Are Catastrophes Virtual?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2010-10-13 · 1:41:41 · 14,312 words
with Norman Finkelstein
ideologyecology-climatepsychoanalysishegel-dialecticscapitalismethicsreligion-theologyphilosophy-generalliberalism-political-correctnesscinema-art-culturerace-antisemitism
Delivered at the Penn Humanities Forum, this talk uses the question 'are catastrophes virtual?' to argue that the virtual (the frozen image, the Platonic ideal) is more real than empirical reality. Žižek moves through a critique of Levinasian/Butlerian ethics of fragile otherness, an analysis of Starbucks-style ethical consumerism as ideology, and a sustained argument that ecological catastrophe is real but systematically disavowed via two forms of fetishist denial. He concludes with a distinction between 'futur' (continuation of the present) and 'avenir' (radical rupture), arguing that adopting catastrophe as symbolic destiny, rather than avoiding it, is the only genuine political act, and defending useless academic thinking as genuinely subversive.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 24
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The inconsistent external symbolic network on whose support the precarious subject's identity hinges, per Levinas/Butler's account Žižek is critiquing.
Implicitly invoked through 'partial object', the clasped hands that persist as an eternal fragment even as the bodies are destroyed.
Used here as that which insists beneath or through empirical reality, the frozen image of clasped hands persists as the Real while the bodies perish; the seductive surface of the erotic body is the Real, not the decaying flesh beneath.
The excessive pleasure or deadly fascination that the Real threatens to draw us into, the voluptuous body as Real threatens to pull the subject into a vortex of jouissance.
The condition of God-become-man in Christ, precarious, vulnerable, even impotent, which Žižek uses to push Levinas's ethics of fragile otherness to its theological conclusion.
The Cartesian notion that animals are mechanisms without inner pain, which La Mettrie extended to humans, used to show that denying animal suffering logically collapses into denying human suffering.
as “meme as ideological parasite”
Dawkins' meme concept reread through Lacan: a unit of symbolic/ideological content that spreads not for its benefits to bearers but like a computer virus, using humans as hosts, paralleling how capital runs people rather than vice versa.
as “drive vs desire”
The distinction between individual capitalist greed (desire) and capital's impersonal compulsion to expand and reproduce (drive), which subordinates and uses individual desires.
The structure 'I know very well, but…', used to explain why people know about ecological catastrophe and economic irrationality yet continue behaving as if they don't believe it.
The brand of capitalism critique (Porto Alegre, Seattle movements) that never questions the liberal-democratic legal frame and thus remains within the ideological horizon it purports to challenge.
A symptom of the crisis of scientific authority: once experts told us how things are, now they offer 'opinions', signaling that science has become an inconsistent field of competing perspectives rather than a source of stable truth.
The scientific-ideological category (e.g. 2°C warming threshold) that fetishizes a contingent quantitative fixation as if it were a meaningful natural boundary, masking the true indeterminacy of ecological thresholds.
The proposed geological era in which humanity has become a geological agent capable of destabilizing the basic parameters of life on earth, used to press the point that ecological catastrophe is systemic not personal.
The necessary ecological attitude: not returning to Mother Earth and natural homeostasis (which is the source of the catastrophe) but accepting the radical fragility and horror of nature itself.
Frantic but ineffectual gestures (recycling, buying organic food) that substitute for genuine political action and actually serve to prevent it by giving people the feeling they are doing something.
as “real impossible”
Lacan's notion, used by Žižek, that the impossible is not a pragmatic constraint but something that, when you do it as a risky wager, creates its own conditions of possibility, against the opportunistic 'impossible' of neoliberal realism.
as “futur vs avenir”
The distinction between 'futur' (the future as extrapolation of present tendencies) and 'avenir' (what is genuinely to come, a radical break, a discontinuity) used to articulate a politics of rupture.
The virtual zero point of ecological and economic breakdown toward which the present system drifts if left to itself, a virtual attractor that orients political action even if indefinitely postponed.
as “symbolic destiny”
The paradoxical notion that by adopting catastrophe as our inevitable symbolic destiny we can change the very content of that destiny, freedom operates at the level of destiny itself, not within it.
as “predestination as freedom”
The Protestant/capitalist paradox that precisely because everything is predestined you must be frenetically active, and the deeper Marxist-theological point that we are free not within destiny but to change destiny itself.
Marx's insight that fetishism resides not in what people consciously believe but in what they materially do, in the social activity of using money and commodities.
Implicitly present in the analysis of how ideology functions through activity rather than conscious belief, we enact beliefs without knowing we hold them.
as “solidarity of struggle”
Universal solidarity grounded not in recognition of cultural difference or shared fragility but in a common political/class struggle, contrasted with liberal multicultural tolerance.
as “surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir)”
Invoked when describing the shared obscene joke with the Indian taxi driver as the 'plus-de-jouir', the moment of excess enjoyment that founds authentic solidarity.
Stories he reaches for 10
Bohr has a horseshoe above his country house door (a superstitious good-luck charm). A friend asks if he really believes in it. Bohr says: 'Of course I don't, but I was told it works even if you don't believe in it.' Illustrates how belief is enacted in practice, not located in conscious conviction.
“Of course I'm not an idiot, I don't believe in it that it works, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it”
In Missoula, Montana, Žižek meets a Native American man who prefers 'Indian' to 'Native American' because at least 'Indian' is a monument to white man's stupidity (Columbus thinking he was in India), whereas 'Native American' implies closeness to nature while whites are culture, the worst form of racism.
“At least if I'm called Indian, my name is a monument to white man's stupidity, you know, who thought they are in India”
When people buy expensive half-rotten organic apples at double the price, they are not buying better apples but buying ideology: membership in self-conscious humanity caring for Mother Earth.
“I pay more but isn't it wonderful, this makes me a member of self-conscious humanity doing something for the Mother Earth”
When you watch a football match on TV and shout 'Yes, do it!', knowing it makes no difference, you are performing superstitious pseudo-activity. Žižek uses this to characterize recycling and green consumption.
“you shout 'Yes do it!' in this kind of superstitious activity as if, you know, you are doing something to help your guys win”
An Italian priest friend tells Žižek that the worst thing for the Church would be to discover the Turin shroud IS Christ's, because then you'd immediately demand a DNA test to find out who Jesus's father really was. Authentic religion requires uncertainty; fundamentalists want empirical confirmation.
“the most horrible thing that you can imagine for the church is to discover that this really is Christ's shroud”
Chinese earthquakes may have been caused or intensified by the weight of the Three Gorges Dam's artificial lakes pressing on underground cliffs, evidence that humans have become geological agents (the Anthropocene).
“Even something as elementary as the earthquake could be included into the scope of phenomena influenced by human activity.”
Even while experiencing Nazi horrors, Anne Frank wrote in her diary that she nonetheless believed there is something eternal and good in every human being, cited as the purest form of belief, absolutely counter-factual.
“but nonetheless I believe there is something eternal and good in every human being”
Politicians and thinkers warned from the 1880s that a great European war was coming, but people really didn't believe it could happen even as it approached, paralleling today's ecological disavowal.
“people really didn't believe that it can happen”
Obama's reaction to the Gulf oil spill, insisting BP pay, is ridiculed as legalistic thinking: the real task is not compensation but changing the structural conditions (capitalism) that make such damage inevitable.
“all this rhetorics 'I will kick British Petroleum in the ass and they will I will make them pay.' Sorry but when we are talking about such a catastrophe, it reaches beyond this logic.”
Chesterton's Everlasting Man imagines the 'monster' man must have appeared to naturally evolved animals, wrapped in artificial bandages (clothes), propped on artificial crutches (furniture), shaken with laughter, unique in averting his thought from his own bodily existence. Žižek uses this to frame human monstrosity as the death drive.
“Man has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin. He cannot trust his own instincts.”
Works invoked 10
Žižek's own first English-language book, mentioned by the introducer as the work that established his reputation, described as presenting Marxist ideology critique in dialogue with psychoanalysis.
Žižek's recent book at the time, mentioned by the introducer as among his most recent publications.
Paul Veyne's book cited to support the argument that ancient people were not naive literalists, distantiation was already included in their utterances, making moderns more naive by comparison.
Fredric Jameson's book mentioned by the introducer as the other main coordinate of her intellectual project alongside Freud's jokes book.
The Everlasting Man book
Chesterton's book is cited for its vivid imagining of how man must have appeared as monster to the natural animals around him, Žižek uses it to locate the death drive as the monstrosity animals perceive in us.
Hal Foster's account of postmodern art's return to the real is taken as a paradigm case of getting things backward, Žižek argues the gestures Foster celebrates are escapes from, not returns to, the Real.
Freud's book mentioned by the introducer as one of the theoretical coordinates that anticipated Žižek's project of unpacking the political logic of the joke.
Kant's lesser-known text on education, cited for the definition 'Man is an animal who needs a master' and the concept of 'unruliness', irrational excess of freedom unique to humans.
Derrida's late book on animals, especially the scene with the cat, is praised for exposing the systematic philosophical disavowal of the animal gaze that Levinas explicitly excludes.
Precarious Life book
Judith Butler's book is the main philosophical foil: Žižek quotes it on the desire to kill as first impulse toward the other but argues Butler misreads psychoanalysis and her ethics of precariousness ideologically enables humanitarian depoliticization.
People invoked 33
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
French theorist of rationality; cited for the insight that today we know our knowledge was insufficient to change behavior, and for the concept of the 'dystopian fixed point' as virtual attractor toward which civilization drifts.
Umberto Eco positive
Cited for his observation about modern love declarations requiring explicit distantiation ('as a poet would say, I love you'), used to argue moderns are more naive than ancient people who had distantiation implicitly built in.
Jacques Derrida positive
Žižek gives 'all the honor' to Derrida for his late book on animals (L'Animal que donc je suis) and its exploration of the cat's gaze as the excluded animal other that philosophy has systematically disavowed.
Paul Krugman positive
Cited for his observation about the financial crisis: that even if people could go back in time knowing there would be a breakdown, most would still follow the herd, evidence that fetishist disavowal is built into capitalist behavior.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
His ethics of the face and unconditional responsibility to the fragile other is subjected to sustained critique: Žižek argues it secretly preserves the subject's priority, excludes the animal gaze, and underpins the humanitarian ideology he opposes.
Jorge Semprún positive
Spanish writer and concentration camp survivor; Žižek opens the talk with a quote from his memoir about two children at Buchenwald dying with clasped hands, using it as the anchoring example for his argument about the Real.
Hal Foster negative
His book The Return of the Real is cited as a paradigm case of misreading postmodern art's return-to-the-real gestures, Žižek argues these are the exact opposite of returns to the real.
Polish philosopher cited for the claim that man can be a moral being only insofar as he is weak, limited, fragile and broken-hearted, taken as representative of liberal postmodern ethics Žižek critiques.
Appears as Turn 4 speaker in the Q&A but the diarization is uncertain; introduces the Derrida/Eco discussion about distantiation and love.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority throughout: Lacan's correction of Plato (ideas as virtual not substantial real), ethics of psychoanalysis, distinction between desire and drive, 'plus-de-jouir', the 'real impossible', and the point that animals cannot cheat to cheat.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Cited as a 'good dialectical Darwinist' for the insight that there is no natural balance or teleological evolution, nature itself is a series of catastrophes, supporting Žižek's anti-deep-ecology argument.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Žižek's 'favorite Catholic theologian'; cited from The Everlasting Man for a mental experiment imagining man as monster from the animal perspective, used to argue humans are strangers on earth driven by an irrational excess.
Daniel Dennett positive
Noted for using the same parasite/infection metaphors when discussing memes as Lacan uses for language, establishing a convergence between memetics and Lacanian linguistics.
Judith Butler negative
On good personal terms ('I'm on very good terms with her personally') but intellectually criticizes her: Butler misreads psychoanalysis as limited to narcissistic economy, whereas for Lacan the encounter with the desiring other is constitutive; also parodied for endless distantiation qualifications ('if we strategically concede to the essentialist use of language...').
Alain Badiou positive
Noted for the paradox that his account of immortality/eternity has the same structure as Butler's account of precariousness, used to illustrate that fragility and eternity are two sides of the same ethical structure.
Fredric Jameson positive
Called 'my friend'; credited with the idea that predestination is the most dialectical theological concept that Marxists should borrow, freedom operates at the level of destiny itself, not within it.
T. S. Eliot positive
Cited for the conservative insight that every new work of art changes the entire past, used to illustrate how radical newness retroactively transforms its conditions of possibility (the Kafka/Borges point).
Richard Dawkins positive
His concept of the meme (unit of memory/cultural transmission) is used as a parallel for capital, both spread autonomously using human bearers as hosts, rediscovering the symbolic level outside biology/subjectivity.
Anne Frank positive
Cited for her diary entry about believing in the goodness of every human being even amid Nazi horrors, paradigm of authentic counter-factual ethical belief.
Cited briefly for the claim that animals are 'worldless' (as opposed to humans who relate to death), listed as one of a series of tired philosophical distinctions between humans and animals that Žižek prefers to sidestep.
Bill Gates negative
Exemplifies the humanitarian-consumerist ideology: 'who cares about computers when people are starving of diarrhea in Africa', a call to act rather than think, depoliticizing structural critique.
Jeremy Bentham positive
Honored for his simple proposal: instead of asking whether animals reason or speak, ask 'Can they suffer?', a crucial ethical reorientation away from philosophical anthropocentrism.
Jean Laplanche positive
Cited as having convincingly elaborated that for Freud and Lacan the traumatic encounter with the desiring other, not narcissistic aggressivity, is constitutive of subjectivity.
