antonio, to put some control when I talk too much, but I'm—okay. So, I will just go on. I would like to begin with something—I warn you there will be some provocations, but consciously I would like to solicit the debate a little bit along the lines of what we improvised briefly in the morning. Two hundred years of the birth of Marx. Okay, but we should ask the naive question: is Marx still alive? Which is a wrong arrogant question. Marx is alive if not if we find something in him but if he—he can tell us something about ourselves. The trick is: if we read our modern society through the eyes of Marx, does this still tell us something? My—I'm not a naive Marxist. My answer is yes and no. Why? I'm sorry if you heard this joke applied to Marx. I used it in a short text published and—it's an old joke. I think the greatest legacy of communism cultural were political jokes, which disappeared now. And it's one of the classical Soviet jokes about the Jew Rabinovich and they had a legendary radio station—in jokes only, there is a real Radio Yerevan, it's a capital of Georgia—I think—no, or doesn't matter. So—the—the joke is that people ask their questions and the radio always answers in the same way: in principle yes, but. The most famous answer is: somebody calls radio station and says is it true that the Jew Rabinovich won a new car on state lottery? And the radio answers: in principle it's true, just it wasn't a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn't win it, it was stolen from him. I think unfortunately pretty much the same with Marx. Is Marx still actual? In principle yes, but. And I will just try to elaborate today some of these buts. Others are obvious, like the whole problem of which is the proletarian subject, the emancipatory subject today and so on and so on. One would have been—you know Marx's well-known definition of religion as the opium of the people. Marx is more subtle than it may appear here. He doesn't say for the people because this implies a naive position as if there are some evil servants of those in power who manipulate and offer, produce religion. No, religion is opium of the people, authentically experienced by them. So the first thing we can in a very productive way, I claim, elaborate here is that Marx has to be supplemented that, okay, with some fundamentalisms and so on, religion is still to some extent the opium of the people. But isn't it today we have two other opiums of the people? And if you know some of my latest comments, you know the joke that's coming. These two new opiums of the people are precisely opium and the people. Opium is getting—by opium I don't mean just literally opium, but the whole industry of drugs in both senses: medical drugs and drugs like opium, crack or whatever. It is as if—and it's not limited to a narrow one or two percent—I read somewhere already ten years ago that in American academia generally, around six—seven—sixty to seventy percent of people there, professors, students, use either Xanax or whatever some kind of drugs. And this is a wonderful paradox. At the same time, how do these drugs function? First, if we are over-excited, bombarded by experiences, too excited, some threats traumatic, they calm us down. But then they are used also for exactly the opposite purpose. When you're depressed, inactive, to resuscitate you again. Okay, that's another topic. What interests me also, this is the first opium of the people, opium as the name for all the drugs. The second one is 'people' itself. This is the new right-wing, alt-right, whatever populism. We have it in Europe and so on. Precisely 'people' are for populists the opium for the people. This imaginary representation: we are one united people, whose function is to drug you, to make you ignore all the antagonisms that cut across the people because in populism as a rule the enemy always comes from somewhere outside. It's for Trump fundamentalists and so on, either, I don't know, the corrupted New Left cultural, like for Jordan Peterson it's cultural Marxism, some external, or is the immigrant threat and so on and so on. Things get get more complex, but I think that's the first thing to do. The second thing about Marx: you know the famous description in Communist Manifesto—and Marx means it basically almost in a positive way, that that's the great result of capitalism—that as Marx puts it, it dissolve—everything solid melts into the air. Capitalism resolves all traditional, patriarchal, authoritarian social relations and so on and so on and so on. I think that the problem with Marx here is that he was more right than he could have imagined. Isn't the whole LGBT movement—and please to avoid the misunderstanding, I will this time not make fun of it, this is a great achievement—that—I think that LGBT+ also Q and so on, and ecology today prove that it's not only all patriarchal social relations that melt into thin air, they lose their natural-given character and stability. Also our innermost sexual identity and even nature itself. The result of today's technology and so on is that nature itself—that's what Anthropocene means—we can—nature is no longer what it was till now in human history, the stable background that somehow will put things back in balance and we always said: okay, we can pollute this river, do this, do that, but somehow all of it will find a new—we could count on nature being remaining the same. I think, although I hate these references to some original wisdom, I admire here nonetheless ancient—I don't know who did this, I think both Aztecs or Incas who saw that it's not as simple as that. You know Jacques Lacan noticed somewhere what's so surprising about those ritual they had with human sacrifices and so on. For what were they sacrificing? Not what you would have expected: that so that something out of