Žižek interview with Derbyshire On June 2012 and Žižek in Russia August 21, 2012
Why Hegel Today?
Cut to Hegel is 1 of the key 3 philosophers: Plato, Descartes, Hegel. Each defines a whole epoch that comes after them but in a negative way.
All history of philosophy is a history of Anti-Platonism: Aristotle, Plato to Nato (Popper, Levinas), Marxist anti-Platonism, Analytical philosophy anti-Platonism. And the same goes for Descartes. Nobody is ready to be a Hegelian, everyone wants to mark a distance.
The same for Descartes, all modern philosophy is a refute of Descartes. Leibniz and feminists, ecology etc. The same is for Hegel, all modern philosophy is a way to distance itself from Hegel: Marx Heidegger etc. Nobody wants to be a Hegelian. Even if you largely agree with him you have to set out a marginal space where you disagree with him.
Is is possible to be a Hegelian today. The answer is NO.
In each of these 3 cases what people react to is SCREEN MEMORY, an easy simplified image and memory which protects you from something much more unsettling, traumatic. And the thing is to see through this screen memory.
Plato: Traumatic encounter, an idea is something you traumatically encounter
Descartes: de-substantialize philosophy, introduces madness into philosophy
Hegel: the ultimate philosopher
All the problems of reading Hegel: the crazy guy who knows everything, Absolute Knowledge, can read the mind of God, this is a screen memory to cover up something which is maybe TOO RADICAL and TRAUMATIC for us to accept today.
Cut to Joke about Ninotchka: Coffee without cream, coffee without milk
but nor is he a historicist. Both poles are wrong.
Hegel is a hinge point in the history of philosophy: The moment of German Idealism 1787 when Kant publishes Critique of Pure Reason and 1831 when Hegel dies.
CUT TO: Speculative Realists (Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier) This is I think where we disagree. For me philosophy is transcendental. Philosophy before Kant was too naive. They though reality was out there, how do we understand it.
We should think with Hegel but BEYOND HEGEL. All this post-Hegelian reversals, Willing of Schopenhauer, Late Schelling production process for Marx, were ways to NOT confront HEGEL. Hegel’s deep insight was too traumatic, monstrous to accept for post-Hegelian period. So we have to go back and seek what Hegel did.
CUT TO: Kant’s transcendental turn: the conditions of possible experience. What is it that takes Hegel beyond Kant. Epistemological into ontological. What Kant sees as epistemological obstacles, imperfections in knowledge, Hegel sees as “cracks in the real.”
Quantum Physics Uncertainty Principle
Where Heisenberg sees it as an epistemological limitation: velocity/position we can’t measure at same time, if we measure one we can’t get the other
Neils Bohr: Not only can’t we measure at the same time but In itself reality is INCOMPLETE
ŽiŽek brings up the computer game analogy, you play a computer game, and you see a house, but the total house is not programmed, because it doesn’t belong in the game, it only exists in blurred not fully realized way. (This is from the Nicholas Fearn book)
INCOMPLETELY PROGRAMMED REALITY AND QUANTUM physics.
IF we are not to approach the house in the game because its not part of the game, we have incompleteness in reality because God underestimated us. God created the world but God thought we would not go beyond the atom but we surprised him. But I’m an atheist. So is it possible to think reality as incomplete without GOD.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO THINK THIS INCOMPLETENESS WITHOUT GOD.
Heidegger is crucial for me here, I agree with Quentin Meillassoux, ultimately we cannot ask this direct naive question, does this table exist, do I have a soul, all we can do is ask within what hermeneutic horizon do these things appear so that we can ask this question.
The basic way things are disclosed to us. In medieval times nature meant meaningful order, in modern nature becomes grey endless universe, with no value. With Heidegger we can go no further, it’s meaningless. In order to approach the question, REALITY has already to be disclosed to you in a certain way. This attitude becomes our daily bread.
The predominant form of continental French philosophy is historicist discourse theory. For a typical continental philosopher: Does the human being have a soul. All I can describe the episteme within which such a question could be raised. My problem is IS THIS ENOUGH. CAN WE MOVE BEYOND THE TRANSCENDENTAL. And for me Hegel Lacan is a way to say YES WE CAN but without falling into Speculative Realists pre-Kantian objectivism.
This “reality is out there we can endlessly approach it and so on and so on” No! How can we break out of the TRANSCENDENTAL HORIZON? the answer for me is Hegel-Lacan. I’m not a continental thinker in terms of this TRANSCENDENTAL HISTORICISM.
I try to be more productively ECLECTIC but in a stupid way. I’m on side of Lacan and Deleuze, because they do not say, “all guys until me are idiots, only I see the way it is.” I don’t do this.
