Hi Todd, could you point me to where Hegel shows or works out that the principal of non contradiction is contradictory? Thanks

I was also "awakened" by an experience with psilocybin. For me, this came in the form of a direct confrontation, or much more direct than in everyday life, with death. And when I reread things I had written previously, poems from my adolescence, small reflections in an aphoristic format, etc., I saw how death was already a central theme, somewhat implicit, unconscious. In a way, psilocybin did not give me the insight, it just forced me to look at it. In a very traumatic way because, I believe, there is not much that can be seen without this brutal push. I would just like to emphasize the "seeing", not the understanding. Understanding, to a certain extent, comes later. With calmer reflection. That said: 1 - Could "Death" be one of the names of "das Ding"? 2 - I was very interested in Buddhism. This religion always seemed to me to be the religion of the void, of nothingness, par excellence. However, could it be said that Buddhism does not go as far as Christianity precisely because it equates "das Ding" with desire and attachment too much? Or because Buddhism ends up focusing too much on the consequences of "das Ding" (desire and attachment), which naturalizes the experience too much and ends up anchoring, more than Christianity, the traumatic relationship with "das Ding" in a relationship of frustrated desire and not in the absurdity of the relationship itself, in the fact that the very source and objective of desire seems to be frustration insofar as human desire is not satisfied in the object? I apologize if it was not very clear, I do not understand exactly what I am saying and, on top of that, English is not my native language.

4:35 es geht nicht um das Biologische, sondern um die Art der symbolischen Verhüllung des Mangels (Toupet vs. Hut) zu 16:30 1) widersprechen sich die Idealbilder der Frauen, und 2) stehen diese Idealbilder nicht für sich (Herrensignifikanten, siehe 23:47), sondern sind Wunschvorstellungen der Männer; siehe 19:05 feminine impossibilty 21:09! 23:09!

Better Call Saul is a B tier show at best. I have lost all respect for you as a philosopher.

Upon returning to this, I realize how this explication of sacrifice as the source of value rather than sacrifice to bring a profit mirrors how Kierkegaard would differentiate between the tragic hero of the Ethical vs the knight of faith of the Religious. That the Abrahamic dilemma to sacrifice his child is one of pure absurdity. It's funny because it came off to me, though I have not read Kierkegaard deeply, that Kierkegaard is precisely attacking Kant and Hegel arguing that there is something beyond the Universal (i.e. the Teleological suspension of the Ethical). Yet, you claim that Kant is in some way saying the same thing. Assuming this line of thought, I hypothesize it's because Kierkegaard misunderstands the Universal as the Symbolic. Regardless, I think there is a connection, and perhaps Zizek is right in saying that Kierkegaard frequently gets too close to his supposed opponents. That aside, I was curious as to how this reflects onto virtue ethics? For me, the characterization of Kant as a deontologist or a rule-based ethicist had always struck me as odd, precisely for its emphasis on autonomy as I feel like you further elaborate on. I want to say that Kant is doing a kind of character-based virtue ethics, but rather focused on a kind of particularity (or abstract universality) that is linked to a pre-existing symbolic identity (or form, maybe even in the Platonic sense), Kant is advocating for a kind of character of singularity. Or maybe this is an improper use of the term "virtue ethics". Anyways, I do agree with you that there is something radically different about Kantian morality that I would say hasn't been thought through enough by more common approaches to Kantian morality that try to treat the categorical imperative in a algorithmic or game-theoretic manner.

I highly disagree with this video. Not in a way that I disagree about the historical examples, nor because I disagree the theory; instead I think you elaborate it in a way that is not very helpful. Before I drop some wall of text here, I must say that I'm not a native English speaker and this is not a easy topic either. So do expect poor writing, and I apologize in advance for that. There are two points that I don't agree. First, the whole concept about alienation in this video is nothing more than the divided subject. Why not just use the divide subject to explain it? It is not only possible to achieve "I am I", but actually rather easy. The way I approach it is "I am a wound of the trauma I experienced that always trying to heal". In this way, the lacking and the wholeness overlaps at each other, and it's really easy to imagine a lacking that doesn't start with completeness (because the lacking start at the trauma itself, but the trauma is exactly what I am), it's also not hard to imagine a wholeness persists with lacking too (because my existence is born with flaw, thus the flaw is a part of my wholeness). The second part that I do not agree is much more daring. I do not agree with just calling that "the efforts to cure alienation is the source of oppression", because it's not hard to see that every "efforts to cure the alienation" you mentioned in the video is means of alienation themselves. And so it goes back to the first point - the theory about divided subject already points out that any identity is doomed to be partial, inconsistent, distorted, and fail to reflect the subject. And following that theory it's easy to see that any attempts to try to fit people into an identity is alienation. It's impossible to simply embracing alienation but also fight against oppression. The way I see it is, the oppression did not from the attempts to try to cure alienation. The cure of alienation is a lie, a lure. It lures people to submit into alienation, and it is the submission that fuels the oppression. It's completely political, to a degree that I can't say they have the same structure, instead I should say it is politics itself. The ruling structure completely overlaps with the structure of enforcing alienation (although, it works in persuasive ways). Ruling itself is always achieved by either by actual alienation that leads to violence, or by implied alienation that leads to the games of identities. So I think the real radical emancipatory gesture is to take back alienation, not just embrace it - I am the only one that alienates myself thus I reject anyone else doing it to me. By this way, alienation is reduced (or perhaps I should say restored) to the dividing gap of the divided subject, which is a part of the subject itself; and at the same time "embracing certain alienation" is also reduced (or restored) to uphold the subjectivity.

