Posted on September 7, 2012 by afoniya
It is quite a complex thing to describe a Slavoj Zizek
lecture. I went to two of his Moscow lectures- listened and laughed at one and
listened, laughed and took copious notes at the second one. It seems such a
long time since I attended the lectures that all I have are my notes on his
second lecture and very vague memories of his first lecture. The problem with
describing a Zizek lecture is in trying not to give a simple recapitulation of
all the jokes and the serious philosophical or psychoanalytical points that
these jokes or quotes from films are said to represent. As Zizek himself
acknowledged many of the jokes and anecdotes have already appeared and are
probably already well known to the Zizek fan. So his quotation from
Ninotchka about a waiter telling a client at a restaurant that there was no
cream but there was milk so instead of having coffee without cream perhaps the
customer would like coffee without milk was one I had already come across a
couple of times. His jokes and anecdotes about the Communist era also came
thick and fast – the wonderful conspiracy theory in the Soviet period where
people imagined a secret KGB cell that was dedicated only to producing
anti-Soviet jokes which would be repeated in kitchens throughout the country
has since become my favourite conspiracy theory. Yet as Zizek had argued it,
too, only reproduced the Stalinist paranoia that it was supposed to be
conspiratorial about.
In any case the Hegel lecture was genuinely quite a
fascinating one. As the person who presented Zizek argued, Zizek himself
embodied a kind of truly Hegelian contradiction as was Hegel the embodiment of
contradictions in his day. Zizek tried to develop this idea as to how Hegel
could become both the philosopher of the Prussian State and of the French
Revolution and of how Hegel went further in accepting the totality of the
French Revolution, understanding that 1789 without 1793 was impossible. This
led Zizek into a number of Hegelian concepts which he illustrated with the
usual jokes and anecdotes. For Zizek, the contradiction of Hegel was embodied
in being the end of the line in metaphysical philosophers and the first
philosopher of modernity. Zizek also tried to show how the idea of great
opening was embodied in the very moment of total closure and how the
proclamation of an end (end of history, end of art, end of literature) is at
the same time the proclamation of a beginning. (He went to hint at some of the
errors of Kojeve who Lacan was greatly influenced by having said that Kojeve
was the freest person he (Lacan) had ever met.
Zizek took up Hegel as a cudgel in the criticism of the
totalitarianism approach. The Popperian idea of philosophers such as Hegel and
Platon as represnting a threat of totalitarianism was denounced. Philosophy for
Hegel was “time seized in thought”, in the sense that only when philosophy is
totally immersed in a certain historical moment can it find any opening to a
total or absolute knowledge. For Zizek, Lenin’s study of Hegel Logic must
fully embodied Hegelian thought amongst Marxists (and that for the past 50
years no Marxist has been able to properly read Das Kapital was
precisely because of their lack of knowledge of Hegel’s text). Zizek then took
us on the detour regarding Lacan and Kojeve mentioned above.
Zizek also spoke about what he saw as the trinity of
fundamental philosophers: Plato, Descartes and Hegel arguing that all
philosophy has only ever been anti-Platonism, anti-Cartesianism or
anti-Hegelianism. Zizek wanted to challenge the screen image of Hegel being
interested in absolute knowledge and the philosophical madman at his
purest. He argued that there was another Hegel and then used some
illustrations about Hegelian concepts such as Hegel’s idea of differentiality.
Here Zizek spoke of Russian formalism and the Lotman school. He illustrated the
absence of a characteristic feature as a positive feature in Hegelian thought
illustrating this by the Sherlock Holmes curious incident about the dog last
night story (ie the curious incident was that there was no incident).
Zizek went on to add in a number of theological ideas in his
next section. Beginning with G.K. Chesterton’s idea of the philosopher
policemen who tour philosophy conferences to see if crimes will be committed in
the future he related this to Popper’s accusation/denunciation of Plato where
Popper tries to prove that a totalitarian crime will be committed in the future
because of Plato’s world view. Zizek then further elucidated Chesterton’s
notion of the morality of the criminal but says that Chesterton doesn’t go far
enough in discovering how morality itself is essentially criminal. The idea of
Universal Law being crime elevated to the Absolute takes Zizek on a path from
Proudhon, Wagner and Ilyenkov to Pussy Riot who Zizek called true
Hegelians. Zizek, then, introduces us to ways in which certain religious
ideas and holistic truths become unbearable.
Hegelianism is not, Zizek is saying, telling us to look at
the bigger picture but truth for
Hegelians is a kind of unilateral fact and here Zizek
attacks the the lie, or the deception of the middle path or the centrist
(which was symbolised by Stalin and here we had yet another Stalin
joke/anecdote about Stalin telling Bukharin -who believed that a future
socialist society would still use money and Trotsky – who thought that
socialist society would abolish money by telling them there was a centrist- for
some there would be money and for others there would be none).
After this theology was discussed at some length- the book
of Job (the first acknowledgment of the Death of God and the visit of the three
ideologists), Chesterton (again) who accuses God of blasphemy, some Norwegian
theologist (Krampfel?) who believed that God was all powerful but totally
stupid and Levinas who argued that the injunction ‘Don’t Kill’ for example was
addressed to God himself (Zizek argues that the first theology of God being dead
is to be found in Judaism and not Nietzsche). He then argues about the
difference between the death of God and the need for the death of Christ and
that the message of this is that there is no one left to trust in. (Here he
talks of Paul Claudel’s belief that we should not trust God but that God should
trust us).
Zizek, then, talks about how the choices made during
revolutionary times are always wrong choices at first but that the wrong choice
needs to be taken in order to get to the right choice and here Zizek links this
to Hegel’s understanding of the Prussian State and the French revolution.
Finally Zizek returns to totality as being only a
retroactive truth – that is, every totality is only possible after the event.
Here he relates it to Borges’s essay on Kafka creating his own predecessors as
well as Eliot’s view in Tradition and the Individual Talent relating
all this to the Hegelian view of contingency and arguing that Hegel is really
more of a materialist than Marx. Hegel is more open to the ontological
incompleteness of knowledge. Zizek, interestingly relates this to a Tarkovsky
film where reality is not yet fully and completely formed. Reality itself,
Zizek seems to be saying, is incomplete.
The exchanges after the talk were interesting and Zizek was
definitely not brief in his answers. Zizek insisted that Hegel was no
organicist and was not a thinker of proto harmony. Moreover he also mentioned
the views of Boehme and the idea that Boehme was the first to point out the
demonic side of God himself (that is, if mankind fell from God something
terrible must have happened within God himself). Freud and sexuality came up in
questioning too (sex not as an animalistic experience as the Church insisted
but the first metaphysical experience and on this he spoke more at length
during the first lecture).
Well there is no way of denying that listening to Zizek is
an extraordinary experience, rather a whirlwind experience which it is
difficult to pick at critically. Some comments that I have read from the Russian
left are rather sceptical (both Boris Kagarlitsky and Maxim Kantor seem to
think that Zizek is either rather insane or an idle chatterbox- Волван). How,
in general, Zizek was understood in Moscow by those attending his lectures is
hard to tell. The lectures nonetheless seemed to have generated quite a
significant interest though how his ideas are interpreted still remains to be
seen.
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