Žižek seminar Hegel Now? Workshop Philosophy Department, Middlesex University. Thursday May 5, 2011.
Žižek’s Hegel Lecture put on by Dahlem Humanities Center (DHC), Freie Universität Berlin, on March 31, 2011, in the Henry Ford Building in Dahlem.
Post-Hegel: A move to a positivity of Being and on the other hand, formalist pure repetition, Kierkargard and Freud (death drive) two strange bedfellows.
You can’t be a Hegelian after this break. Before there were communitarian Hegelians, and radical Hegelians. the Pittsburgh Hegelians have rejuvenated Hegel for Liberals. Their point is ‘recognition’. This is Zizek’s problem with them.
Catherine Malabou in her debate with Judith Butler There is an co-written article in Houlgate’s recent edited collection on Hegel
For Malabou, she says, no intersubjectivity is not the ulitmate horizon of Hegel
Master — Servant
Phenomenology of Spirit: you should be attentive to the beginning of Master-Servant
Self-consciousness, a subject which perceives among the objects in the world, another object that claims “fuck you” I’m also a subject.
This is an absolute ontological standard. The original situation is not, I’m a subject and you’re a subject. “This is not the 69 position, lick and recognize each other.” No there is an absolute antagonism, I am as a subject singular and absolute, now there is another guy there that says I am also like you, there is only room for one and there is two now competing for the only place. This Other is not the Levinasian other, nor the (Butler) Other, I recognize you, you recognize me. The Other is an absolutely shattering intrusion.
The Pittsburgh Hegelians deflate Hegel, no metaphysical commitment, just a transcendental forms of a priori rational forms of argumentation.
Suspension of big ontological questions always implies the worst historicism, which opens up the path of violent return of realist metaphysics, neo-Darwinism
Avoiding or suspending the big ontological questions never works, the big radical questions return.
The break is between post-Hegelian thought and the pre-Hegelian metaphysics. My thesis is that precisely Hegel disappears in this passage. Hegel is a vanishing mediator between the two: traditional philosophy and post-metaphysical thought. Hegel something that is neither is one nor the other. If you are in-between you can see something which afterwards becomes invisible. Nice example, the beginning of sound, for a brief moment, the apparent reactionaries like Chaplin, knew something about the ghastly dimension of voice, he saw a potentially ominous spectral dimension of voice, that voice is never a self-transparent means of self-expression but a foreign intruder that can haunt us. But this became invisible. This unbearable excess in Hegel becomes invisible.
The ultra-totalitarian Hegel: GK Chesterton “The Man Who was Thursday” the work of the philosophical policeman. Popper, Adorno, Levinas, Glucksman, would they also subscribe, totalitarianism, the philosophical crime is totality. Totality = Totalitarianism. The task of philosophical police, is to find a political crime, gulag, totalitarianism, reading Rousseau etc that a philosophical crime will be committed. They search out for proponents of totality. But Ž wants to defend totality.
Žižek’s definition of the Hegelian Totality: [I should go back to the audio to fill in this definition a bit more]
Totality is not an ideal of an organic whole. But a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in it’s totality is not to locate hidden harmony of its whole. antagonism, self-contradictory antagonistic. The whole which is the true is the whole plus its symptoms, It’s unintended consequences which betrays its untruth. Today’s global capitalism means speak of the Congo. This is why again the anti-Hegelian rhetorics, which … the space of the Hegelian totality is the space of the abstract harmonious whole, and the excess which undermine it.
Whenever you have a project to something, you can expect it to go wrong, every project is undermined by its inconsistency.
extrnal negtion becomes self-negation.
Only the abstract terror of the French Revolution creates the conditions for liberal freedom. The first choice has to be the wrong choice, it is only the wrong choice that opens the space for concrete freedom.
You arrive at the highest only thruogh the radical contradiction of the lowest. This is the basic temporality of the dialectical process.
Book of Job
Each of 3 theologists try to convince JOb that his suffering must have a deeper meaning.
Why did you do all these things to me? God there commits a blasphemy, the true answer is, you think you are something special but I screwed up everything.
What dies on the cross is God of beyond itself. Holy Spirit is totally unique, what dies on the cross is this disgusting idea that God is up there as a guarantee of meaning. As in when something appears to us as evil, you are looking too close it is a stain, but if you stand back, you can look at it as a part of global harmony. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ, there is no big Other, no guarantee of meaning, the Holy Ghost is that we are here alone without a guarantee. The true message of Christianity is not Trust God, but God Trusts Us. Holy Spirit is the first radical egalitarian institution.