Your channel is an absolute gem 🥹

They don't understand agamben. He is not proposing a return to not exceptional law. The state as an extension of capital operates the same way capital does which through relationships not materiality. Its not X has money give Y money, but the relationship of production as you would know from orthodox marxisme. the state extends that logic to everything, the state of exception exacerbates it.

I think that the fact that Philosophy of History was copied from Hegels lecture notes makes it more important. Because it shows how his thought was taught to his students, and makes any mistakes that they would’ve made in interpreting it, thus making it much more material than work he was able to spend much more time with and correct himself. The importance of philosophy is in how it’s taught, interpreted, misunderstood, misinterpreted and then retroactively re-evaluated. And copying it from speech makes any contradictions much more important I think, maybe I’m wrong though. Just a thought, thanks for the video Todd. 👍🏼

So, the subject unconsciously seeks wholeness through the acquisition of desired objects/experiences.. There's the visible desire (that car, that commodity) and the invisible overage (Jouissance) that can never be seen by the subject or realized -- because the subject is split. I think I understand this so far. Question: The desiring subject and its ordinary objects can be represented in static images. So, are there any photo books that specifically document jouissance? Thank you!

Hi Todd, I am slightly confused. So when Freud mentions "civilization" does he mean "social order" or is civilization related to social order and therefore also has a distinctive identity or is a bigger circle? Thanks for sharing the video :) Also, I wonder how fair is it for freud to call olfactory stimuli an "organic repression" or repression" since some people are quite attracted to olfactory and some people have their sexual desires linked to olfactory.. Would love to know what you think.

Girard's scapegoat theory works here also: Without scapegoat there is no culture.

There goes the unconscious structured like a language ! Silence of the LA(mbs) + (petit Pierre's)CAN = LACAN Haha😂

I appreciate all the work you have put into making this

15:40 thats the point of marriage - to turn the virgin into a sex object

So the objet "a" is a perceptual mediator, in the sense that it both enables us to see the object, e.g., by making it notable, but in so doing distorts our perception of the object. Isn't this what language does vis a vis the Real? Language as part of the symbolic enables us to engage with then Real symbolically, but also removes us irrevocably from the Real. Would that be a fair statement?

I dont get the Lacan joke

Gonna be pedantic a bit here--the word "excess" implies "more than necessary" or "overabundance" but the family looks for a replacement soon after his change and eventual demise. I would look for a different word that better captures Gregor's predicament. Otherwise great work, and one of the better videos on youtube analysing this work.

amazing video!! thank you so much for explanations and examples. It is still not all clear to me, but I think I am getting closer!

It is a critique of Marxism.

Thank you.

Psychological Seduction....😌

Hey Todd! This is really great! Thank you very much. I was wondering if there were any books or essay where the things you talked about, in the way you presented them, are explained more in detail or in depth? I am writing a seminar paper whose idea was inspired by this very video, so any help in understanding these ideas more clearly and deeply would be very appreciated!!

...ja but it also means ghost! and that is important to know since the word derives directly form the German word Geist.

Chapter 2 footnote 4 - according to my internet sources, Copernicus was a priest and thus celibate, never married nor had children (altho a scandalous relationship with a distant cousin ‘housekeeper’ is documented). What is a citation for the claim in this footnote?

