It was a surreal experience being there, I was lost for the first half an hour but utterly engrossed. Have re listened numerous times and I still only understand about 37%.
35:24 " _'What if what Hegel calls absolute knowing is precisely the opposite of this absolute opening-I know it all...'_ is that at every historical period, you simply (if you go to the end) you, as it were, _reach the limit._ So that *absolute knowing* is not opposed to historicism, but it's historicism brought to its most radical extreme-that's the limit. And precisely as such, Hegel I think opens up a space for Otherness. Hegel's point is not: 'We now know it all!'_ Hegel's point is: _'This is where we can be now-what is out there is an openness.'_ Which is why I think- and that _openness_ is out of reach for us-which is why I even think Hegel is more materialist (quite seriously) than Marx-Marx went a step further. Marx thought that _we_ as _historical agent,_ (at least the privileged ones, proletarians, communists) have access to some historical necessity which points even towards the future. Like how, _'out of the contradictions of the present society we have at least the possibility of communist society.'_ So that you can _know_ history even in the future and then you can act as an agent of this knowledge. *For Hegel this is too idealist.* And I think that paradoxically Hegel is here more open to contingency. I like to use here (with this I will finish don't worry) I think that for Hegel it is no future, but I like very much (I discovered this by chance) you know how in French, at least (and only in a couple of other languages, I don't know in English) you have two words for _future._ You have _futur_ like future and then you have _avenir,_ (à venir) to come. *But they are not the same.* Future means, also can mean the continuation of the like, _'once and future king'..._ the same idiot. À venir, to come, points towards a radical break-it's true _openness._ So I claim, *Yes, for Hegel there is no future because there is À venir-there is no philosopher more open to things to come than Hegel."*
Agreed. Žižek is wonderful when he goes off on his tangents but he needs to be reined in every so often to keep him on point. I enjoy rambling a Žižek but I also want to hear as much from him that is pertinent as well.
lets take the proper question then what does that system think of us? and from the sketch he provides here, (which contained at least for me, nothing in addition to a hundred other talks of his I have watched in the past 6 years) what variety of reply did he provide? what does the system think of us? since you know Z's work fairly well what did you hear that was new?
also, the quantum theory/video games thing is from nicholas fern... as he says. he just cites it to show the difference and breadth of implication between kant and hegel.
about quantum physics - reality is even stranger - its REALLY like video game - schrodinger cat is uncollapsed until anybody look at her - it means all reality , not just distant mountains - is unexisting until you touch it - just like in video game processor draws to your screen only immediate suroundings . So great fillosopher Žižek didn't got it fully.
Some measure of humility on your part would be greatly appreciated here, as even the greatest minds of our time are not completely sure how quantum physics works. The math behind it would indeed imply that matter is in some state of quantum wave soup that only coalesces into actual particles when the conditions are just right (one way of doing it, apparently, is hitting it with a photon, which is how we measure these things). Just the fact that the photon was launched by a human being doesn't change much, as the universe is, you know, pretty well stocked on photons. So if we were suddenly to, I don't know, vaporize the entire human race, the universe would pretty much go on, not disappear as you seem to imply. This wave soup thing is all just a theory, of course, as there is no way (that we know of) of actually measuring a thing without influencing it, which is the main problem here. Thus, there is no actual evidence of things not existing in a definite location before you stick your penis in the soup, that is just what the math seems to imply. It seems to me, then, that the great RU-vid commenter sve utrpim didn't quite get it fully either. I'm sure you will survive, tho, like you do everything else. Peace and love, a physicist
+Jan Kragelj Vidim da ni ti nisi shvatio kvaku. ko što bi rekao bohr - "your theory is crazy but is it crazy enough?" u pitanju je informacija. ona je ispod. ti si se zakačio na materiju kao osnovu što je krivo, vj. kao klasično obrazovani fizičar. pa onda imaš konfuziju kako objediniti makro i mikro svijet potrebno je da postoji mjeritelj, nemora to bit čovječanstvo ili nečiji penis, to može biti vj. i drugi atom koji električki interferira s drugim - u tom trenutku uključuje se render-mašina., koja također postoji neovisno od postojanja čovječanstva, točnije na virtualki u roditeljskom svemiru..
sve utripm haha izvini sto sam te imao za budalo, kad to ocito nisi. Ah, da, kako bi bilo lepo, da je sve iz lego komadica umijesto ove strane crne goveđe supe koje niko ne moze da nadze... moram da kazem, da se mi sa napredakom fizike sve vise cini kako smo svi u neki jbn kompjuterski simulaciji. JBG bitno sto ima mesa koje mogu fizicki da interpretiram kao tako. (Izvini, kad mi engleski ide bolje nego srpski i budi dobar, pa sretne praznike, ako ih slavis :) -Jan
He makes a good point about Derrida, but it doesn't originate with Malabou - Already in Violence and Metaphysics he effectively defends Hegel against Levinas.
