_There is nothing, basically. I mean it quite literally. But then, how do things emerge? Here I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics, where the idea is that the universe is a void, but a kind of positively charged void, and then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. I like this idea very much, the fact that it's not just nothing, that things are out there; it means something went terribly wrong. That what we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, a cosmic catastrophe, that things exist by mistake. I'm even ready to go to the end, to claim that the only way to counteract it is to assume the mistake and go to the end, and we have a name for this: it's called "love". Isn't love precisely this kind of cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted with this notion of "I love the world" and universal love; I don't like the world. I'm somewhere in between "I hate the world" and "I'm indifferent to the world", but the whole of reality, it just is, it's just stupid, it is out there, I don't care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not "I love you all", love means I pick out something, and it's again this structure of imbalance, even if this something is just a small detail, like a fragile individual person, I say "I love you more than anything else". In this quite formal sense, love is evil._
When she says, 'I love you' I ether frown, smirk, or say 'I know'. Never 'I love you too. Not unless I know you are delusional, and wish to keep those delusions up.
Philosophy yet again devoid of anthropology even though now it’s contemporary. Love is an anthropological phenomena, we are monogamous bond-pairing hominids. What separates a sapien & a chimp is allo-parenting (takes a village to raise a child)
I made the mistake of reading this comment briefly before watching the video... and I couldn't catch a word of what he was saying because I was laughing too hard. I thank you for the solid four minutes of uncontrollable laughter you provided me with
Or to quote Douglas Adams: “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
"the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him."
“If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
"(the creation of the universe means) something went terribly wrong..." "cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe, that things exist by mistake" "I'm somewhere in between I'm indifferent and I hate the world" Wonderful... :) I wish I could sit down with him for a coffee. I suspect I wouldn't be able to get in word the entire time, but it wouldn't matter.
It's absolutely true. It's hard to love the world. Hatred and indifference are much more powerful than love. I can only love the world and the universe when i think of the absolute meaningless existence and mistery of it.
I don't think the word resolution is the right one. If love was the resolution it would drive things back to nothingness. But instead, love is abandonment to the catastrophe. The acceptation that you don't want it to be resolved but to go to the end of it
@@robertamagdalena8224 I think it meant that love is the resolution that may or not drive things back to nothingness. It's a force of curiosity, voracius it will uncover the mystery of the nature of the universe. Results may vary
I was just about to say the same thing! This guy is NOT a philosopher. Did you hear him talk in favour of communism and brain chip implants? He's a shill.
"i love carpet. i love desk." "brick, are you just looking at things in the office and saying that you love them?' "i love lamp." "do you really love the lamp or are you just saying it because you saw it?"
_There is nothing, basically. I mean it quite literally. But then, how do things emerge? Here I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics, where the idea is that the universe is a void, but a kind of positively charged void, and then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. I like this idea very much, the fact that it's not just nothing, that things are out there; it means something went terribly wrong. That what we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, a cosmic catastrophe, that things exist by mistake. I'm even ready to go to the end, to claim that the only way to counteract it is to assume the mistake and go to the end, and we have a name for this: it's called "love". Isn't love precisely this kind of cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted with this notion of "I love the world" and universal love; I don't like the world. I'm somewhere in between "I hate the world" and "I'm indifferent to the world", but the whole of reality, it just is, it's just stupid, it is out there, I don't care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not "I love you all", love means I pick out something, and it's again this structure of imbalance, even if this something is just a small detail, like a fragile individual person, I say "I love you more than anything else". In this quite formal sense, love is evil._
"In the beginning there was nothing, a void of darkness, a cold eternity of silence. Then the perfect void was corrupted by light." - Darkness (Legend 1985)
I think it misses the point of what's being said here to think that Zizek is speaking against love when he says that it's evil. It calls to mind the famous line from Nietzsche, that "What is done from love takes place always beyond good and evil." Love is, as Zizek says, formally evil, but ONLY formally, because (to borrow an old platitude) you have to love yourself in order to love anyone else. The particular, fragile human person who, as Zizek says here, must be loved arbitrarily, as a mistake, with utter abandon as of a laughing leap into an abyss, is myself (or in your case, yourself); it is formally evil precisely because it is utterly egoistic, but it is humanly good because it makes possible love for the other. You know the myth of Narcissus, where Narcissus rejects all love, only to unwittingly fall in love with his reflection in the pool of water? That's what love for the other is like, because we love the other "as ourself," for the sake of what is in the other that is identical to what we love in ourselves. Universal love, the sort of love that you see in, say, Saint Francis or the Bodhisattvas, comes from realizing that every other person is identical to yourself, that where you saw this distinction between self/other you saw only your own image in a mirror. So, although love is "formally" evil, it is only through this act of evil that absolute goodness becomes possible. This idea, I think, is one formulation of the idea that Zizek tries to indirectly articulate in many, perhaps all of his books.
