to observe a structure in its totality: we have usually an ideal structure, in contingent in empirical reality, contradictions, it goes wrong. Hegelian totality means, when we speak of something, we talk of all these consistencies as part of the whole. When Hegel speaks of a totality it means including all its inconsistencies with it. For Plato every example is imperfect, becuase there is this ideal, same for Hegel, but the surplus is on the side of the example.
Cunning of reason: whenever you want to impose a project on reality, you can be sure that something will go wrong. Things will go wrong necessarily, and at the end you get a theory of how things necessarily go wrong.
Something traumatic happens in Hegel: in the moment of passage you see something in the old order that you didn’t see.
Zizek: 20 years ago the dissolution of commie regimes, one capitalism established itself it became invisible. The passage from silent to talkies, the truly great artists Chaplin, Eisenstein, they knew the moment the talkies became hegemonic, extension of realism. No the voice is not natural, what we get is this deep insight, in its most radical dimension the voice is a foreign intruder that disrupts our identity.
Alenka Zupancic: in Think Again edited by Hallward.
superstructure which is not superstructure but in the very core of material production. It is not an illusion, we’re good British empiricists. You think that its only concrete people, but in capitalist society, in order to be a person you need theological mystifications.
How is it that reality is flat reality, but is re-doubled in itself?