Author of L'Homme Machine, cited to show that the Cartesian animal-machine thesis, once extended to humans, collapses the distinction between animal and human pain.
Niels Bohr positive
The horseshoe joke illustrates the Bohrian (and Žižekian) point that beliefs are enacted in practice independently of conscious conviction.
Paul Veyne positive
Author of Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, cited for the point that ancient Greeks weren't naive literalists; they already had distantiation built into their utterances about Zeus, paralleling modern cynicism.
Barack Obama negative
Žižek says he 'still deeply respects' Obama personally but criticizes his response to the BP oil spill as trapped in legalistic logic, the demand that BP pay is not radical enough when the problem is systemic.
Plato positive
Žižek declares himself an 'unashamed Platonist', Platonic ideas are not substantial realities behind appearances but virtual eternal moments that emerge within reality (corrected through Lacan).
Karl Marx positive
Cited for commodity fetishism (ideology materialized in practice not in conscious belief), and for locating freedom not in the political sphere but in apolitical social relations of production, key insights Žižek defends as still valid today.
Jorge Luis Borges positive
Cited for the observation that Kafka created his own predecessors, illustrating how genuinely new creations retroactively reconfigure destiny.
His notion of the animal-machine is cited as the philosophical enabler of the systematic disavowal of animal suffering, and his 'I think therefore I am' is parodied via Derrida's 'The Animal That Therefore I Am'.
Sigmund Freud positive
Central authority on the death drive (what the animal sees in us), on commodity fetishism paralleling Marx, and on the structure of belief as materialized in practice, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious is also alluded to by the introducer.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited from On Education for his definition 'Man is an animal who needs a master' and his concept of 'unruliness', the irrational excess of wild freedom unique to humans that animals see as monstrous.
What it argues
the virtual as more real than empirical realityfetishist disavowal of ecological catastrophecritique of Levinasian ethics of vulnerable othernessStarbucks as the paradigm of contemporary ideologyfutur vs avenir: continuation vs radical rupturecommodity fetishism and the materiality of beliefsolidarity through shared struggle vs multicultural tolerance
Dialectical moves 12
“Far from enacting a return to the real, imagining the body in decay under the skin equals an escape from the real — it is the spectral appearance which is the real and the decaying body which is reality.”
Žižek inverts the common assumption that bodily horror reveals a deeper truth: the erotic surface IS the Real, and demystification retreats from it.
“Far from being a return to the real, postmodern estrangement effects (actors breaking the fourth wall, slaughtering chickens on stage) are the exact opposite: desperate escapes from the real of the illusion itself.”
The gesture of exposing artifice is itself the supreme artifice, a flight from the Real that inhabits fiction.
“Instead of asking 'what are animals for humans?', one should ask the obverse question: 'what is man for animals?' — in the animal's gaze we see our own monstrosity.”
Reversing the direction of the question exposes the death drive as that which animals perceive in us rather than something we project onto them.
“Instead of asking 'do Christians treat Judaism properly?', the more interesting question is: 'what were the first Christians in the eyes of the Jewish establishment — what monstrous excess was this?'”
The same reversal: asking what the emergent formation looks like from the perspective of the established order reveals its radical excess.
“Far from being sustained by individual greed, capitalist expansion subordinates individual greed to capital's impersonal drive — what we need is not less but more egotism to combat ecology (a long-term egotistic interest suffices).”
The critique of capitalism should target the systemic drive, not individual morality; and paradoxically genuine self-interest would serve ecology better than pseudo-altruistic green consumerism.
“Levinas: in my asymmetric subordination to the other's unconditional demand, I assume supremacy over the other — the ethics of total responsibility preserves the subject's priority.”
The structure of unconditional obligation to the vulnerable other secretly reinstates the priority of the subject it claims to efface.
“Exactly when it seems everything technological is possible, socio-economic change is declared impossible — the truly impossible today is a modest change in health care, not downloading your mind to hardware.”
The ideological distribution of 'possible' and 'impossible' is the reverse of what it should be: radical technology is celebrated, modest political transformation is foreclosed.
“Destiny is inevitable, but what we can change is our very inevitable destiny — freedom operates not within destiny but at the level of destiny itself.”
The Borges/Kafka/Protestant paradox: not freedom within a fixed field but freedom to retroactively reconfigure the field itself.
“Precisely because everything is predestined, you have to be active all the time — predestination generates frenetic activity rather than passive waiting.”
Protestantism's predestination is the theological model of how constraint at the level of destiny generates maximum activity at the level of existence.
“We are not more cynical today — we are much more naive. Afraid of literal belief, we must explicitly include all the distantiation qualifications that in the past were implicitly contained in a simple utterance.”
Modern reflexive irony is a symptom of deeper, more literal credulity, not of sophistication.
“Fundamentalists are not believers — they treat miracles as scientific facts, which is the end of authentic religious belief; the Turin shroud confirmed scientifically would be the worst thing for the Church.”
Fundamentalism is the inverse of faith: it requires empirical confirmation and thereby destroys the excess that makes genuine belief possible.
“The white liberal who admits Western guilt ('it's always still our imperialist manipulations') still wants to be at the top — if not the top good guys, at least the top bad guys.”
White liberal self-criticism secretly reproduces the centrality and power of the West by claiming total causal responsibility for others' suffering.
Claims 24
asserts
The frozen image (the virtual) is more real than empirical reality — the clasped hands of the two dying boys are the Real, not the physical deaths.the ontological status of the virtual
asserts
The spectral appearance of the sexualized body is the Real; the decaying body beneath the skin is reality — true art stays on the surface rather than returning to hidden depth.the real vs reality, surface vs depth in aesthetics
rejects
Postmodern attempts to 'return to the real' (Brechtian alienation effects, shocking stage gestures) are in fact escapes from the real — the exact opposite of what they claim.postmodern return-to-the-real aesthetics (Hal Foster)
rejects
Levinas's ethics of unconditional responsibility to the fragile other covertly preserves the ethical subject's priority and supremacy over the other they are supposed to subordinate themselves to.Levinasian ethics of the vulnerable other
rejects
Butler misreads psychoanalysis as confined to narcissistic economy; in fact for Freud and Lacan the traumatic encounter with the desiring other is constitutive of subjectivity, not a limit psychoanalysis cannot cross.Judith Butler's reading of psychoanalysis in Precarious Life
asserts
Starbucks is the paradigm of contemporary ideology: it dissolves the split between consumerism and anti-consumerist duty by incorporating the humanitarian moment into the price of the commodity.the ideological function of ethical consumerism
asserts
Humanitarian appeals to fragile suffering others (Starbucks ads, charity images) serve ruling ideology by blocking politicization and substituting emergency-state logic for structural analysis.the ideological function of humanitarian ethics
asserts
The capitalist expansion of productive forces is not driven by individual greed but by capital's impersonal drive to reproduce — individual greed is subordinated to this systemic drive, not the other way around.the structure of capitalism and the difference between desire and drive
asserts
Marx's key insight is that freedom is located not in the political sphere (elections, free press, human rights) but in the apolitical network of social relations — market, family — which cannot be changed by democratic procedures alone.Marx's critique of political freedom and liberal democracy
asserts
Knowing about ecological catastrophe or financial irrationality is not enough to change behavior — ideology is materialized in what we do, not in what we consciously believe (fetishist disavowal).the inadequacy of raising consciousness / critique of ideology as enlightenment
rejects
We need more, not less, denaturalization in our approach to ecology — the idea of nature as harmonious Mother Earth is itself the source of our inability to confront ecological catastrophe.deep ecology and the ideal of returning to natural balance
rejects
Today what is politically impossible (changing socio-economic relations) and what is technologically possible (genetic enhancement, eternal life) have been perversely reversed — any change in social relations is deemed impossible while unlimited technological transformation is celebrated.the ideological naturalization of the economic status quo
asserts
The proper response to catastrophe is to adopt it as symbolic destiny — to say 'yes, if the existing system continues it leads to breakdown' — and from within that acceptance work to indefinitely postpone and finally undermine it.catastrophe theory and political strategy
asserts
We need 'avenir' rather than 'futur' — a genuine rupture, something genuinely to come, rather than a future as continuation of present tendencies.the political horizon beyond capitalist futurism
rejects
Today we are more naive, not more cynical — modernity requires explicit distantiation qualifications ('I love you, as a poet might say') because the distances that were once implicitly included in utterances must now be spelled out.the narrative of modern cynical disenchantment
asserts
Religious fundamentalists are not true believers — they treat miracles as scientific facts, which is the end of authentic religious belief; authentic religion requires uncertainty and cannot survive empirical confirmation.the nature of fundamentalist belief vs authentic religious faith
asserts
Suicide terrorists do not really believe in paradise with virgins — their act is a wager to calm their own doubt about belief, not an expression of firm conviction.the psychology of terrorist belief
rejects
The Levinasian fragile other is only tolerated as long as it remains helpless — the moment it organizes and acts for itself it becomes a terrorist or fundamentalist; this reveals the ideological limit of the ethics of vulnerability.the politics of the ethics of the vulnerable other
asserts
Authentic universality is not found in recognizing cultural difference or shared fragility but in a solidarity of common struggle — the shared obscene joke with the Indian taxi driver opened more real solidarity than multicultural tolerance would have.universality, multiculturalism, and solidarity
asserts
The animal's gaze reflects not merely suffering but the monstrosity of the human being itself — in the wounded animal's eyes we see our own death drive and excess of wild freedom.the philosophical significance of the animal gaze
asserts
What animals see in man is precisely what Kant called 'unruliness' — an excess of wild irrational freedom that animals lack and that necessitates human education and mastery.Kant's anthropology and the human-animal distinction
asserts
Pursuing purely useless academic thinking is genuinely subversive today in the context of the Bologna reform's demand for socially useful expert knowledge.the value of humanistic thinking vs expert knowledge
rejects
The true capitalist monstrosity is not individual egotism but a systemic impersonal drive — the Pope's Christmas claim that humanity must overcome its egotism is both a moralistic platitude and a falsehood.moralistic critiques of capitalism centered on individual greed
rejects
Legal-democratic responses to ecological catastrophe (making BP pay, finding guilty parties) are not radical enough — the task is to change the structural conditions that make such damage possible, not to extract compensation.the legalistic-compensatory response to ecological disasters
Quotes 24
“While the sound renders temporary reality — the brutal murder of the two boys — the image renders the eternal real.”Slavoj Žižek · the virtual/eternal as more real than empirical reality
“In the opposition between the spectral appearance of a sexualized body and the repulsive body in decay, it is the spectral appearance which is the real and the decaying body which is reality.”Slavoj Žižek · inversion of surface and depth: the Real is the surface
“One should rather denounce them for what they are: the exact opposite of what they claim to be, escapes from the real.”Slavoj Žižek · postmodern return-to-the-real as escape from the real
“Wisdom is the great enemy of the real.”Slavoj Žižek · wisdom as flight from the Real
“Pay a little bit more and the price for it is included into it — by being a consumerist, you already do your anti-consumerist duty.”Slavoj Žižek · Starbucks ideology / ethical consumerism as ideological synthesis
“It is a call to do something and don't think. Don't think, don't politicize, do something.”Slavoj Žižek · emergency-state logic of humanitarian ideology
“What we really need is more, not less, egotism.”Slavoj Žižek · paradox of ecological ethics — systemic drive vs individual greed
“Knowing is not enough. One can know what one is doing and still do it.”Slavoj Žižek · the failure of ideology critique as enlightenment
“What is today perhaps impossible: the future is not what it was.”Slavoj Žižek · Jean-Pierre Dupuy on the failure of knowledge to change behavior
“They make in New York they cut your penis, you have two penises, you can screw yourself — but a little bit of a change in health care is not possible.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological reversal of the possible and the impossible
“From time to time impossible happens. Impossible means you do something which within the existing ideological universe appears impossible but while doing it you create its own possibility.”Slavoj Žižek · the Lacanian real impossible as political act
“Destiny is inevitable but what we can change is our very inevitable destiny.”Slavoj Žižek · predestination as radical freedom — changing destiny itself
“There is no future in future, but there is something there is something venir.”Slavoj Žižek · futur vs avenir — rupture vs continuation
“Ideology means 'Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es' — they don't know what illusions they are actually following in what they are doing.”Slavoj Žižek · Marx's formula for ideology — illusion materialized in practice
“I claim today we are not more cynical, sophisticated. We are much more naive.”Slavoj Žižek · modern cynicism as deeper naivety
“The true reasoning of a suicide terrorist is more something like 'I am not sure that I believe, I can prove it to myself by exploding myself.' It's a kind of crazy wager in order to calm his own doubt.”Slavoj Žižek · suicide terrorism as wager against doubt rather than expression of belief
“Authentic religion more is...the most horrible thing that you can imagine for the church is to discover that this really is Christ's shroud.”Slavoj Žižek · authentic faith requires uncertainty — fundamentalism is its destruction
“If I cannot be the top good guys, we want at least be the top bad guys.”Slavoj Žižek · white liberal self-criticism as disguised claim to centrality
“At least if I'm called Indian, my name is a monument to white man's stupidity, you know, who thought they are in India.”Slavoj Žižek · subversive embrace of a racist name as record of oppressor's error
“Thinking is not to solve problems, thinking is to reformulate the problems.”Slavoj Žižek · the vocation of philosophy vs expert knowledge