Just look at Hegel’s work. The end of his lectures of the history of philosophy. As a good idealist, he ends up with his system. He says this is where we are today for the time being. He doubly relativizes it. When he talks in his philosophy of history, in 1820 when he talks about about USA and Russia, he says we cannot develop a full philosophical history of these countries, because their century will be the 20th century. Not bad saying this in 1820.
I follow here Robert Solomon, he wrote In the Spirit of Hegel, Absolute Knowing, at every historical period, if you go to the end you reach the limit, so that Absolute Knowing is historicism brought to its most radical extreme. Hegel opens up a space for Otherness. Hegel’s point is not that we now know everything. Hegel is out there is an openness, not that WE know it it all. Hegel is more materialist than Marx. Marx thinks the proletariat have access to some historical necessity, out of contradictions of society, you can know history and act as an agent of this knowledge. for Hegel this is too IDEALIST, Hegel is more open to contingency than Marx.
Žižek gives the Hegel lecture at Free University of Berlin in March 2011
Žižek in Russia August 2012 on Totality at 45 minute mark
Totality is not an ideal of an organic whole. But a critical notion. To locate a phenomenon in it’s totality is not to see hidden harmony of its whole. but to include into a system all its symptoms: antagonism, the Hegelian totality is self-contradictory antagonistic. The whole which is the true is the whole plus its symptoms, it’s unintended consequences which betrays its untruth. If you want to talk about today’s global capitalism means you must speak about Congo.
Hegel is absolutely NOT a holistic philosopher. IF there is something foreign to Hegel, it is the legitimation of EVIL. the comparison with a big painting, you may think you see evil in the world, but the things you see as evil, is like viewing a picture too close and you see just a stain, but from a proper distance that stain is part of the global harmony. For Hegel this position of holistic wisdom this is NOT Hegel.
Hegel’s dialectic is not this stupid wisdom we have to take into account all sides. NO for HEGEL TRUTH IS UNILATERAL.
A JOKE
There was in 1930s a debate in Politburo. Will there be money or not? First there was a Leftist deviation, Trotsky said there will be no money, it will be a transparent society then Bukharin the Right winger said but money is necessary in a complex society. Then Stalin says you are both wrong. There will be a dialectical synthesis, a dialectical unity, “There will be money and there will be not money. Some people will have money and other people will not have money.”
The space of the Hegelian totality is the very space of the abstract harmonious whole, and all the excesses which undermine it.
For Freud it’s not that we have a normal person and then here and there we have pathologies, as Freud put it, pathological phenomena are the truth of normallity itself.
Whenever you have a project to do something, you can expect it to go wrong. Every project is undermined by its inconsistency.
“Property is theft.” external negation becomes self-negation. Theft becomes internal to definition of property itself.
Hegel does not subscribe to liberal critique of French Revolution (1789 but not 1793). Hegel saw the necessity of going through the Jacobin Terror. 1793-94 is a necessary consequence of 1789. 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 through the radical contradiction of the lowest. This is the basic temporality of the dialectical process.
The first choice has to be the wrong choice, it is only the wrong choice that creates the conditions for the right choice. You only arrive at the choice where you see the choice of the rational state, through the choice of abstract terror, it is only terror itself that opens up the space for concrete freedom. You arrive at the choice in 2 stages, the choice has to be repeated.
Ultimate Hegelian Joke
Rabinovitch, a Soviet Jew, wants to emigrate from Soviet Union. I want to emigrate for 2 reasons. 1) I want to emigrate because if Soviet Union falls the Jews will be blamed. The bureaucrat says are you crazy, the Soviet Union will be here forever. Nothing will change here. Rabinovitch says, that’s my second reason. The necessity of this detour is Hegelian
Bad news is God is dead, we have no support in the big Other. Good news is this bad news, we now have substantial freedom.
Book of Job (click here too): First great critique of ideology in history of humanity. why? Things go terribly wrong for Job. Each of his 3 friends (ideologists) try to convince Job that there is a deeper meaning to his suffering. One says God is testing you, the other one, oh God is Just, so if you suffer you must have done something wrong even if you don’t know what, they all 3 try to justify Job’s suffering.
The greatness of Job he doesn’t say I’m innocent, only that these catastrophes have NO MEANING. God comes and says everything the 3 ideologists say is wrong, and everything Job says is right, he agrees with JOB. Then comes an even more subversive moment. Then JOb asks god, ok I get the point but nonetheless, “why did I suffer?” God’s reply might sound arrogant. Where were you when I created the earth, all the animals and so on. HOW ARE WE TO READ THIS? Who are you small men to understand me God, we are on different levels. THis is how it is usually read.
