der slowenische psychoanalytiker und philosoph slavoj zizek hielt heute einen vortrag im volkstheater zum thema "globalisierung und gewalt - perspektiven nach dem zwölften september" (ich habe tatsächlich "zwölfter september" geschrieben. was soll das???) berufs- und studienbedingt sowie zum (besseren) verständnis hab ich mich drangemacht, das 80 minütige verbalkonzentrat des lacan-schülers zu transkribiern. hier teil eins, noch unkorrigiert - die rechtschreibfehler symbolisieren quasi zizeks aussprache (-:

"when, on the way home from his theatre injuly 1956 bertold brecht incountered a colon of sovjet tanks towards stalinalee to the wortkers-rebellion, he waved his hand at them. later that day he wrota in his diary that in this moment he for the first time in his life tempted to join the communist party. it was not that brecht tolerated the cruelty of the strugle on behalf of the hope that it will bring about a prosperous future. it is not okay, its against our ideals, but let's suffer it...we need it. i claim the harshness of this present violence - sojet tanks crushing the rebellion - was as such preceived as a sign of authenticxity. this is i claim the eternal temptation in the twentieth century was the eternal temptation of left and right wings as if things go horrible, there is terror, shooting, torture...as if this suffering in itself functuions as a proof or at least a sign of authenticity. everything is falling apart, which means: this is the real thing. i think nobody will find this clearer as in cuba. it's clear that there the very fact that there everything is in decay is presented to the visitor as a proof: "you see, that's the price of our fidelity to evolutionary project." no wonder because this idea - that in order to (???) you must sacrifice something, suffer - is what in psychoanalysis is called "the logic of symbolic castration". so no wonder that the cuban leader is called "fidel castro". {laughter} i claim this reaction of pleasure is an exemplory case of what a good friend, afrench philosopher (ßßß) recently identified as the key feature of the twentieth century. he calls it "la passion du reel - the passion of the real". in contrast to nineteenth century - a century of the utopia, scientific projects and ideas, plans about the future - the twentieth century came at delivering the thing itself. it aimed at directly realising the new order. the ultima, defining experience of the twentieth century was the direct experience of the real, of the thing itself, as opposed to everyday social reality. everyday social reality is a deceiving domain of false appearance. and in order to penetrate the real we should pay the price of extreme violence. again, the price of penetrating through the deceiving layers of reality. already in the first world war ernst jünger was celebrating the face-to-face-combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter. you know this idea when you meet eye to eye with the enemy soldier: in that moment there is authentic contact. authenticity resides in the end of violent transpiration (???), and you have numerous versions: in politics, in art, even in sexuality, of this fundamental axiom i am almost tempted to say of the twentieth century: in order to be authentic you have to go to the end in a very violent, often self-destructive way. f.e. in theory: the notion of georges bataille of self-destructive excess; or in the domain of sexuality: even i think in our beloved hardcore-websites we can observe the violence of the real. you know what you can get almost everywhere now: you can observe the inside of a vagina from the standpoint of the tiny camera on the top of the penetrating dildo. and you know you must really go this close to the thing itself, and of course, at this point, when get too close to it, erotic fascination turns into ddisgust. because from sexuality you are all of a sudden a doctor examing. you have to suspend this disgust in order to have the experience of the real. so my point would have been that the so-called fundamentalist terror is also an expression of this same passion of the real."

"erleuchtung mit slavoj (im hintergrund)"

