If there is a dream final in the world championship of brain teasers, then this one: the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek against the Bavarian director Werner Herzog.
Italian programmer Giacomo Miceli, with a little help from artificial intelligence, has now put the two in an endless duel of words - to create awareness of how easy it is now to create such deceptions ("any motivated fool with a laptop can do it do in his bedroom");
and in homage to the “brilliant ideas” and “idiosyncratic language” of Žižek and Herzog.
Talking about God and the world
On the website Infiniteconversation.com you can listen to them talk about everything in the truest sense of the word, cinema and psychoanalysis, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, dreams and aliens.
The fact that the conversation, apart from a few unmistakable technical pauses, is such a perfect simulation of Žižek and Herzog, in terms of their speech rhythm and their narrative style, seems to be confirmed at first by all those who have always considered the two to be tricksters and dazzlers anyway, whose play lacks depth and works for a pretentious bluff.
In a reaction to his virtual doppelganger in "Zeit", the presumably real Žižek reacted somewhat offended and accused Miceli's program of turning his thoughts "into harmless shit".
The project does not at all pretend to produce a "real theory", as Žižek criticizes (perhaps he did not write the text himself).
Listening to the conversation is more like the flow of variation and surprise in a familiar pattern, akin to a soccer game: it plods along forever, with lots of banter in midfield, until at some point someone pulls out a real hammer: then Žižek tells a joke about the devil , who grants a man a wish never to die, but instead plunges him into a lake of honey forever.
And duke the anecdote,
Just change your name!
At one point, Duke Žižek suggests changing his name, and Žižek readily agrees.
The next time he visits the office, he will simply say that Herzog wanted it.
The two also extensively discuss the question of truth and lies.
There is no such thing as a lie, says Herzog, just different ways of seeing the world.
Yes, agrees Žižek: “We shouldn't even accept that there is such a thing as a fact.
A fact is always loaded with meaning.” “But we're still free in what we see there,” replies Herzog.
“Yes,” says Žižek.
"But we are not free from what we see there."