Zizek! Page #4

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What does it mean to be free?

So this is what philosophy

basically does.

It just asks, when we

use certain notions,

when we do certain acts,

and so on,

what is the implicit

horizon of understanding?

It doesn't ask these

stupid ideal questions:

"Is there truth?"

No. The question is,

"What do you mean

when you say this is true?"

So you can see, it's a very

modest thing, philosophy.

Philosophers are not the madmen

who search for some eternal truth.

What we encounter here, I think,

is precisely Lacan's reversal

of the famous Dostoyevsky model,

"If God doesn't exist,

everything is permitted.

If God doesn't exist,

everything is prohibited."

How? On the one hand,

again, you are allowed

to have a full life

of happiness and pleasure,

but in order, precisely,

to be happy,

you should avoid

dangerous excesses.

So at the end,

everything is prohibited.

You cannot eat fat,

you cannot have coffee,

you cannot have nothing

precisely in order to enjoy.

So today's hedonism combines

pleasure with constraint.

It is no longer the old notion

of the right measure

between pleasure and constraint.

Like sex, yes,

but not too much.

Proper measure.

No, it's something

much more paradoxical.

It's a kind of immediate

coincidence

of the two extremes,

like... as if action

and reaction coincide.

The very thing

which causes damage

should already be

the counter-agent,

the medicine.

The ultimate example

I encountered recently

in California...

I don't know if you can buy it

also here in New York...

is chocolate laxative.

And there it says

as a propaganda,

"Do you have still constipation?

Eat more of this chocolate."

The thing is already

its own counter-agent.

And the negative proof

of the calamity

of this stance, I think,

is the fact that today,

the true unconstrained

consumption

in all its main forms...

drugs, free sex, smoking...

is emerging as the main danger.

The traditional notion

of psychoanalysis

is that, because of some

inner obstacles...

you internalized,

identified excessively

with paternal or other

social prohibitions...

you cannot set yourself

free to enjoy, to...

Pleasure is not accessible for you.

It is accessible to you

only in pathological forms,

of feeling guilty and so on.

So, then, the idea is,

psychoanalysis allows you

to suspend, overcome

this internalized prohibitions

so that it enables you

to enjoy.

The problem today

is that the commandment

of the ruling ideologies

enjoy in different ways.

It can be sex and enjoyment,

consumption, commodity enjoyment,

up to spiritual enjoyment,

realize yourself, whatever.

And I think

that the problem today

is not how to get rid

of your inhibitions

and to be able

to spontaneously enjoy.

The problem is how to get rid

of this injunction to enjoy.

Organizations,

such as the New York

Psychoanalytic Institute,

have helped gain

general acceptance

for theories considered radical

when first advanced

some 50 years ago

by Dr. Sigmund Freud.

The relationship

between childhood frustrations

and disturbed adult behavior

has been clearly traced

by such authorities

as Dr. Rene Spitz of New York.

Distressing experiences

in childhood

may set up patterns

which in later life

will produce mental conflicts.

Such conflicts lead to the same

feelings of insecurity

which was felt as a child.

When such conflicts

paralyze the individual,

preventing him

from acting freely,

he is said to have a neurosis.

Let us see

how a neurosis develops.

My eternal fear

is that if,

for a brief moment,

I stopped talking,

you know, the whole

spectacular appearance

would disintegrate.

People would think

there is nobody

and nothing there.

This is my fear,

as if I am nothing

who pretends all the time

to be somebody,

and has to be hyperactive

all the time,

just to fascinate people enough

so that they don't notice

that there is nothing.

Well?

- Okay. You also, you also.

- Go ahead.

One of the big reproaches

to psychoanalysis

is that it's only a theory

of individual pathological

disturbances,

and that applying psychoanalysis

to other cultural

or social phenomena

is theoretically illegitimate.

It asks in what way

you as an individual

have to relate

to social field,

not just in the sense

of other people,

but in the sense

of the anonymous social as such

to exist as a person.

You are, under quotation marks,

normal individual person

only being able to relate

to some anonymous social field.

What is to be interpreted

and whatnot

is that everything

is to be interpreted.

That is to say

when Freud says,

"Unbehagen in der Kultur"...

civilization and its discontent,

or more literally,

the uneasiness in culture...

he means that it's not just

that most of us, as normal,

we socialize ourself normally.

Some idiots didn't make it.

They fall out.

Oh, they have to be normalized.

Culture as such,

in order to establish

itself as normal,

what appears as normal

involves a whole series

of pathological cuts,

distortions, and so on and so on.

There is, again,

a kind of a "Unbehagen,"

uneasiness:

We are out of joint,

not at home

in culture as such,

which means, again,

that there is no normal culture.

Culture as such

has to be interpreted.

When people ask me

why do I combine

Lacan with Marx,

my first answer is,

"Lacan already did it."

I think, for example,

that it's only through

the strict psychoanalytic

Lacanian notion of fantasy

that we can really grasp

what Marx was aiming at

with his notion

of commodity fetishism.

It's, I think, precisely

the use of Lacanian notions

like, again, fantasy...

fantasy in the strict

Lacanian sense,

or excess "plus de joie,"

excess enjoyment,

and so on and so on.

The real...

not to mention the real...

that we can understand

today's phenomena,

like new fundamentalist

forms of racism,

like the way our so-called

permissive societies

are functioning.

Again, here,

the psychoanalytic notion,

especially the way

it was conceptualized

by Lacan.

The psychoanalytic notion

of superego

as injunction to enjoy

as an obscene category,

not as a properly

ethical category,

is of great help.

So again, I think

that if Freud,

in his Freudian theory

in its traditional configuration,

was appropriate to explain

the standard capitalism

which relied to some kind

of a more traditional ethic

of sexual control,

repression, and so on,

then Lacan is perfect to explain

the paradoxes of permissive

late capitalism.

When did you have the last meal...

breakfast... or down there?

Down there.

We should probably...

No, no, I mean, one,

two hours later,

we should maybe go down there.

Or do you know any...

At the place

where you had your coffee,

they do have good menus,

you know,

like very nice ones,

like simple steak or whatever.

- They are not bad.

- They are all vegetarian.

Sorry?

Degenerate.

You'll turn into monkeys.

There is a table free here

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