“To pursue purely useless academic thinking, it's becoming more and more quite a subversive thing.”Slavoj Žižek · useless thinking as subversion under Bologna-reform capitalism
“Man is an animal who needs a master.”Slavoj Žižek · Kant's definition of man — excess requiring mastery
“What if a human sees in the abyss of the wounded animal's gaze what he sees there reflected is his own monstrosity?”Slavoj Žižek · animal gaze as mirror of the death drive
“In my very asymmetric subordination to the other's call, in my unconditional responsibility, in my being taken hostage by the other, I assume supremacy over the other.”Slavoj Žižek · Levinas's ethics secretly reinstates the subject's priority
Transcript 12 turns
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I want to thank all of you for coming and thank Richard Hodges and the museum people for sharing their space and thank the School of Arts and Sciences for funding our event. I remember very clearly the upsetting moment when I first heard spoken the name Žižek. It was I just arrived at Penn and embarked on the dreaded Ivy League tenure track, which meant I was expected to be well along in writing a fabulous cutting-edge book. All I'd actually managed at that stage was to admit to myself that my dissertation was a piece of crap and that I had at best a few fragments toward a publishable manuscript. At a reception after a talk at the Comparative Literature lounge, I was approached by a rather intimidatingly brilliant colleague, several years senior to me, a Russian with a PhD in mathematics as well as this alarmingly fluent expertise in Hegel. He was a bona fide high theorist. He comes over and begins asking me the very questions I dreaded: what was my book about, how far along was it, what exactly were my arguments. So I answered evasively. I said I was writing about modernist fiction, about comedy, about politics. I nattered on for a minute and he looked at me, he said, "Is interesting. But what are your theoretical coordinates?" And this was hitting too near the jugular for me. I knew that the theoretical tools I had picked up in grad school were the old standards and not by any means the latest high-octane stuff. All I could say was, "Well, there's Freud and there's Marx. There's Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and there's Marxist literary criticism as proposed in Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious." So I said I'm basically trying to talk about literary jokes in their relation to the political unconscious. So this is the best I could do. My colleague scrutinized me again for another minute and again he said, "Is interesting. But," he added, "maybe a little derivative of Žižek." And so there it was, this word or name. I didn't even know at that time which it was: was it a man, a woman, a collective or institution? This unfamiliar bisyllabic thrown down by a senior colleague as a criticism of my theoretical coordinates and a challenge to the value and originality of my work. So it was that I first encountered Žižek as insult. How to deal with such a wound? I left the reception, I walked the two blocks down to the house of our own bookstore where we got our books in those days and right up front I found the answer to my main question: What is this Žižek? There were several copies of a book called The Sublime Object of Ideology. Its author Slavoj Žižek, positively identified as a male philosopher at the Institute for Sociology in Ljubljana. Further information gleaned from the cover was that this was his first book in English, there were already some in French, and that it had only just been published a month or two earlier. So feeling a little better now that I knew this Žižek was a quite recent phenomenon, at least on our side of the Atlantic, I bought the book, took it home and began reading. But that only made everything worse again. For the intimidating colleague had been absolutely right about my belatedness and unoriginality. There was nothing I had written or tried to write or imagined writing about the relationship between humor and politics that was not already expressed with far greater force and complexity and clarity here in this damnable book. Here were Freud's Jewish jokes, Hegel's dialectical jokes, Lewis Carroll's vegetable jokes, all manner of popular Russian and Yugoslavian jokes about Stalinism, all brilliantly cracked open by an analysis that
I want to thank all of you for coming and thank Richard Hodges and the museum people for sharing their space and thank the School of Arts and Sciences for funding our event. I remember very clearly the upsetting moment when I first heard spoken the name Žižek. It was I just arrived at Penn and embarked on the dreaded Ivy League tenure track, which meant I was expected to be well along in writing a fabulous cutting-edge book. All I'd actually managed at that stage was to admit to myself that my dissertation was a piece of crap and that I had at best a few fragments toward a publishable manuscript. At a reception after a talk at the Comparative Literature lounge, I was approached by a rather intimidatingly brilliant colleague, several years senior to me, a Russian with a PhD in mathematics as well as this alarmingly fluent expertise in Hegel. He was a bona fide high theorist. He comes over and begins asking me the very questions I dreaded: what was my book about, how far along was it, what exactly were my arguments. So I answered evasively. I said I was writing about modernist fiction, about comedy, about politics. I nattered on for a minute and he looked at me, he said, "Is interesting. But what are your theoretical coordinates?" And this was hitting too near the jugular for me. I knew that the theoretical tools I had picked up in grad school were the old standards and not by any means the latest high-octane stuff. All I could say was, "Well, there's Freud and there's Marx. There's Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and there's Marxist literary criticism as proposed in Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious." So I said I'm basically trying to talk about literary jokes in their relation to the political unconscious. So this is the best I could do. My colleague scrutinized me again for another minute and again he said, "Is interesting. But," he added, "maybe a little derivative of Žižek." And so there it was, this word or name. I didn't even know at that time which it was: was it a man, a woman, a collective or institution? This unfamiliar bisyllabic thrown down by a senior colleague as a criticism of my theoretical coordinates and a challenge to the value and originality of my work. So it was that I first encountered Žižek as insult. How to deal with such a wound? I left the reception, I walked the two blocks down to the house of our own bookstore where we got our books in those days and right up front I found the answer to my main question: What is this Žižek? There were several copies of a book called The Sublime Object of Ideology. Its author Slavoj Žižek, positively identified as a male philosopher at the Institute for Sociology in Ljubljana. Further information gleaned from the cover was that this was his first book in English, there were already some in French, and that it had only just been published a month or two earlier. So feeling a little better now that I knew this Žižek was a quite recent phenomenon, at least on our side of the Atlantic, I bought the book, took it home and began reading. But that only made everything worse again. For the intimidating colleague had been absolutely right about my belatedness and unoriginality. There was nothing I had written or tried to write or imagined writing about the relationship between humor and politics that was not already expressed with far greater force and complexity and clarity here in this damnable book. Here were Freud's Jewish jokes, Hegel's dialectical jokes, Lewis Carroll's vegetable jokes, all manner of popular Russian and Yugoslavian jokes about Stalinism, all brilliantly cracked open by an analysis that
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presented sorry that pushed Marxism into an altogether new and difficult conversation with psychoanalysis. Here beautifully complete was the inchoate project I had wanted to claim as my own, that of unpacking the political logic of the joke and conversely locating the joke-work at the core of ideology. Well, at some point during that first reading of that great book, these initial responses of professional angst and petty jealousy did give way to the rising sense one has of excitement when discovering a really important new writer and embarking on an intellectual itinerary that forces a rearrangement of one's earlier ideas. And in this case there was also to a rare degree in my reading in critical theory and if I may say so especially in Lacanian theory, there was also a great yield of pleasure, a joy in experiencing the voice or style of Žižek which manages to install in an explosive way at the heart of a rhetoric of left political commitment. Here was a continental philosopher who could make you laugh out loud, who produced one surprising giddy turn or tilt after another, who was always up to something and was never boring. In truth, The Sublime Object of Ideology was a godsend for me at that point. Even just from this first in English of his many books I learned an enormous amount. And one of the first and most immediately useful things I learned from it was that critique may be negated through affirmation, through the trick of denial by repetition. Which is to say that after reading the book I had a way of fending off any further challenge from colleagues who asked me too many difficult questions about my manuscript on politics and humor. I would describe the project in a general way and then I would say, "Of course my theoretical coordinates are derived from Žižek." Worked like a charm. Alright, that was a long time ago. Since that moment Slavoj Žižek has published something like books and pamphlets, including such classics of postmodern theory as Tarrying with the Negative, The Fragile Absolute, Enjoy Your Symptom!, most recently Living in the End Times. He and his work have been the subject of more than a dozen monographs, a couple of films, several hundred articles in the fields of critical sociology, cultural studies and of course film theory. Currently professor at the European Graduate School and director of the Institute for Humanities at Birkbeck College, London. He has been a professor or scholar-in-residence at, so it seems, half the universities in Europe and North America. He has crossed over as we say into the domain of the public intellectual, climbing high on those media lists of the world's most influential and celebrated thinkers, but using that elevation in admirably mischievous and irreverent ways. Žižek's prodigious publications and lectures confound easy summary. Though a systematic thinker he hasn't handed us a grand system, he hasn't founded a school or put out a call for disciples and acolytes. Yet if you have read around in his work you know that the adjective "Žižekian" points to something as consistently present and as distinctive in his writings as what is Kafkaesque in Kafka. And I don't mean only the matter of style. I'm talking also about a steadfast intellectual disposition through a period postmodernism if you like or late capitalism a period when many critics have been giving up on critique, despairing of ever getting around the wiles of capital, the monstrous ironies of our times, the cynicism so comprehensive that even the tools of critical theory are somehow rendered cynical in our own hands. We know that they don't work on society but maybe they'll still work to advance our careers. Through this period of critique's presumptive exhaustion, Žižek has been its indefatigable reinventor, articulating fresh insights again and again
presented sorry that pushed Marxism into an altogether new and difficult conversation with psychoanalysis. Here beautifully complete was the inchoate project I had wanted to claim as my own, that of unpacking the political logic of the joke and conversely locating the joke-work at the core of ideology. Well, at some point during that first reading of that great book, these initial responses of professional angst and petty jealousy did give way to the rising sense one has of excitement when discovering a really important new writer and embarking on an intellectual itinerary that forces a rearrangement of one's earlier ideas. And in this case there was also to a rare degree in my reading in critical theory and if I may say so especially in Lacanian theory, there was also a great yield of pleasure, a joy in experiencing the voice or style of Žižek which manages to install in an explosive way at the heart of a rhetoric of left political commitment. Here was a continental philosopher who could make you laugh out loud, who produced one surprising giddy turn or tilt after another, who was always up to something and was never boring. In truth, The Sublime Object of Ideology was a godsend for me at that point. Even just from this first in English of his many books I learned an enormous amount. And one of the first and most immediately useful things I learned from it was that critique may be negated through affirmation, through the trick of denial by repetition. Which is to say that after reading the book I had a way of fending off any further challenge from colleagues who asked me too many difficult questions about my manuscript on politics and humor. I would describe the project in a general way and then I would say, "Of course my theoretical coordinates are derived from Žižek." Worked like a charm. Alright, that was a long time ago. Since that moment Slavoj Žižek has published something like books and pamphlets, including such classics of postmodern theory as Tarrying with the Negative, The Fragile Absolute, Enjoy Your Symptom!, most recently Living in the End Times. He and his work have been the subject of more than a dozen monographs, a couple of films, several hundred articles in the fields of critical sociology, cultural studies and of course film theory. Currently professor at the European Graduate School and director of the Institute for Humanities at Birkbeck College, London. He has been a professor or scholar-in-residence at, so it seems, half the universities in Europe and North America. He has crossed over as we say into the domain of the public intellectual, climbing high on those media lists of the world's most influential and celebrated thinkers, but using that elevation in admirably mischievous and irreverent ways. Žižek's prodigious publications and lectures confound easy summary. Though a systematic thinker he hasn't handed us a grand system, he hasn't founded a school or put out a call for disciples and acolytes. Yet if you have read around in his work you know that the adjective "Žižekian" points to something as consistently present and as distinctive in his writings as what is Kafkaesque in Kafka. And I don't mean only the matter of style. I'm talking also about a steadfast intellectual disposition through a period postmodernism if you like or late capitalism a period when many critics have been giving up on critique, despairing of ever getting around the wiles of capital, the monstrous ironies of our times, the cynicism so comprehensive that even the tools of critical theory are somehow rendered cynical in our own hands. We know that they don't work on society but maybe they'll still work to advance our careers. Through this period of critique's presumptive exhaustion, Žižek has been its indefatigable reinventor, articulating fresh insights again and again
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through Marx and Freud and Lacan and producing therefrom stratagems for a repoliticization of our commodified world. Reading Žižek one feels less hopeless, less ready to accept the inevitability or imperishability of the contemporary order of things. This afternoon Professor Žižek will address our topic of virtuality by posing the question: are catastrophes virtual? Please join me in welcoming to Penn Humanities Forum our very distinguished guest Slavoj Žižek.
through Marx and Freud and Lacan and producing therefrom stratagems for a repoliticization of our commodified world. Reading Žižek one feels less hopeless, less ready to accept the inevitability or imperishability of the contemporary order of things. This afternoon Professor Žižek will address our topic of virtuality by posing the question: are catastrophes virtual? Please join me in welcoming to Penn Humanities Forum our very distinguished guest Slavoj Žižek.
