AI generated conversation between Herzog & Žižek - with speech synthesis
The Infinite Conversation
Herzog:
I think it's what your friend Lacan calls la maison vide, an empty house.
An empty space has to be filled with something.
For example, I was once in a
house that had been completely destroyed by fire.
And I still remember the traces of destruction and how
this family had tried to take along every little object
even though the house had been totally destroyed.
They were so afraid to lose anything, because they had had so little.
So they tried to salvage literally everything.
And then they just stopped, because there was no floor anymore, no walls
and because it was impossible to salvage anything anymore.
You look at this trace and you see something.
It's not truth.
There is a truth beyond it, but it has
a sort of a purity that comes from somewhere else
from something else.
Žižek:
The idea of purification is also connected to the theme of violence.
For example, in your The Act of Gratitude
you describe how, when you were a child
you were fascinated with a certain picture of
the Last Supper, where they all have turbans
and you fantasized that these turbans are made out of animal skins,
so that the apostles are cannibals who eat meat from their own companions.
Then afterwards you learn that it was Muslims who had
come from some part of the Arab world and that the
original story of the Last Supper had been totally mistranslated
into Latin and misleading versions of it spread around Western Europe.
So this whole fantasy collapses and you begin to hate your former obsession.
Then you write, 'My only remaining hope was
to identify with the secret truth of the operators
to become one of them and to watch
while they pulled out the fat and flesh
from the slaughtered bodies and threw them into
the boiling cauldron.’ This violent side of obsession
which you elsewhere described as ‘the desire to be an angel of death’
is not just something that happens in you, but
that you would like to project onto the Other.
Isn't this the function of fantasies?