order would be—for example, you don't get rain, let's kill fifty children or prisoners or whatever virgins and maybe there will be rain. No, they sacrificed, they feel the need to make human sacrifices so that the most ordinary, regular things would—to make it sure that they will happen again and again. They sacrifice so that sun will rise next—next morning and so on. In some sense they were right, I claim. In what sense? From today's ecological experience, it's not just that we screwed nature—I mean screwed it up in the sense of destabilizing it—but we can see retroactively that there never was a true natural balance. I am opposed to this anthropocentric ecology: it says basically nature has its balance, stability, homeostasis, and then we arrogant humans screwed it up. If you look at the history, even of life of our earth, think about what? Think about just our main sources still of energy, coal and oil. Can you even imagine what kind of mega-ecological catastrophes must have happened on our earth so that earth produce this reserve? So earth maybe our mother, but it's a dirty bitch of a mother. It is crazy. There is—we don't have any natural balance to return to. Going back to this fluidity of sexual identities, here I again had a very friendly debate with Judith Butler. The problem years ago, the problem was this one: that I told her and again she probably thinks she gave me a good answer, I don't think. Namely, my question to her was the following one: she describes a certain constitution of subjectivity, it's no longer patriarchal, stable, fixed identities, it's fluid, everybody can you can reconstruct yourself, play performative games, all that stuff. My—I—yes, he simply she doesn't agree with my diagnosis, but I agree with myself. It's that what she is describing, the type of subjectivity, this fluid reinventing itself, deconstructing and so on itself, changing identities, that it's nothing subversive. It's—she is simply, for example in Gender Trouble, describing the predominant form of, let's use this bombastic term, late capitalist mode of subjectivity. Then she exploded and said: what about Trump, alt-right, neo-conservative, Christian fundamentalist? My answer is, maybe I'm wrong: yes, but they are a reactive phenomenon. In a way, as LGBT demonstrate, what fascinated me with LGBT—and this isn't an argument against, although maybe a little bit—is did you notice how LGBT was instantly accepted by top businesses? Name them: Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, all were instantly for it. Now, I'm not saying this is bad, I'm not saying that if they support it, it must be reactionary and so on. I'm just saying that—that in this project of denaturalizing human sexuality, making it something contingently constructed and so on and so on, first, I don't believe in the revolutionary potential of it. I can imagine a late capitalist society with all this fluidity, reconstruct identity and so on, where precisely all these abilities of yours to reconstruct yourself, change your identity, are perfectly commodified and so on. I don't believe there is something very subversive in it. But I have two, three other problems, very respectful ones, in the sense that I'm not making fun of LGBT, but that's precisely my point. Let's go through it. My first problem with LGBT is sometimes they engage in what Judith Butler is not doing, she is very intelligent. But sometimes, you know, what interests me how a certain ideology gets popular, starts to work. You have this idea that LGBT means that we should playfully change our identities, you know today you are gay, tomorrow you are bisexual and so on and so on. Now, here I react with all my theoretical respect, I will immediately make—made it clear why I react on behalf of LGBT people. Yes, in some sense we are free, our sexual orientation, identity is not given to us. But here I remember again the legacy of German idealism, Schelling, not Hegel, who developed in a wonderful way how the highest act of freedom, the most radical choice is an unconscious choice. You know choice at the most radical level of existential choice, where it's not the choice, let's go to sweet store, do I want strawberry cake or chocolate cake, it's the choice of who I am. This choice is never done in this easy way: oh, let's look around, let's—today this week I will play being gay, then I'm bisexual, then I'm, I don't know, screw animals, whatever you want. No, it's—it's like the structure of love. If there is a free choice, it's love in the sense of you don't really—you—love cannot be enforced, nobody can order you fall in love. Love is free. But did you notice if you're truly in love how exactly like that love, you experience it as your fate? You never are in a moment where you say—I'm sorry for the obscenity, don't take it personally—okay, I want to fall in love, let's look around—I'm sorry since I'm heterosexual—a nice girl there, a nice girl there, there, but I like her hair, I like her breasts, I like her eyes, let's make a list and the... you don't fall in you all of a sudden in your subjective experience, you all of a sudden discover that you are already in love. You assume the choice already made. And I think even at the deepest level this is how great political choices happen. For example, the big choice: your country's occupied. Will I fight or not? If you decide to fight, you do it because you experience the pressure to fight for freedom as your innermost necessity. I wouldn't like to die but I cannot live with myself, I cannot look into the mirror in the morning if I don't join the fight. So where does transgender enter here? I met some transgender people with whom incidentally I have very good relations, seriously, and they told me that this exactly is was hold for them. Can you imagine for example when