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much for all of you coming here, all the distinguished guests and especially for this kind introduction which is too kind. I feel threatened by it. You know why? Because if you were still in that envious awe, that would have been a good sign. My idea is that the moment you are ready to praise a colleague, no matter how excessively you praise him or her, it means you already feel safe and above him, you know. So it means, yeah, yeah, when I was young, basically your message was: yeah, yeah, when I was young I was stupid enough to be duped by me, but now I'm up there. No, I mean, no. And so okay, thanks for claiming that I'm never boring and so on. So you can rely on that. Today I will try to surprise you and be boring. Seriously, I want to do some simple but a little bit more systematic line. Let me begin by Jorge Semprún, survivor of concentration camps in World War II and Spanish writer. He reports in his memoirs how he witnessed the arrival of a truckload of Polish Jews at Buchenwald concentration camp. They were stacked into the freight train, almost to a car, traveling for days without food and water in the coldest winter of the World War II. All had death from frost, except for children kept warm by the others in the center of the bundle of bodies. When the children were emptied from the car, the Nazi guards let their dogs loose on them. Soon only two fleeing children were left. And then a quote from Jorge Semprún: "The little one of the two children began to fall behind. The SS guards were howling behind them and then the dogs began to howl too. The smell of blood was driving them mad. And then the bigger of the two children slowed his pace to take the hand of the smaller. Together they covered a few more yards till the blows of the clubs felled them and together they dropped, their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for all eternity." End of quote. What should not escape our attention is that the freeze of eternity is embodied in the hand as a partial object. While the bodies of the two boys perish, the clasped hands persist for all eternity like the smile of the Cheshire Cat from Lewis Carroll. One can easily imagine how this scene should be filmed. At least I would have filmed it in that way. While the soundtrack renders what goes on in reality the two children are clubbed to death, torn apart by the dogs and so on the image of their hands clasped freezes, immobilized for eternity. While the sound renders temporary reality the brutal murder of the two boys the image renders the eternal real. It is the pure surface of such fixed images, not any deeper meaning, which allows for redemptive moments in the bleak story of the Holocaust. The frozen image which insists over reality rendered by sounds reality stands for a positive ethical utopia of eternity. So that's my first point: this image is real and at the same time virtual. And here I am an unashamed Platonist. I think that Plato just has to be corrected the way Lacan suggests. A Platonic idea is not some deeper substantial reality. It's just, you know, when an unexpected miraculous ethical act occurs, like here, the older boy gathering the courage at the moment practically of dying, of stepping back holding the other guy's hand. This frozen image, this is eternity. This is the real. In a way more real than the vulgar reality. It is real as virtual. What does this mean? To explain a little bit how this works, I want to recall the old Catholic strategy to guard men against the temptation of the flesh. I think that medieval monks developed this if you were tempted too much. They told you: when you see in front of you a voluptuous feminine body, imagine how it will look in a couple of decades, the dried skin, sagging breasts and so on and so on. Or even better: imagine what lurks now already beneath the skin, raw flesh and bones, inner fluids, half-digested food, excrements and so on and so on. Now, far from enacting a return to the real destined to break the imaginary spell of the body, such a procedure I claim equals the escape from the real. The real which announces itself in the seductive appearance of the naked body. That is to say, in the opposition between the spectral appearance of a sexualized body and the repulsive body in decay, it is the spectral appearance which is the real and the decaying body which is reality. We take recourse to the decaying body in order to avoid the deadly fascination of the real, which threatens to draw us into its vortex of jouissance, of excessive pleasure. One should even, I think, turn around the usual opposition of true art and as deep and commercial kitsch as superficial. The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract its subject from its deepest context of historical reality. The same goes maybe for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts at least in the 80s, 90s, maybe not so much today to return to the real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream. This gesture has two main forms, which although opposed, amount to the same. In literature or cinema there are, especially in postmodern texts, self-reflexive reminders that what we are watching is a mere fiction. Like the actors on screen addressing us directly as spectators, thus ruining the illusion of the autonomous space of the narrative fiction. Or the writer directly intervening into the narrative through ironic comments. In theater there are occasional brutal events which awaken us to the reality of the stage. Like when I was young it was fashionable, I don't know, to slaughter a chicken on stage allegedly to shock you, that you are aware that this is just a fiction and so on. But instead of conferring on these gestures a kind of Brechtian dignity, perceiving them it was fashionable to say this when I was young as versions of estrangement, of being liberated of this ideological imaginary fixation, one should rather denounce them for what they are: the exact opposite of what they claim to be, escapes from the real. Desperate attempts to avoid the real of the illusion itself, the real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle. So this is the first point of clarification I think which is very important because, for example, take the classical book, it was written already some years ago I think Hal Foster, no, The Return of the Real. I think the processes he describes in postmodern art, again, are the exact opposite. I hope you got my point. For example, when you are in an erotic trance, the real is the surface, that the real is that absolute compulsion or pulsion pulsion in the sense of drive which transfixes you on the beloved image of your beloved, image of sexual object for all time. And again there is nothing transgressive I claim in saying, "Oh, oh, oh, cool down. Remember," again to repeat my vulgar lines, "beneath the skin there are intestines, shit is collecting there and so on and so on." That's the this is wisdom. I think wisdom is the great enemy of the real. You know, wisdom in the sense of "Oh when the kink slips or whatever or when I don't know, a nice woman whom or boy whom you try to kiss blurps or something like does something vulgar." No, there is nothing sublime going on here. So how do these virtual eternal moments relate to our ethical experience? I think that this dimension as it were of eternity is necessary to supply the big motive of postmodern ethics: the precariousness, fragility, finitude of a human being. The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski wrote that man can be a moral being only insofar as he is weak, limited, fragile and with a broken heart. This is I think the liberal core also of Emmanuel Levinas, to which Judith Butler also subscribes when she focuses on the fragile symbolic status of a human subject caught in the abyss of decentered representations, a being whose very identity hinges on an external inconsistent network. It is this precarious status of subjectivity which, according to Levinas and Butler here they agree accounts for the zero level of all ethics: the absolute call, injunction, emanating from a vulnerable neighbor's face. An ethical subject means to experience oneself as less such responding to this call even if one chooses to ignore it. You already respond to it. From a Christian perspective we should go to the end here. Man is created on God's image. The becoming man of God means that the same goes for God. In Christ God becomes a fragile absolute, precarious, vulnerable, even impotent. The first thing to take note here nonetheless is the basic asymmetry of the situation. The other's face makes an unconditional demand on me. I did not ask for it. I am not allowed to refuse it. And of course what Levinas means by face is not directly the physical face. A face can also be a mask for the face. There is no direct representation of the face. This demand is the real which cannot be captured by any words. It marks the limits of language. Every translation into language already distorts it. It is not simply external to discourse, it is its inner limit. The encounter with the other which opens up the space for discourse, since there is no discourse without the other. It is the real of a violent encounter which throws me off my existence as simple human animal. The irony here is that with Judith Butler, the way she describes this encounter of the other in its precariousness and fragility, mortality and so on, that this description has exactly the same structure as in Alain Badiou the structure of immortality eternity. And Butler is fully justified to emphasize that this ethical injunction, this encounter of the other as fragile and so on, is at its most basic level a reaction to the quasi-automatic reaction to get rid of the other neighbor, to kill him. This urge can be easily accounted for in Lacanian terms as the basic reaction to the encounter of the intrusive neighbor-Thing. A quote from Judith Butler's Precarious Life: "If the first impulse towards the other's vulnerability is the desire to kill, the ethical injunction is precisely to militate against that first impulse." In psychoanalytic terms, that would mean marshalling the desire to kill in the service of an internal desire to kill one's own aggression and sense of priority. The result would probably be neurotic but now listen carefully but it may be that psychoanalysis meets a limit here. For Levinas it is the ethical itself that gets one out of the circuitry of bad conscience, the logic by which the prohibition against aggression becomes the internal conduit for aggression itself. Aggression is then turned back upon oneself in the form of superegoic cruelty. If the ethical moves us beyond bad conscience, it is because bad conscience is after all only a negative version of narcissism and so still a form of narcissism. The face of the other comes to me from outside and interrupts the narcissistic circuit. End of quote. I think that something is terribly wrong here. Psychoanalysis is constrained by Judith Butler to the narcissistic economy of egotistic aggression and its super-ego reversal. And then of course the conclusion imposes itself that the proper dimension of the ethical is outside the scope of psychoanalysis, that as she put it psychoanalysis meets a limit here. Psychoanalysis can only read the ethical dimension as the neurotic masochistic reversal of narcissistic aggressivity. I claim that in a typical philosophical gesture she first brutally simplifies psychoanalysis to make her point. Because for Freud and Lacan, as was convincingly elaborated also by Jean Laplanche, the traumatic encounter of the other as desiring, which interrupts the narcissistic circuit, is precisely the basic experience constitutive of desiring subjectivity. Which is why for Lacan desire is a desire of the other. This is why Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis stands for his attempt to demonstrate that there is an ethical dimension discovered in the psychoanalytic experience. A dimension which has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of reduction of the higher ethical sphere to lower neurotic libidinal vicissitudes. Lacan's option is neither the aggressive thrust to annihilate the other nor its reversal into accepting the other as the source of an unconditional ethical injunction. Why not? What one should take note of is that in Levinas it is not me who experiences himself or herself as precarious, it is always the other who is addressing me as precarious. This is why in my very asymmetric subordination to the other's call, in my unconditional responsibility, in my being taken hostage by the other, I assume supremacy over the other. Do we not encounter this wounded precarious other almost daily in the ads for charity which bombard us with images of starved disfigured children crying in agony? Far from undermining the hegemonic ideology, such ads are one of its exemplary manifestations. Butler shows how face itself can function as an instrument of dehumanization, like the faces of evil fundamentalists Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and how the power regime also decides which faces are allowed to be seen as worthy of grief and mourning and which are not allowed to function like this. But it was the pictures, she claims, for example of the children burning or dying from napalm that generated the ethical outrage in the large United States public and helped ending the Vietnam War. What one should nonetheless add is that today the very fragility of the suffering other is part of the humanitarian ideological offensive. Images of sick and starving children from Africa abound on our screens. So again, all this founding of ethics in, you know, this fragility of the other staring back at you and so on has its obverse with which I disagree. It is that: okay, the other is good insofar as it is vulnerable, precarious and so on and so forth. The moment the other doesn't want to play this role but organizes itself, it becomes a terrorist, a fundamentalist and so on and so forth. We all love this weak other, helpless disfigured children whom as Starbucks ads put it, you can save by buying a cup of cappuccino with them and so on and so forth. So again, we live in I will try to develop this later a little bit we live in very interesting ideological times today. You should always bear in mind this that, you know, when I was young it was still the standard leftist ideology which was: we in relatively prosperous Western countries, we live in our ivory tower of false welfare but outside there are starving others and so on and so forth. Today this is the ruling ideology. Bill Gates is saying this all the time: what is the meaning of who cares about computers when people are still starving of diarrhea in Africa and so on and so forth. And this has a precise ideological function, I claim. First it is an emergency state logic to prevent politicization. Because when you listen to Bill Gates and all those guys, the story always goes on: so let us stop with our stupid ideological issues, critique of capitalism, whatever, people are suffering there. Forget about politics and ideology. Let's all get together, private business, state, charity, let's just do something and help them. It is precisely a call to do something and don't think. Don't think, don't politicize, do something. The other thing and I think this is so unique about today's more and more functioning of publicity, which is why I really think that Starbucks is the the example of today's ideology. Is that you remember when we were young, at least that's my case, we still had this split between private consumerism and doing something for the community. Like you know, privately you are spending money blah blah blah, then I don't know, you engage in some charitable activity or so. The uniqueness of Starbucks is a kind of a pseudo-Hegelian dialectical synthesis, no? The uniqueness of Starbucks among others is that you can do both in one and the same gesture. As it were, their as they just read what they say in their ads their coffee is more expensive because the humanitarian moment is included into it. You know as they say: we buy our coffee only organically grown, it's organically grown, we give part of the profit to help the children to get school, to help them to get water. It's as if telling you: you feel guilty about being a consumerist, no problem. Pay a little bit more and the price for it is included into it. So that you know and the message is wonderful pay half a dollar more for coffee and we guarantee you that by being a consumerist, you already do your anti-consumerist duty. You know you you cancel the effects. And it would be nice, in it may sound cynical but I think it's fundamental to read charitable activity, even green, much of green ecological activity like this today. How? The point is not really to help nature, the poor. The point is to make you feel good while you consume. That's the extra price that you pay. For example let me be very brutal. I'm often attacked for this, but do you when people like to buy organic apples, do you really believe that those apples are so much better? I don't think that those half-rotten apples which cost double are no, I think the reason you buy them is for pure you buy ideology there. You know: I pay more but isn't it wonderful, this makes me a member of self-conscious humanity doing something for the Mother Earth, it makes you feel warm, you know, like I do something for Mother Earth, I'm part of the great movement. You are buying this ideological dimension. But nonetheless, let us go on. So the first point being, I I don't like all this logic of, you know, I claim that this priority of the vulnerable precarious other involves a certain constellation which still allows you to retain priority. Second point: I want to focus on what is excluded from this vulnerable other. Here I give all the honor to Jacques Derrida, who in one of his late books on animals, L'Animal que donc je suis The Animal That Therefore I Am, of course the paraphrase of Descartes where he focuses on another gaze which typically is, as Derrida emphasizes, excluded, explicitly excluded by Levinas: the gaze of a wounded suffering animal. Derrida begins his exploration of this phenomenon with reporting on a kind of primordial scene from his own life. After awakening he goes naked to his bathroom where his cat follows him. Then the awkward moment occurs: he is standing in front of the cat which looks at his naked body. Unable to endure this situation he does something: puts a towel around his waist, chases the cat outside, enters the shower and so on. The cat's gaze stands here for the gaze of the other, an