Very droll indeed , Dr. Crow...I bet you pulled it out of one of Lacan's Seminars...But what exactly is your experience of love? Have you received any compassion and love in your life , and if you did , was it "formally" evil?
It's an interesting interpretation, but to me it seems like Zizek mostly rejects the idea of love between individuals, as a kind of discriminatory love. Since love is by nature unequal, to cultural Marxists like Zizek it could appear as necessarily evil. Of course, you could say this has nothing to do with Marxism but to me it seems this is where he always comes back to.
I have always said love is a selfish thing, not a selfless thing. Love is selfless only to the object of it's appreciation. To everything else, it's utterly selfish
Is this really true? If you love someone and they love you, the love spreads outwards. If it doesn't, if you actually become a worse person for it, it's not real love.
Only if you interpret love as a pie chart. If you assume that if you love someone more that means someone else gets less love (not in comparison but in total) but I would counter that love is neither a pie chart nor quantifiable. I love my partner more than I love any of you, since I know none of you. If I wouldn't love my partner or love him less than I wouldn't love anyone else more as result of that. I my love of everyone else ranging between dislike, indifference and siblings love as much as before. The love I give my partner is not being taken away from someone else. Under every circumstance I feel emotionally indifferent to strangers and friendly to friends and acquaintances regardless of romantically loving my partner. TL:DR Loving something more does not mean that something else gets less love than it would otherwise which means that love is not selfish. I would agree that love is not entirely selfless either since it always involes own interests, desires and wishes.
When I was a child, I wasn't very picky about who I loved more than anyone else. As you age, you see people showing they don't care about you as much as someone else for some strange reason and that makes you insecure and you think that you need to counterbalance that with your own biases. It's still not a fair deal.
Yuh, its not fair, but natural. I think that different informations fight against different informations and make they own alliances, its like cruel flow of evolution on mental level.
Love is evil by Apollo 440 is one of my favorite songs, but I never knew from whom they sampled the voice and I didn't really want to look it up (the mistery seemed more pleasing). I listened to that song A LOT and I always imagined who the person speaking was. I ended up here after seeing a video about the movie Snowpiercer on a channel called Nerdwriter1. The video featured a fragment from this clip and I instantly recognized the voice. I felt a strange satisfaction at putting a face to the voice, even more so as this happened by pure chance. Just wanted to share this serendipitous moment which I find has an interesting connection with the ideas in the video. The song is great by the way.
Love is what formed the essential connection between our ancestral mothers and their highly dependent children…to ensure survival. Love connects us to others. Possessive love is evil… it’s only about selfish attachment.
Ye idk, to say that the universe is stupid is just insane. I get it, i get the sense of whatsverness alot, about life, but, to say that the universe is stupid is stupid. I think slavoj has a part of the brain thats rly smart, and a part that stupid. And i mean that, hes a smart idiot. Its why he doesnt think god exists.
I love the intellectual engagement he just created in my mind. At the same time, following his reasoning, I am doing a quite violent act by picking out this very thought as my object of appreciation. I wonder where this will take me.
@@7enLLL Ah! I'm the same person, different account. Essentially... Very far. Though David Pearce's Zero Ontology went much further. See my videos for an explanation!
Also, what he calls love - the tendency to embrace the cosmic imbalance that creates the universe (breaks initial symmetry and enables patterns to form and physical laws to be set) and strive toward something individual, something distinct from perfect balance - could also be called the life drive. What life does is defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics by persisting against natural tendencies to entropic increase. Thus we feel most alive when we love. We feel dead when we embrace balance
yess, thats exactly what i feel from it and how I understand his notions maybe due to this rule I was so depressed when I was following buddhists concepts, a simillar attitudes to life, and maybe I understand now, why Nietzche thought that buddhism is more realistic than christianity but still so nihilistic towards life
The emotional quality of this philosophical perspective is so addicting. Its at once despairing and yet anticipatory. The way he says "I hate the world".
He is right. He says,"in this precise meaning,that separates and distinguish one from another,the loved from the unloved,love is violent. Is a force that drives to change. Is "the " changing agent in every system.
He's not proposing anything. His standpoint is not based on cold observation, he makes an analogy between the existence of the universe and the experience of love which he often talks about as being violent (In his own philosophical definition which is something like 'a radical disruption of normality') and evil in that it relies on the fact that everything else in the universe, apart from that feature which you love has very little value. Both rely on a sort of random distortion.
