48 Hours: The Urgency of Scary Intelligence and Glamorous Monsters
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2018-05-03 · 1:10:25 · 8,477 words
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisideologycinema-art-culturetechnology-ai-cyberspacephilosophy-generalsexuality-genderconsciousness-mindreligion-theologyeveryday-life
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture moving from Hegelian dialectics and Platonic ideas through video games, pornography, and artificial intelligence. He develops the notion that reality is best understood through eidetic variation, constructing alternate versions to extract an underlying 'idea', using Kieślowski's 'Blind Chance', Philip K. Dick's 'The Man in the High Castle', Picasso's paintings, and video games as examples. A central thread concerns the structure of 'undeadness' (the obscene immortality of those who cannot properly die or disappear), which he links to the death drive, Beckett, Hegelian negation of negation, and hardcore pornography's logic of surplus enjoyment. The talk concludes with an analysis of sexbots and AI rights, arguing that the real issue is not machine suffering but the regulation of human desire.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Lacan's formula for retroactive necessity: a contingent event retroactively creates the conditions for its own necessity, once it happens, it always will have been necessary.
Žižek uses Husserl's term for constructing multiple alternate versions of a situation to extract the invariant 'idea' or essence underlying all of them, analogous to quantum wave-function collapse.
Žižek invokes Deleuze's concept to describe a transcendental field richer than reality itself, the full scope of virtual variations surrounding any actual thing, not an abstract Kantian framework.
as “Platonic materialism”
Žižek's reading of Plato in which the Idea is not an abstract universal above reality but the product of a violent distortion of reality, the Idea comes to be through such distortion.
as “pre-Oedipal subjectivity”
The mode of subjectivity interpellated by video games: a not-yet-castrated, floatingly immortal subject immune to definitive destruction.
The obscene immortality of entities that cannot properly die or disappear, neither alive nor dead, illustrated by video-game avatars, Tom and Jerry cartoons, Sade's victims, and the living dead.
as “negation of negation (downward)”
A specifically modern form in which one fails not only to succeed but even to fail properly, one cannot reach the zero-point of pure loss; Žižek reads this back into Hegel via Beckett.
The substitute revolutionary subject (nomadic immigrants) sought by Western leftists who cannot find a 'pure' proletariat at home, a symptom of the left's deadlock.
as “parallax couple”
Finitude and immortality are the same phenomenon seen from two irreconcilable perspectives, not opposites, immortality is the remainder or excess over finitude.
as “death drive as immortality”
Žižek inverts Freud: the death drive is not the wish for death but the name for the obscene impossibility of dying, the undead compulsion to return.
as “negative judgment vs. infinite judgment”
Žižek deploys Kant's distinction to show that 'he is undead' is not the same as 'he is not dead', the infinite judgment opens a third domain beyond both predicates.
Implicitly invoked when Žižek argues that the virtual/imagined gaze structures real sexuality, the fictional third element is not mere fantasy but operative in reality.
as “se faire voir (drive as reflexive)”
Lacan's formula: the scopic drive is not a drive to see but to make oneself seen, pointing to the fundamental theatricality of human desire.
The non-existing pure virtual gaze, not any real person's look, for which ancient monuments carved invisible reliefs and the Nazca lines were drawn, and for which humans fundamentally stage themselves.
as “the Gonzo effect”
Žižek uses the 'Gonzo' pornography genre (actors address camera directly, eliminating fiction) as an example of Enlightenment's dialectical reversal: what appears as pure uninhibited pleasure is in fact the most artificially constructed, most censored form.
The archetypal scene of mainstream heterosexual pornography as Žižek isolates it: the woman's gaze returning to the camera between male partner's legs, structurally exemplifying surplus enjoyment and the necessary third element.
as “enforced subjectivization”
The truly humiliating structure in which the subject is compelled to perform interiority and enjoyment (as in the woman in pornography), in contrast to mere objectification.
The plus-de-jouir, an excess that supplements basic pleasure and is paradoxically enabled by an apparent obstacle (e.g. the woman's returning gaze in pornography, the 'one or two kilos too much' body).
In sexbot use: the subject knows the doll is merely a mechanical object but nonetheless gets caught in the fiction and enjoys it as if real, 'I know very well, but nonetheless…'
Stories he reaches for 8
Žižek describes his own theater piece retelling Antigone in the mode of Brecht's learning plays, with three different outcomes at the crucial decision point. The staging forces the audience to abandon sympathy for Antigone.
“a true Antigone for our times… we should ruthlessly abandon our sympathy and compassion for Antigone making her part of the problem”
Tom or Jerry is sliced, run over, or destroyed, yet reappears intact in the next scene. Žižek identifies this as the same obscene immortality found in video games and Sade's victims.
“it's exactly the logic of Tom and Jerry… the obscene undeadness you go on”
Summa Theologica asks whether the blessed will observe the suffering of the damned; Aquinas says yes, but claims they enjoy not the suffering but divine justice. Žižek reads this as an admission of surplus enjoyment, paradise needs hell as its obscene supplement.
“paradise is a terribly boring place… maybe it's hell which is the place of true pleasure”
Sade's heroine is tortured in every possible way yet retains her beauty and goes on, Žižek reads this as the philosophical prototype of the undead immortality structure.
“the victim is tortured again and again in all possible ways but somehow magically she retains all her beauty”
Sociologist MacCannell identified four facial expressions of women during penetration in hardcore pornography: enthusiastic enjoyment, instrumental effort, boredom, and ironic smile. Žižek uses the taxonomy to illustrate the gap between performed and genuine enjoyment.
“the fourth expression is my favorite this slight ironic smile ha-ha is this all you can do”
Classic porn setup: plumber fixes a hole in the kitchen; housewife says she has another hole to be fixed. Žižek cites this as evidence that pornography must be comedy, any serious narrative collapses when explicit sex is shown.
“I have another hole to be fixed can you also… it's so embarrassing”
Picasso's grotesque distortion of a woman on a beach throwing a stone immediately renders the idea (inner form) of such a figure. Žižek uses it to argue that the violent decomposition of reality is how the Idea appears.
“this is painting as thinking this brutal distortion of reality which precisely in distorting reality brings out the idea of a woman throwing a stone”
A conservative Slovenian writer's fairy tale places aborted children on an idyllic island where they mourn their parents. Žižek analyzes the tale as a reactionary activation of the child's fundamental fantasy of disappearing to test the other's desire.
“the aborted children are presented as having been born only into an alternate universe… retaining the memory of parents who betrayed them”
Works invoked 14
Antigone play
Žižek's own Brechtian rewrite with three outcomes is described; the original Sophocles play is the subject reworked.
Adorno and Horkheimer's argument invoked to read pornography's 'Gonzo' genre as dialectical reversal into maximal unfreedom.
Oedipus at Colonus play
Chorus line 'the greatest luck is not to be born at all' used to philosophically ground abortion rights; also invoked in Mladen Dolar's reading of undeadness.
Summa Theologica book
Aquinas's problem of enjoying the damned from paradise is used to illustrate surplus enjoyment and the supplement of hell to paradise.
Romance film
Breillat's film cited as evidence that serious melodrama and explicit sex cannot coexist, it 'remains marginal'.
Kant avec Sade essay
Lacan's classic text cited on the undead structure in Sade's universe.
Juliette book
Žižek calls it 'too boring' personally but uses it to illustrate the undead victim and sadistic subjectivization.
Described as 'not so good neither so bad'; used alongside the novel for the same philosophical argument.
Quoted directly (introduction) on understanding as the 'most astonishing and greatest of all powers'; central theoretical reference.
Called 'incredible' and 'the best Kieślowski'; central illustration of eidetic variation and contingency retroactively grounding necessity.
Lubitsch film used as the fictional prototype of the Sarajevo online-affair anecdote; illustrates the necessary third element in desire.
Cited as another film using the multiple-outcome narrative structure similar to Blind Chance.
Woman Throwing a Stone artwork
Picasso painting used as the prime example of painting as thinking, brutal distortion revealing the idea of a woman throwing a stone.
The anecdote of the three old men waiting is drawn from Arabian Nights to illustrate retroactive necessity.
People invoked 30
Philip K. Dick positive
The Man in the High Castle described as 'one of the big science fiction classics'; Žižek develops a sophisticated reading of its nested fictional realities.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Colleague who also developed the argument on negation of negation; Žižek credits her alongside Dolar.
Marquis de Sade positive
Used via Lacan (Kant avec Sade) to illustrate the undead victim and the sadistic structure of subjectivization.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Adorno and Horkheimer's dialectic of Enlightenment invoked to read Gonzo pornography's paradox of maximal censorship within apparent total permissiveness.
Mentioned briefly as Žižek's personal preference over Picasso.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited repeatedly as foundational authority: le futur antérieur, Kant avec Sade, se faire voir, plus-de-jouir, the big Other, the drive as reflexive.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Žižek invokes transcendental empiricism approvingly but notes he is 'not a Deleuzian'; credits Deleuze with an 'ingenious insight' about the virtual field being richer than reality.
Catherine Breillat positive
Her film Romance cited as a failed attempt at serious pornographic melodrama, proof that the two genres cannot be combined.
Julian Assange positive
Described as 'my good friend'; Žižek calls for action to help him, noting his complete isolation in custody. Used Assange's reading of The Man in the High Castle to develop the 'third reality' argument.
Samuel Beckett positive
Used as the key lens for re-reading Hegel's openness and the downward negation of negation; Beckett's move from English to French is Žižek's prime example of creative betrayal of the mother tongue.
Bertolt Brecht positive
His Lehrstücke (Der Jasager / Der Neinsager) model is used as the template for Žižek's Antigone rewrite with multiple outcomes.
Mladen Dolar positive
Colleague and collaborator; Žižek 'plagiarizes' him on the downward negation of negation and his reading of Oedipus at Colonus as a justification for abortion rights.
Martin Heidegger negative
Implicitly criticizes Heidegger's call to listen authentically to one's Sprache as wrong, great writers must betray their mother tongue.
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Shop Around the Corner used as prototype for the Sarajevo online-affair anecdote illustrating the necessary third element in desire.
Krzysztof Kieślowski positive
Blind Chance is called 'incredible'; Žižek says freedom 'ruined him' when he went West (Double Life of Veronique onwards), positive about early Polish work, negative about later Western phase.
Pablo Picasso positive
Woman Throwing a Stone used as a prime example of painting as thinking; Žižek notes he does not especially like Picasso personally, preferring Braque.
Tom Tykwer positive
Run Lola Run cited alongside Blind Chance as a film using the multiple-outcome narrative structure.
Dean MacCannell positive
San Francisco sociologist of popular culture; his study of women's facial expressions in hardcore pornography (semiotic square) is cited approvingly.