Agamben towers over you, and the Covidian overreach VALIDATED every aspect of his philosophy. Government mandates for an experimental medical product which, we now know, was NOT sterilizing (i.e., it did not stop people from getting or spreading the disease) is as clear a demonstration as we can expect of the reduction of sovereign biopower’s subjects to bare life. What you call “solidarity” is the mob mentality of brainwashed masses. In fact, feudo-capitalist billionaires became MUCH richer and wealth gaps expanded during the pandemic, which shows that mitigation effort exacerbated capitalist inequalities. The pandemic actually gave the biosecurity regime more instruments of control over the broader populace. Every aspect of your analysis is regurgitated partisan propaganda. All you care about is not “being on the side of Bolsonaro”, even to the point of “making the state of exception permanent”. Your reductive, knee-jerk, enemy-of-my-enemy thinking is laying the groundwork for support of fascism (as long as it comes tied up in a nominally “leftist” bow and isn’t supported by Bolsonaro). Truly this is the most asinine commentary I’ve ever come across.

Is religion fantasy?

The problem I think is that in the 21st century we mainly associate "war" with WW2 (a nihilistic war), while Hegel associated it with the Napoleonic invasion of the Holy Roman Empire (a nation-founding war). He saw revolutionary France as liberating the backwards German principalities and ushering them into the modern age, by enabling the creation of a unified German state. I still think he was wrong on the whole, but maybe it becomes a bit more excusable if we substitute the term "war" with "Napoleonic conflicts", which is what he was referring to.

The late, great Hannibal Lecter!

....but there is power in losing..Every woman knows this.

At around 16:00 Re conversation about the sperm whale being the largest whale, and did Melville know about the blue whale. Some people think the blue whale actually is mentioned under another name, but it’s not sure. But he definitely mentions the ‘razor back’ whale, which is now known as the fin back whale. And that is almost as large as the blue whale, and definitely larger than the sperm whale. Whether Melville knew this (I think he probably did) and made it so the sperm whale is the largest for artistic reasons, or he simply didn’t know, I’m not sure.

Alienation is emancipation

Although this essay is mostly about societal applications, I find this notion & Todd-Hegel’s overall “reconciliation-with-contradiction” thing to be also existential-wise a crucial antidote for this anxiety-ridden generation’s “mental health” problems, as briefly implied via the Freud quote. There’s no final calm state where you can perfectly enjoy everything & you’re not alone in it, growing up means tarrying with this absurdity; it could be true comfort above all psychotherapies. Thanks to professor always & hope you touch on this part as well someday if this doesn’t go against the teachings 🙏🏻

I could imagine the necessity of a War-like emergency state if perhaps we had more global organisation. Say in a sort of global communist society, the usefulness of war-like situations ( ecological, extra territorial, biochemical threats and, humanitarian catastrophes) would be to emphasise the universality of such a diverse and maybe fragile social order.

I love capitalism. Anyone who thinks otherwise.needs to get a complete and thorough mental health examination. The phone you're staring at is a product of Capitalism. Try to keep up.

now I know why I don't approve of shock cinema like Irréversible: kits authorsvuse cheap tricks to get to our unconscious via violated gaze

29:44 Why do MNCs need so much user generated ("Prosumer") input...?

References which Zizek is talking about as Buddhist references are actually from the writer of Tantra Lok, Abhinavgupta.

About the death of Abhinavgupta it is said that he along with his thousands of pupil entered in a cave near Srinagar (Kashmir) and they all never came back. It is all the same like that Lacan in his last seminar just appeared for a minute before an audience of 500 people and went back uttering few words only. This is the end of all Ontic thoughts which makes one vanish to oneself

Miller’s journey towards singularity structured only on jouissance is the ultimate decay of psychoanalytical discourses like that of Tantra which tended towards such a particular kind of singularity through Panch Makaar, i.e., taking madya(alcohol), māṃsa (meat), matsya (fish), mudrā (grain), and maithuna (sexual intercourse) as the elements of only Taboo-breaking. Lacan had a deep understanding of Tantra Shastra of India and even quoted at many places its greatest ever thinker Abhinavgupta (11th century AD) as a Hindu thinker when he discusses language type structure of unconscious in his Ecrits.

Enjoyment itself is the freedom.

Without the mention of Oedipus complex I think Object a too can not be defined. Liberty is the sublimation of submission.

I am utterly stunned how amazing this interview on Hegel is. His discussion about identity, the predicates of how we identify ourself that seethe with contradictions. I’m only 10 mins in and my wife and I are riffing on what this means as we sometimes get waylaid in our thinking about who we are or who we are not. Conflating a predicate as an absolute description of ourselves or others. Still pondering this. Wow!!!!

