"God is like this stupid dog"

Supporting the headline act on Tuesday was Ronaldinho versus Spivak, a grudge match staged for my pleasure by two grad students sitting in the row immediately before mine.

Spivak fan: I am going to a conference on postcolonialism chared by Spivak.
Ronaldinho: Spivak!! She is so problematic!!! I find her really problematic. Can the Subaltern Speak? is really problematic!!!!
Spivak: Well...
Ronaldinho: She is not self-reflexisive at all!!!
Spivak: Er...
Ronaldinho: You are just essentializing what a third worldist is!!!!!

[Ronaldinho, who has been vibrating like a faulty electrical appliance throughout this exchange, suddenly explodes. A shower of aluminium shards rain down upon the immediate area]

Spivak: Um...

Heidegger and Foucault

2pm rolls around, and Zizek enters stage left and strolls up to his podium, to be introduced by the camera guy of previous weeks, Costas having apparently finally abdicated his diplomatic responsibilities, having finally tired of always playing the straight man.

Zizek starts by trailing his own coming attractions over the next two sessions - Foucault and the Iranian revolution, Heidegger and Nazism, and the unbearable political lightness of being a radical public intellectual.

"I think, we must reject," Zizek begins, "This intellectual blackmail that says, because of Heidegger involvement with Nazism, Heidegger is worthless. No, this is not true - almost everything in Heidegger is right! Only he adds this one tiny thing, and it all becomes shit."

"There is great similarity between patterns of thought of Heidegger and Foucault - in both you see this early fascination with power, and then later withdrawal into aesthetics of self. You see this logic also in way Nietzsche is treated today by feminists - you have this nice, friendly, politically correct Nietzsche - but no, Nietzsche is brutality itself. You look at his style, he says things lik, "George Sands is a fat cow whose breasts give sour milk." Imagine if someone today said something like this about Judith Butler or someone, "Judith Butler is a thin cow whose breasts have dried up." They would get crucified, and rightly so! I think we must say, Nietzsche is brutal - and if he is not brutal, he is not really Nietzsche."

"This will be major target fo me next time - idea of public intellectual as kind of clown [!] who sometimes say funny violent things but is not really to be taken seriously, because that would be disaster. I think that this idea is absolutely wrong. Again - crucial point here about Heidegger and Foucault is - they did right thing! Or at least, almost right thing."

"I will say something horrible now, about Hitler - problem with Hitler, was he was not violent enough! [An audible shudder echoes around the auditorium] What I mean is - all of his violence was impotent acting out, not real violence, he did not really act, did not disturb means of production."

Original Greece was One Big Kitsch Factory

"There is American joke - one that plays into American stereotype, of rich Arab who buys classical Greek statue and before he puts it in his house in Hollywood, he has it painted - and idea is, look how vulgar rich Arabs are - but real point, originally all Greek statues were painted! There is the idea of ancient Greece as all these pure white marble eternal forms, but no - original Greece was one big kitsch factory!"

From Gorgias to Stalin

"The pure logic of Sophism is the one you find in Plato dialogue Gorgias where Gorgias, who is pupil of Parmenides - and by the way [No! No, Zizek, No!] you do know that Parminedes, he didn't say to himself "I am going to write fragment today" [Arrrghhh!!] - he was writing long boring poems, only today only fragments left."

"Gorgias says three things, he says first, "Nothing exists." Then he says a little later, "If anything did exist, it could not be known." Finally, he says, "If anything did exist, and be known, it could not be communicated."

"So, in other words, nothing - there is nothing. Rhetoorical idea here is backward movement. "If we can't communicate something, that must mean we don't really know it, if we don't really know it, that must mean it doesn't exist. In fact - way out of this is actually very simple, it is just - we can talk about things that don't exist, we do it all the time. I mean here very boring Deconstruction point - we always say too much, more than we intended, more than we know."

"There is text by Bentham - it is actually very tragic text, it is Bentham text on fiction, where he starts out and what he wants to do is to seperate reality from fiction in normal analytic way, but what he realizes is that he cannot do it, because if you lose fiction, you lose reality as well. I want for Verso to republish it, because it is out of print, but they do not want to, I don't know why."

"Other crucial text here - and this text, I think, is really one of the miracles - is text by Kleist, On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts in the Process of Speech, when Kleist says - and this quote is only four lines long, so don't be scared, "The situation is quite different if the mind is finished already with a thought before the speaking starts. Then the spirit stays back in the process of mere articulation and this business of articulation, far from exciting the spirit, on the contrary reduces the mental intensity. If therefore a thought is expressed in a fuzzy way, then it does not at all follow that this thought was conceived in a confused way. On the contrary it is quite possible that the ideas that are expressed in the most confusing fashion are the ones that were thought out most clearly."

"Anyway - my claim is that this Gorgias logic is in Stalinism as well - difference is that Gorgias logic is diagonal, but Stalin logic vertical. In his text, "Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Stalin makes four key points. He says, first - "Contrary to metaphysics," - and metaphysics is always the enemy, "Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics does not regard nature as an accidental agglomeration of things, of phenomena, unconnected with, isolated from, and independent of, each other, but as a connected and integral whole, in which things, phenomena are organically connected with, dependent on, and determined by, each other." Then he says, second: "Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics holds that nature is not a state of rest and immobility, stagnation and immutability, but a state of continuous movement and change, of continuous renewal and development, where something is always arising and developing, and something always disintegrating and dying away. Third: "Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics does not regard the process of development as a simple process of growth, where quantitative changes do not lead to qualitative changes, but as a development which passes from insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes to open' fundamental changes' to qualitative changes; a development in which the qualitative changes occur not gradually, but rapidly and abruptly, taking the form of a leap from one state to another; they occur not accidentally but as the natural result of an accumulation of imperceptible and gradual quantitative changes. Finally: "Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics holds that internal contradictions are inherent in all things and phenomena of nature, for they all have their negative and positive sides, a past and a future, something dying away and something developing; and that the struggle between these opposites, the struggle between the old and the new, between that which is dying away and that which is being born, between that which is disappearing and that which is developing, constitutes the internal content of the process of development, the internal content of the transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative changes. The dialectical method therefore holds that the process of development from the lower to the higher takes place not as a harmonious unfolding of phenomena, but as a disclosure of the contradictions inherent in things and phenomena, as a "struggle" of opposite tendencies which operate on the basis of these contradictions."