51:57 "What I want to say is this. A) Even with Liberalism, I am not as blindly critical as it may _appear._ Look-Liberalism originally (and I will never forget this, in a good sense) did something _wonderful,_ which was... (remember the concrete historical circumstances) Liberalism was the answer originally (if I remember it correctly) to a desperate predicament of European Religious wars. And it tries to answer the question: _'How, even if our basic, metaphysical religious commitments_ (which were not just worldview commitments, but concrete commitments about how to organize your life) _they are opposed more or less radically._ *How can we nonetheless live together?* _How to construct a shared space?_ So, this modest liberalism-which kind of again emphasizes the modesty/finitude maybe of our predicament-nothing bad about it. The same thing with social democracy. I mean I will say something which will disappoint maybe some of the leftists, I will say that _with all the criticism we can make of it and with all the points about how it is dependent on colonial exploitation but nonetheless,_ *can you imagine any period in the history of humanity where such a large percentage of people did lead such relatively, prosperous, safe and free lives as in social democratic western Europe in the last fifty, sixty years?* My problem here is that _these times are over._ This is why I am precisely not nostalgic, neither for Stalinism which failed miserably... I still accept the greatness of Lenin, but in a _dialectical way_ (by dialectical I mean, I don't play these stupid games, _'Lenin was good then Stalin screwed it up.'_ You know and then you can go to the end and say, _'If only Lenin were to survive five years more and made a pact with Trotsky, ooh we would have what-a thriving social democratic Soviet Union or what?)_ But uh, so again.. in the same sense we have to accept that although (and this is the true historical tragedy) it's easy to say, _'Soviet Union had a great chance, Stalin screwed it up.'_ It's also easy to demonize it from the very beginning, you know this game of, _'No, totalitarianism was already there.'_ And then you can move back, and back: _It was already in Lenin ›› It was already in Marx ›› It was already in Rousseau ›› and then..._ yes, you can go back. For Sloterdijk it was already in Christianity-for Adorno and some others it was already in Plato. The most radical answer here with which I tend to agree (but it makes me drop the entire line) is Adorno and Horkheimer in _Dialectic of Enlightenment,_ which was already there at the very beginning of the first prehistoric magical practices, you know-it's meaningless. What I'm saying is that, *what is really difficult to think* is that, on the one hand, it is undoubted (you just have to read really good histories) that October Revolution was not a coup d'etat of three/four guys there, _it was an authentic explosion of emancipatory energy._ How to think the inner logic? which gave birth out of this process to Stalinism, without renouncing... you know this is the true historical tragedy (and this is my only soft point with Stalinism, no mercy for Stalinism) _What I simply claim is that you don't find the same tragic aspect in Nazism._ You cannot say *Nazism was originally a great emancipatory project, Hitler just screwed it up,* whatever-no Nazism is _much_ more vulgar. There were bad guys, Hitler and his friends, who said, _'If we take power we will do some bad, horrible things.'_ And look what happened, they took power and they did, really did these horrible, bad things. You cannot say the same... you have an authentic tragic split in Bolshevik movement. That's my only... "
@Chaim Mendel Hey friend. Ya I love the ability to transcribe/tag with hyperlinked timecode, such a great resource. Very interesting to see how others read the comments too.
I have changed my mind about Zizek. My original view was that he could be hiding some more serious authoritarian tendencies by using for instance , the very honesty you refer to as a double bluff - all this if we watch the world teetering on the verge of a truly dystopian period of history and Slavoj tries to steer the vanguard. But I think he would stand up to any dictatorial tendencies in any era where there are new left leaning revolutionary movements. Like Socrates - whom Zizek resembles - he would rather drink the proverbial hemlock than accept the legitimacy of tyrants.
This follows from one of Adorno's arguments, that it's arrogant to ask what we think of a great philosophical system like Hegel's. The proper question "is what does that system think of us?" Now, obviously he's promoting the book, so exactly what this kind of analysis leads to is left to those who choose to read it, but here he's just providing a sketch of the project undertaken, as well as a few points here and there that emerge from that project.
i agree with žižek, the bad thing is not that bad people are doing bad things, but that bad people are doing the right thing, and no one is willing to do the same, the old guard we could once trust has completely degenerated.
Guys, is He talking about Turkish Left Lacanians at 41:58? As far as I know there is no Turkish "maoist-lacanian at the very beginning". :))) Did he get confused? ,
I suspect you haven't read the passage that you're referring to, as the claim he makes is actually that "if we posit a planet between mars and jupiter then we have to throw out pythagoras" (pythagoras' view was that there were necessarily 7 planets). But i get it, one paragraph in his doctoral thesis where he cites pythagoras' view of the planets is enough to render all of his work nonsense. So newton's belief in alchemy surely means newtonian mechanics is "an irrelevance".