Back in the ealy seventies, after the collapse of the new-left student movement, especially in germany, one of ist resides was the RAF-terrorism. It’s underlined premise that the failure of the student-movement has demonstrated that the masses are so deeply emmerged in the consumerist apolitical stance that it is no longer possible to awaken them through standard political education. A more violent intervention is needed to shatter them from their ideological numbness, hypnosis, from their consumeris hypnotic stance. Bombings of supermarkets will do the job. Thus, at a different level, the same (???) so-called fundamentalist terror is it’s goal not also to awaken us western citizens from our numbness, from the emergent in our everyday ideological universe. So again i claim the presopposition of terror is: we live in a false deceiving reality, reality of boring rituals, inauthentic fashions, deceiving appearences, and there must be a violent intervention which will shatter us. But of course here we encounter the first properly dialectical reversion: what this political passion of the real, a violent intervention which should shatter, liberate us from being hypnotically enslaved to false ideological phantasies, appearances, the ultimate result of this is again a spectacle: a spectacle of terror. This already began with the baader-meinhof-gang: the element of spectacle. Anoither thing interests me even more here: if the political passion of the real ends up with the pure semblance of soime kind of political spectacle, than i claim in the exact inversion: the postmodern passion of semblance (you know all these stories: postmodernity, we no longer experience reality we are just experiencing different symbolic fictions, everything is a semblance and so on) the truth of this postmodern psassion of samblance is that it ends up in a kind of real, in obsession with the real. Recall a very interesting phenomenon of so-called „cutters (mostly women who experience an irresistible urge to cut themselves with raizors or otherwise cut themselves). There are at least two millions of them in the united states alone. This phenomenon of cutters stands for a desperate strategy to return to the real of our body, as such cutting is to be contrasted i think to the standard tattoo-enscriptions of our body. These enscriptiption – tattooing – guarantee the subjects our inclusion into symbolic order. If we have proper tattoos we signal we are part of a certain community. With the cutters the problem is the opposite one: the assersion of reality itself. That is to say: far from being suicidal, far from signalling a desire for self-annihilkation, cutting is a radical attempt to regain a stronghold in reality. To firmely ground our subjectivity in our bodily reality. The standard report of cutters is that after seeing the red warm blood floating out of their self-inflicted wound they feel alive again. So it’s really for them a desperate strategy to fight this experience of the loss of reality. If we have no longer contact with our so-called real world we live in a fake semblance, we do not exist. And this is another nice dialectical thing: the ultimate result of this so-called „disappearance of objective reality“ is not the loss of reality but the loss of subjectivity itself. What gets lost is ultimately the subject itself. And again we need a violent intervention of something like cutting to regain some foothold in reality. More generally on todays market we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property. We find coffee without caffein, cream without fat, beer without alcohol; we even find virtual sex which is sex without sex. We find, i claim, postmodern politics: this is no longer standard politics, this is just technological administratin: this is politics without politics. We find the virtual warfare. You know, colin powell promised „no casualties on our side“, which is of course war without war. We find even, i claim, in the fake liberal multiculturalism the ethnic, the other deprived of ist otherness. The other is just a nice other who does nothing horrible, it just stands there and dances and sings and cooks. Cirtual reality simply generalizes this procedure. In the same way decaffeinated coffee is coffee without caffeein, virtual reality is experienced as reality without being one. Now what is underline this desperate strategy of how to get out of this cycle of virtualization is the fact that we can no longer can simply oppose virtualization, fake realities and so called „real reality“. Real reality itself turns into the ultimate virtual, artificial effect. F.e. for the large majority of the public the collapse of the twin tower where events on the tv-screen and when we watched the often repeated shock of the frightened people running towards the camera away from the giant clowd of dust from the collapsing towers, was the framing of the shock itself, not a reminiscent to the spectacular shocks in the catastrophy-movies, a speacial effect which audited for other special effects. One should therefor turn around the standard reading, according to which the wtc explosions where the intrusion of the real which shattered the sphere of our ideological illusions. Quite on the contrary it is prior to the wtc collapase that, let’s say, new yorkers lived in their reality, that is to say: what they perceived as their reality was their socially constructed daily reality on the streets of ny and so one, while they perceived the the third world chorus as something which is not effectively part of their reality. As something which existed for them just as a spectral apparition on the tv screen. And what happened on sept. 11 is not that reality intruded, violently entered our world of illusions, appearences, but its rather that what up to that point was perceived as a spectral apparition entered our reality. Again, it is not that reality entered our illusion, the image entered and shattered our reality. So again, I think, the tension between semblance and the real cannot be reduced to the rather elementary fact that our daily lifes are – again and again virtualized, we live in artificial worlds, we have no longer contact with brutal reality – and this annihilation from reality gives rise to an urge to return to the real. I think that precisely the real which returns has the status of assemblence, of dramatic apparition. What do I mean by this? Let me be very precise now: My thesis is that we should turn around, reverse the standard postmodern thesis according to which the allgemein mistake is to mistake what effectively is just a symbolic fiction for reality. (This old idea of denouncing fiction. You think what you see and experience is reality itself but as deconstructionists and postmodernists are not getting tired to teach us: this is just a kind of verdinglichung, or fetishist affect; what we experience as social reality is not really out there; it is an effect of social or symbolic construction of reality. So again: don’t trust reality, what we experience as reality is really the effect of symbolic manipulation of a fiction). But I think the actual process is much more complex: what is reality for us? Yes, reality is what is constructed through certain symbolic exclusions, mechanisms and so on, which is why when something – which we can call the real, the real in its brutal sense of immediate real not symbolic – when that intervenes it is experienced precisely not as reality but as REALITÄTSVERLUST, as a kind of nightmarish apparition. This is an old freudian point, that when we leave our false everyday reality we experience the brutal real through realitätsverlust. You got my point? It’s when we experience something as reality – this is our daily reality – something must be excluded, something which is too strong, too dramatic. And this excluded thing can only be integrated into our experience if we suspend it’s status of reality and experience it as a kind of fiction. If I would kill a collegue here in front it would not be possible for you to perceive this horror as reality, it would be a bad dream.