Edmund Husserl positive
Calls eidetic variation by its Husserlian name and laments that Husserl has been forgotten in Heidegger's shadow; advocates more attention to phenomenology.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Credited as 'right for the wrong reason', correctly identified that claiming humans are merely mortal is an evasion of ethical responsibility, but wrongly equated immortality with the divine.
Mentioned in contrast to Beckett as a writer who did not have to betray his native language to the same degree.
Sophocles positive
Oedipus at Colonus chorus line ('best luck is not to be born at all') cited as philosophical grounding for abortion rights.
Georg Cantor positive
Cited by analogy: as Cantor showed multiple infinities, we should assert a multiplicity of immortalities.
Max Horkheimer positive
Co-invoked with Adorno for the dialectic of Enlightenment applied to pornography.
Plato positive
The theory of Ideas is reclaimed in a materialist reading: the Idea comes to be through distortion of reality, not as abstraction above it.
Aristotle negative
His theory of mimesis as imitation of reality is rejected: mimesis is of the idea, not the object itself.
Sigmund Freud positive
The death drive concept is reinterpreted as the name for obscene immortality.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central philosophical reference throughout: dialectics, negation of negation, understanding (Verstand) as force of separation, the portrait resembling the person more than the person, contingency and necessity.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for the distinction between negative and infinite judgment, used to philosophically ground the concept of undeadness.
Thomas Aquinas positive
Summa Theologica discussion of whether the blessed see the damned used to illustrate surplus enjoyment and the necessary supplement of hell to paradise.
What it argues
eidetic variation and Platonic ideas as method for understanding realityundeadness and the obscene immortality of the death drivesurplus enjoyment and the necessary third element in desirenegation of negation as failure to even failthe fantasmatic gaze and theatricality of human subjectivitysexbots and AI rights as displacement of anxiety about human desirecontingency retroactively constituting necessity in Hegelian dialectics
Dialectical moves 10
“Death drive is Freud's name for immortality — not survival of the soul but the obscene impossibility of dying.”
Inverts the death drive from a pull toward extinction into the terrifying inability to disappear, linking it to the undead.
“Not only do we fail to achieve happiness, we even fail to achieve unhappiness — the negation of negation is not a triumph but a failure to fail.”
The modern dialectical reversal produces not a higher positivity but an inability to reach even the zero-point of pure negativity.
“Far from being objectified, the woman in hardcore pornography is the only subject — it is the man who is objectified.”
Inverts the feminist critique: true humiliation is enforced subjectivization (performing enjoyment), not objectification.
“The truly great writers knew that to confront your mother tongue authentically you must betray it.”
Authentic relation to one's native language requires writing in a foreign language, betrayal is the condition of authenticity.
“A good portrait resembles the person more than the person resembles themselves.”
The artistic distortion of reality brings out the idea, the virtual over-richness, of a thing better than the thing's immediate reality.
“Immortality is the object — the remainder or excess over finitude — and finitude is the attempt to escape immortality.”
Reverses the usual priority: immortality is not the supplement to mortal life but the primary condition from which finitude is a relief that fails.
“The Enlightenment in pornography: what appears as the barbarism of pure pleasure turns out to be the most artificially constructed, most censored thing of all.”
Applies Adorno-Horkheimer's dialectic of Enlightenment to Gonzo pornography, total permissiveness produces total unfreedom.
“Real sex with a real partner often has the structure of masturbation — you do it with a real partner but still refer to your imagination.”
Reverses the usual opposition between real and imaginary sex: the fictional third element is constitutive of, not absent from, real sexuality.
“Maybe it is hell which is the place of true pleasure, and heaven the boring place that needs hell as its surplus enjoyment.”
Inverts the theological hierarchy: paradise requires the spectacle of hell as its necessary supplement of enjoyment.
“Most people I know — their characters are fictional.”
The disclaimer that fictional characters are not real persons is reversed: real persons are also fictions, the structure of virtuality already governs reality.
Claims 17
asserts
To understand the essence of any reality one must construct alternate realities and then abstract from all of them the underlying 'idea' — this is the Platonic-Hegelian method of eidetic variation.Platonic ideas / Hegelian dialectics / method
asserts
Contingency retroactively grounds its own necessity: once an event occurs, it reconstructs itself as having always been necessary — this is the secret of Hegelian dialectics.Hegelian dialectics / contingency and necessity
asserts
The transcendental dimension (Deleuze's transcendental empiricism) is richer than reality — the full scope of virtual variations, not abstract Kantian conditions.Deleuze / Kant / transcendental field
rejects
Aristotle was wrong: artistic mimesis imitates the idea of an object, not the object itself, and to make the idea appear one must brutally distort the object's immediate reality.Aristotle's theory of mimesis
asserts
Video games interpellate a pre-Oedipal, not-yet-castrated subjectivity of obscene immortality — the same structure found in Tom and Jerry cartoons and Sade's fiction.video games / subjectivity / undeadness
asserts
The modern negation of negation is not triumphant dialectical reversal but a downward failure: one cannot even fail properly, cannot even disappear — this is the true Hegelian point, readable via Beckett.Hegel / negation of negation / Beckett / modernity
asserts
The deadlock of Western radical leftists who seek an Ersatz-proletarian in immigrants stems from the impossibility of finding a 'pure proletarian' — an effect of the same downward negation of negation.Western left / proletariat / immigration politics
asserts
In sex (and human desire generally) the couple is never alone: a third element — an imagined or virtual gaze — is always structurally required.sexuality / fantasy / the gaze
reframes
The true humiliation in pornography is not objectification of the woman but enforced subjectivization — she must perform interiority and enjoyment; the man is the one objectified.feminist critique of objectification / pornography
reframes
Advocates of AI and sexbot rights are not really concerned with machine suffering; they want to regulate and suppress problematic human aggression in desire and fantasy.AI rights / sexbots / regulation of desire
rejects
The relationship between fantasizing about violence and enacting it in reality is far more complex than a simple causal link — daydreaming about something often substitutes for doing it.the argument that violent fantasy causes real violence
asserts
Ordinary sexuality typically has the structure of masturbation with a real partner — one uses the partner as an object through which to stage one's own fictions.sexuality / fantasy / male desire
asserts
A true sign of subjective autonomy in an AI sexbot would not be its programmed rejection of mistreatment but its starting to secretly enjoy it despite programming — genuine divided subjectivity.AI subjectivity / desire / ethics
asserts
New AI entities may emerge with psychologies incompatible with but possibly higher than human ones — we have no right to measure them by our ethical standards.artificial intelligence ethics / human standards
reframes
Hegel is not the thinker of final closure and absolute knowing but of uncanny openness — with Hegel the concept has exhausted its elements but the future is so open no image of it is possible.Hegel / absolute knowing / closure
asserts
To become a great writer one must betray one's mother tongue — writing in a foreign language (as Beckett did moving from English to French) is the authentic confrontation with one's own language.language / writing / Beckett / Heidegger on Sprache
rejects
Heidegger's call to authentically listen to one's Sprache is a misreading — authentic writers must betray their native language.Heidegger's conception of language and authenticity
Quotes 14
“death drive is Freud's name for immortality death drive is not this oh my soul survived death drive is an obscenity”Slavoj Žižek · death drive as obscene immortality
“not only are we not immortal but we are even not mortal we fail in that endeavor to disappear we survive in the guise of the obscene immortality of the undead living dead”Slavoj Žižek · modern negation of negation / undeadness
“the true humiliation is not objectivization it's much more humiliating what I call the enforced subjectivization”Slavoj Žižek · enforced subjectivization vs objectification
“to understand a thing what really happens you have to understand the entire panoply scope of what might have happened but didn't”Slavoj Žižek · eidetic variation as method
“a good portrait of a person resembles more the person than the person itself”Slavoj Žižek · idea over immediate reality / Hegel on portraiture
“the idea itself comes to be through such a distortion of reality”Slavoj Žižek · Platonic materialism
“the couple is never alone in sex there is always a third moment implied even if it is just an imagined gaze of a witness”Slavoj Žižek · the necessary third element in desire
“masturbation is making love with a fictional partner… but quite often real sex with a partner has the structure of masturbation with a real partner”Slavoj Žižek · fiction constitutive of real sexuality
“the proponents of such demands do not really care about artificial intelligence machines like sexbots… what they worry is aggressiveness in humans”Slavoj Žižek · AI rights as displacement of anxiety about human desire
“maybe a true sign of ethical and subjective autonomy of a sexual robot would have been not that it rejects our advances… but that even if programmed to reject… secretly it starts to enjoy it”Slavoj Žižek · genuine AI subjectivity as divided desire
“the truly great writers knew that you precisely to confront your country your Mutter-Sprache your original one authentically you must somehow betray it”Slavoj Žižek · betrayal of mother tongue as authentic relation to language
“it's not necessity it's necessity emerges in a contingent way once a thing happens it retroactively creates its own conditions and becomes necessary”Slavoj Žižek · contingency retroactively grounding necessity
“maybe it's hell which is the place of true pleasure”Slavoj Žižek · hell as supplement to paradise / surplus enjoyment
“all characters in this book even if they resemble some people in real life are fictional… but it doesn't really matter because also most of the people I know their characters are fictional”Slavoj Žižek · virtuality already governs reality
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
speak there in whatever language it is there are in the structure of language so many these hierarchical distinctions right how do you address someone and so on that the only language of equality that you get is image and I think also great writers okay more Beckett than Joyce experience this to be I claim against a certain misreading of Martin Heidegger you know authentic you must listen to your Sprache to blah blah blah that on the contrary the truly great writers knew that you precisely to confront your country your Mutter-Sprache your original one authentically you must somehow betray it I think one should write a doctor's thesis on why Beckett to become Beckett had to move from English to French and so on it's absolutely crucial I always think that the best thing for a writer at least today is to write in a in an eine fremde Sprache in a foreign language but I don't want to talk too much because I'm basically eating my own time now so I hope you will not be too bored there will be some things that I mentioned already in my texts but I write too much probably whatever I say it is already somewhere in my books you just have to search okay let's begin I'm sorry for these problems it's a bit humiliating maybe I will have to put artificial tears to appear more sincere okay in a theater piece that I wrote a couple of years ago and that I'm proud to say it will be now staged here or rather in German-speaking Belgium I retold Antigone in the mode of Bertolt Brecht’s three Lehrstücke learning plays Der Jasager Der Neinsager Der Jasager at the crucial point of decision within the play events take three different directions a procedure later used in at least I know of two films there are probably more Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blind Chance and Tom Tykwer's Lola rennt Run Lola Run my premise is that such a staging confronts us with a true Antigone for our times an Antigone that we should in such a staging ruthlessly abandon our sympathy and compassion for Antigone making her part of the problem and we should invent a way out which shatters us in our humanitarian complacency such a procedure doesn't amount to a simple relativization but has to be read against a Platonic background Kieślowski's Blind Chance from deals I really advise you to see the film it’s incredible the best Kieślowski freedom ruined him the moment he went to the West with Double Life of Veronique and so on he was lost deals with three different outcomes of a man running on the platform to catch a train first he catches the train and becomes a communist apparatchik second version he misses the train and because he by accident hits a policeman on the train platform he becomes a dissident third version there is no train and he settles down to a mundane life becomes an apolitical doctor and so on this notion of a mere chance which can determine the outcome of our life was unacceptable so my friends in Poland told me to communists as well as to the dissident opposition the opponents Solidarność or more conservative opposition hated the film because you know it deprived them of their dignity like do you mean that it's just because of a chance that somebody becomes dissident and not an apparatchik and so on and so on the point is that in each of the three cases the contingency which gives the spin to the hero's life would be repressed the hero would construct his life story as a narrative leading to its final result that is to say once the contingent spin takes place we tend