"Now, key point here is again, great distinction, and logic which keeps pushing enemy back. So if you don't agree with Stalin fourth point, for example, you find you go back to third, and then second, and then first - so that contingent enemies always slide back to absolute enemy. This philosophical logic is political and historical logic too - which is why with Stalin you get crazy situation where Trotsky, for instance, organizes Red Army after revolution, only because later he wanted to destroy it."

"Crucial moment is when, with great purges, Stalin had ordered liquidation of Kulaks, but problem was that this mean that objective category of Kulaks became undermined, because this was economic category, and after Stalin collectivisation of agriculture, economic definition ceased to work, because there were no more Kulaks, but there was still political resistance. So what you got was new category, "sub-Kulak".

"Sub-Kulak was pure hermenutic of suspiction category - it had no objective characteristics. There is even report in Pravda at this time which says - even our best activists cannot always identify the sub-Kulak. Basically, sub-Kulak was the category that expressed failure of Stalinist dialectical mediation - with the sub-Kulak, situation now became, one could be anywhere at all in friend/enemy distinction - there was no longer any way to tell."

[Nb - I do not understand a word of this]

The Two Sides of Ideology

Falling back into the bitter embrace of his own absolute enemy, the Birkbeck video projection equipment, Zizek now screened the Ingrid-Bergman-goes-too-try-to-get-the-visas scene from Casablanca, at the end of which (as you may recall) Ingrid succumbs to Bogey's Malboroic charms and collapses into his arms. The scene fades out, and then resumes, Humph now with a cigarette in hand, but otherwise nothing significant having apparently happened.

"Now," Zizek said, "The question here is obvious - did they do it or not? On the one hand, there is compelling reason to think they did - last shot was them kissing, then was fade out - which is conventional classical Hollywood code for romantic interlude, and now Bogart is smoking post-coital cigarette. But on the other hand, couch is undisturbed, both are still wearing same clothes, and conversation is the same as it was before."

"Now, what is really funny here is that this same ambiguity is redoubled later in film, in parting scene of Ingrid and Bogey, when Rick recounts early to Victor Laszlo, says: "She tried everything to get them, and nothing worked. She did her best to convince me that she was still in love with me, but that was all over long ago. For your sake, she pretended it wasn't, and I let her pretend." And Victor responds, "I understand."

"Well, I'm sorry - but I don't understand. Rick is saying here that, "She tried everything" - does this mean she screwed him?"

"What I claim is that way things are constructed, it is basically double. They both did, and they didn't do it. What Hollywood is basically saying here is, "We know that you all have these dirty desires, but also that you like to pretend that you don't, so what we are going to do, is we will put it together in such a way so that you can have it both ways."

"This double logic - this is the essence of ruling ideology: surface innocence, combined with obscene underside. Irony is - this is Stalinist ideology also. Classic example here is Shostakovich - there is idea in West that Shostakovich toed party line, but really was secret dissident - to extent that for long time now there has been this mad hunt for some kind of "smoking gun" letter which will finally prove this thesis. But what I claim is that it is precisely this appearance of secret dissidence that made Shostakovich pure Stalinist composer."


"In Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, the classic Western reading is that beneath surface bombastic, triumphant major chords, Shostakovich wrote in secret minor melody that expressed his real message which was suffering, dissent, and so on. But I'm sorry - idea of secret code that somehow everyone understands except Party? Fifth Symphony won Stalin prize - and Stalin was not stupid. It is very funny also - the Shostakovich works that are most popular in West are the exact same works that were most popular in Soviet Union, both with public and with party!"

Mind the Gap

"My argument is - what if it was precisely because of "secret message" that Shostakovich was official party composer? What if idea of distance between surface and real message was precisely essence of Stalinist ideology, Stalinist ideology at purest. My point here is again, old Marxist point, that is the appearance that is true, and the supposedly ironic distance which is the falsity. Classic example here - which I quote in all my books - is Marx example from 18th Brumaire, where you have party of order who think they are secretly Monarchists pretending to be Republicans, but irony was in wrong place, because what they really ended up objectively doing was securing Republic.

"In Soviet Union - and this is true - the really persecuted people were the ones who were sincerely Stalinists!"

Meister Eckhardt, I presume

"There is another part from Man who was Thursday I want to quote - this is from early in book, where character says: "The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime."

"Okay - it is nice idea. But what I want to emphasize here is that this is not real Chesterton position, because later in the book we find out, Chief of philosophical police, who is really also Chief of anarchists, furthermore really in fact is God, and he has orchestrated whole thing as elaborate game, which proves one thing at least - that God is Hegelian, and so we get passage at end of book where all characters are confused and angry, and one says, "It seems so silly that you should have been on both sides and fought yourself."

"Now, radical point in this, is that this absolute gap, of incomprehension or whatever, that seperates us from God - this gap in fact is already inherent in God himself, God is alienated from himself. You find this in Paul Claudel, who was conservative, who says something like, "God is helpless without us."

"The first moment that this really appears in Western thought is with Meister Eckhardt, who says: it is stupid the idea that God gives orders - we give God orders! God is like this stupid dog, he loves us because he can't help it."