...and his claim is only that hegel takes kant's epistemology and reworks it into an ontology. Then he says that heisenberg thought of the uncertainty principle as an epistemological issue (which is a fact), where as bohr thought of it as an ontological issue (also a fact). whats obscene here? or irrelevant to the point of elucidating the distance between kant and hegel's systems?
"I press a button....and you are all literally starting to shit out of fear" Did anyone read William Burroughs? This was his idea: secretly positioned microphones that relayed sounds of gun shots and mass hysteria to induce panic into the public... now it's simply an issue of sending out a wave! Now I live in Tokyo. Can you imagine the stench?
Sure, but I know zizek's work fairly well, and he certainly takes a scatterbrained, ADD approach to the explication of his ideas, but what your criticizing is the explication rather than the idea itself. There's plenty to criticize him about, and maybe even rhetoric is a part of that, but without dealing with what he is saying rather than how he's saying it, what you're saying about him and hegel is as vacuous as what you think he's saying about quantum theory.
This is amazing, you have gone through all this length to propose that no one should ever expect to hear anything new or sensible from a Zizek conversation on any topic other than the same jokes and ridiculous conjectures he has been farting out for the past decade.
You're wrong. It's obvious from the way he formed the last few questions that he has a deep respect for Zizek, and not just in the normal way an interviewer in his position would have for any famous best-selling subject. Those questions basically get right at the heart of Zizek's thinking, the precise interpretation of Hegel that is rare in the world today, but used to be common at least in the central European world. Most people PREFER the improvisation and joking to be honest... have you ever been to one of these live? They're usually boring as shit. Then again, anyone who uses the word "shenanigans" is likely a boring person...
he doesn't provide a reply, he just outlines the project carried out in the book that hes promoting. asking this question is the equivalent to watching jk rowling give a presentation promoting a new harry potter book and saying its 'an irrelevance' because she didn't answer your questions about the plot. Your actual objection is probably more silly as it implies that these questions are within the possible scope of what is essentially an interview.
Still a bit wrecked..but. in connection to your comment, Derrida asks if it's possible to use the word violence in relation to nature, ie, the 'violence of nature'. I think he means that violence can only be meted out by humans. Zizek elsewhere talks about the human/animal divide in another talk on youtube (it's really interesting) He starts out with Derrida's book The Animal That Therefore I Am) and the question: Can animals suffer? Worth a listen! Back to bed for me....
unpacking the potential implications of such a project. And i would suspect that talking about the implications without the analysis from which they arise could be problematic, as they would only be useful if they were radical, but radical statements demand explanation, evidence, and argument, otherwise they're meaningless. so to have him talk about the implications of such a project in this setting would undermine the book that he describes as his life's work.
The basic thesis that he's pushing here is that there is something "traumatic" about hegel that has caused thinkers to erect a straw-man version of Hegel to argue against (he actually uses the term "screen memory", and gives a few examples). The project for him however is not to simply read Hegel correctly, but rather to be able to apply Hegelian thought properly to issues in the modern world, and to radicalize that thought so as to overcome the limitations therein.
the only thing that could have made this better is if Michael Buffer introduced Zizek like, here he is, the Slovenian Soothsayer, the Central European Centaur, Sllllllllavojjjjjj Z-z-zzzzzzziiizeeek!!!!
Hegel's value is at best is that of an attempt to make sense of history and will, but I am sure if Hegel believed as he did that there are only 7 planets in the solar system for reasons that he demonstrated follow from his thought there can only be 7 planets ...then one wonders how valuable is an attempt to resuscitate such irrelevance
Alright, to escape uttering all that can be counted as vacuous, what is the one single refreshing and worthwhile point he has made, not in all his work, but just in this talk, ...is it that "we need to re-read Hegel because wait a minute (all the jokes he has repeated a billion times)" or what?
Surely an attempt by an imaginary Zizek 2.0 to "now I suggest, that maybe, it is the case that, Newton's belief in alchemy is really the same as quantum indeterminacy is really the same as Lacan's riff on Jouissance and can really show us the way to end the financial crisis" would be "an irrelevance
ps...since I live in Japan, and am an 'alien' its not strictly speaking 'human on human' violence..lol But I take your word on the palm hand! (actually I was simply a spectator...the consequences of fighting over here are far more drastic...30 days detention without charge! Madness!)
you say "but he obviously knows what hes talking about with regards to them" even if we imagine that to be the case what did he make more clear by borrowing from a branch of science which he doesn't know to explain what you claim he already knows.
