Surplus Happiness | Slavoj Žižek critiques pleasure

if you are a fanatic purist you prohibit yourself to enjoy but then all of a sudden you discover yourself enjoying the very rituals of prohibition [Music] let me begin years ago I was reading a text about how the Nazis tortured prisoners in the concentration camps it affected me quite dramatically when I found that they used industrially made testicle crashes like to crack nuts they made them industrially to torture prisoners in concentration camps now I did something I didn't want to be caught lying again so I simply went to Google or whatever and put a testicle

Crusher or ball crasher to get the data I was extremely surprised when I got an answer immediately but not about the Nazis I got a couple of websites advertising where they say pick your poison for pleasure from this ball torture group then you have stainless steel ball Crusher stainless ball clamp torture device brutal Vice torture toy and so on and so on I think that this passage from the ball crasher used to torture prisoners in Nazi contentation camps to the ball cluster that you can buy they're very nicely done even with some small diamonds for

for 500 pounds this will undoubtedly be celebrated as a sign of historical progress the same progress which brings us classic works of art purified of the content they that may hurt somebody so that's where we are you shouldn't use a wrong word like he or she when it should be day but you get or the pain that you want from a ball Crusher the question that bothers me today is uh I'm not against this I think that this ball crashing machines and so on are not a pathological phenomenon that they indicate something that is imminent

to our sexuality so why does the permissive stance towards sexual pleasures entail impotence and frigidity why when pleasure is enjoined by a superego figure are we deprived of it why in these conditions the only way is to enjoy through pain I'm raising here of course the old Freudian question why do we enjoy oppression itself that is to say power edifice asserts its hold over us not simply by oppression or repression they are not the same but which are sustained by a fear of punishment power asserts Itself by bribing us for our obedience and enforced renunciations

what we get get in exchange for our obedience and renunciation is a perverted pleasure in renunciation in itself in loss itself here comes a very nice ambiguity of lacon's term for Surplus enjoyment blue if you know minimally friend you know that blue the can mean a surplus but it can also mean negative no longer enjoyment so uh Lacon formulated this term with reference of course to Marx Merv Surplus value Lacon added Surplus enjoyment and Freud already doesn't have a term but called this Luft Gavin a gain of pleasure which does not designate a simple stepping

up of pleasure more pleasure but the additional pleasure provided by the very formal detours in the subject effort to attain pleasure another figure of this Luft Gavin is the reversal that characterizes hysteria renutation to pleasure reverts into pleasure of renunciation repression of Desire reverts into desire for repression and I think I'm here although we are enemies theoretically but personally normal relations here I agree with her I refer her to Judith Butler where he develops in one of her texts about psychoanalysis very nicely this point of how yes enjoyment is impossible direct pure enjoyment but at

the same time you cannot get rid of enjoyment for example if you are a fanatic purist you prohibit yourself to enjoy but then all of a sudden you discover yourself enjoying the very rituals of prohibition and lacon's point is that there is no zero level pure enjoyment non-oppressed enjoyment which would then be repressed and so on no enjoyment is such uh uh an excess this brings me now to uh this Gables uh Gables speak again I think that this uh speak as already said stands for Pure Sublime in the sense of his messages you think

you've already seen enough suffering no way you will suffer immediately more and the result is a quite open obscene enjoyment now ah now comes my trick maybe you will say but wait a minute wasn't this all staked my point it doesn't matter the way ideology works today and already in the Nazi time is that the most dangerous false distance is when you tell yourself oh but I'm not taking it seriously no it is serious and you are not aware how serious it is or Freud has a very nice formula for this when he says we

are not only more immoral than we think our either yes is also more moral than we think so again where is here the Surplus enjoyment in global City speech it is produced by the very renunciations he imposes on the people a look at his distorted face when he shouts his challenges to the public his enjoyment at its purest and now I come to the pessimist said conclusions is in killing the truth the Surplus is produced by the very fact that brutal murder is presented as the highest Duty so that while I enjoy I can tell

myself that I'm doing my duty I'm improvised a little bit on this already yesterday how for me the most depressing horrible thing is that Earth and I gave yesterday two examples not only the Nazis but also in a different way I don't confuse them the Stalin is Terror in gulak you know the really depressive thing is that like we all have some sense of common decency but to present you to you as the highest ethical challenge that you are ready to sacrifice your common decency for the good of the nation for the high cost and

so on and so on for example Heinrich Himmler the really bad guy the chief of ss and so on he put this at its purest in his message to uh SS officers killing the Jews he said when you are confronted with the Jewish lady and her small son both sides are already covered by Blood crying totally helpless there comes the greatest ethical Temptation that if you feel sympathy for them the highest ethical stance is to ignore this common decency and to do it and even himner comes close to saying this that every idiot can be

seduced like he did it here by giving his life for his country and him no the highest ethical Act is to sell yours sell your soul to the devil to do the most horrible things as the highest ethical Duty and I found again repeating myself from yesterday in some stalinist notes in the early 30s when they did the collectivization it was the same when they were preparing a people to go to The Villages and First Farmers into collectivization they said you will do the most horrible things you will have to ignore small Starving Children families

but he says there is the Temptation they call this temptation of course Bourgeois sentimentalism liberalism and so on that and now you will say but this is an exaggeration no I don't have time now to go into this in detail but uh I found traces of this today clearly in also in Russian but especially American ultright Alternative rights the scientist Trump and all of them are mostly giving the same message they say Trump openly says a couple of months ago that our sense of justice that he won really the elections and so on allows us

to ignore even the Constitution you see and here things get but I will not go into it by my next book if you're literally very sad for example so many friends of mine were depressed when you remember two years ago when was it yesterday after the at the uh when the the trumpian crowd entered Congress occupies it you know that my many of my Lefty friends were crying they said my God we should have been doing he the people and this is the same sad thing today even the leninist violent upheaval topic is taken over

by the Earth by the alt right so that this liberal left did you notice how all they can do is they call for police like all my leftist liberal friends were saying where was the National Guard there saying where was the police and so on and so on and not to mention guys really disgusting like Steve Bannon they may be most intelligent theorist ideologist of trump trumpism he proclaimed himself openly a leninist he says I'm the only serious leninist today because like for learning my task is to destroy the state so that the people take

it over now I know what you will say this is only a mask of the privileged big capital and so on but my point is it doesn't matter this engrenders an incredible Surplus enjoyment to continue watching this video click the link in the top left or in the description below or visit iai.tv for more debates and talks from the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas