The Power of Negative Thinking with Slavoj Žižek

There is a wonderful joke in Lubitch’s classic comedy Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies: “Sorry, but we have run out of cream. Can I bring you coffee without milk?” In both cases, the customer gets coffee alone, but this One-coffee is each time accompanied by a different negation, first coffee-with-no-cream, then coffee-with-no-milk. The point of this joke is that the absence itself has to be positively registered: it is not enough to have one full glass of water, since, if the Montenegrin will not be thirsty, he will simply ignore it - this negative fact itself has to be taken-note-of by the empty glass, i.e., no-need-for water has to be materialized in the void of the empty glass.

And how not to mention here another incident with coffee from popular cinema, this time from the English working class drama Brassed Off? The hero accompanies home a young pretty woman who, at the entrance to her flat, tells him: “Would you like to come in for a coffee?” To his answer - “There is a problem – I don’t drink coffee.” - she retorts with a smile: “No problem – I don’t have any…” The immense direct erotic power of her reply resides in how – through a double negation, again – she pronounces an embarrassingly direct sexual invitation without ever mentioning sex: when she first invites the guy in for a coffee and then admits she has no coffee, she does not cancel her invitation, she just makes it clear that the first invitation for a coffee was a stand-in (or pretext), indifferent in itself, for the invitation to sex.

The conference will simply try to develop the consequences of such a negative approach for creative thinking in general and, in particular, for advertising. Can we imagine a publicity for coffee using these mechanisms?

Slavoj Žižek will talk about "The power of negative thinking" on Friday, 27 January 2012, at 10 am. Don't miss it!
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