If you were to actually give a comprihensive answer it would require a holistic analysis of hegel's system, followed by an evaluation of how to evaluate the modern world that emerges from your analysis followed by the analysis of the world, which would have to then feed back on the analysis of hegel itself (because, as hegel realized, his philosophy would become insufficient once the "historical moment" changed). 2 hours of casual conversation about such a project is not enough to even begin
really? you watch this and think "bankruptsy" (sic)? if you think theres no value to a discussion of hegel and heidegger etc then okay, but he obviously knows what hes talking about with regards to them, as scatterbrained as his presentation of the material may be.
im not violent these days but kickin ass is like riding u never forget how tho i may want to forget if im ever in japan as 30 days of walls is rarely a good thing love the country tho ur lucky there amazing people thay have been thru hell an still thay stand there cute men an pretty woman too
of course in this case it is not Hegel's conjectures on astronomy that are resuscitated for some critique but the fact remains that when Zizek starts his sentences with the words "Isn't it the case ..." and then few lines ahead he brings in quantum this or that, there is a clear reply ...and that is "no it is not the case" ....these borrowings are not cute, they are irrelevant and obscene
don't bother, it's impossible for me to describe the pronounciation in a comment. it would be much easier if i could tell you in person:). slavic languages have many words that must seem very abstract to someone who was born in a non-slavic country though, so i don't blame anyone but it's still very funny to hear people trying to pronounce them.
I've been over here for 15 years! Reminds me of that 80s song...'I think I'm turning Japanese.' lol. Yeah...it's quite an amazing place, and the people, on the whole, are very nice. They've had such a roller coaster ride into modernization, war, being occupied by the US, alienated by Korea and China..it takes its toll. But, I guess I wouldn't be here if I didn't like the place. But if porn is any gauge of a country's mental map, Japan has to be one of the most fucked up places on the planet! LOL
He frequently says that he prefers wrong pronunciation of his name. It's only guys like us who feel this deep embarassment when people grotesquely mispronounce his name. I'm pretty sure he is truly rather amused than angry or offended by it.
-facepalm- this isn't an abuse of science, hes not taking a position on quantum concepts, he's simply using his self-admittedly "lay man" understanding of them as metaphor to help describe his position on "hegelian nonsense".
49:29 "It's so fashionable today, Tariq Ali and so on, to make fun of Obama, _'Ooh the traitor and so on.'_ I still have a sympathy for Obama-why? Because first, you know, why disappointment? It's as if these guys thought what, that Obama would introduce socialism to the United States or whatever? Why do I still have an appreciation of Obama? _Healthcare,_ universal healthcare-I know that the result it is a total compromise, but can you just imagine what kind of a traumatic, sore point this was for the American establishment if even now they brought it to the Supreme Court and so on. Why, why is this an excellent example? Because on the one hand it obviously disturbs the very foundation of, let's call it naively, _popular American ideology._ No? Which is freedom of choice and so on-not seeing how freedom of choice is meaningful *only* against the background of a well-regulated state apparatus, social customs and so on and so on. But at the same time (that's why I like it) it's not an impossible demand you know in the sense of, _'Let's do something crazy, radically Communist,'_ it's something very realistic which can be done-there is universal healthcare in Canada, in Scandinavian countries, even somewhere else. So this is for me also one of the great models of how to act: _pose a demand which is very realistic/local, but who knows what the global, at least, ideological consequences will be."_
...this is a complete non-sequitor. Not only did i not say that, but i didn't even imply it and it doesn't follow from anything that i said. And here's a fun challenge for you, point me to 3 specific examples of him using a joke or conjecture in this talk that he's used commonly in the past. Perhaps I've been naive in assuming that you actually watched it, but he's actually much more substantive here than in most lectures.
well there very open minded yet censored in some ways more then most it is very odd i think id just enjoy the real thing lol id say the japanese are ahead of civilization so sumthing most b right tho id change afue things get rid of that pixeliization for a start lol its no good for the mind
well since this "lay man" understanding is flawed that crappy metaphor which he keeps using about parts of video game graphics which are not designed to be part of the game not only sheds no light on anything Hegelian or otherwise, just serves to highlight bankruptcy...Zizek is the worst symptom any speculative bubble can produce.
On the whole I like Zizek, but in this interview in particular he has an extremely annoying and demoralizing habit of refusing to say anything that might encourage or empower the Left. He seems overly worried that he will appear insufficiently "realistic" or "pragmatic." This is his failing as a Leftist. He accuses OWS of uttering a lot of platitudes, but OWS strengthens the will and the spirit a lot more than Zizek does.
This joker's got to be totally coked up. He goes to his nose every five seconds. He appears to be thoroughly knowledgeable about the subject matter, but what a friggin' mess otherwise.
You've become too used to the stupid fake world of American TED Talks and whatnot. Most true geniuses in the history of the world were not perfect public speakers, but their ideas transcended the ability to talk smoothly. In American culture this constant need to "talk yourself up" ruins so much of Academia, entertainment, RU-vid, and so on. Btw, according to many accounts this is exactly how Hegel acted in public.