@chefshitpiece Actually, I do find it uplifting. There's a lot of depression around from saying the world is so great that if we don't feel happy all the time then we're awful. This duty to be happy is like a great weight around the shoulders of our culture, and the mental health stats back that up. To hear somebody articulate so well the idea that the world is a mistake, or that those of us without a love in our life aren't lacking anything that great or noble, is relief, liberation. Oxygen.
Toxic positivity is a thing to be wary of. The most healthy way to look at the world is to take it as it is. It's not perfect. It's messy and chaotic, which is beautiful in its own way, but ignoring the shitty parts of it just leads to cognitive dissonance. Culture forces upon us these notions of what is good and valuable. Fuck all of that. Decide for yourself what is good and valuable and move forward from there.
He's saying that like in quantum physics, positive and negative are created together out of "empty" space, when you love someone you say I love you specifically, but it means that I care about the rest of the world much less. You love by selection. When you value one person, you devalue the rest. This is destructive, but life affirming. To some this is a paradox, but to him it is not, because he does not believe that love is good. It just is.
The most important quote in this video is completely missed... and it "Assume the mistake, and go to the end"... Dont' apologize, don't backtrack, just go with the flow...
"kafedeydik, oturuyorduk, duygusal konuşmalar yapıyordu. çok mutluyum diyordu. hiç bu kadar mutlu olmadım ama benim mutluluğum seni üzebilir, sakın üzülme falan filan diyordu."
Remember he is a human being and he also can be wrong. Not everything that comes out from his mouth has to be true. Being that said I admire him a lot. People tend to worship intellectuals, gurus or any kind of evolved human being way too much. listen, learn and make your own conclusions.
Unfathomably true, I see this all the time people will take someone's word as fact just because others do the same. If you make your own opinions and it matches with the proposed theory of things, then perfect, but you have to have some sort of self-reflection instead of blind following
Love the spontaneity of it.... If he tried to put it in writing, it would sound so pretentious, but in his own words, it's absolutely precious. He's the modern day Socrates.
_There is nothing, basically. I mean it quite literally. But then, how do things emerge? Here I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics, where the idea is that the universe is a void, but a kind of positively charged void, and then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. I like this idea very much, the fact that it's not just nothing, that things are out there; it means something went terribly wrong. That what we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, a cosmic catastrophe, that things exist by mistake. I'm even ready to go to the end, to claim that the only way to counteract it is to assume the mistake and go to the end, and we have a name for this: it's called "love". Isn't love precisely this kind of cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted with this notion of "I love the world" and universal love; I don't like the world. I'm somewhere in between "I hate the world" and "I'm indifferent to the world", but the whole of reality, it just is, it's just stupid, it is out there, I don't care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not "I love you all", love means I pick out something, and it's again this structure of imbalance, even if this something is just a small detail, like a fragile individual person, I say "I love you more than anything else". In this quite formal sense, love is evil._
Love automatically divides the world into more deserving and less deserving of resources. Everyone has loved objects that they declare more deserving of time, attention, money etc.than a stranger. It is self interest pure and simple. Love on a limited grand application, nationalism,religion, ethnicity, political affiliation etc.,the division of us/other, is the cause of war.
This view of the universe as an order that emerges from imbalance accords with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, by the way. Maximum entropy is a state in which energy is perfectly evenly distributed, no imbalances exist, and so nothing can occur if the system operates only on thermodynamic principles. The dynamic universe we have is the result of energy imbalances that cause flow and activity. Hence, order requires the disruption of balance. It requires :something going wrong."
"Loving" to the point of excluding all the rest is not love but hoarding, and is an act that undermines universal love.... proof positive is whenever an extremely "loving" relationship ends out in mutual hate.... hate can't come from love, so love was not there to begin with... and trying to find just one person to love is an insult to all the humanity surrounding you. So some people should just admit it: they really hate everything, and are going with one person to spite the world.
these comments are great.. just want to point out that zizek really qualifies his flashy punchline here with "in a formal sense".. because if you do formalize love somehow, that's when it becomes kind of ugly and stagnant.. or at least nothing very elegant anyway.. formalities aside, we can say love is violent.. and I think this is more or less the message here, that it purges us somehow, or at least something of our externalities.. the stupid (excessive) universe and so on and so on..
I've always enjoyed Zizek but didn't know why, but I think that I enjoy him as a performer. His books are quite difficult to read just as were the works of his biggest influences, such as Lacan (notoriously incomprehensible in the Ecrits) and Hegel for instance, but as a performer, he is almost like a comedian or spoken word artist as someone else said here.
Zizek. Love, Evil, Quantum Physics... in front of Biblioteca Nacional Argentina, a wonderful Brutalistic Architectural building in Buenos Aires Circa 2008-09. ❤️🇦🇷