automatically to reconstruct it as a necessity and I think this is I don't have time to go into it today this is one of the mysteries of dialectics of Hegelian Hegel's dialectics it’s not really a necessary dialectical progress but it's a contingency which retroactively grounds its own necessity for example you know there is I think it's in Thousand and One Nights Arabian Nights this wonderful small accident how a guy thirsty half-dying wanders around the desert and enters a cave and then three old men who were sleeping awaken and said oh we were waiting for years for you to come you are finally here and so on that's how Hegelian dialectic progresses it's not necessity it’s necessity emerges in a contingent way once a thing happens it retroactively creates its own conditions and becomes necessary this is what Jacques Lacan referred to as le futur antérieur of the unconscious which will have been while Blind Chance is full of direct political references they are nonetheless clearly subordinated to the metaphysical vision of the meaningless chances which determine the outcome of our lives however the point of the film is not simply how our lives depend on pure chance one should also bear in mind how in all three alternate universes as a apparatchik dissident apolitical doctor Witek the hero basically remains the same decent considerate person who tries not to hurt others we can thus read the film also as three and I use this term now in strict Husserlian Husserl’s phenomenology I think incidentally some of you are philosophers it's very sad that in the big shadow of Heidegger Husserl is now practically forgotten I think that we Husserl Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology needs more of our attention so we have three eidetic variation that enable us to extract I would say with all Platonic meaning the eternal idea of Witek which remains the same in all possible universes idea has to be understood here in a very specific way not in its usual sense of a Platonic abstraction the abstract concept of a table in contrast to individual tables but more in the sense of what Deleuze calls transcendental empiricism the thick web of virtual variations which surround the reality of a thing with regard to this dense transcendental field reality is the result of its reduction to one version like the collapse of a wave function in quantum physics you see although I'm not a Deleuzian here Deleuze did have an ingenious insight his transcendental dimension is not like Kant's the abstraction like time-space concepts pure abstract conditions of possibility but the transcendental dimension is much richer than reality it’s not abstract conceptual structure of reality but it’s the entire scope of variations of possibilities and of course Deleuze's great thesis which is I think also but that’s another story deeply Hegelian is that to understand a situation you must read sorry something wrong here oh no sorry no but I sweat in anyway thanks very much it doesn't help that to understand a thing what really happens you we are not historicists it's not that you have to understand the historical conditions no you have to understand the entire panoply scope of what might have happened but didn't but didn't happen it is in this sense that as already Hegel put it a good portrait of a person resembles more the person than the person itself himself or herself a good painting of a woman sorry to use this slightly sexist example supplements the woman's photographic reality with its transcendental field of virtualities all the layers of potentialities that underlie the actual existence of a woman the potential aggressiveness or the threat of libidinal explosion that may lurk beneath her gentle appearance her vulnerability and exposure to male violence the melancholy that often threatens the existence of a woman up to the disparity of the composure of the feminine body which may all of a sudden strike an external gaze all these virtualities which in a painting are directly inscribed into the feminine figure and distort its realist shape are not just subjective misperceptions of objective reality of the body they bring out potentialities inscribed into the thing itself now I'm ashamed of this it's such a simple example but I want to be elementary up up look there it’s Picasso's from a woman throwing a stone the distorted fragments of a woman on a beach throwing a stone are of course a grotesque misrepresentation if measured by the standard of realist reproduction however in their very plastic distortion they immediately in some sense even intuitively render the idea of a woman throwing a stone the inneres Gehalt inner form of such a figure upon a closer look you can easily discern the steps of the process of eidetic reduction of the woman to her essential features hand stone breasts head this painting thinks it thinks it performs the violent process of tearing apart elements which in their natural state coexist in reality they do this in exactly the sense in which Hegel characterizes the infinite power of understanding a quote from introduction to Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes the action of separating the elements is the exercise of the force of Verstand understanding the most astonishing and greatest of all powers or rather the absolute power so you see my point what Picasso was doing and I don't incidentally I don't even especially like Picasso I much prefer Braque and so on but it's a good example this this is painting as thinking this brutal distortion of reality which precisely in distorting reality brings out the and I use very naively here the Platonic term idea brings out the idea of a woman throwing a stone Aristotle was thus wrong in his critique of Plato's theory of art as mimesis mimesis is the mimesis of the idea of the object not of the object itself and in order to get this idea to appear one has to distort brutally the object's immediate reality in a materialist reading of Plato one can even say that the idea itself comes to be through such a distortion of reality now I will give you another example if you have more popular tastes which brings out the ontology implied in this idea of Platonic materialism there is a TV series recently going on which is not so good neither so bad but I like the novel Philip Dick’s The Man in the High Castle you know what it is no it's one of the big science fiction classics an alternate history it takes place in years after an alternate ending of the World War happened in which in this alternate reality World War lasted till when the victorious Axis powers Nazi Germany Imperial Japan rule over the former United States the novel features a novel within the novel within the novel there is a mysterious man in the high castle a writer who describes something that appears like our real reality an alternate world where allies United States Russia won World War and everybody laughs at him like how can he be so crazy but we can of course read this double reversal as a dark allegory of our own time in which although fascism was defeated in reality it is more and more triumphant in fantasy however such a reading neglects the fact that the alternate reality described in the novel within the novel within the novel again which takes place in a world of German victory within the novel a novel circulates in which allies won but and I refer here to a guy to whom I will brutally ironically refer to as a guy who certainly has enough time to read novels and think about this it's my good friend I'm proud to say Julian Assange who is now please try to do something totally isolated getting desperate no phone contact he cannot even get visitors only lawyers can visit him from time to time only [unintelligible] and so on so he told me that when he read the novel and especially when he watched the TV series he discovered that the reality described in this fiction within the fiction where allies won is not simply our reality where allies won there are subtle differences so talking with him and again cynically he has enough time to talk talking with him we came to the idea then that it's crucial to read this novel within the novel not as an ironic depiction of the real world but again as a kind of a Platonic point of reference the underlying idea is that we have our reality we have the alternate reality of the victory of the Axis or whatever and then we have a third reality which is the central point of reference which is the basic matrix out of which we have to we only can understand our reality so again I'm back at this idea that to understand the essence or Platonic idea of our reality one has to construct alternate realities and then out of them abstract a kind of the idea of all possible realities and now if you suffered through this now we slowly go into more popular area this is how why I think although they are extremely boring I cannot play them but this is why video games have a certain theoretical interest they directly materialize such a structure of multiple virtual realities the universe of video games not only regulates the gamer's desire it also interpellates the gamer into a specific mode of subjectivity what I mean by this is when you are deeply immersed in a video game which is the type of subjectivity that you conform to when you act in a video game I claim it's a pre-Oedipal not yet castrated subjectivity that floats in a kind of obscene immortality when I'm immersed into a video game I dwell in a universe of undeadness where no annihilation is definitive since after every destruction I can return to the beginning and start the game again this is what I often describe in my work you know it’s interesting how although they appear something so new but I hope you noticed this that video games are just technically more developed version of what we find already half a century ago in cartoons you know it's exactly the logic of Tom and Jerry you know in some one scene Tom or Jerry is I don't know sliced into tiny pieces run over by a truck no problem in next scenes is the obscene undeadness you go on you know who was the first as Jacques Lacan developed so nicely in his classic text Kant avec Sade Kant with Sade is the universe of Marquis de Sade where the victim has the same undeadness just read if you can I cannot it's too boring Juliette the victim is is tortured again and again in all possible ways but somehow magically she because it's a woman in the novel retains all her beauty she is again and again here incidentally sorry for this short vulgar detour the same goes for hardcore pornography did you notice that after the orgasm you see the orgasm and so on they never use Kleenexes or whatever to wipe the sperm they simply go on and they can do it again and again it’s the same undead universe the further philosophical implications of this undeadness are crucial for understanding our wrongly so-called post-Hegelian universe warning here stealing begins I will my two colleagues with whom I'm proud to be associated they may not be proud but I am Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar here you know in a just universe but we don't live in a just universe good for me somebody would have to stand behind me and say warning he's now plagiarizing Mladen Dolar okay one of the determinations of modernity is that in it a specific form of negation of negation arises Alenka also developed this far from the triumphant reversal of negativity into a new positivity here the negation of negation means that even negation our striving to reach the bottom the zero point fails not only are we not immortal but we are even not mortal we fail in that endeavor to disappear we survive in the guise of the obscene immortality of the undead living dead so not only do we fail in our pursuit of happiness we even fail in our pursuit of unhappiness our attempt to ruin our life produced small unexpected bits of miserable happiness in social life not only do most of us fail to achieve social success and slowly approach that point admired so much by Marxists of being becoming pure proletarian those who don't have even who only have their chains to lose no we may try this but we never get there you know you have a small house you have a rich uncle whatever you never get there perhaps therein resides a very vicious political remark that the deadlock of today's Western radical leftists who disappointed at the lack of true proletarian in their own country desperately search for an Ersatz-proletarian which will mobilize itself as a revolutionary agent instead of our corrupt inert working class who likes to acquire a house an apartment just don't be pure proletarian the most popular candidate is recently nomadic immigrants that's why for these totally hypocritical reasons leftists like them as a friend of mine I will not name him name him he is still pure friend of mine but I think from Finland a friend he really slipped into this pure regression he wrote me at least now immigrants they are homeless they are proletarians we need them in Europe they will be this Marxist pure negativity only chains not having anything to lose and so on and so on in this weird negation of negation is it really what escapes Hegel I don't think so I think that this downward negation of negation where you fail but then the negation of negation is not you fail but secretly this failure is a triumph no you fail but you cannot even really fail is maybe one of the secrets of Hegelian dialectical process maybe this is how we should re-read Hegel backwards from the perspective plagiarizing Mladen now of Samuel Beckett's late short texts and plays which all deal precisely with the Hegelian problem of how to go on when the game is over when the game reaches its end point Hegel is not simply the thinker of final closure absolute knowing we know everything but much more a figure of this uncanny openness it’s not this Marxist progressive openness we are at the crucial point there is a chance of revolution will we make it or not no it's rather it already happened the concept exhausted its elements with Hegel you never have images of the future for Hegel future is so open that you cannot even afford images of any imaginations of the future let me go on but what if the choice between finitude and immortality is false what if finitude and immortality form a kind of a parallax couple what if they are the same from a different point of view what if immortality is an object that is a remainder or excess over finitude what if finitude is an attempt to escape the excess of immortality I think Kierkegaard was right here but for the wrong reason when he understood the claim that we humans are just mortal beings who disappear after their biological death as an easy way to escape the ethical responsibility that comes with the immortal stone Kierkegaard was right for the wrong reason insofar as he equated