inhuman gaze but for this reason all the more the other's gaze in all its abyssal impenetrability. Seeing oneself being seen by an animal is an abyssal encounter of the other's gaze since precisely because we should not simply project onto the animal our inner experience, something is returning the gaze which is radically other. And I think Derrida is right in pointing out that the entire history of philosophy is based upon a disavowal of such an encounter. I remember here I will be very personal seeing years ago a photo of a cat after it was submitted to some lab experiments in a centrifuge, its bones half-broken, its skin half-hairless, her eyes helplessly looking into the camera. This is the gaze of the other disavowed not only by philosophers but by humans as such. One of the few exceptions is here he should be honored Jeremy Bentham, who made the simple proposal: instead of asking "can animals reason and think? Can they talk?" you know all these boring philosophical questions to which then you have all this series of binary oppositions, like: we humans can really talk, animals just exchange signs; we live in a world, animals are worldless; or the Heideggerian version: we relate to death, animals are not really dying; or even Lacan's version: we animals can cheat but only we humans can cheat to cheat. Like what the animal that's Lacan's idea can't do is, let's say you expect me to lie, so I can dupe you by telling the truth, counting on the fact that you will think it's a lie. You know the old story of Freudian joke: "Why are you telling me you're going to Krakow when you're really going to Krakow?" So again, instead of asking this question, Jeremy Bentham claims we should rather ask a simple question: "Can they the animals suffer?" Human industry alone is continuously causing immense suffering of animals which is systematically disavowed. Not only laboratory experiments but special regimes to produce eggs and milk, like turning artificial light on and off to shorten or lengthen the day, use of hormones and so on; pigs who are half-blind and barely able to walk, just fattened fast to be slaughtered and so on and so on. All of us knows what goes on knows what goes on here, know what goes on. But this knowledge has to be neutralized so that we can act as if we don't know. One of the ways to facilitate this ignorance is the Cartesian notion of "animal-machine". Cartesians were warning people against compassion with animals. The idea is that when we see an animal emitting sounds of pain, we should always bear in mind that these sounds do not express any real inner feeling. Animals do not have souls, they are just sounds these sounds generated by a complex mechanism of muscles, bones, fluids and so on that you can clearly see through dissection. The problem is that the notion of animal-machine quickly ends up in La Mettrie's notion of "l'homme machine", of a human being as a machine. If you are a fully committed neurobiologist, exactly the same claim can be made about sounds and gestures emitted by humans when they are in pain. There is no separate interior domain of soul where the pain where the pain is really made. So what should we do here? What if, that's my proposal, the perplexity of a human looking at a cat, what if this perplexity in the animal's gaze tortured animal's gaze is the perplexity aroused by the monstrosity of the human being itself? What if a human sees in the abyss of the wounded animal's gaze, what he sees there reflected is his own monstrosity? Or in Hegelian terms: instead of asking "what is substance for subject? How can subject grasp the substance?" we should ask the obverse question: "what is the rise of the subject for pre-subjective substance?" My favorite Catholic theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton proposes such a reversal precisely apropos men and animals. Instead of asking "what are animals for humans? For our experience?" one should ask "what man is for animals?" In his lesser known essay Everlasting Man, Chesterton makes a wonderful mental experiment along these lines: imagining the monster that man might have seemed at first to the merely natural animals around him. A quote from Chesterton: "The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being, almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. Man has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin. He cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes. He is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals man is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter." Again another distinction of which I'm not so sure. "As if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals man feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique." So what I'm saying is that I'm not definitely not trying to convince you into some New Age attitude of, you know, in the animal gaze we see how animals feel the same as us, understand us, and then you end up with all this bullshit of trees secretly talk among themselves and so on. No, but what I'm saying is that nonetheless, it's much sadder, is that if you turn around the perspective and ask simply yourself not what the not what does it mean for you this gaze of the frightened animal, but what the animal what but what do you see? Do you see in the animal's gaze? I think you see your own monstrosity. You see precisely that which philosophers don't want to see. In short I cannot develop it now, read my next book and so on, the 51st as you have said you see you see what Freud called death drive. You see that excessive violence of which good philosophers were aware. For example, just briefly, Immanuel Kant has a wonderful text small text unknown On Education, where he provides his famous definition of what is man: "Man is an animal who needs a master." And then he explains why. He says that there is a kind of he uses the term which is usually translated as "unruliness" a kind of wild irrational excess of violent freedom in man which animals don't have. This is why animals don't need education. So Kant is here very precise. He he is not saying that it's the nature in man which has to be educated. It's precisely let's call it a nature turned against itself, an excess of wild freedom and maybe this is what animals see in ourselves. I mean, you know this is always the question to ask if you want to be good Hegelians and I am. For example, instead of asking "do Christians treat properly Judaism?" and then you get these rather boring debates of, usually defending Judaism in the sense of "Oh Christian notion of love misses the point, anxiety of God in Judaism." A much more interesting question is: "What were the first Christians in the eyes of the Jewish establishment? What monsters they were. What monstrous excess this was." Always this is the question to be asked. We have a similar example. Do you remember some three years ago I think they some explorers deep in Argentinian jungle did it was reproduced in all media a photo of some tribe which was not yet touched by our so-called civilization, it was the first contact. And you see in color those frightened faces looking at us. We see our monstrosity there. So just we have to be aware of this dimension. But again, where is this monstrosity? Now I come to the crucial part. I think that the next step is to locate properly our monstrosity, which is not the simple egotistic violence and so on whatever, but a more systemic one. What do I mean by this? When in his Christmas message on December the Pope said that if humanity did not learn to overcome its egotism, human history would end in self-destruction, he not only stated a moralistic platitude, but also uttered a clear lie, falsehood. Let us accept that the two principal dangers today are unbridled capitalism and religious fundamentalism. But as even a superficial analysis of fundamentalist subjectivity makes it clear: so-called fundamentalists are not egotists but quite on the contrary, ruthlessly dedicated to a transcendent goal, ready to sacrifice everything, their lives included, for it. As for capitalism, one could also show that its over-expanding circulation cannot be reduced to the capitalist's egotistic striving for more and more profit. A parallel of the structure of the capital with Dawkins' notion of "meme" you know like made based on gene meme can be of some help here. A meme, unit of memory, spreads neither because of its actual beneficial effects upon its bearers say, those who adopt a meme in some intellectual idea unit are more successful in life and thus gain an upper hand in the struggle for survival nor because of its characteristics which make it subjectively attractive to its bearers. Like a computer virus, the meme proliferates simply by programming its own retransmission. What is so unsettling about this notion is that we humans, endowed with minds, wills and an experience of meaning, are nonetheless unwitting victims of a thought contagion which operates blindly, spreading itself like a computer virus. No wonder that when talking about meme, Dennett Daniel Dennett regularly resorts to the same metaphors as Lacan apropos language. In both cases we are dealing with a parasite which penetrates and occupies the human individual, using it for its own purposes. And indeed, does memetics not rediscover the notion of a specific symbolic level which operates outside the standard couple of objective biological facts and subjective experience? In a liminal case, an idea can spread even if in the long term it brings only destruction to its bearers and is even experienced as unattractive. So where is here the parallel with capital? In the same way that meme, misperceived by us subjects as means of our communication, effectively run the show they use us to reproduce and multiply themselves the productive forces which appear to us as means to satisfy our needs and desires, effectively run things. The true aim of the capitalist process of production is the development of productive forces and the satisfaction of our needs is effectively just the means for the development of productive forces. Consequently one should not say that capitalism is sustained by the selfish greed of individual capitalists for more power and wealth. This greed itself is subordinated to the impersonal striving of capital to reproduce and to expand. One is thus almost tempted to say that what we really need is more, not less, egotism. Take the ecological threat. No pseudo-animistic love for nature is needed to act here. Just a long-term egotistic interest. In Lacanian terms, one can determine the distinction between individual greed and this striving of capital to reproduce and to expand as the difference of desire and drive. Apropos the financial breakdown of Paul Krugman made a very nice observation. I quote him: "If we could spin a time machine back to so that people could ask themselves whether to exercise caution or to follow the herd, most of them would still follow the herd in spite of knowing that there will be a break-down." End of quote. This I think is crucial for this memetic automatic functioning of ideology today. The irrationality of capitalist rationalism, the counter-productivity of capitalist productivism are known for a long time. They were analyzed in detail by Frankfurt School and many others. But when the same topic is resuscitated today, it is not just in order to return to the past. Today we are able to add a crucial reflexive twist. Let me quote from a work by French theorist of rationality Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Quote: "What is new and different today is precisely the fact that years later we know that the knowledge we already possessed was in no way sufficient to make us change our behavior. This fact is not a minor detail. It constitutes a key element of the problem. In it was more simple to believe that another world is possible. This is why these years continue to inspire so much nostalgia. At which epoch? At this epoch one could still imagine that the warnings based on the present situation could influence in a positive way the future. Today we know it: the future is not what it was." End of quote. Therein resides the lesson of the failure of the traditional critique of ideology. Knowing is not enough. One can know what one is doing and still do it. The reason is that such knowledge operates under the conditions of fetishist disavowal: "one knows but one doesn't really believe what one knows." So the problem is how to make this knowledge operative. Or to put it in another way: there is no lack of anti-capitalism today. We are even witnessing an overload of the critique of the horrors of capitalism. Books, newspapers, in-depth investigations, TV reports abound on companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, on corrupt bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks have to be saved by public money, of sweat shops where children work overtime and so on and so on. There is however a catch to all this overflow of critique. What is as a rule not questioned in this critique, ruthless as it may appear, is the democratic liberal frame of fighting against excesses. The explicit or implicit goal is to democratize capitalism, to extend the democratic control onto economy through the pressure of the public media, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws and so on. But never to question the institutional frame of the state of law. This remains the sacred cow even for the most radical forms of ethical anti-capitalism like the Porto Alegre, Seattle movement and so on. It is here I think that Marx's key insight remains valid, today perhaps more than ever. For Marx the question of freedom is not located primarily into the political sphere proper. Does a country have free elections? Are the judges independent? Is the press free from hidden pressures? Are human rights respected? And similar list of questions different independent and not so independent Western institutions apply when they want to pronounce a judgment on a country. The key to freedom for Marx is in the apolitical network of social relations, from market to family, where change the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not just a political reform, but a change in social relations which appear apolitical, which means a change which cannot be done through democratic political procedures, elections and in the narrow sense of the term. We do not vote who owns what. We do not vote about relations in a factory. All this is left to processes outside the narrow sphere of the political. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the legal sphere. And again I think this is the tragic limitation we have to overcome. This limitation of the legal-democratic approach was clearly visible in the case of the recent Bay of Mexico oil spill oil spill here in the States. What was unfortunately ridiculous in President Obama's, whom I still deeply respect, reaction was the idea that a private company no matter how rich can pay for the damage of a serious ecological catastrophe which reaches even over the US population and potentially shatters the foundations of our way of life. The search for the guilty agent who should be made legally responsible for the damage is part of our legalistic frame of mind. People can and do sue fast food chains as responsible for their obesity. Ideas circulate about slavery reparations, arguing that compensation is long overdue and so on. What is fundamentally wrong with this logic is not that it's too radical, but that it's not radical enough. The true task is not to get compensation from those responsible, but to change the situation so that they will no longer be in a position to cause damage, or pushed towards this kind of activity which causes damage. I think this is what was lacking in Obama's reaction. You know all this rhetorics "I will kick British Petroleum in the ass and they will I will make them pay." Sorry but when we are talking about such a catastrophe, it reaches beyond this logic. It's ridiculous for me to talk about paying for the first thing to note is that my god even if maybe I don't know BP was a little bit worse than other companies, but it could have happened probably to another company. So the problem is not British Petroleum. The problem is a more global general one and which again compels us to ask fundamental questions about our way of life and so on and so on. And that's our situation today. Risks are exploding everywhere and we rely on scientists to cope with them. Here lies the problem. Scientific experts are supposed to know, but they do not know. The spread of science in our societies has two unexpected features. We more and more rely on experts, even in the most intimate domains of our experience: sexuality, religion. But this all-presence of science transforms scientific knowledge into an inconsistent field of multiple opinions. The symptom here is: did you notice the use of a very weird term for somebody educated in traditional science: "expert opinion"? Sorry but when I was young we ordinary people had opinions. Experts simply told us "this is how it really is". Today we have expert opinions. The paradigmatic category which reveals this helplessness of science is the category of limit value. You know this is a nice mode of scientific fetishization. As if you know we are told if the global warming apropos global warming if the temperature will go out will go out more than degrees, then it's catastrophe. But are we aware that these are purely contingent fixations which really which really don't mean anything? What is the problem here? Our growing freedom and control over nature, our survival itself depend on a series of stable natural parameters which we automatically take for granted: temperature, composition of the air, sufficient water, energy supply and so on. We can do what we want only insofar as we remain marginal enough so that we don't seriously perturb the parameters of the life on earth. This limitation of our freedom becomes palpable with ecological disturbances which disturbances which are the outcome of the very exponential growth of our freedom and power. Our grown growing ability to transform nature around us can destabilize the very basic geological parameters of the life on earth. The fact that humankind is becoming a geological agent on the earth indicates that as some geologists think, a new geological era is beginning. Some scientists call it Anthropocene. For example, with the recent devastating earthquakes in the interior of China. What's the problem there? There are good reasons to think that the main course or at least the unexpected strength of these earthquakes was the construction of the gigantic Three Gorges dams nearby, which resulted in large new artificial lakes. The additional pressure on the surface of the earth seems to influence the balance of the underground cliffs and thus contribute to the earthquake. So even something as elementary as the earthquake could be included into the scope of phenomena influenced by human activity. But wait a minute, the situation is even more complex. I'm now I'm now not preaching the idea that we humans are guilty for everything and so on. This is also a too easy way out. We like to be guilty since if we are guilty then it all depends on us, we pull the strings of the catastrophe so we can also save ourselves by simply changing our lives. What is really difficult for us to accept is that we are reduced to a purely passive role of an impotent observer who can only sit and watch what his fate will be. To avoid such a situation we are prone to engage in frantic obsessive activity. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food. I claim that we have here an interesting structure of again fetishist disavowal. I claim that in ecology we have two modes of disavowal. The one mode of disavowal is: we don't take the catastrophe seriously. It's the "je sais bien mais quand même" I know very well but, in the sense of: I know very well there is global warming but let's face it, we don't in our guts how do you put it? we don't really believe it. You know some stupid scientist I admire them is telling you "Oh global warming," you agree with him, then you go out you see the sun, the the sun, the wind, the trees and you say "My god can this really change?" It cannot. The conclusion from this is pretty paradoxical I claim. It is that: I'm here totally opposed to so-called "deep ecology" which claims we are too alienated by science, you know reducing nature to an object of scientific manipulation domination, we need to regain our being beings of the earth, breathing together with our environs. No, I claim that's the source of the catastrophe. We can do horrible things we don't know probably through science manipulation, but we are not ready to accept the consequences precisely because we are still as it were wired to the earth. I think we need more denaturalization. We have to bear in mind the utter fragility of nature. We have to get radically rid of this of the idea of nature as, you know, Mother Earth kind of caught in some kind of harmonious circulation, stability, homeostasis and so on which we humans with our hubris have undermined. I mean earth is a horror, nature is a horror also. Think about oil. Can you imagine what kind of catastrophes there must have been on our earth so that we have oil supplies and so on? Now the message of this is not: oh since there is no natural balance we can do whatever we want. No, no, no, I am for radical ecology, but the point is that the situation is much more tense. We cannot even fall back on some firm standard, like we just have to return to that point. There is no balance. This is I think the lesson of the good dialectical Darwinists like Stephen Jay Gould. There is no evolution, there is no natural balance, nature itself is a series nature itself is a series of catastrophes. So again, one problem with ecology is that: we know it, there is a threat of catastrophe, but we don't really accept it. We in a way don't believe it. The situation is here the same as the one wonderfully described by Bergson and others at the outset of World War I. I mean politicians, everyone was drawing attention to it for years from 1880s that the big European war is near, will explode. But people really didn't believe that it can happen. So that's one disavowal. But there is also the opposite disavowal, which also is interesting: namely the opposite one. We know that with some catastrophes, even if they are man-made, we as individuals cannot really do anything. But we are not ready to accept this totally passive position. So we like to engage in what I like to call pseudo-activity. You know I think that, sorry if this hurts you, but I think that often when we recycle and buy organic food, it's a little bit like, you know, when you have a baseball or soccer match, you watch it at home on TV and you shout "Yes do it!" in this kind of superstitious activity as if, you know, you are doing something to help your guys win. You know it's stupid but you do it. I claim it's also it's also that dimension, precisely this pseudo-activity. So to conclude, if you just allow me another five minutes. The first my first concluding point is that things are much too serious for such recycling games. Humanity should get ready to live in a much more plastic nomadic way. What do I mean? Are we aware what is happening? Probably, in all probability and I'm not saying will be the end of the world, I'm very much more optimistic here but nonetheless we are obviously approaching the time where large migrations will be population migrations will be necessary. And we are simply lacking proper mechanisms to do this. For example, in some parts of the world the desert is spreading. On the other hand, we learn that because of global warming the whole of Northern Siberia in Russia will probably become much more inhabitable. Who will organize, how will it be done, this large movement of populations? In the past this is nothing new in the history of humanity, it was often done, but how? Through spontaneous migrations which meant millions of death, war and so on and so on. We know that we cannot afford this because of weapons of mass destruction and so on. So we need some kind of a trans-state global mechanism to regulate it. Who will do this and so on? Now you will probably say all this is utopia, it can't be done, it's impossible. Ah here, just to conclude, I have another nice point. Namely did you notice how ambiguous the term "impossible" is today? How ambiguously it is used in our everyday ideological practice? On the one hand, concerning private pleasures, freedoms and scientific achievements, everything is possible. You know we are told, I don't know, soon we will be able to grow grow genetically, to grow organs, to live eternally, to have to download everything, to enhance our physical, psychic activities and so on, whatever. To travel to Moon, whatever you want. So practically almost everything is possible. But did you notice how at the same time, when you touch socio-economic relations, more and more we are taught "Oh sorry but the disintegration of communism was the end of utopias, we maturely accept," you know, the impossibility. It's like to be slightly ironic: they already make in New York they cut your penis, you have two penises, you can screw yourself, turn it around, whatever you all this is possible. But a little bit of a change in health care is not possible, no? That's a catastrophe. And maybe, maybe, maybe, just maybe I'm saying the time has come the the time has come, the time has come to change this. To claim maybe it's wise to allow a little bit more impossibilities in that region. Maybe in spite of what some technological Gnostics are telling us, we will nonetheless never really become like software, just downloading ourselves to from one to another hardware and just survive eternally. But maybe we can do something and we will have to do something at the socio-ecological level. This is what Lacan means by his notion of "real impossible". It's not this opportunistic impossible like "Oh you cannot touch it." No, no, Lacan's point is Lacan's point is not this cheap publicity "everything is possible". But from time to time impossible happens. Impossible means you do something which within the existing universe, ideological universe, appears impossible but while doing it you as it were create its own possibility. You do it as a crazy risky wager and through the act itself it becomes it becomes possible. This is what we need. So let me really conclude now with just a simple duality. On the one there is there are in French two words for "future" and you find them also in German and in my own language Slovene, but as far as I know I don't think you find them in English. It's "futur" and "avenir". And I would like simply to conclude with this: "futur" stands for future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of the tendencies which are already here. While "avenir" points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present. "Avenir" is what is to come venir", not just what will be. For example if you say "the future prime minister", it can be that it will be the same as now. But if you say in French "le Premier Ministre venir", it doesn't mean the same. And I think that this is our fate today. In today's situation, the ultimate horizon of the future is what Dupuy and other theorists of catastrophe call "the dystopian fixed point": some zero virtual zero point of ecological breakdown, global economic chaos and so on and so on. Even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero point is a kind of virtual attractor towards which our reality left to itself tends. The way to combat the catastrophe is through acts which interrupt this drifting towards the fixed point and somehow open it up towards another order. So in this sense I agree with the slogan "no future". There is no future in future, but there is something there is something venir". What does this mean? Let me conclude maybe, if you allow me, just with a funny story. A Jewish friend told me that, you know, the problem of death penalty, that a rabbi had a solution that instead of directly prohibiting death penalty, which is a tricky thing which always involves then "But there are some exceptions," you know like "No death except" and so on, and then of course you always find exceptions. He said that it would be much more productive to do the opposite: to say, of course there should be death penalty, God allowed it, how can we contradict God? But instead of outrightly prohibiting it, you should say, "Oh there must be death penalty, but for every particular situation to find an excuse." You know like: death penalty in principle I'm for it, but in every concrete case I will I will show not here. And maybe this is the thing we should do. This is the intelligent catastrophe theory. We, and now I come nonetheless a little bit closer to the title, we should adopt catastrophe as this virtual point. It's not if we play this cheap freedom in the sense, "Oh it's just one of the possibilities, we will do nothing." We should say "Yes, okay, at the end if we bring the logic of the existing system to the end there is probably some kind of ecological social breakdown and so on." But what I like is to say: okay, this is our destiny, but we can, you know, like the Jewish advice, we can indefinitely postpone it and so on and so on. And at some point we can undermine it in this way. I am for much more I am for much more modest modest attitude here. I claim that the only way to really fight the catastrophe is to admit it as a destiny. But you see my point: not destiny in the sense of natural necessity, but destiny precisely in the sense of symbolic destiny. The existing system if it's left on its own leads towards catastrophe. This doesn't mean that it will really arrive. It's a much nicer dialectical point which is that: destiny is inevitable but what we can change is our very inevitable destiny. You will say I'm crazy here. No, I will give you a convincing example: think about capitalism and predestination. Isn't this a wonderful paradox? Did you notice it that if we accept this common sense idea that and there is a truth in it that Protestantism is the religion of capitalism. If there ever was an active social order, social order which dynamized people's activity we are all caught in frantic activity it's capitalism. Wouldn't you expect then rather the thing to be opposite: if everything is predestined, why would you work all the time? You sit down and masturbate, watch pornography and wait everything is predestined. But you see the nice paradox: precisely because it's predestined you have to be active all the time. Why? I think my friend Fredric Jameson gave me this idea. He told me that he likes to also to this this shocking proposal. He told me that if there is a concept which a Marxist should take from theology it's the concept of predestination. That is the most dialectical concept. It doesn't mean it's pre it is predestined, but and we are not free within this destiny. But we are free much more radically to change destiny itself. You know, I'm saying something similar here to what we always should learn from intelligent conservatives: to what T. S. Eliot said, you remember, when he said that every new work of art changes the entire past. And this is what I'm talking about. This is "le futur", this is the new. For example along these lines you find a wonderful example in Borges. You know when Borges said about Kafka that ordinary writers rely on their predecessors, on but Kafka created his own predecessors. Like for example of course we can say: there are elements for Kafka in Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Milton and so on. But we can see this only once Kafka is here. So in this very dialectical sense destiny and freedom are not exclusive. We are caught in destiny. Destiny would be today's technological capitalist culture. And we cannot simply do it within this space of freedom. But maybe more radically, producing something new, we can change the destiny itself. We have to do it, otherwise we live in a world where I wouldn't like to spend too much time. I'm very grateful for your patience, I was over long. Thanks very much. Please, yes. Hi. Thank you. I wanted to know when you were saying that this knowledge that we have of like global warming, all these types of things, that that knowledge does not actually affect the beliefs we have. What would be the structure of belief and and what would change beliefs fundamentally if knowledge and sort of logical constraints aren't enough to change those beliefs? I well it's a good difficult question but I even I openly admit it, I don't have if I were to have this answer, it would have been the big answer which would have changed everything. I but on the other hand, of course beliefs do change. What I only mean is that I only can give you the theoretical background, which is: this fascinates me more and more. I'm sorry if I will now repeat some old jokes of mine, maybe some of you know it. You know this idea that already Descartes was aware of it, that we believe much more than we think and our beliefs are not some deep Jungian shit deep in us. Our beliefs are out there in our activity. We we enact them. So sorry now to repeat the ultra joke that I repeat in every of my talks: Niels Bohr. You know this old joke probably you know it. He was visited once by a friend in his country house and the friend noticed a horseshoe above the entrance to the house, no? And this is at least in Europe a superstitious item, a horseshoe above the entrance allegedly prevents evil spirits entering the house, no? So he asked Niels Bohr: "Oh my god, I thought you were a scientist. Are you superstitious? Do you believe in this?" And Bohr gave him a perfect answer: "Of course I'm not an idiot, I don't believe in it that it works, but," he said, "I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it," no? Like this is this is our everyday life. We don't believe in democracy, you vote. You don't believe in law, you you know, this is what always fascinates me: how much more we believe in our activity. Here I think Freud and Marx, as I always repeat, are still of an incredible help. Contrary to what people think, Marx was aware of it when he emphasized that all the theory about commodity fetishism doesn't really cancel fetishism in our actual life. So it's not a question of knowledge. Here Marx should be read in a very precise way. I mean, don't misunderstood me, I'm very critical of Marx, I'm not fetishizing Marx and so on. But in his theory of commodity fetishism there is still something worth reading. Namely, where is fetishism for Marx? It is it is not in what we believe. Marx doesn't propose this simplistic duality: haha, money is really just a means of social exchange, social product, but we idiots think money is something magical, a magical object. No, in our actual beliefs we are like British nominalists. We think money is just a sign which gives you an item right to a part of a social product blah blah blah. Fetishist belief is how we use and deal with money in our actual life itself. So when Marx says that ideology means "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es" in German they don't know what they are doing but they are doing it Marx does not mean this stupidity "Oh we are doing something but we don't know what we are doing." No, it's more twisted. What Marx says is: we don't know what illusions we are actually following in what we are doing. It's a very nice structure where consciously you can know the truth. But illusion is not in what you think as opposed to what you do. Illusion is materialized in your social activity, in what you do. And this is to come back to what I quoted Krugman and so on, what he was aware: even if we were to know in where it leads, we would still followed the illusions which are in our acts. So I agree with you: the big question is how, when do you change that? And it's a I I do work on the answer but you know, it's I even doubt if it can be done as a conscious as a conscious action. How should I put it, that you do because here here things are very mysterious in the sense of you know, here I'm this is why I'm so fascinated by Christianity. Because I think that something like this happens in Christianity, in a good sense. The Christian we are all more or less today atheists, but at the same time I claim we maybe believe more than ever, no? We just act on our beliefs. Today's ideology is usually cynical, no? You claim, "Oh I don't care, I don't believe in anything and so on and so on." But in practice you act as if you believe. And I more and more think that maybe even not actually believing in it not only doesn't prevent things from functioning, but it's maybe even a condition of it. This is the traumatic lesson that I learned from my own political past in ex-Yugoslavia. Where you know, I am from Slovenia which is a small shitty republic, everybody knows everybody else, which means no I want to say something very precise which means that for us, general secretary of the party and so on, this wasn't a person you see once a year on the screen, this was a guy whom it was possible to meet on the street walking. So we knew the situation. And you know, I noticed something very weird: that in order to become a member of "nomenklatura" top circle not only you didn't have to take seriously the ruling ideology, but you it was obligatory not to take it seriously. Like you know I had two friends who were kind of naive communists, they really believed in self-management socialism and so on. They lost their jobs because they were perceived by ruling nomenklatura as dangerous. So you see here how to really all this question of belief and so on, it's so it's so much mystified today. I claim it's crucial to take this into account that, you know, the usual image we have is: the ancient, the old people were naive, they believed it, now we are more reflexive. First, I don't think the ancient, whatever we mean by this people, were naive. You know a wonderful book by Paul Veyne, Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, where he says of course they didn't. I mean, they were not stupid. They didn't think if you go on the Mount Olympus you will see Zeus screwing Athena or whatever you mean. They knew so how did they mean it? How did they mean it? The point is that today we believe more. That's why we need this, if I may be a little bit evil in a friendly way towards my theoretical friends, all this deconstructive jargon. For example I'm on very good terms with her personally, but this is my ironic stab at her Judith Butler, she never forgave me for it. Namely you know Judith Butler is an intelligent person whom if you were to ask her what is this I'm now exaggerating ironically she would never have said "this is a lamp". She would said, "If we strategically concede to the essentialist use of language, maybe we can risk the hypothesis just strategically that this is a lamp," no? Now but what is lost here is the fact that all this distantiation was for the ancient already included in saying this is a lamp. They didn't really mean it that this is a lamp. Like again to go back to Paul Veyne, when an ancient Greek said Zeus and so on, he didn't mean it there is real