Hate your mother and father, as parts of hierarchy of social order, god is dead, the only hope after this break is an egalitarian community. But there is in Hegel a teleological movement. Not so according to Ž.
June 23, 1789: King says scram. Mirabeau, “Go and tell your king that we shall leave our places here except when forced by bayonets” the invention of the new surprises you. A prophet from chance, you say too much, you try to integrate the excess, and you suceed.
Christ died. It was a shock. They didn’t know what. Somebody says, why don’t we see it as a triumph.
Contingency, is a deeper necessity that articulates itself through contingency. Julius Cesar crossing the Rubicon. At that point it was totally open. Once he crossed the Rubicon, he created his destiny, so that in retrospect it appeared necessary.
Baladour 1995, Le Monde wrote, “if B will be elected, then we can say his election was necessary” something happens and once it happens it retroactively appears necessary.
The time is come to do a materialist reversal of Marx back to Hegel. This opening towards contingency, Hegel is radical thinker of contingency. marx is you as a historical agent can look into history, see where history is going, and then posit yourself as an agent of progress. Hegel no way. there is no big Other. The conservative poet T.S. Eliot. Every really new work of art, it retroactively changes the whole history of art. This is the Hegelian theory of totality. With every new break the whole past is re-written.
Borges wrote about Kafka, every writer has his predesccors, Kafka can be said to create his forerunners. No. We are not simply retroactively projecting things into the past. No what if history is open, events are retroactively constituted.
Can we think this incompleteness of reality without God thinking of it, in a materialist way. We cannot simply become Hegelians. We should admit that there are things Hegel didn’t know. The topic of REPETITION. Deleuze made it clear, what characterizes post-Hegelian space, it is a notion of REPETITION, in contrast to Hegel involves no Aufhebung.
Kierkargard and Freud: A pure repetition. It’s not that Hegel didn’t see it, but there are signs that point to the unthought of Hegel. There are points that you can see where Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough. This is what Marx was saying. Hegel’s theory of economy, didn’t yet capture the whole speculative madness of economy. The ideal of captial as abstraction that rules concrete life, Hegel wasn’t Hegelian enough, passage from money to capital subject to substance. Marx in Grundrisse, capital is an AUTOMATIC SUBJECT. Captial wouldh ave been an horror for Hegel, because it is actually infinity and bad repetitive infinity.
hegel’s theory of madness where Hegel develops the rise of human spirit out of animal life, which is more radical than Foucault. The passage through radical madness, is a permanent background to being human. What Hegel missed, its not simple as passing directly from nature to culture, our cultural rituals of love is not a defence against a naturalism, but against a deadly force, once we pass from nature to culture RETROACTIVELY a third domain of radical negativity arises.
Kant: Man is an animal who needs a master, not because of any natural unruliness, but metaphysical unruliness.
Hegel would have been against the Catholic church, Hegel would have said, animals only do it for procreation, to take something that serves a biological aim, and autonomize it with regard to that aim,
Lacan is right. the horror of sexuality for Christianity, is not vulgar biological life, but metaphysical competitor. Sexuality is the very domain where at its most elementary, wher ethe passage fro manimal to human emerges.
In todays crazy world, offers itself to a Hegelian in-between … and for us too, a certain epock is coming to an end.
Mobilizing Hegelian potentials in today’s world, the time has come to return to Hegel against post-Hegelians against Marx. For example his stuff on the rabble, isnt it today precisely, is that the main form of class struggle isn’t just working class-bourgeouisie, but many forms of rabble, illegal immigrants, landless, etc.
Today isn’t that we are living in a time, maybe in the 20th century we tried too quick to change the world, and that we should reflect on it radically. A brutal fasciest counter-revolution Bologna educational reform. Change intellectuals into experts, change higher education to make it useful. Demonstration in suburbs call psychologists, sociologists. ecology should also ask how did it come to that, do we perceive it correctly.
We are aproaching a time where thinking is absolutely needed Ecology, biogenetics, the limit between inside from outside, we can control mind from outside, chairs moving by your thoughts. This changes the very definition of being human. Be careful to resist the pseud-state of emergency talk. Bill Gates talks like that, Why are we still caught in these ideological debates while children are starving in Africa. The message is do, don’t think about it. Consumption, but I almost become tempted when I pass a Starbucks, they do a wonderful job of ideology, 1% goes to Guatamala children. In the old times citizens/consumers. Now buying the coffee the consumer, your citizenship will be also done by others. Don’t be afraid to be intellectuals today The BOlogna reforms show that those in power know that we are dangerous.