immortality with the divine and ethical part of a human being but there is another immortality what Cantor did for infinity we should do for immortality and assert the multiplicity of immortalities maybe the most basic immortality is not this noble immortality oh I did a great thing I will survive my death but more that desperate immortality I hope that I will just disappear after death I cannot even disappear I cannot even die this is I think what we are dealing with in video games is the same obscene immortality you return again and again and okay this is a more philosophical point I don't have time to develop it now this I think is also what what Freud called death drive it's a beautiful paradox death drive is Freud's name for immortality death drive is not this oh my soul survived death drive is an obscenity in classical literature who is undead Hamlet's father why because of his crimes he cannot even disappear properly he has to return like a ghost and so on and so on if you allow me another plagiarizing this time from myself I use this in my book Kant was the first who philosophically discovered this obscene immortality I claim with his wonderful distinction between negative and infinite judgment a negative judgment negates a predicate an infinite judgment asserts a non-predicate now you will say what the fuck am I talking isn't this the same no it's not and I give you an example from Stephen King somebody is dead okay we negate a predicate he is not dead no problem he is alive but let's now assert a non-predicate if I say he is undead it’s not the same as he isn't dead he is undead means precisely that a third domain opens up neither dead nor alive all those beautiful creatures living dead undead vampires whatever you want this obscenity is so interesting now my last plagiarism here this undead are as Mladen I don't know if you will do this here tomorrow in your reading of Oedipus at Colonus Mladen then I draw attention to his text it will appear somewhere it's also undead his text sooner or later gave the best justification that I know of for abortion rights you know Oedipus at Colonus where the chorus says that famous line the greatest luck is not to be born at all I think that feminists who advocate abortion should refer first to this line like we are just trying to do this not being born at all so okay my point would have been that we should do the same eidetic variation that I used then our normal state is to be living dead we are all in this half-aborted state now let's go further but am I not describing here a mere fantasy you can say okay but this undeadness that I'm describing is just a fantasy a fantasy image but in reality we are mortal beings and so on and so on oh it's not as simple as that because I think that first if we go back at video games they don't just structure our virtual fantasy universe where you move in a video game they structure our reality itself for example I read recently a good analysis of erotic lives today games of seduction where they claim that many people men and women behave in real life in the same way you try it with one girl or boy it doesn't work you go back to the beginning you try again and so on and so on that is to say you can also live your real life as a video game just it's as if you can return to the zero point and again and again start from the zero point as it were this intermingling of reality and fantasy structures our sexuality which precisely is never immediate what does this mean this means that and we should go to the end in this idea that in sex this structure of virtuality variations and so on means that we are never alone with our partners ultimately the couple is never alone in sex there is always a third moment implied even if it is just an imagined gaze of a witness so what is this gaze now comes a trigger warning if you are politically correct now I will use a rather vulgar example but I think it holds and its lesson is important no sorry first comes a not so vulgar example I used this in one of my old books but I think it's beautiful example of how ideology works back thirty forty years ago a Slovenian conservative writer wrote an anti-abortion fairy tale it takes place this fairy tale on an idyllic South Sea Pacific island where aborted children live together without their parents although their life is nice and calm there they miss parental love and they spend their time in sad reflections on how it is that their parents preferred a career or a luxurious holiday to themselves you know like they always think about like one boy says the other while they are swimming on a beach why your mother didn't like you oh unfortunately my mother preferred to have a free sexual life another said my mother wanted a career and so on and so on the trick of course resides in the fact that the aborted children are presented as having been having been born only into an alternate universe the lonely Pacific island retaining the memory of parents who betrayed them this way they can direct at their parents a reproachful gaze which makes them guilty now what this reactionary fairy tale relies on is the overlapping of the two lacks in the encounter of the enigma the subject encounter in this case the child enigma of the other's desire in this case parents as Lacan put it the subject answers the enigma of the other's desire what does the other my parents want from me what am I for them with his own lack with proposing his own disappearance when a small child is confronted by the enigma of his parents' desire the fundamental fantasy to test this desire is his own disappearance what if I die or disappear how can my mother and father react to it in the reactionary Slovenian fairy tale this fantasmatic structure is realized the children imagine themselves as non-existing and from this position question their parents' desire what then is this gaze when Lacan defines the Freudian drive as reflexive as the stance of se faire visual drive is not the drive to see but in contrast to the desire to see the desire drive is a desire to make oneself seen and so on I think that Lacan thereby points towards the most elementary theatricality of the human conditions our fundamental striving is not to observe but to be part of a staged scene to expose oneself to a gaze not a determinate gaze of a person in reality but the non-existing pure gaze of the big other you find this gaze already in ancient monuments it is the gaze for which on the ancient Roman viaducts the details were carved on the reliefs on the top invisible you know that's the mystery of Roman viaducts they were they were they put precise statues reliefs at such a point that no human being was able to see them so which gaze was imagined here or you know the famous ancient Incas' gigantic drawings that they discovered only today with airplanes we can see them so for which gaze they were doing that and my answer is not ideal it's not oh this is the proof of aliens and so on it's just the presence of a purely virtual imagined gaze in this precise sense fantasy proper is not the scene itself that attracts our fascination but the imagined inexistent gaze observing it the fundamental fantasy is not whatever you erotically imagine but it's the fantasy that there is a gaze which will observe me sometimes real life here produces wonderful variations on this like I read in newspapers and I was so shocked how the scene that Ernst Lubitsch staged in his Shop Around the Corner you know it's two people a woman and a man who work in a small store and officially they hate each other but they are writing letters to an unknown partner got in love but at the end they discover that this partner is precisely the person there in reality do you know that something like this I read a couple of years ago happened in of all places in Sarajevo it's so ridiculous that I couldn't believe it that it happened truly a young man and his wife their sex life and love life got they got estranged so of course they had computers so both of them developed sex yeah you know the solution no sex relationship with an with a virtual partner and after all the passions there they decided to meet in real life a mistake you can guess what they discovered they were having a virtual affair with each other now how to read this now comes my more theoretical point you would have thought oh of course it's a beautiful solution they discover that they really even dream about each other that they love each other no it's the opposite I don't know what happened it wasn't reported in the media but I think it could have been a total catastrophe why because I think in order to sustain I am now talking as a male chauvinist but I think the same goes for the other for the other feminine perversion to support your real life you need an imagined virtual partner and if the two collapse it's a catastrophe you have nowhere to escape this indirectness reaches all the way down now comes I'm sorry I was too early now comes the trigger warning this is a last example but I think it's theoretically correct and you can learn a lot of it but I spoke with friends about a very basic question don't be afraid I don't watch secretly pornography but pornography always interested me as a narrative problem I've written a lot about this years ago when I was younger because can you imagine what a different genre what an interesting genre pornography is why because it's a I think maybe the most heavily censored genre what is prohibited is seriousness itself if you had the misfortune of ever watching a lot of pornography hardcore did you notice something how whenever there is a narrative and if it's one hour and a half full pornography movie you have to have some kind of a story now the problem is how absolutely ridiculous these stories are and I think I remember sorry to tell you this old joke but when I was young I was strong I still now I remember it's so ridiculous like a plumber comes housewife is alone and he fixes a hole in the kitchen and then he and then she says but I have another hole to be fixed can you also it’s so embarrassing that I asked myself can they be so stupid and the answer is clear in France I once spoke with some people through my Lacanian colleague do we did it and they told me no this is an absolute pressure it's kind of a choice if it's a melodrama where you really have to be engaged cry and so on you shouldn't show it all it wouldn't have worked the proof is the one who tried it Catherine Breillat Romance and so on you know there are attempts of a serious melodrama but when it comes to sex you see it all it doesn't work it remains marginal so either you have a melodrama you don't show it all or you show it all but it has to be a comedy now people reproach to me that I'm a little bit retarded here that they were doing stupid movies about plumber when I was young years ago and that today ah then I inquired please today it's even worse the predominant form today is so-called Gonzo I think it's called which is what even a most stupid comical story is prohibited what remains is just actors ironically referring to the camera you know like the woman shouting hey is it good like this should I spread my legs more the guy am I pushing enough I think this is extreme censorship they are afraid even of a minimal identification everything is I think this is a nice paradox of dialectic the Aufklärung as Adorno and Horkheimer would have put it how when you think it's just the barbarity of pure pleasure let's do it no there things are most artificially constructed no freedom at all and so on and so on like a friend of mine Dean MacCannell MacCannell sociologist of popular culture from San Francisco told me that he made a study perverted old guy how could he of focusing on something very precise the expression of woman's face in hardcore pornography but just the face while she is penetrated and he immediately discovered a kind of a semiotic square he told me they even have terms for it the first position is please okay sorry I cannot say ah this enthusiastic enjoyment but that's just the first all this moaning and groaning and so on then the second position is already more interesting it's check it up if you don't believe me it’s the what I call instrumental reason woman has her lips tight looks down as in a hard effort this is difficult physical work the third position is boredom woman is doing her sorry I'm looking at Alenka well the task of this talk is to cause a nice heart attack here no it's like a woman just ignores it and it's a necessary and the fourth expression is my favorite this slight ironic smile ha-ha is this all you can do and so on but you know you know what I'm trying to tell you how and Adorno and Horkheimer were really aware of it apropos de Sade how when you think it's just the barbarity of pure pleasure let's do it no there things are most artificially constructed no freedom at all and so on and so on so now I come to my point with friends I tried to elaborate isolate let's call it the basic archetype scene of male chauvinist standard hardcore pornography and the result is very interesting kind of a zero hardcore shot it's what imagine now I cannot imitate this here that would be too much imagine a woman on the back with her legs wide spread and the guy penetrating her women's thighs are up you see from the guy penetrating her but you see the guy only from behind and his face doesn't matter I was told that in most of these films you don't even see the guy's face he is total just instrument you see him penis penetrate but now comes to the crucial detail and they must put great effort into it between the two legs you always can see her face her gaze breaking the rule of fiction cinema staring into the camera into you and that's so fascinating the secret is not just sex if the camera were to move closer and show just the penetration it will soon become like a boring medical examination no her she is returning the gaze you as a viewer are of course the addressee of this gaze why is this so important because it's again a nice primitive illustration of my point that you need an imagined gaze the two are never alone and you as a viewer male chauvinist of hardcore pornography occupy precisely the point of that gaze and that's very important you don't identify with the guy doing it to the girl the guy is totally objectified the most miserable creature he is used to do it and shut up the only subject of it is the woman the woman is subjectivized you what you look you as a spectator is the confirmation the proof of feminine jouissance the beauty of the woman is to display her pleasure now where is you will say feminism here ah a very important lesson now with Me Too movement and so on which I totally support in its goals I just have some disagreements about how they argue they Me Too feminists often protest women's objectivization like women are just