This is such a brilliant concept. However, I have my reservations, as far as its application in the post-modern world is concerned. The post-modern world is highly fragmented into self-identities (officially and/or externally certified), which constitute the high diversity of the division of labor, always asking for more. To be fundamentally alienated is to not fit in to whatever identification, identity, list of properties are applied to the subject to present itself to the world. There will always be a gaping hole, and individuals will strive to uphold this mask of "self-identity", at the detriment of the subject. The tighter the identity, the more agonizing the task. This leads to a paradox. One can never be truly alienated as long as she/he acts from the point of a specific identity, i.e. a doctor, an engineer, a professor, etc., and assumes responsibility of the mask. This world needs a "profile" in order to move and let you operate into it. It is from the point of self-identity that one speaks, and is expected to be heard. Even to be "unemployed" means a specific identity, a profile, and a category in this world. Even to be "disabled" means a certain identity in our identity politics driven world. What if someone meets the "criteria" of these two "self-identities", but does not fit into those two "profiles"? The problem arises and appears like the Wittgenstein's ladder. What if one resists classification and this is one's normative stance? If one concludes that she/he is closing to "nothing", to "nothingness", due to a consistent application of this "alienation", she/he may find that the others do not simply care to enter into dialog. The current world seems to need the mask of "identity" in order to render the subject "harmless", "recognizable", and "assimilable" (i.e. a cogwheel into the Machine). To deny this self-identification equals to "exclusion". While I find Lacan brilliant, even genius, I disagree with the label of "psychoanalysis". It is the form, the label I am opposed to, not the content and the praxis. Being a "psychoanalyst" in the Symbolic Order seems to be nothing more than discipline, and a certain "identity" and "profile", and it constitutes -as everything else- a commodity, as commodities are cinema, cars, psychiatry in the form of administering prescriptions for pills, and so on. Why choose psychoanalysis instead of psychiatry prescribing pills towards remedying existential angst and symptoms? One would also argue that Capitalism is the driving force which brings forth and creates the Desire for the Analyst (Capitalism, as you said, is all about desire!), and psychoanalysis as a commodity. The desire is for the commodity, not for the analyst; what a paradox! One could argue that Socrates was a psychoanalyst, one of the first, but Socrates resisted his classification into this or that, into a specific "identity/profile". The price paid is known: Socrates drank the conium, and this happened under the rule of democracy. The very architecture, the social, techno-political mechanics of our world do not allow for a positioning outside this world. In other words, no self-identity/profile loss acquires any sense if the "identity/profile" of the entire edifice stays unchanged, and particularly if the subject speaking does so from a place of a "profile". So, the hypothesis of embracing alienation is only of theoretical value. In the Ancient Greek world displacement was a usual practice in case someone wanted to be alienated. In case, for example, an Anthenian citizen left Athens, he could move to Corinth without having an "identity" nor needed an "identity" in order to enter the city-state and live in; even without having a certified name. I would really appreciate you commenting on the above remarks.

lovely interview, thanks both!!

This is fantastic! Have you written anywhere about this?

One could not be a sex object and virgin at the same time? I got confused... it seems that "purity" is the ultimate sex object, doesn't it?

I’m sorry Todd, but Hegel would be a Chiefs fan

great discussion but wow o wow, she dont have a better mic to work with on the laptop in chicago !!??

'Das Tiefe, das der Geist von innen heraus, aber nur bis in sein vorstellendes Bewußtsein treibt und es in diesem stehen läßt,-und die Unwissenheit dieses Bewußtseins, was das ist, was es sagt, ist dieselbe Verknüpfung des Hohen und Niedrigen, welche an dem Lebendigen die Natur in der Verknüpfung des Organs seiner höchsten Vollendung, des Organs der Zeugung,-und des Organs des Pissens naiv ausdrückt.-Das unendliche Urteil als unendliches wäre die Vollendung des sich selbst erfassenden Lebens, das in der Vorstellung bleibende Bewußtsein desselben aber verhält sich als Pissen'. - Hegel, 'Phänomenologie des Geistes', 1807. The depth which Spirit brings forth from within-but only as far as its picture-thinking consciousness where it lets it remain - and the ignorance of this consciousness about what it really is saying, are the same conjunction of the high and the low which, in the living being, Nature naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulfilment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination. The in finite judgement, qua infinite, would be the fulfilment of life that comprehends itself; the consciousness of the infinite judgement that remains at the level of picture-thinking behaves as urination'. - Heegel, 'Phenomenology of Spirit', 1807. (Miller translation). 'des Organs des Pissens': even if you know no German you can have a guess at the proper translation. But it's always translated 'organ of urination'. Bloody British puritanism! I look forward to a translation that translates it properly. Hegel resorts to crude language here for a reason, everything is done for a reason, I discuss it in one of my videos but I won't give a link.. I don't approve of hijaking other posts.