The real is experienced as something which cannot be integrated in our reality. So the mistake then is not “let’s not misperceive fiction for reality”, let’s denounce reality as a mere fiction“ one should on the contrary be able to distern, not to mistake reality for fiction. That is to say to discern in what we experience as fiction the real, the dramatic of the real, so to recognize as what we misperceive as fiction the real, some brutal real, which precisely because it doesn’t fit into what we experience as reality we must experience it as an nightmarish fiction. And this strategies of derealisation to maintain this limit which is to prevent us to confront the real where very interesting, a propos the events of september 11¨did you notice for example how media reported: there was a clear contrast and the usual reports about third world horror: there, on cnn at least, the standard procedure is that first the journalist warns you that some of the images will be extremely graphic and on and on and then you get all the horror from bosnia. But you didn’t see anything like that from new york, almost no blood, it was in a way censured. Another feature along the same lines: when we watched on the tv screen the collapse it became possible to experience what is false about the reality-tv shows. Even if these shows are for the real, people still act in that, they simply play thermselves; big brother shows are the ultimate in fiction. Why? The standard discliamer in a novel (like “everything is fiction” and so) holds also of the participants of the reality-tv-shows: what we see there are fictional characters, even if they play themselves for the real.. So again the dramatic events confront us almost empirically with the paradox of this dialectical relation between fiction and reality; reality is not simply reality; reality is something which we experience as reality. To be experienced as such it must fit certain criteria. If something is too dramatic, too brutal, too horrifying to fit these criteria it has to be in a way derealized. It has to be exerienced as fiction, as something not fully integrated in our reality, and here then in return to the old marxist topic of fetishism I claim that this phenomena perfectly fits into the latest pace of fetishism. In all my respect for marx there is a certain problem with marxes account on fetishism, for marx the problematic of fetishism still relied on the notion refication, verdinglichung: the fetish is an object out there, and the point is to be certain denounce this object as only materialisation, object of socialisation,and so on. But I claim what is happening today is that fetishism gets dematerialized. For example: money. Its no longer that I have here money, a material effect, and I think money as we all know money will disappear as a material object, it will be a purely virtual entity existing just in the virtual space of computers; even paper money will disappear. But that is the paradox, I claim: in this complete dematerialization, fetishism will not disappear, it will become even stronger. Precisely: money will no longer exist empirically; it will turn into a kind of invisible gespenst, a spectral entity, dominating us completely.

And in a different level that also holds for warfare. Far from pointing towards the twentiethfirst century warfare, the wtc explosions and collapse was rather the last spectacular try of the twentieth century warfare. What awaits us I think is much more unheimlich: an immaterial war where the attacks will be invisible: viruses, poisons, gas, which can be anywhere and nowhere, nothing will happen on the level of visible reality, no big explosions, yet our universe will all of a sudden start to disintegrate. In this universe again the enemy will change more and more into a paranoia-invisible, but for that reason all present enemy. This is far of the abstractions of our daily environments. […???], this soldier sitting hundred miles from the battlefield hitting a button. The link what you are doing behind a computerscreen and the empirical destruction that you cause is broke. But this is not exactly the same going on f.e. in todays economy, it’s not the same abstraction in international monetry foind, wtcoorperation: they make their abstracticism where any link with real life, destructive events is broken. So that is my first point: what we are experiencing today is – almost empirically again – the fact that reality is not immediately real. In order to experience the real we have to experience it as some kind of nightmarish apparition where we have this problem of accepting it as real. Its just a nightmare. So now the next problem: why do people dream about these nightmares? The first lesson of freuds traumdeutung is that the archetypical situation of sreaming is not: I live a miserable life but I dream about a good life; it’s that people who have enough sex still dreram about not having sex, having another type of sex, or whatever. This is the problem of the people of the united states: it’s easy to explain why poor mexican people dream about becoming american; the problem is why american dream in movies announcing the 11. of september catastrophy like independence day or something you dream about the destruction of it. Why does this happen? I think the question to be asked here is a very old fashioned one: that of happiness. Are americans really happy, or more generally: when are people happy? Under what conditions are you happy? I don’t think happiness is a positive category; I think its an ideological category. I asked myself for example after world war 2 in wurope: when were peole really happy? I claim – and I am not for totalitarian- they were happiest in some of thee late communist regimes, where life was relaitvely comfortable and the communist power structure made a deal with the population, allwoing them a certain space of privacy, and so on, as long as they of course not mess with politics. So I think in order of being happy, some conditions (three or four) must be fulfilled. Of course, your basic material needs should be satisfied; life should go on in a regular, predictable way, without any great effort or shocks. The second conditiopn: you should have another one blame (no bananas – haha, communists) – that’s very important. The next poiunt: you still believe there is another place which is like paradise where you could be really happy; that was ideal during the 70s, early 80s, in slovenia or so. There is always somethind stupid in happiness; heppiness for me is a category of studpidity; “sound of music” constructs happiness for americans;

ihre meinung, bitte.