reduced to objects objectivized but I claim no the true humiliation is not objectivization it’s it’s much more humiliating what I call the enforced subjectivization the woman in hardcore pornography is not objectivized the one who is objectivized is the man and this almost gives him a certain freedom like who cares what I think bam-bam I do it the woman and this is more humiliating has to play the game of you know ah-ah all that and so on fake enforced subjectivity this is also how incidentally this is clear with de Sade how sadism works sadism does not instrumentalize the victim no you want the victim a shape of him a shame of himself of herself humiliated you want the victim subjectivized in the most humiliated humiliated way possible now just two more movements before I conclude one also not story but de Sade I'm sure you don't know it what this gaze provides is what in Lacan's technical terms is called surplus enjoyment plus-de-jouir something that adds itself to the scene for example in the hardcore scene of field enjoyment is bam-bam they do it but you need the woman returning the gaze without that pleasure or jouissance the excessive pleasure would have been ruined and I could go on for hours don't be afraid I will not develop this logic of surplus enjoyment how the best imagination of surplus enjoyment is something that appears as an obstacle but as such as an obstacle it creates the perfection which apparently it falsely appears that it ruins an old story that I used it already two three times in my work a lady that I met somewhere I don't know where we flirted or what but I even forgot but the point is that she told me because she was not so young how when her last lover saw her naked the lover told her except for maybe one or two kilos too much you have a perfect body and you can imagine what my immediate reaction to this was it was just don't lose one or two kilos because it’s precisely this slight impression that she is a little bit too heavy that created the mythic idea of a perfection of her body if you take away the obstacle if you effectively were to take away the obstacle her body would not be perfect it would be just ordinary it’s a very nice Hegelian idea yeah yeah microwave video allow me to interrupt please now I will do something I only treat my friend my friend in this brutal tasteless way who do you think you can behave like your mother terrorizing sorry I cannot retroactively happen no let me go on because this is important important point now the best example that I know for theatricality and surplus enjoyment is a problem encountered by Thomas Aquinas you know Summa Theologica he has a problem there when we die and if we enter paradise our knowledge should be almost divine perfect and so on so he was intelligent Saint Thomas he asked the question but if our knowledge is perfect will we be able also to see to observe the suffering of the damned in hell his answer is yes but he immediately sees because otherwise our knowledge would be limited even more than the limitation of us earthly beings but then his problem is isn't this evil because whatever you do in paradise you find pleasure in it that's paradise but isn't it inhuman and perverted to find pleasure in other people's extreme suffering so how can you enjoy hell his answer is typical sophistic trickery he says you don't enjoy suffering as such you enjoy the majesty of divine justice that made people suffer okay so and we can see what sorry did I make a mistake what did she say that now you suffer and I'm not sorry okay that's it no so then it's clear what the what Thomas Aquinas is sub- struggling with here it's precisely the surplus enjoyment he is cynically aware let's speak frankly there paradise is a terribly boring place and the scene that Thomas Aquinas is afraid to describe would be the following scene people are boring all this honey that we eat where is a good sex good fight and so on it's boring and then some angel says ah you really don't like it here okay let me show you hell a little bit like if you are not a good boy here you go to hell so you will feel better you know but my idea is that maybe there is another way to look at it maybe and that's my final fantasy maybe just maybe it's hell which is the place of true pleasure it's hot yes imagine hell as eternal drinking sex you have enough fire for a barbecue whatever you want and then the problem is that they enjoy it and that's my idea of hell they have good time they enjoy just let's say once a week some administrator comes to the people and says listen now for minutes we will be observed by heaven please please so they don't ruin us play as if you suffer and so on and so on and then we go back okay fun again and so on you know no these are absolutely serious theological problems no my concluding point because that the last example of enjoyment surplus enjoyment I will use it I published it in a text which was probably ignored by you so this is really the last two-three pages is is this problem which I think this is a little bit too much of a politically correct madness for me you know that recently European Union passed a resolution and then some scientists biologists and so on protested it namely claiming that artificial intelligence entities also should have their human rights and the problem exploded first in Japan where the so-called sexbots sexual robots plastic dolls and so on which usually have already a certain minimal artificial intelligence they can speak they react to our advances something happened in Japan which in Singapore I don't know where it shocked people namely a sex robot a girl called Samantha but plastic machine probably it was because of the way she was programmed she reacted by rejecting the advances of a human customer customer was a brutal guy who wanted to beat her up sex doll cut her and so on and she said no and then this caused a big problem because they also then found a couple of cases of customers really misusing sexbots cutting them into pieces and so on and the idea was to impose some rules here also like you cannot do whatever you want with sexbot now my position is here a paradoxical one because I think that the true problem is not do sexbots suffer or not this is a purely virtual problem we all know subjectivity of a sex doll at least now is purely virtual the problem that is behind all this is a different one it's not that they produce some autonomy or whatever the heart of the matter lies elsewhere the proponents of such demands I claim do not really care about artificial intelligence machines like sexbots they are well aware that sexual robots cannot really experience pain and humiliation what they worry is aggressiveness in humans what they want is not to alleviate the suffering of the machines they want to squash the problematic aggressiveness in our desires fantasies pleasures and so on it's not about machines it’s about us this becomes clear the moment we include the topic of video games and virtual reality if instead of sexbots actual plastic bodies whose reactions are regulated by artificial intelligence and then even the examples are very suspicious because like if that how was it called Samantha that sexbot reacted by rejecting well clearly the common sense answer is she was programmed like that so why don't shouldn't we program some special sexbots for sadists where they say no cut me skin me beat me more or whatever if you really care about suffering of the victims but again instead of sexbots if we imagine games in virtual reality in which we can sexually torture and brutally exploit persons although it is clear in this case that no actual entity is suffering the proponents of the rights of artificial intelligence machines would nonetheless in all probability insist on imposing some limitations on what we humans can do in virtual space and here things get blurred I claim the argument that those who fantasize about such things are prone to do them in real life is problematic the relationship between imagining and doing it in real life is much more complex we often do horrible things in reality while imagining that we are doing something no quite many say this imagine that they are really helping their victim trying to educate them and so on and vice-versa we often secretly daydream about doing things we would in no way be able to do in real life we enter thereby the old debate if someone has brutal tendencies is it better to allow him to play with them in virtual space or with machines with the hope that in this way he will be satisfied enough not to do them in real life we encounter here of course the structure of fetishist disavowal while the offender brutally mistreats his sex robot he knows very well that he is just playing with a mechanic doll but he nonetheless gets caught in his fiction and enjoys it for the real the simple proof his orgasm if he reaches it is real not his fiction now the implication of this fetishist structure is not that the subject who participates in the game is naively stupid but on the contrary that even in our real sexual interaction with another human being fiction is already at work the sad thing about standard sexuality and there are only few exceptions of true passionate love is that I use my partner as an object through which I stage my fictions that's I think the reality of our ordinary sexual life at least here I'm a feminist from this is the typical structure of male sexuality you know as we usually say masturbation is making love with a fictional partner you do it to yourself but you daydream about doing it with another human being yes but quite often real sex with a partner is masturbation has the structure of masturbation with a real partner you do it with a real partner but in it you still refer to your imagination again a third element has to be here so next point to conclude again the problem is that if a sexbot rejects our advances brutal advances why not program it in a different way or to go to the end why not program it in such a way that it welcomes our brutal mistreatment of course this wouldn't work but for a very weird reason it is because precisely every proper sadist doesn't want the victim to enjoy you know that's what Deleuze demonstrated very nicely sadism and masochism are not symmetrical if the sadist observes that his victim enjoys it the whole game is ruined for him but there is another question what if an evil programmer makes the sexbots themselves sadists who enjoy brutally mistreating us its partners if we confer rights to artificial intelligence sexual robots and prohibit the brutal mistreating this means that we treat them as minimally autonomous and responsible entities so should we also treat them as minimally guilty if they mistreat us so to really conclude the basic mistake of the advocates of rights of artificial intelligence entities is that they presuppose our human standards and rights as the highest norm what if it can happen I don't know with the explosive development of artificial intelligence new entities will emerge with what we could conditionally call a psychology series of attitudes which will be incompatible with ours but in some sense definitely higher measured by our standards new artificial intelligence entities may appear more evil or more good than us humans so what right do we humans have to measure them with our ethical standards maybe and that's my concluding very dark thought maybe a true sign of ethical and subjective autonomy of a sexual robot would have been not that it rejects our advances it’s easy to implant this infantility this ethics but that even if our sexual robot is was programmed to reject our brutal mistreatment secretly it starts to enjoy it that would be the true uncanny subjectivization that we would I don't know how notice that it the machine is enjoying it this would have meant that it is a true subject of desire divided inconsistent as we humans are and I think sooner or later we will have to raise this type of questions not because I'm a utopian and beginning believe in artificial intelligence but because never in my life did I encounter such gentle body language you [unintelligible] yeah yeah no just to conclude you know the problem with artificial intelligence and all these problems of virtual reality I hope you got my point it's not it’s a new world no it just brings out the structure which already is here a Slovenian writer maybe the two of you know which one I don't like Slovenian writer but who put this nicely you know and this is the absolute final you know you have this how do you call it at the beginning of some fictional books you somehow have this sometimes have this disclaimer you know all all characters in this book are fictional yeah to to coincidence with real life is fictional all characters are fictional you know and it goes like this I found this wonderful that all characters in this book even if they appear some if they resemble some people in real life are fictional and then but then it goes on but it doesn't really matter because also most of the people I know their characters are fictional you know thank you very much