Thanks very much for all of you coming here, all the distinguished guests and especially for this kind introduction which is too kind. I feel threatened by it. You know why? Because if you were still in that envious awe, that would have been a good sign. My idea is that the moment you are ready to praise a colleague, no matter how excessively you praise him or her, it means you already feel safe and above him, you know. So it means, yeah, yeah, when I was young, basically your message was: yeah, yeah, when I was young I was stupid enough to be duped by me, but now I'm up there. No, I mean, no. And so okay, thanks for claiming that I'm never boring and so on. So you can rely on that. Today I will try to surprise you and be boring. Seriously, I want to do some simple but a little bit more systematic line. Let me begin by Jorge Semprún, survivor of concentration camps in World War II and Spanish writer. He reports in his memoirs how he witnessed the arrival of a truckload of Polish Jews at Buchenwald concentration camp. They were stacked into the freight train, almost to a car, traveling for days without food and water in the coldest winter of the World War II. All had death from frost, except for children kept warm by the others in the center of the bundle of bodies. When the children were emptied from the car, the Nazi guards let their dogs loose on them. Soon only two fleeing children were left. And then a quote from Jorge Semprún: "The little one of the two children began to fall behind. The SS guards were howling behind them and then the dogs began to howl too. The smell of blood was driving them mad. And then the bigger of the two children slowed his pace to take the hand of the smaller. Together they covered a few more yards till the blows of the clubs felled them and together they dropped, their faces to the ground, their hands clasped for all eternity." End of quote. What should not escape our attention is that the freeze of eternity is embodied in the hand as a partial object. While the bodies of the two boys perish, the clasped hands persist for all eternity like the smile of the Cheshire Cat from Lewis Carroll. One can easily imagine how this scene should be filmed. At least I would have filmed it in that way. While the soundtrack renders what goes on in reality the two children are clubbed to death, torn apart by the dogs and so on the image of their hands clasped freezes, immobilized for eternity. While the sound renders temporary reality the brutal murder of the two boys the image renders the eternal real. It is the pure surface of such fixed images, not any deeper meaning, which allows for redemptive moments in the bleak story of the Holocaust. The frozen image which insists over reality rendered by sounds reality stands for a positive ethical utopia of eternity. So that's my first point: this image is real and at the same time virtual. And here I am an unashamed Platonist. I think that Plato just has to be corrected the way Lacan suggests. A Platonic idea is not some deeper substantial reality. It's just, you know, when an unexpected miraculous ethical act occurs, like here, the older boy gathering the courage at the moment practically of dying, of stepping back holding the other guy's hand. This frozen image, this is eternity. This is the real. In a way more real than the vulgar reality. It is real as virtual. What does this mean? To explain a little bit how this works, I want to recall the old Catholic strategy to guard men against the temptation of the flesh. I think that medieval monks developed this if you were tempted too much. They told you: when you see in front of you a voluptuous feminine body, imagine how it will look in a couple of decades, the dried skin, sagging breasts and so on and so on. Or even better: imagine what lurks now already beneath the skin, raw flesh and bones, inner fluids, half-digested food, excrements and so on and so on. Now, far from enacting a return to the real destined to break the imaginary spell of the body, such a procedure I claim equals the escape from the real. The real which announces itself in the seductive appearance of the naked body. That is to say, in the opposition between the spectral appearance of a sexualized body and the repulsive body in decay, it is the spectral appearance which is the real and the decaying body which is reality. We take recourse to the decaying body in order to avoid the deadly fascination of the real, which threatens to draw us into its vortex of jouissance, of excessive pleasure. One should even, I think, turn around the usual opposition of true art and as deep and commercial kitsch as superficial. The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract its subject from its deepest context of historical reality. The same goes maybe for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts at least in the 80s, 90s, maybe not so much today to return to the real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream. This gesture has two main forms, which although opposed, amount to the same. In literature or cinema there are, especially in postmodern texts, self-reflexive reminders that what we are watching is a mere fiction. Like the actors on screen addressing us directly as spectators, thus ruining the illusion of the autonomous space of the narrative fiction. Or the writer directly intervening into the narrative through ironic comments. In theater there are occasional brutal events which awaken us to the reality of the stage. Like when I was young it was fashionable, I don't know, to slaughter a chicken on stage allegedly to shock you, that you are aware that this is just a fiction and so on. But instead of conferring on these gestures a kind of Brechtian dignity, perceiving them it was fashionable to say this when I was young as versions of estrangement, of being liberated of this ideological imaginary fixation, one should rather denounce them for what they are: the exact opposite of what they claim to be, escapes from the real. Desperate attempts to avoid the real of the illusion itself, the real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle. So this is the first point of clarification I think which is very important because, for example, take the classical book, it was written already some years ago I think Hal Foster, no, The Return of the Real. I think the processes he describes in postmodern art, again, are the exact opposite. I hope you got my point. For example, when you are in an erotic trance, the real is the surface, that the real is that absolute compulsion or pulsion pulsion in the sense of drive which transfixes you on the beloved image of your beloved, image of sexual object for all time. And again there is nothing transgressive I claim in saying, "Oh, oh, oh, cool down. Remember," again to repeat my vulgar lines, "beneath the skin there are intestines, shit is collecting there and so on and so on." That's the this is wisdom. I think wisdom is the great enemy of the real. You know, wisdom in the sense of "Oh when the kink slips or whatever or when I don't know, a nice woman whom or boy whom you try to kiss blurps or something like does something vulgar." No, there is nothing sublime going on here. So how do these virtual eternal moments relate to our ethical experience? I think that this dimension as it were of eternity is necessary to supply the big motive of postmodern ethics: the precariousness, fragility, finitude of a human being. The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski wrote that man can be a moral being only insofar as he is weak, limited, fragile and with a broken heart. This is I think the liberal core also of Emmanuel Levinas, to which Judith Butler also subscribes when she focuses on the fragile symbolic status of a human subject caught in the abyss of decentered representations, a being whose very identity hinges on an external inconsistent network. It is this precarious status of subjectivity which, according to Levinas and Butler here they agree accounts for the zero level of all ethics: the absolute call, injunction, emanating from a vulnerable neighbor's face. An ethical subject means to experience oneself as less such responding to this call even if one chooses to ignore it. You already respond to it. From a Christian perspective we should go to the end here. Man is created on God's image. The becoming man of God means that the same goes for God. In Christ God becomes a fragile absolute, precarious, vulnerable, even impotent. The first thing to take note here nonetheless is the basic asymmetry of the situation. The other's face makes an unconditional demand on me. I did not ask for it. I am not allowed to refuse it. And of course what Levinas means by face is not directly the physical face. A face can also be a mask for the face. There is no direct representation of the face. This demand is the real which cannot be captured by any words. It marks the limits of language. Every translation into language already distorts it. It is not simply external to discourse, it is its inner limit. The encounter with the other which opens up the space for discourse, since there is no discourse without the other. It is the real of a violent encounter which throws me off my existence as simple human animal. The irony here is that with Judith Butler, the way she describes this encounter of the other in its precariousness and fragility, mortality and so on, that this description has exactly the same structure as in Alain Badiou the structure of immortality eternity. And Butler is fully justified to emphasize that this ethical injunction, this encounter of the other as fragile and so on, is at its most basic level a reaction to the quasi-automatic reaction to get rid of the other neighbor, to kill him. This urge can be easily accounted for in Lacanian terms as the basic reaction to the encounter of the intrusive neighbor-Thing. A quote from Judith Butler's Precarious Life: "If the first impulse towards the other's vulnerability is the desire to kill, the ethical injunction is precisely to militate against that first impulse." In psychoanalytic terms, that would mean marshalling the desire to kill in the service of an internal desire to kill one's own aggression and sense of priority. The result would probably be neurotic but now listen carefully but it may be that psychoanalysis meets a limit here. For Levinas it is the ethical itself that gets one out of the circuitry of bad conscience, the logic by which the prohibition against aggression becomes the internal conduit for aggression itself. Aggression is then turned back upon oneself in the form of superegoic cruelty. If the ethical moves us beyond bad conscience, it is because bad conscience is after all only a negative version of narcissism and so still a form of narcissism. The face of the other comes to me from outside and interrupts the narcissistic circuit. End of quote. I think that something is terribly wrong here. Psychoanalysis is constrained by Judith Butler to the narcissistic economy of egotistic aggression and its super-ego reversal. And then of course the conclusion imposes itself that the proper dimension of the ethical is outside the scope of psychoanalysis, that as she put it psychoanalysis meets a limit here. Psychoanalysis can only read the ethical dimension as the neurotic masochistic reversal of narcissistic aggressivity. I claim that in a typical philosophical gesture she first brutally simplifies psychoanalysis to make her point. Because for Freud and Lacan, as was convincingly elaborated also by Jean Laplanche, the traumatic encounter of the other as desiring, which interrupts the narcissistic circuit, is precisely the basic experience constitutive of desiring subjectivity. Which is why for Lacan desire is a desire of the other. This is why Lacan's ethics of psychoanalysis stands for his attempt to demonstrate that there is an ethical dimension discovered in the psychoanalytic experience. A dimension which has nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of reduction of the higher ethical sphere to lower neurotic libidinal vicissitudes. Lacan's option is neither the aggressive thrust to annihilate the other nor its reversal into accepting the other as the source of an unconditional ethical injunction. Why not? What one should take note of is that in Levinas it is not me who experiences himself or herself as precarious, it is always the other who is addressing me as precarious. This is why in my very asymmetric subordination to the other's call, in my unconditional responsibility, in my being taken hostage by the other, I assume supremacy over the other. Do we not encounter this wounded precarious other almost daily in the ads for charity which bombard us with images of starved disfigured children crying in agony? Far from undermining the hegemonic ideology, such ads are one of its exemplary manifestations. Butler shows how face itself can function as an instrument of dehumanization, like the faces of evil fundamentalists Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and how the power regime also decides which faces are allowed to be seen as worthy of grief and mourning and which are not allowed to function like this. But it was the pictures, she claims, for example of the children burning or dying from napalm that generated the ethical outrage in the large United States public and helped ending the Vietnam War. What one should nonetheless add is that today the very fragility of the suffering other is part of the humanitarian ideological offensive. Images of sick and starving children from Africa abound on our screens. So again, all this founding of ethics in, you know, this fragility of the other staring back at you and so on has its obverse with which I disagree. It is that: okay, the other is good insofar as it is vulnerable, precarious and so on and so forth. The moment the other doesn't want to play this role but organizes itself, it becomes a terrorist, a fundamentalist and so on and so forth. We all love this weak other, helpless disfigured children whom as Starbucks ads put it, you can save by buying a cup of cappuccino with them and so on and so forth. So again, we live in I will try to develop this later a little bit we live in very interesting ideological times today. You should always bear in mind this that, you know, when I was young it was still the standard leftist ideology which was: we in relatively prosperous Western countries, we live in our ivory tower of false welfare but outside there are starving others and so on and so forth. Today this is the ruling ideology. Bill Gates is saying this all the time: what is the meaning of who cares about computers when people are still starving of diarrhea in Africa and so on and so forth. And this has a precise ideological function, I claim. First it is an emergency state logic to prevent politicization. Because when you listen to Bill Gates and all those guys, the story always goes on: so let us stop with our stupid ideological issues, critique of capitalism, whatever, people are suffering there. Forget about politics and ideology. Let's all get together, private business, state, charity, let's just do something and help them. It is precisely a call to do something and don't think. Don't think, don't politicize, do something. The other thing and I think this is so unique about today's more and more functioning of publicity, which is why I really think that Starbucks is the the example of today's ideology. Is that you remember when we were young, at least that's my case, we still had this split between private consumerism and doing something for the community. Like you know, privately you are spending money blah blah blah, then I don't know, you engage in some charitable activity or so. The uniqueness of Starbucks is a kind of a pseudo-Hegelian dialectical synthesis, no? The uniqueness of Starbucks among others is that you can do both in one and the same gesture. As it were, their as they just read what they say in their ads their coffee is more expensive because the humanitarian moment is included into it. You know as they say: we buy our coffee only organically grown, it's organically grown, we give part of the profit to help the children to get school, to help them to get water. It's as if telling you: you feel guilty about being a consumerist, no problem. Pay a little bit more and the price for it is included into it. So that you know and the message is wonderful pay half a dollar more for coffee and we guarantee you that by being a consumerist, you already do your anti-consumerist duty. You know you you cancel the effects. And it would be nice, in it may sound cynical but I think it's fundamental to read charitable activity, even green, much