GK CHESTERTON provides a much more radical reading: Why did all this happen to me?? God’s reply is usually read as arrogance of god, the gap that separates us from God. Chesteron turns this around God’s answer: You think you are in trouble, look at the entire universe I created it’s one big mess all around. Here is Žižek at Princeton in Oct 2010 explaining this point
The commandment NOT TO KILL is primarily addressed at God himself, “Don’t be too brutal to humans.” Which I think the first theology to say that GOD IS DEAD is Judaism. The God of the law is a DEAD God.
Recall the story from the Talmud about two rabbis debating a theological point: the one losing the debate calls upon God himself to intervene and decide the issue, but when God (Jehovah) duly arrives, the other rabbi yells at him, go away old man, that since his work of creation is already accomplished, God now has nothing to say and should leave. God says yes you are right and walks away. This is a sacred text, wow!!
The whole strategy is to keep God at a proper distance. Images of God is too close, God should only be in the letter, a dead god. The only atheists today are theologists. People usually say, God dies in Aushwitz. If there is God how could he have permitted the holocaust. Even Habermas said a nice answer, in view of the horrors of the 20th Century, these crimes are so horrible, to describe them in secular terms is not strong enough, it doesn’t match the horror. So we need here some dimension of the sacred, a excessive sublime, its too much, it can’t be explained as a secular affair. Not only did GoD NOT DIE at aushwitz, maybe he came back at Aushwitz, he came too close to us. [Ž at University of Vermont Oct 16 2012]
So in Judaism God is dead what only remains is the LAW. But Nietzsche knew this death of God is NOT enough. This death of God is not enough. I think that what happens with the death of Christ is even this dead God which is still alive as a moral authority HAS TO DIE. Which is why the death of Christ can only be read as a radicalization of the book of JOB.
The message of Christ is not don’t worry if you’re in trouble there is a good old guy upstairs that will take care of things. The message of the death of Christ is there is no one. You are alone. Even intelligent Catholic conservatives Paul Claudel, is not put your trust in God, he can do it, but that God put his trust in us.
God expresses his perplexity at his own creation. This is an incredible ETHICAL REVOLUTION.
First step out of Pagan justice means: do your particular duty … this withdrawal culminates in the death of Christ: What dies on the cross: not God’s messenger, what dies on the cross is GOD of BEYOND himself, God as that TRANSCENDENT power that secretly pulls the strings. Precisely god can no longer be conceived as we are in shit, but there’s a guy up there who secretly pulls the strings, NO this is no longer. Something tremedous happens in Christianity. After death of Christ we have not the Father but the HOLY SPIRIT. where there is love between the two of you I AM THERE.
God says to Job, “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. God abdicated, the Holy Spirit is the first radical egalitarian institution, (Communist Party).
For Hegel what is contingent is necessity itself
No. We are not simply retroactively projecting things into the past. No what if history is not fully constituted, history is open, events are retroactively constituted.
There is needed a materialist reversal of Marx back to Hegel. This opening towards contingency, Hegel is radical thinker of contingency. The position adopted by Marx is that you as a historical agent can look into history, see where history is going, and then posit yourself as an agent of progress. Hegel says no way. This is strictly prohibited by Hegel. For Hegel precisely there is no big Other. This is not because we cannot know this higher divine plan, its because there IS NONE. Those philosophers who claim that Hegel is also a philosopher of LOVE are RIGHT!!
You know how it is when you fall in Love. You float around in a contingent way. You just slip down on a banana. You are taken to hospital, you fall in love with the nurse. You automatically translate all your previous life as leading to this moment. It is a retroactive semiotic totalization of a contingency. There is a necessity but it is always a retroactive necessity. Something contingently happened and you retroactively create the necessity that leads to it.
Borges wrote about Kafka, every writer has his predecessors, Kafka can be said to create his forerunners or predecessors. No. We are not simply retroactively projecting things into the past. No what if history is not fully constituted, history is open, events are retroactively constituted. Every totality is retroactive. There is no deeper teleology. Something happens contingently and retroactively creates an order. Hegel is more materialist than Marx.
The conservative poet T.S. Eliot stated, this: 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. This is the Hegelian totality.
Something happens contingently and retroactively creates an order. Hegel is more materialist than Marx.
Push this contigency idea to the limit and we get to the ONTOLOGICAL INCOMPLETENESS OF REALITY
True Materialist task, the Hegelian challenge to quantum physics. Can we think this incompleteness of reality without God thinking it? This is the task.
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Avenir not Future. Future means also the continuation, once and future thing. Avenir points to a radical break, a true openness.