speak there in whatever language it is there are in the structure of language so many these hierarchical distinctions right how do you address someone and so on that the only language of equality that you get is image and I think also great writers okay more Beckett than Joyce experience this to be I claim against a certain misreading of Martin Heidegger you know authentic you must listen to your Sprache to blah blah blah that on the contrary the truly great writers knew that you precisely to confront your country your Mutter-Sprache your original one authentically you must somehow betray it I think one should write a doctor's thesis on why Beckett to become Beckett had to move from English to French and so on it's absolutely crucial I always think that the best thing for a writer at least today is to write in a in an eine fremde Sprache in a foreign language but I don't want to talk too much because I'm basically eating my own time now so I hope you will not be too bored there will be some things that I mentioned already in my texts but I write too much probably whatever I say it is already somewhere in my books you just have to search okay let's begin I'm sorry for these problems it's a bit humiliating maybe I will have to put artificial tears to appear more sincere okay in a theater piece that I wrote a couple of years ago and that I'm proud to say it will be now staged here or rather in German-speaking Belgium I retold Antigone in the mode of Bertolt Brecht’s three Lehrstücke learning plays Der Jasager Der Neinsager Der Jasager at the crucial point of decision within the play events take three different directions a procedure later used in at least I know of two films there are probably more Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blind Chance and Tom Tykwer's Lola rennt Run Lola Run my premise is that such a staging confronts us with a true Antigone for our times an Antigone that we should in such a staging ruthlessly abandon our sympathy and compassion for Antigone making her part of the problem and we should invent a way out which shatters us in our humanitarian complacency such a procedure doesn't amount to a simple relativization but has to be read against a Platonic background Kieślowski's Blind Chance from deals I really advise you to see the film it’s incredible the best Kieślowski freedom ruined him the moment he went to the West with Double Life of Veronique and so on he was lost deals with three different outcomes of a man running on the platform to catch a train first he catches the train and becomes a communist apparatchik second version he misses the train and because he by accident hits a policeman on the train platform he becomes a dissident third version there is no train and he settles down to a mundane life becomes an apolitical doctor and so on this notion of a mere chance which can determine the outcome of our life was unacceptable so my friends in Poland told me to communists as well as to the dissident opposition the opponents Solidarność or more conservative opposition hated the film because you know it deprived them of their dignity like do you mean that it's just because of a chance that somebody becomes dissident and not an apparatchik and so on and so on the point is that in each of the three cases the contingency which gives the spin to the hero's life would be repressed the hero would construct his life story as a narrative leading to its final result that is to say once the contingent spin takes place we tend automatically to reconstruct it as a necessity and I think this is I don't have time to go into it today this is one of the mysteries of dialectics of Hegelian Hegel's dialectics it’s not really a necessary dialectical progress but it's a contingency which retroactively grounds its own necessity for example you know there is I think it's in Thousand and One Nights Arabian Nights this wonderful small accident how a guy thirsty half-dying wanders around the desert and enters a cave and then three old men who were sleeping awaken and said oh we were waiting for years for you to come you are finally here and so on that's how Hegelian dialectic progresses it's not necessity it’s necessity emerges in a contingent way once a thing happens it retroactively creates its own conditions and becomes necessary this is what Jacques Lacan referred to as le futur antérieur of the unconscious which will have been while Blind Chance is full of direct political references they are nonetheless clearly subordinated to the metaphysical vision of the meaningless chances which determine the outcome of our lives however the point of the film is not simply how our lives depend on pure chance one should also bear in mind how in all three alternate universes as a apparatchik dissident apolitical doctor Witek the hero basically remains the same decent considerate person who tries not to hurt others we can thus read the film also as three and I use this term now in strict Husserlian Husserl’s phenomenology I think incidentally some of you are philosophers it's very sad that in the big shadow of Heidegger Husserl is now practically forgotten I think that we Husserl Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology needs more of our attention so we have three eidetic variation that enable us to extract I would say with all Platonic meaning the eternal idea of Witek which remains the same in all possible universes idea has to be understood here in a very specific way not in its usual sense of a Platonic abstraction the abstract concept of a table in contrast to individual tables but more in the sense of what Deleuze calls transcendental empiricism the thick web of virtual variations which surround the reality of a thing with regard to this dense transcendental field reality is the result of its reduction to one version like the collapse of a wave function in quantum physics you see although I'm not a Deleuzian here Deleuze did have an ingenious insight his transcendental dimension is not like Kant's the abstraction like time-space concepts pure abstract conditions of possibility but the transcendental dimension is much richer than reality it’s not abstract conceptual structure of reality but it’s the entire scope of variations of possibilities and of course Deleuze's great thesis which is I think also but that’s another story deeply Hegelian is that to understand a situation you must read sorry something wrong here oh no sorry no but I sweat in anyway thanks very much it doesn't help that to understand a thing what really happens you we are not historicists it's not that you have to understand the historical conditions no you have to understand the entire panoply scope of what might have happened but didn't but didn't happen it is in this sense that as already Hegel put it a good portrait of a person resembles more the person than the person itself himself or herself a good painting of a woman sorry to use this slightly sexist example supplements the woman's photographic reality with its transcendental field of virtualities all the layers of potentialities that underlie the actual existence of a woman the potential aggressiveness or the threat of libidinal explosion that may lurk beneath her gentle appearance her vulnerability and exposure to male violence the melancholy that often threatens the existence of a woman up to the disparity of the composure of the feminine body which may all of a sudden strike an external gaze all these virtualities which in a painting are directly inscribed into the feminine figure and distort its realist shape are not just subjective misperceptions of objective reality of the body they bring out potentialities inscribed into the thing itself now I'm ashamed of this it's such a simple example but I want to be elementary up up look there it’s Picasso's from a woman throwing a stone the distorted fragments of a woman on a beach throwing a stone are of course a grotesque misrepresentation if measured by the standard of realist reproduction however in their very plastic distortion they immediately in some sense even intuitively render the idea of a woman throwing a stone the inneres Gehalt inner form of such a figure upon a closer look you can easily discern the steps of the process of eidetic reduction of the woman to her essential features hand stone breasts head this painting thinks it thinks it performs the violent process of tearing apart elements which in their natural state coexist in reality they do this in exactly the sense in which Hegel characterizes the infinite power of understanding a quote from introduction to Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes the action of separating the elements is the exercise of the force of Verstand understanding the most astonishing and greatest of all powers or rather the absolute power so you see my point what Picasso was doing and I don't incidentally I don't even especially like Picasso I much prefer Braque and so on but it's a good example this this is painting as thinking this brutal distortion of reality which precisely in distorting reality brings out the and I use very naively here the Platonic term idea brings out the idea of a woman throwing a stone Aristotle was thus wrong in his critique of Plato's theory of art as mimesis mimesis is the mimesis of the idea of the object not of the object itself and in order to get this idea to appear one has to distort brutally the object's immediate reality in a materialist reading of Plato one can even say that the idea itself comes to be through such a distortion of reality now I will give you another example if you have more popular tastes which brings out the ontology implied in this idea of Platonic materialism there is a TV series recently going on which is not so good neither so bad but I like the novel Philip Dick’s The Man in the High Castle you know what it is no it's one of the big science fiction classics an alternate history it takes place in years after an alternate ending of the World War happened in which in this alternate reality World War lasted till when the victorious Axis powers Nazi Germany Imperial Japan rule over the former United States the novel features a novel within the novel within the novel there is a mysterious man in the high castle a writer who describes something that appears like our real reality an alternate world where allies United States Russia won World War and everybody laughs at him like how can he be so crazy but we can of course read this double reversal as a dark allegory of our own time in which although fascism was defeated in reality it is more and more triumphant in fantasy however such a reading neglects the fact that the alternate reality described in the novel within the novel within the novel again which takes place in a world of German victory within the novel a novel circulates in which allies won but and I refer here to a guy to whom I will brutally ironically refer to as a guy who certainly has enough time to read novels and think about this it's my good friend I'm proud to say Julian Assange who is now please try to do something totally isolated getting desperate no phone contact he cannot even get visitors only lawyers can visit him from time to time only [unintelligible] and so on so he told me that when he read the novel and especially when he watched the TV series he discovered that the reality described in this fiction within the fiction where allies won is not simply our reality where allies won there are subtle differences so talking with him and again cynically he has enough time to talk talking with him we came to the idea then that it's crucial to read this novel within the novel not as an ironic depiction of the real world but again as a kind of a Platonic point of reference the underlying idea is that we have our reality we have the alternate reality of the victory of the Axis or whatever and then we have a third reality which is the central point of reference which is the basic matrix out of which we have to we only can understand our reality so again I'm back at this idea that to understand the essence or Platonic idea of our reality one has to construct alternate realities and then out of them abstract a kind of the idea of all possible realities and now if you suffered through this now we slowly go into more popular area this is how why I think although they are extremely boring I cannot play them but this is why video games have a certain theoretical interest they directly materialize such a structure of multiple virtual realities the universe of video games not only regulates the gamer's desire it also interpellates the gamer into a specific mode of subjectivity what I mean by this is when you are deeply immersed in a video game which is the type of subjectivity that you conform to when you act in a video game I claim it's a pre-Oedipal not yet castrated subjectivity that floats in a kind of obscene immortality when I'm immersed into a video game I dwell in a universe of undeadness where no annihilation is definitive since after every destruction I can return to the beginning and start the game again this is what I often describe in my work you know it’s interesting how although they appear something so new but I hope you noticed this that video games are just technically more developed version of what we find already half a century ago in cartoons you know it's exactly the logic of Tom and Jerry you know in some one scene Tom or Jerry is I don't know sliced into tiny pieces run over by a truck no problem in next scenes is the obscene undeadness you go on you know who was the first as Jacques Lacan developed so nicely in his classic text Kant avec Sade Kant with Sade is the universe of Marquis de Sade where the victim has the same undeadness just read if you can I cannot it's too boring Juliette the victim is is tortured again and again in all possible ways but somehow magically she because it's a woman in the novel retains all her beauty she is again and again here incidentally sorry for this short vulgar detour the same goes for hardcore pornography did you notice that after the orgasm you see the orgasm and so on they never use Kleenexes or whatever to wipe the sperm they simply go on and they can do it again and again it’s the same undead universe the further philosophical implications of this undeadness are crucial for understanding our wrongly so-called post-Hegelian universe warning here stealing begins I will my two colleagues with whom I'm proud to be associated they may not be proud but I am Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar here you know in a just universe but we don't live in a just universe good for me somebody would have to stand behind me and say warning he's now plagiarizing Mladen Dolar okay one of the determinations of modernity is that in it a specific form of negation of negation arises Alenka also developed this far from the triumphant reversal of negativity into a new positivity here the negation of negation means that even negation our striving to reach the bottom the zero point fails not only are we not immortal but we are even not mortal we fail in that endeavor to disappear we survive in the guise of the obscene immortality of the undead living dead so not only do we fail in our pursuit of happiness we even fail in our pursuit of unhappiness our attempt to ruin our life produced small unexpected bits of miserable happiness in social life not only do most of us fail to achieve social success and slowly approach that point admired so much by Marxists of being becoming pure proletarian those who don't have even who only have their chains to lose no we may try this but we never get there you know you have a small house you have a rich uncle whatever you never get there perhaps therein resides a very vicious political remark that the deadlock of today's Western radical leftists who disappointed at the lack of true proletarian in their own country desperately search for an Ersatz-proletarian which will mobilize itself as a revolutionary agent instead of our corrupt inert working class who likes to acquire a house an apartment just don't be pure proletarian the most popular candidate is recently nomadic immigrants that's why for these totally hypocritical reasons leftists like them as a friend of mine I will not name him name him he is still pure friend of mine but I think from Finland a friend he really slipped into this pure regression he wrote me at least now immigrants they are homeless they are proletarians we need them in Europe they will be this Marxist pure negativity only chains not having anything to lose and so on and