you do a transgender operation? This is extremely painful, you suffer and so on. So if they still insist on doing it, it's because the change of sex or whatever is for them experienced precisely as a free choice as a tremendous pressure. They are ready to literally cut their body in order to actualize the identity that they have chosen. So first let's not play with it as this, you know, the lesson of transgender is it's all one happy dance we change identities and so on and so on. It's a very tough thing. The second thing nonetheless: when we have this fluidity of multiple sexual or whatever—gender—it's not the same, but I will not bore you with this here—identities and so on and so on, I want to repeat here closely a line of thought which is already my last book but it will be more expansively in my next book. The illusion that I sometimes detect there is how—okay, they are totally right, I agree with it, there is no fixed sexual identity and so on and so on. But they read this in the following way: the binary sexual identity, male identity, masculine identity, feminine identity, they are hegemonic in our patriarchal societies and the idea is—I simplify it but this is how it functions—I that is supposed to be the original trans—LGBTQ+ whatever experience, I don't cannot recognize myself in any of these identities, I don't cannot adopt as my existential choice to be a man or a woman the way they are defined by our predominant ideology. I totally subscribe to this. But then they try to supplement this with a wider description, like I got list of identities: butch, queer, transgender, asexual, bisexual, trisexual, whatever. Of course you have to have some kind of identity, I accept this. Just I claim that sexuality is in itself antagonistic. So let's not replace one identity with a wider identity and then say if we just enlarge the list, you know if instead of two gender identities we have then everything will be okay, everyone can choose. And here the infamous plus enters, which I think is the most interesting part of LGBTQ+ movement. I'm really for them here. This is Hegel in practice. We just should not read it in an empiricist way. The empiricist way is simply: okay, we give a list of LGBT whatever, identities but this empiricist way of classification, we cannot ever be sure did we cover all of them? So it's like maybe other—we shouldn't be oppressive—maybe other identities will emerge. So let's leave it open, you know, it's like when you enumerate all things in a certain category, you add etcetera, you know, like let's leave it open. My paradoxical solution here, a Hegelian one—and interestingly enough I know some LGBT, especially transgender people who are aware of this, they are my Hegelian friends—is: what about to be, what if plus is not simply just a shorthand for all new identities to be discovered, what if we can be a plus directly? And I think human subjectivity basically is a plus. Or to put it in another way: in the last list of identities proposed that I've read, I noticed there are three categories which obviously stick out. Asexual, allied and questioning. First they cheat with allied: it's not really a sexual or gender identity, it simply means straight old normative heterosexual people who are sympathetic towards us, open to us. They cheat here. This is just saying not all heterosexual are bad, there are some who are allies. Then you have asexual. It's interesting because with all the paradoxes that is involved. They are right: to be asexual is an immanent part of being sexual. Sexuality precisely as antagonistic always has an option of asexuality. This is how—and we had this already in Soviet Union in that utopian era of 1920s and now it's returning—this idea that the ultimate result of the struggle for the liberation of sexuality will be liberation from sexuality. You have now people who claim that—in Ray Kurzweil style of—of—of—of—that unique post-human state singularity where we'll be all one but also more applied ways how we are entering a new stage of post-humanity where reproduction will be done in non-sexual way and it's an open question what remains of sexuality and more and more people simply advocate the end of sexuality, claiming sexuality as such is objectifying, means objectifying another human being and so on and so on. So it's a legitimate topic. And the last one, questioning, like basically you don't know what you are, you are questioning your identity. What I claim is that this questioning attitude is part of sexuality as such. Sexuality functions only through such questioning. Sexual identity as a man or as a—I wouldn't say even as a man—masculine, feminine, is just different type of questioning. And we should keep this—we should keep this absolutely open. Why? Because—and here I would like to react what was said this morning a little bit benevolently that my identity is pervert and so on and so on. Maybe, but I'm not responsible for the title of those movies Pervert's Guide to... It's Sophie Fiennes who suggested this to me and I said okay if it works well commercially, fuck it. But I'm not that. I think and this is one of the dark legacies of '68 liberation, sexual, where I remember I was very young then, the idea was this one—this is the subtle anti-feminist aspect of it—women are hysterical which means they—they just provoke the master secretly they want a new master, a stronger master. The truly heroic position is a pervert. A pervert, as they say, actually does what hysterical and pervert is basically a man—there is a great debate in psychoanalysis if feminine perversion exists at all. The idea is that a pervert subject does again what hysterical subjects only dream about in an ambiguous way. I think that both Freud and Lacan totally opposed this version. That, you know, hysteria is the position