LACAN IS JUST AN INSTRUMENT FOR ME TO READ HEGEL, I OPENLY ADMIT IT. AT 39:40
Conservative Hegelians: McTaggert and Bradley
Now its the LIBERAL HEGEL: Hegel of RECOGNITION
CONSERVATIVE LACAN: paternal authority, symbolic law, the problem of today’s permissive society, the only thing that can save us is return to paternal authority
Now Liberal Lacanianism: I part ways with Jacques Miller. Every social field is based on imaginary symbolic illusions, we can only accept the necessity of these illusions, like Edmund Burke, better not to know too much
Late Lacan’s rumblings, how to organize the Lacanian school, his Leninist writings, how to construct a social space, a group, a society of psychoanalysts without the MASTER FIGURE.
Is there a chance for EGALITARIAN society, not just a Tahir square, every now and then.
Alain Badiou: This idea that the state is here to stay. Authentic politics has to take place outside of the state. Authentic politics should not engage in power, but SUBTRACT withdraw, resist.
What I don’t like, I see here an opening for a comfortable safe position, I can be in my safe position. I believe in HEROICALLY INTERVENING.
I don’t sit and wait for some radical violent moment, my attitude is extremely pragmatic. The most threatening thing to do is REJECT dialogue. Occupy Wall St. Oh fine let’s come together, let’s debate. This is not a time to do that. It was only possible there to speak the language of the enemy. Sometimes, you have to strike with all brutal violence (Against Hitler), and sometimes, you have only minor political gestures. I have a sympathy for Obama, (disagree with Tariq Ali), Healthcare. What kind of traumatic sore point this is for the conservative establishment, it disturbs the very foundation of popular American ideology. FREE CHOICE. At the same time its not an impossible demand. There is universal healthcare in other countries. This is how to ACT. Place a demand. NOW Ž sounds like a social democrat.
Hey Liberalism did something wonderful. It was the answer to a desperate predicament of European religious wars. How can we live together, construct a shared space. Even Social Democracy, with all the criticism we can make of it … can you imagine in the period in history of humanity, so many people lived such prosperous free lives in social democratic western Europe in last 50-60 years. But these times are over.
I still accept the greatness of Lenin. We have to accept, it’s easy to say USSR had a great chance, Stalin screwed it up, or No it was already in Lenin, Marx no Rousseau, No it was in Christianity, No it was already in Plato.
On the one hand the October Revolution was an authentic explosion of egalitarianism, emancipatory project. But Stalin … You can’t say same for Hitler. There is no tragic split in Nazism.
I really fully support in OCCUPY WALL ST. But the Bartleby point: I would prefer NOT TO. Contrast to single issues protest, we have for first time Big protest movement that targets Capitalist system as such, there is a structural fault in system as such.
The existing institutional democratic mechanisms we have are not strong enough to control this excess of capital.
What then should the LEFT DO: All Žižek finds here are ironies. Too general stuff. The critique of FINANCIAL capitalism, no its not this. Re-organize society so bankers don’t have power to do this.
THE MORNING AFTER: the true test what will really change when afterwards, things return to “normal” will there be any changes felt there. If no. Then we are in sad cyclical stuff where things explode and then return to normal.
Syriza in Greece is the idea that Ž truly supports. The commies hate Syriza so much they’ll make a pack with New Democracy, because commies say the situation is not ready yet … but if you wait for the right moment the right moment will never arrive, it only arrives through repeated attempts repeated failures.
The lesson the the last years: the true illusion is that things can go on as always with a little tinkering. No we are approaching a zero-point. things cannot go on indefinitely the way they are, even if we don’t do anything things will change, it will be some form of authoritarian, one of the first to get this point was Terry Gillian in BRAZIL. Its crazy comical, Berlusconi rule of BRAZIL. This is for me what is unsettling in China. Till now one can reasonably claim that capitalism may have required 10-20 years of dictatorship, once it began to take hold, there were movements for democracy. THis time is over. Capitalism Asiatic/Berlusconi. Capitalism more dynamic,creative destructive, than our western flavour, but it DOESN’T need democracy to function. IF you are serious about protecting LIBERAL values, you need to work with the socialists.
We like your ideas but why do you stick to Communism?
1. There is still a tradition clearly identified as part of Communism that is precious: Spartucus rebellion, radical millenarian rebellion, there is something great in authentic popular outbursts
2. The problem that I see today is communist problem, all the crucial problems today are problems of the commons, intellectual, bio-genetics, environment.
3. All trauma associated with “communism” all the other terms: Democracy/socialism/justice can all be appropriated but not communism.
4. We are approaching dangerous times. Isn’t it nice to have as your master signifier a term that can remind of all the time of how WRONG things can go, you are all the time aware of how things can go wrong.