so on in this weird negation of negation is it really what escapes Hegel I don't think so I think that this downward negation of negation where you fail but then the negation of negation is not you fail but secretly this failure is a triumph no you fail but you cannot even really fail is maybe one of the secrets of Hegelian dialectical process maybe this is how we should re-read Hegel backwards from the perspective plagiarizing Mladen now of Samuel Beckett's late short texts and plays which all deal precisely with the Hegelian problem of how to go on when the game is over when the game reaches its end point Hegel is not simply the thinker of final closure absolute knowing we know everything but much more a figure of this uncanny openness it’s not this Marxist progressive openness we are at the crucial point there is a chance of revolution will we make it or not no it's rather it already happened the concept exhausted its elements with Hegel you never have images of the future for Hegel future is so open that you cannot even afford images of any imaginations of the future let me go on but what if the choice between finitude and immortality is false what if finitude and immortality form a kind of a parallax couple what if they are the same from a different point of view what if immortality is an object that is a remainder or excess over finitude what if finitude is an attempt to escape the excess of immortality I think Kierkegaard was right here but for the wrong reason when he understood the claim that we humans are just mortal beings who disappear after their biological death as an easy way to escape the ethical responsibility that comes with the immortal stone Kierkegaard was right for the wrong reason insofar as he equated immortality with the divine and ethical part of a human being but there is another immortality what Cantor did for infinity we should do for immortality and assert the multiplicity of immortalities maybe the most basic immortality is not this noble immortality oh I did a great thing I will survive my death but more that desperate immortality I hope that I will just disappear after death I cannot even disappear I cannot even die this is I think what we are dealing with in video games is the same obscene immortality you return again and again and okay this is a more philosophical point I don't have time to develop it now this I think is also what what Freud called death drive it's a beautiful paradox death drive is Freud's name for immortality death drive is not this oh my soul survived death drive is an obscenity in classical literature who is undead Hamlet's father why because of his crimes he cannot even disappear properly he has to return like a ghost and so on and so on if you allow me another plagiarizing this time from myself I use this in my book Kant was the first who philosophically discovered this obscene immortality I claim with his wonderful distinction between negative and infinite judgment a negative judgment negates a predicate an infinite judgment asserts a non-predicate now you will say what the fuck am I talking isn't this the same no it's not and I give you an example from Stephen King somebody is dead okay we negate a predicate he is not dead no problem he is alive but let's now assert a non-predicate if I say he is undead it’s not the same as he isn't dead he is undead means precisely that a third domain opens up neither dead nor alive all those beautiful creatures living dead undead vampires whatever you want this obscenity is so interesting now my last plagiarism here this undead are as Mladen I don't know if you will do this here tomorrow in your reading of Oedipus at Colonus Mladen then I draw attention to his text it will appear somewhere it's also undead his text sooner or later gave the best justification that I know of for abortion rights you know Oedipus at Colonus where the chorus says that famous line the greatest luck is not to be born at all I think that feminists who advocate abortion should refer first to this line like we are just trying to do this not being born at all so okay my point would have been that we should do the same eidetic variation that I used then our normal state is to be living dead we are all in this half-aborted state now let's go further but am I not describing here a mere fantasy you can say okay but this undeadness that I'm describing is just a fantasy a fantasy image but in reality we are mortal beings and so on and so on oh it's not as simple as that because I think that first if we go back at video games they don't just structure our virtual fantasy universe where you move in a video game they structure our reality itself for example I read recently a good analysis of erotic lives today games of seduction where they claim that many people men and women behave in real life in the same way you try it with one girl or boy it doesn't work you go back to the beginning you try again and so on and so on that is to say you can also live your real life as a video game just it's as if you can return to the zero point and again and again start from the zero point as it were this intermingling of reality and fantasy structures our sexuality which precisely is never immediate what does this mean this means that and we should go to the end in this idea that in sex this structure of virtuality variations and so on means that we are never alone with our partners ultimately the couple is never alone in sex there is always a third moment implied even if it is just an imagined gaze of a witness so what is this gaze now comes a trigger warning if you are politically correct now I will use a rather vulgar example but I think it holds and its lesson is important no sorry first comes a not so vulgar example I used this in one of my old books but I think it's beautiful example of how ideology works back thirty forty years ago a Slovenian conservative writer wrote an anti-abortion fairy tale it takes place this fairy tale on an idyllic South Sea Pacific island where aborted children live together without their parents although their life is nice and calm there they miss parental love and they spend their time in sad reflections on how it is that their parents preferred a career or a luxurious holiday to themselves you know like they always think about like one boy says the other while they are swimming on a beach why your mother didn't like you oh unfortunately my mother preferred to have a free sexual life another said my mother wanted a career and so on and so on the trick of course resides in the fact that the aborted children are presented as having been having been born only into an alternate universe the lonely Pacific island retaining the memory of parents who betrayed them this way they can direct at their parents a reproachful gaze which makes them guilty now what this reactionary fairy tale relies on is the overlapping of the two lacks in the encounter of the enigma the subject encounter in this case the child enigma of the other's desire in this case parents as Lacan put it the subject answers the enigma of the other's desire what does the other my parents want from me what am I for them with his own lack with proposing his own disappearance when a small child is confronted by the enigma of his parents' desire the fundamental fantasy to test this desire is his own disappearance what if I die or disappear how can my mother and father react to it in the reactionary Slovenian fairy tale this fantasmatic structure is realized the children imagine themselves as non-existing and from this position question their parents' desire what then is this gaze when Lacan defines the Freudian drive as reflexive as the stance of se faire visual drive is not the drive to see but in contrast to the desire to see the desire drive is a desire to make oneself seen and so on I think that Lacan thereby points towards the most elementary theatricality of the human conditions our fundamental striving is not to observe but to be part of a staged scene to expose oneself to a gaze not a determinate gaze of a person in reality but the non-existing pure gaze of the big other you find this gaze already in ancient monuments it is the gaze for which on the ancient Roman viaducts the details were carved on the reliefs on the top invisible you know that's the mystery of Roman viaducts they were they were they put precise statues reliefs at such a point that no human being was able to see them so which gaze was imagined here or you know the famous ancient Incas' gigantic drawings that they discovered only today with airplanes we can see them so for which gaze they were doing that and my answer is not ideal it's not oh this is the proof of aliens and so on it's just the presence of a purely virtual imagined gaze in this precise sense fantasy proper is not the scene itself that attracts our fascination but the imagined inexistent gaze observing it the fundamental fantasy is not whatever you erotically imagine but it's the fantasy that there is a gaze which will observe me sometimes real life here produces wonderful variations on this like I read in newspapers and I was so shocked how the scene that Ernst Lubitsch staged in his Shop Around the Corner you know it's two people a woman and a man who work in a small store and officially they hate each other but they are writing letters to an unknown partner got in love but at the end they discover that this partner is precisely the person there in reality do you know that something like this I read a couple of years ago happened in of all places in Sarajevo it's so ridiculous that I couldn't believe it that it happened truly a young man and his wife their sex life and love life got they got estranged so of course they had computers so both of them developed sex yeah you know the solution no sex relationship with an with a virtual partner and after all the passions there they decided to meet in real life a mistake you can guess what they discovered they were having a virtual affair with each other now how to read this now comes my more theoretical point you would have thought oh of course it's a beautiful solution they discover that they really even dream about each other that they love each other no it's the opposite I don't know what happened it wasn't reported in the media but I think it could have been a total catastrophe why because I think in order to sustain I am now talking as a male chauvinist but I think the same goes for the other for the other feminine perversion to support your real life you need an imagined virtual partner and if the two collapse it's a catastrophe you have nowhere to escape this indirectness reaches all the way down now comes I'm sorry I was too early now comes the trigger warning this is a last example but I think it's theoretically correct and you can learn a lot of it but I spoke with friends about a very basic question don't be afraid I don't watch secretly pornography but pornography always interested me as a narrative problem I've written a lot about this years ago when I was younger because can you imagine what a different genre what an interesting genre pornography is why because it's a I think maybe the most heavily censored genre what is prohibited is seriousness itself if you had the misfortune of ever watching a lot of pornography hardcore did you notice something how whenever there is a narrative and if it's one hour and a half full pornography movie you have to have some kind of a story now the problem is how absolutely ridiculous these stories are and I think I remember sorry to tell you this old joke but when I was young I was strong I still now I remember it's so ridiculous like a plumber comes housewife is alone and he fixes a hole in the kitchen and then he and then she says but I have another hole to be fixed can you also it’s so embarrassing that I asked myself can they be so stupid and the answer is clear in France I once spoke with some people through my Lacanian colleague do we did it and they told me no this is an absolute pressure it's kind of a choice if it's a melodrama where you really have to be engaged cry and so on you shouldn't show it all it wouldn't have worked the proof is the one who tried it Catherine Breillat Romance and so on you know there are attempts of a serious melodrama but when it comes to sex you see it all it doesn't work it remains marginal so either you have a melodrama you don't show it all or you show it all but it has to be a comedy now people reproach to me that I'm a little bit retarded here that they were doing stupid movies about plumber when I was young years ago and that today ah then I inquired please today it's even worse the predominant form today is so-called Gonzo I think it's called which is what even a most stupid comical story is prohibited what remains is just actors ironically referring to the camera you know like the woman shouting hey is it good like this should I spread my legs more the guy am I pushing enough I think this is extreme censorship they are afraid even of a minimal identification everything is I think this is a nice paradox of dialectic the Aufklärung as Adorno and Horkheimer would have put it how when you think it's just the barbarity of pure pleasure let's do it no there things are most artificially constructed no freedom at all and so on and so on like a friend of mine Dean MacCannell MacCannell sociologist of popular culture from San Francisco told me that he made a study perverted old guy how could he of focusing on something very precise the expression of woman's face in hardcore pornography but just the face while she is penetrated and he immediately discovered a kind of a semiotic square he told me they even have terms for it the first position is please okay sorry I cannot say ah this enthusiastic enjoyment but that's just the first all this moaning and groaning and so on then the second position is already more interesting it's check it up if you don't believe me it’s the what I call instrumental reason woman has her lips tight looks down as in a hard effort this is difficult physical work the third position is boredom woman is doing her sorry I'm looking at Alenka well the task of this talk is to cause a nice heart attack here no it's like a woman just ignores it and it's a necessary and the fourth expression is my favorite this slight ironic smile ha-ha is this all you can do and so on but you know you know what I'm trying to tell you how and Adorno and Horkheimer were really aware of it apropos de Sade how when you think it's just the barbarity of pure pleasure let's do it no there things are most artificially constructed no freedom at all and so on and so on so now I come to my point with friends I tried to elaborate isolate let's call it the basic archetype scene of male chauvinist standard hardcore pornography and the result is very interesting kind of a zero hardcore shot