of questioning. And for Lacan and Freud already, they never—true psychoanalysis never dismisses feminine hysteria as you know a man should come to set in order the house confused, questioning and so on and so on. No, hysterical questioning is the origin of it all, even the origin of critique of ideology because as Lacan points out so nicely: what is the original hysterical question? It's not I don't know what I desire, nothing empirical such, no, it's which object is my true object and then we have this infinite metonymy, metonymy sorry, never there. The original hysterical question is: what kind of object I am? Even in the most naive, it may sound anti-feminist way, we get this with this eternal feminine question—and it's an authentic question, you know, which some men find annoying—woman says you say you love me, but tell me why do you love me. This eternal: tell me why do you love me. It's an authentic question, the question is precisely what kind of an object I am for you. It's radical questioning in contrast to a pervert who never questions. A pervert knows what's good for you, he knows better than you what's good for you, that's why he can—this is the basic pervert structure. I torture you because I know better than you what's good for you so I torture you really to help you, better for you and so on. So to go on—that's why already Freud says something very interesting. He says that it's not true that in perversion we lay our unconscious bare. No, he says: nowhere is our unconscious more hidden, inaccessible than in perversion. First result. Second result: as Lacan puts it nicely, far from being subversive, perversion is really a hidden part of a power edifice. Every power to reproduce itself needs a hidden perverse supplement. Okay, sometimes this supplement comes open like you in the United States with Trump, it's—Trump is a bit more complex. But what I want—what I want to say is that it's time maybe to adopt this old-fashioned position and to—to celebrate hysteria which is basically feminine as the founding gesture of subjectivity. In contrast to those who think man is subject, woman is an object. No, Lacan knew it well. This hysterical self-questioning is, as it were, the origin of subjectivity. And Lacan makes this clear when in his type different discourses, you know, master, university, analyst, he claims that only the hysterical subject through questioning really produces new knowledge. University is then the classification and so on of the established knowledge but at its creative moment science is definitely hysterical. Now you will say but nonetheless there is an analyst. Analyst is absolutely not sexed as male. If you want to sexualize Lacan's four types of discourses, it is clear that we have the male couple: master and university, and we have the feminine couple: hysteric and analyst. But remember for Lacan, it's not that the analyst is the ultimate goal, the analyst is basically non-productive. The analyst is just a stupid object of transference, a screen which allows the productivity—the productivity of the—of the subject. Okay, let's go on, I'm a little bit losing time. The next thing I wanted to develop if you allow me is something—now comes the trigger warning. It will be something maybe it will offend you a little bit, very problematic, but please give me, trust me at the end the turn will be critical and absolutely pro-feminist. But I say this to provoke you. I—precisely because subjectivity is I am a subject only on condition that I don't know what for an object I am, what for an object of desire precisely. And now this brings us to the problem of objectification. I think that one of the confusions in MeToo—and again, I totally support MeToo. I'm not one of those Catherine Deneuve and I don't know Germaine Greer who claim they are too radical now MeToo, we should be more pragmatic and so on. No, I think the problem with MeToo is again that it's not radical enough. You know one of these standard complaints is men objectivize women. I'm tempted to say: I hope they do and I hope that they objectivize each other as much as possible. True sadist domination is not objectivizing, but is a terrifying fake violent subjectivization. I will try to explain. First let me tell you something totally naive. Sexuality involves objectivization. If you are a girl, it's totally legitimate if you are heterosexual, if you are lesbian even better, of course you want to seduce a guy. And of course you want to appear attractive to him. And of course you in this sense objectivize yourself. I don't see anything anti-feminist, humiliating in this. Men are doing the same and so on. The trick is: are you allowed to objectivize yourself as part of your strategy? If you look at ideological fundamentalism, why do they, for example—for example, but I don't want to go into Islamophobia, this is not my position—but why this covering up of women in much of Islam? Precisely their ultimate horror is that the women will objectivize themselves, appear active sexual agents, not under male control. What I mean in this way, what I mean, let me now—here comes the trigger warning now you should plug it in, include it. Once I spoke with friends about something—I'm sorry if it will hurt you—about something pretty obscene. What would have been—and please believe me not because only I'm old—I never really watch hardcore pornography. Not because I am conservative or whatever, but it's for me—it's always was sexually so depressive, you know. Like for me, although the contrary, if you think too much about sexuality, I would say download a really cheap depressing hardcore movie and it will turn you off like... But I debated with friends who had more experience in this about what would have been the—let's call it very naively—the typical archetypal hardcore male