it's what imagine now I cannot imitate this here that would be too much imagine a woman on the back with her legs wide spread and the guy penetrating her women's thighs are up you see from the guy penetrating her but you see the guy only from behind and his face doesn't matter I was told that in most of these films you don't even see the guy's face he is total just instrument you see him penis penetrate but now comes to the crucial detail and they must put great effort into it between the two legs you always can see her face her gaze breaking the rule of fiction cinema staring into the camera into you and that's so fascinating the secret is not just sex if the camera were to move closer and show just the penetration it will soon become like a boring medical examination no her she is returning the gaze you as a viewer are of course the addressee of this gaze why is this so important because it's again a nice primitive illustration of my point that you need an imagined gaze the two are never alone and you as a viewer male chauvinist of hardcore pornography occupy precisely the point of that gaze and that's very important you don't identify with the guy doing it to the girl the guy is totally objectified the most miserable creature he is used to do it and shut up the only subject of it is the woman the woman is subjectivized you what you look you as a spectator is the confirmation the proof of feminine jouissance the beauty of the woman is to display her pleasure now where is you will say feminism here ah a very important lesson now with Me Too movement and so on which I totally support in its goals I just have some disagreements about how they argue they Me Too feminists often protest women's objectivization like women are just reduced to objects objectivized but I claim no the true humiliation is not objectivization it’s it’s much more humiliating what I call the enforced subjectivization the woman in hardcore pornography is not objectivized the one who is objectivized is the man and this almost gives him a certain freedom like who cares what I think bam-bam I do it the woman and this is more humiliating has to play the game of you know ah-ah all that and so on fake enforced subjectivity this is also how incidentally this is clear with de Sade how sadism works sadism does not instrumentalize the victim no you want the victim a shape of him a shame of himself of herself humiliated you want the victim subjectivized in the most humiliated humiliated way possible now just two more movements before I conclude one also not story but de Sade I'm sure you don't know it what this gaze provides is what in Lacan's technical terms is called surplus enjoyment plus-de-jouir something that adds itself to the scene for example in the hardcore scene of field enjoyment is bam-bam they do it but you need the woman returning the gaze without that pleasure or jouissance the excessive pleasure would have been ruined and I could go on for hours don't be afraid I will not develop this logic of surplus enjoyment how the best imagination of surplus enjoyment is something that appears as an obstacle but as such as an obstacle it creates the perfection which apparently it falsely appears that it ruins an old story that I used it already two three times in my work a lady that I met somewhere I don't know where we flirted or what but I even forgot but the point is that she told me because she was not so young how when her last lover saw her naked the lover told her except for maybe one or two kilos too much you have a perfect body and you can imagine what my immediate reaction to this was it was just don't lose one or two kilos because it’s precisely this slight impression that she is a little bit too heavy that created the mythic idea of a perfection of her body if you take away the obstacle if you effectively were to take away the obstacle her body would not be perfect it would be just ordinary it’s a very nice Hegelian idea yeah yeah microwave video allow me to interrupt please now I will do something I only treat my friend my friend in this brutal tasteless way who do you think you can behave like your mother terrorizing sorry I cannot retroactively happen no let me go on because this is important important point now the best example that I know for theatricality and surplus enjoyment is a problem encountered by Thomas Aquinas you know Summa Theologica he has a problem there when we die and if we enter paradise our knowledge should be almost divine perfect and so on so he was intelligent Saint Thomas he asked the question but if our knowledge is perfect will we be able also to see to observe the suffering of the damned in hell his answer is yes but he immediately sees because otherwise our knowledge would be limited even more than the limitation of us earthly beings but then his problem is isn't this evil because whatever you do in paradise you find pleasure in it that's paradise but isn't it inhuman and perverted to find pleasure in other people's extreme suffering so how can you enjoy hell his answer is typical sophistic trickery he says you don't enjoy suffering as such you enjoy the majesty of divine justice that made people suffer okay so and we can see what sorry did I make a mistake what did she say that now you suffer and I'm not sorry okay that's it no so then it's clear what the what Thomas Aquinas is sub- struggling with here it's precisely the surplus enjoyment he is cynically aware let's speak frankly there paradise is a terribly boring place and the scene that Thomas Aquinas is afraid to describe would be the following scene people are boring all this honey that we eat where is a good sex good fight and so on it's boring and then some angel says ah you really don't like it here okay let me show you hell a little bit like if you are not a good boy here you go to hell so you will feel better you know but my idea is that maybe there is another way to look at it maybe and that's my final fantasy maybe just maybe it's hell which is the place of true pleasure it's hot yes imagine hell as eternal drinking sex you have enough fire for a barbecue whatever you want and then the problem is that they enjoy it and that's my idea of hell they have good time they enjoy just let's say once a week some administrator comes to the people and says listen now for minutes we will be observed by heaven please please so they don't ruin us play as if you suffer and so on and so on and then we go back okay fun again and so on you know no these are absolutely serious theological problems no my concluding point because that the last example of enjoyment surplus enjoyment I will use it I published it in a text which was probably ignored by you so this is really the last two-three pages is is this problem which I think this is a little bit too much of a politically correct madness for me you know that recently European Union passed a resolution and then some scientists biologists and so on protested it namely claiming that artificial intelligence entities also should have their human rights and the problem exploded first in Japan where the so-called sexbots sexual robots plastic dolls and so on which usually have already a certain minimal artificial intelligence they can speak they react to our advances something happened in Japan which in Singapore I don't know where it shocked people namely a sex robot a girl called Samantha but plastic machine probably it was because of the way she was programmed she reacted by rejecting the advances of a human customer customer was a brutal guy who wanted to beat her up sex doll cut her and so on and she said no and then this caused a big problem because they also then found a couple of cases of customers really misusing sexbots cutting them into pieces and so on and the idea was to impose some rules here also like you cannot do whatever you want with sexbot now my position is here a paradoxical one because I think that the true problem is not do sexbots suffer or not this is a purely virtual problem we all know subjectivity of a sex doll at least now is purely virtual the problem that is behind all this is a different one it's not that they produce some autonomy or whatever the heart of the matter lies elsewhere the proponents of such demands I claim do not really care about artificial intelligence machines like sexbots they are well aware that sexual robots cannot really experience pain and humiliation what they worry is aggressiveness in humans what they want is not to alleviate the suffering of the machines they want to squash the problematic aggressiveness in our desires fantasies pleasures and so on it's not about machines it’s about us this becomes clear the moment we include the topic of video games and virtual reality if instead of sexbots actual plastic bodies whose reactions are regulated by artificial intelligence and then even the examples are very suspicious because like if that how was it called Samantha that sexbot reacted by rejecting well clearly the common sense answer is she was programmed like that so why don't shouldn't we program some special sexbots for sadists where they say no cut me skin me beat me more or whatever if you really care about suffering of the victims but again instead of sexbots if we imagine games in virtual reality in which we can sexually torture and brutally exploit persons although it is clear in this case that no actual entity is suffering the proponents of the rights of artificial intelligence machines would nonetheless in all probability insist on imposing some limitations on what we humans can do in virtual space and here things get blurred I claim the argument that those who fantasize about such things are prone to do them in real life is problematic the relationship between imagining and doing it in real life is much more complex we often do horrible things in reality while imagining that we are doing something no quite many say this imagine that they are really helping their victim trying to educate them and so on and vice-versa we often secretly daydream about doing things we would in no way be able to do in real life we enter thereby the old debate if someone has brutal tendencies is it better to allow him to play with them in virtual space or with machines with the hope that in this way he will be satisfied enough not to do them in real life we encounter here of course the structure of fetishist disavowal while the offender brutally mistreats his sex robot he knows very well that he is just playing with a mechanic doll but he nonetheless gets caught in his fiction and enjoys it for the real the simple proof his orgasm if he reaches it is real not his fiction now the implication of this fetishist structure is not that the subject who participates in the game is naively stupid but on the contrary that even in our real sexual interaction with another human being fiction is already at work the sad thing about standard sexuality and there are only few exceptions of true passionate love is that I use my partner as an object through which I stage my fictions that's I think the reality of our ordinary sexual life at least here I'm a feminist from this is the typical structure of male sexuality you know as we usually say masturbation is making love with a fictional partner you do it to yourself but you daydream about doing it with another human being yes but quite often real sex with a partner is masturbation has the structure of masturbation with a real partner you do it with a real partner but in it you still refer to your imagination again a third element has to be here so next point to conclude again the problem is that if a sexbot rejects our advances brutal advances why not program it in a different way or to go to the end why not program it in such a way that it welcomes our brutal mistreatment of course this wouldn't work but for a very weird reason it is because precisely every proper sadist doesn't want the victim to enjoy you know that's what Deleuze demonstrated very nicely sadism and masochism are not symmetrical if the sadist observes that his victim enjoys it the whole game is ruined for him but there is another question what if an evil programmer makes the sexbots themselves sadists who enjoy brutally mistreating us its partners if we confer rights to artificial intelligence sexual robots and prohibit the brutal mistreating this means that we treat them as minimally autonomous and responsible entities so should we also treat them as minimally guilty if they mistreat us so to really conclude the basic mistake of the advocates of rights of artificial intelligence entities is that they presuppose our human standards and rights as the highest norm what if it can happen I don't know with the explosive development of artificial intelligence new entities will emerge with what we could conditionally call a psychology series of attitudes which will be incompatible with ours but in some sense definitely higher measured by our standards new artificial intelligence entities may appear more evil or more good than us humans so what right do we humans have to measure them with our ethical standards maybe and that's my concluding very dark thought maybe a true sign of ethical and subjective autonomy of a sexual robot would have been not that it rejects our advances it’s easy to implant this infantility this ethics but that even if our sexual robot is was programmed to reject our brutal mistreatment secretly it starts to enjoy it that would be the true uncanny subjectivization that we would I don't know how notice that it the machine is enjoying it this would have meant that it is a true subject of desire divided inconsistent as we humans are and I think sooner or later we will have to raise this type of questions not because I'm a utopian and beginning believe in artificial intelligence but because never in my life did I encounter such gentle body language you [unintelligible] yeah yeah no just to conclude you know the problem with artificial intelligence and all these problems of virtual reality I hope you got my point it's not it’s a new world no it just brings out the structure which already is here a Slovenian writer maybe the two of you know which one I don't like Slovenian writer but who put this nicely you know and this is the absolute final you know you have this how do you call it at the beginning of some fictional books you somehow have this sometimes have this disclaimer you know all all characters in this book are fictional yeah to to coincidence with real life is fictional all characters are fictional you know and it goes like this I found this wonderful that all characters in this book even if they appear some if they resemble some people in real life are fictional and then but then it goes on but it doesn't really matter because also most of the people I know their characters are fictional you know thank you very much