heterosexual hardcore scene. And we, my friends who know the stuff, told me: there is one precise shot which fits it. It's like this—here I apologize again for the fourth time—imagine a woman is lying on bed with her legs up, spread, a man is penetrating her. You see—this is why it's so complicated how deconstructed it must be, it must be very unpleasant probably. You have to see penetration but now comes the crucial point, you will always find it, be careful for it if you watch this shit: through her legs, that's why man has to be a little bit on the side, you should see her face, she looks into the camera, displaying her pleasure. She breaks this basic rule of fiction cinema: you know that the actor if it's not a subjective shot, the actor shouldn't look into the camera. She does it. And her duty is to bear witness of her—I cannot imitate that, oh okay, the sounds, you know that—that she is really enjoying. So let's in a very simple way analyze this scene. The man is the one who is truly objectivized, instrumentalized. You—I was shown some short movies where you literally don't even see the man's face. Fuck him, he is nothing, his duty is hard on, bam-bam-bam, that's it. And at the end through ejaculation he has to prove that it's for the real. The only subjectivity, in a very active sense, in the sense addressing you as another subject, you, the male—the male viewer, is the woman. The woman is not an object but it's something much worse, it's an enforced brutally imposed subjectivization. And that's how also sadism works. Sadism even when it appears just to torture you, objectivize you, no, it objectivizes you in order to humiliate you as a subject. The whole pleasure of—of sadism is not: you are an object for me. But you are an object for me and that is horrible for you as a subject and I want to see your shame, your suffering and so on and so on. So I claim that the whole point of religious oppression or this sexism and so on, it's always this—this surplus of enforced subjectivization. No male chauvinist wants a woman just as an object, in the simple sense of enjoying and so on. No, you want this to see how this makes her feel humiliated and so on. You want to see her broken, her broken subjectivity. Okay, now I will censor myself. We started at six—okay, I still have time, I'm not yet there, because I have many more things to say. So, okay, the next thing, I will jump out of this, I jump to my next point, I will jump a little bit here. Then this crazy situation: what type of ideology, how should we reply to it? Now I would like to introduce another, but I will be very brief here, I don't want to lose time, a wonderful Hegelian category of objective humor. Hegel criticizes very violently what he calls subjective humor, which for Hegel means you want to be wiser than your target and you just display your brilliance, making fun of and so on and so on. Hegel rejects this, but he's not simply saying: now we must see reality. We must see all these humorous reversals and so on in reality itself. What if reality itself is crazy enough? I will not go into it, I don't have time, I want to conclude soon. Just to give you an idea. That's why I think I find so problematic all these Jon Stewart, John Oliver, eternal sport of American liberals, making fun of Trump all the time. I mean, you cannot beat Trump here, Trump is already his own humor. What he is—let's focus just on what Trump is doing and you get the biggest joke if you want to see. And I—for me, our late capitalist reality is in some sense full of comical reversals. One big joke. For example, one of the biggest jokes in unemployment. How—and this is a genius of today's ideology. I don't know how it is in United States, but in my country, Slovenia, almost half of the workers are already precarious workers. You don't have a permanent job, you have to care for contracts every—every couple of month and so on. You know what's the genius of the ruling ideology? This which is for you at least basically, if you are not a successful artist or what, it's a source of permanent anxiety. They sell you this as your freedom. No, we are all self-entrepreneur. Oh, you have—you can reinvent yourself with the new contract every... Isn't this something a wonderful cynical joke? Your very freedom is the form of your, as it were, additional—additional slavery and so on and so on. Let me go on, I'm just now giving you short insights so that I will somehow cover it all. My next topic is that something is happening today which is the technological background, if you want, on this permanent fluidity of sexual identities. That's why I find very interesting video games. No, I'm too stupid, too old, I don't play them, my son leads me in—instantly. And here I have a kind of a friendly, they're my best friends, but mockingly racist attitude: beware of Koreans, they are the best in the world. My son who plays this through the web with all around the world, he said the moment Koreans enter the game, we are lost. But what I want to say is that—and are you aware even how important this is? It's incredibly important, these games. Because are you aware that these games already turn around more money than movies and TV combined? It's the central ideological apparatus. And what interests me is that a certain type of subjectivity emerges there. It's what I call a pre-Oedipal, although it's not really pre-Oedipal, un-dead subjectivity. You know the basic logic of video games is you die, you can start again. It's really what I described all the time in my work like this identity that you find in Marquis de Sade, where you have the same un-deadness. You know like Juliette is tortured, in the next scene she is again there in all beauty and so on. You find a little bit of this even in hardcore pornography where... did you know...