of green ecological activity like this today. How? The point is not really to help nature, the poor. The point is to make you feel good while you consume. That's the extra price that you pay. For example let me be very brutal. I'm often attacked for this, but do you when people like to buy organic apples, do you really believe that those apples are so much better? I don't think that those half-rotten apples which cost double are no, I think the reason you buy them is for pure you buy ideology there. You know: I pay more but isn't it wonderful, this makes me a member of self-conscious humanity doing something for the Mother Earth, it makes you feel warm, you know, like I do something for Mother Earth, I'm part of the great movement. You are buying this ideological dimension. But nonetheless, let us go on. So the first point being, I I don't like all this logic of, you know, I claim that this priority of the vulnerable precarious other involves a certain constellation which still allows you to retain priority. Second point: I want to focus on what is excluded from this vulnerable other. Here I give all the honor to Jacques Derrida, who in one of his late books on animals, L'Animal que donc je suis The Animal That Therefore I Am, of course the paraphrase of Descartes where he focuses on another gaze which typically is, as Derrida emphasizes, excluded, explicitly excluded by Levinas: the gaze of a wounded suffering animal. Derrida begins his exploration of this phenomenon with reporting on a kind of primordial scene from his own life. After awakening he goes naked to his bathroom where his cat follows him. Then the awkward moment occurs: he is standing in front of the cat which looks at his naked body. Unable to endure this situation he does something: puts a towel around his waist, chases the cat outside, enters the shower and so on. The cat's gaze stands here for the gaze of the other, an inhuman gaze but for this reason all the more the other's gaze in all its abyssal impenetrability. Seeing oneself being seen by an animal is an abyssal encounter of the other's gaze since precisely because we should not simply project onto the animal our inner experience, something is returning the gaze which is radically other. And I think Derrida is right in pointing out that the entire history of philosophy is based upon a disavowal of such an encounter. I remember here I will be very personal seeing years ago a photo of a cat after it was submitted to some lab experiments in a centrifuge, its bones half-broken, its skin half-hairless, her eyes helplessly looking into the camera. This is the gaze of the other disavowed not only by philosophers but by humans as such. One of the few exceptions is here he should be honored Jeremy Bentham, who made the simple proposal: instead of asking "can animals reason and think? Can they talk?" you know all these boring philosophical questions to which then you have all this series of binary oppositions, like: we humans can really talk, animals just exchange signs; we live in a world, animals are worldless; or the Heideggerian version: we relate to death, animals are not really dying; or even Lacan's version: we animals can cheat but only we humans can cheat to cheat. Like what the animal that's Lacan's idea can't do is, let's say you expect me to lie, so I can dupe you by telling the truth, counting on the fact that you will think it's a lie. You know the old story of Freudian joke: "Why are you telling me you're going to Krakow when you're really going to Krakow?" So again, instead of asking this question, Jeremy Bentham claims we should rather ask a simple question: "Can they the animals suffer?" Human industry alone is continuously causing immense suffering of animals which is systematically disavowed. Not only laboratory experiments but special regimes to produce eggs and milk, like turning artificial light on and off to shorten or lengthen the day, use of hormones and so on; pigs who are half-blind and barely able to walk, just fattened fast to be slaughtered and so on and so on. All of us knows what goes on knows what goes on here, know what goes on. But this knowledge has to be neutralized so that we can act as if we don't know. One of the ways to facilitate this ignorance is the Cartesian notion of "animal-machine". Cartesians were warning people against compassion with animals. The idea is that when we see an animal emitting sounds of pain, we should always bear in mind that these sounds do not express any real inner feeling. Animals do not have souls, they are just sounds these sounds generated by a complex mechanism of muscles, bones, fluids and so on that you can clearly see through dissection. The problem is that the notion of animal-machine quickly ends up in La Mettrie's notion of "l'homme machine", of a human being as a machine. If you are a fully committed neurobiologist, exactly the same claim can be made about sounds and gestures emitted by humans when they are in pain. There is no separate interior domain of soul where the pain where the pain is really made. So what should we do here? What if, that's my proposal, the perplexity of a human looking at a cat, what if this perplexity in the animal's gaze tortured animal's gaze is the perplexity aroused by the monstrosity of the human being itself? What if a human sees in the abyss of the wounded animal's gaze, what he sees there reflected is his own monstrosity? Or in Hegelian terms: instead of asking "what is substance for subject? How can subject grasp the substance?" we should ask the obverse question: "what is the rise of the subject for pre-subjective substance?" My favorite Catholic theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton proposes such a reversal precisely apropos men and animals. Instead of asking "what are animals for humans? For our experience?" one should ask "what man is for animals?" In his lesser known essay Everlasting Man, Chesterton makes a wonderful mental experiment along these lines: imagining the monster that man might have seemed at first to the merely natural animals around him. A quote from Chesterton: "The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being, almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. Man has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin. He cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes. He is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals man is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter." Again another distinction of which I'm not so sure. "As if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals man feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique." So what I'm saying is that I'm not definitely not trying to convince you into some New Age attitude of, you know, in the animal gaze we see how animals feel the same as us, understand us, and then you end up with all this bullshit of trees secretly talk among themselves and so on. No, but what I'm saying is that nonetheless, it's much sadder, is that if you turn around the perspective and ask simply yourself not what the not what does it mean for you this gaze of the frightened animal, but what the animal what but what do you see? Do you see in the animal's gaze? I think you see your own monstrosity. You see precisely that which philosophers don't want to see. In short I cannot develop it now, read my next book and so on, the 51st as you have said you see you see what Freud called death drive. You see that excessive violence of which good philosophers were aware. For example, just briefly, Immanuel Kant has a wonderful text small text unknown On Education, where he provides his famous definition of what is man: "Man is an animal who needs a master." And then he explains why. He says that there is a kind of he uses the term which is usually translated as "unruliness" a kind of wild irrational excess of violent freedom in man which animals don't have. This is why animals don't need education. So Kant is here very precise. He he is not saying that it's the nature in man which has to be educated. It's precisely let's call it a nature turned against itself, an excess of wild freedom and maybe this is what animals see in ourselves. I mean, you know this is always the question to ask if you want to be good Hegelians and I am. For example, instead of asking "do Christians treat properly Judaism?" and then you get these rather boring debates of, usually defending Judaism in the sense of "Oh Christian notion of love misses the point, anxiety of God in Judaism." A much more interesting question is: "What were the first Christians in the eyes of the Jewish establishment? What monsters they were. What monstrous excess this was." Always this is the question to be asked. We have a similar example. Do you remember some three years ago I think they some explorers deep in Argentinian jungle did it was reproduced in all media a photo of some tribe which was not yet touched by our so-called civilization, it was the first contact. And you see in color those frightened faces looking at us. We see our monstrosity there. So just we have to be aware of this dimension. But again, where is this monstrosity? Now I come to the crucial part. I think that the next step is to locate properly our monstrosity, which is not the simple egotistic violence and so on whatever, but a more systemic one. What do I mean by this? When in his Christmas message on December the Pope said that if humanity did not learn to overcome its egotism, human history would end in self-destruction, he not only stated a moralistic platitude, but also uttered a clear lie, falsehood. Let us accept that the two principal dangers today are unbridled capitalism and religious fundamentalism. But as even a superficial analysis of fundamentalist subjectivity makes it clear: so-called fundamentalists are not egotists but quite on the contrary, ruthlessly dedicated to a transcendent goal, ready to sacrifice everything, their lives included, for it. As for capitalism, one could also show that its over-expanding circulation cannot be reduced to the capitalist's egotistic striving for more and more profit. A parallel of the structure of the capital with Dawkins' notion of "meme" you know like made based on gene meme can be of some help here. A meme, unit of memory, spreads neither because of its actual beneficial effects upon its bearers say, those who adopt a meme in some intellectual idea unit are more successful in life and thus gain an upper hand in the struggle for survival nor because of its characteristics which make it subjectively attractive to its bearers. Like a computer virus, the meme proliferates simply by programming its own retransmission. What is so unsettling about this notion is that we humans, endowed with minds, wills and an experience of meaning, are nonetheless unwitting victims of a thought contagion which operates blindly, spreading itself like a computer virus. No wonder that when talking about meme, Dennett Daniel Dennett regularly resorts to the same metaphors as Lacan apropos language. In both cases we are dealing with a parasite which penetrates and occupies the human individual, using it for its own purposes. And indeed, does memetics not rediscover the notion of a specific symbolic level which operates outside the standard couple of objective biological facts and subjective experience? In a liminal case, an idea can spread even if in the long term it brings only destruction to its bearers and is even experienced as unattractive. So where is here the parallel with capital? In the same way that meme, misperceived by us subjects as means of our communication, effectively run the show they use us to reproduce and multiply themselves the productive forces which appear to us as means to satisfy our needs and desires, effectively run things. The true aim of the capitalist process of production is the development of productive forces and the satisfaction of our needs is effectively just the means for the development of productive forces. Consequently one should not say that capitalism is sustained by the selfish greed of individual capitalists for more power and wealth. This greed itself is subordinated to the impersonal striving of capital to reproduce and to expand. One is thus almost tempted to say that what we really need is more, not less, egotism. Take the ecological threat. No pseudo-animistic love for nature is needed to act here. Just a long-term egotistic interest. In Lacanian terms, one can determine the distinction between individual greed and this striving of capital to reproduce and to expand as the difference of desire and drive. Apropos the financial breakdown of Paul Krugman made a very nice observation. I quote him: "If we could spin a time machine back to so that people could ask themselves whether to exercise caution or to follow the herd, most of them would still follow the herd in spite of knowing that there will be a break-down." End of quote. This I think is crucial for this memetic automatic functioning of ideology today. The irrationality of capitalist rationalism, the counter-productivity of capitalist productivism are known for a long time. They were analyzed in detail by Frankfurt School and many others. But when the same topic is resuscitated today, it is not just in order to return to the past. Today we are able to add a crucial reflexive twist. Let me quote from a work by French theorist of rationality Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Quote: "What is new and different today is precisely the fact that years later we know that the knowledge we already possessed was in no way sufficient to make us change our behavior. This fact is not a minor detail. It constitutes a key element of the problem. In it was more simple to believe that another world is possible. This is why these years continue to inspire so much nostalgia. At which epoch? At this epoch one could still imagine that the warnings based on the present situation could influence in a positive way the future. Today we know it: the future is not what it was." End of quote. Therein resides the lesson of the failure of the traditional critique of ideology. Knowing is not enough. One can know what one is doing and still do it. The reason is that such knowledge operates under the conditions of fetishist disavowal: "one knows but one doesn't really believe what one knows." So the problem is how to make this knowledge operative. Or to put it in another way: there is no lack of anti-capitalism today. We are even witnessing an overload of the critique of the horrors of capitalism. Books, newspapers, in-depth investigations, TV reports abound on companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, on corrupt bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks have to be saved by public money, of sweat shops where children work overtime and so on and so on. There is however a catch to all this overflow of critique. What is as a rule not questioned in this critique, ruthless as it may appear, is the democratic liberal frame of fighting against excesses. The explicit or implicit goal is to democratize capitalism, to extend the democratic control onto economy through the pressure of the public media, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws and so on. But never to question the institutional frame of the state of law. This remains the sacred cow even for the most radical forms of ethical anti-capitalism like the Porto Alegre, Seattle movement and so on. It is here I think that Marx's key insight remains valid, today perhaps more than ever. For Marx the question of freedom is not located primarily into the political sphere proper. Does a country have free elections? Are the judges independent? Is the press free from hidden pressures? Are human rights respected? And similar list of questions different independent and not so independent Western institutions apply when they want to pronounce a judgment on a country. The key to freedom for Marx is in the apolitical network of social relations, from market to family, where change the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not just a political reform, but a change in social relations which appear apolitical, which means a change which cannot be done through democratic political procedures, elections and in the narrow sense of the term. We do not vote who owns what. We do not vote about relations in a factory. All this is left to processes outside the narrow sphere of the political. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the legal sphere. And again I think this is the tragic limitation we have to overcome. This limitation of the legal-democratic approach was clearly visible in the case of the recent Bay of Mexico oil spill oil spill here in the States. What was unfortunately ridiculous in President Obama's, whom I still deeply respect, reaction was the idea that a private company no matter how rich can pay for the damage of a serious ecological catastrophe which reaches even over the US population and potentially shatters the foundations of our way of life. The search for the guilty agent who should be made legally responsible for the damage is part of our legalistic frame of mind. People can and do sue fast food chains as responsible for their obesity. Ideas circulate about slavery reparations, arguing that compensation is long overdue and so on. What is fundamentally wrong with this logic is not that it's too radical, but that it's not radical enough. The true task is not to get compensation from those responsible, but to change the situation so that they will no longer be in a position to cause damage, or pushed towards this kind of activity which causes damage. I think this is what was lacking in Obama's reaction. You know all this rhetorics "I will kick British Petroleum in the ass and they will I will make them pay." Sorry but when we are talking about such a catastrophe, it reaches beyond this logic. It's ridiculous for me to talk about paying for the first thing to note is that my god even if maybe I don't know BP was a little bit worse than other companies, but it could have happened probably to another company. So the problem is not British Petroleum. The problem is a more global general one and which again compels us to ask fundamental questions about our way of life and so on and so on. And that's our situation today. Risks are exploding everywhere and we rely on scientists to cope with them. Here lies the problem. Scientific experts are supposed to know, but they do not know. The spread of science in our societies has two unexpected features. We more and more rely on experts, even in the most intimate domains of our experience: sexuality, religion. But this all-presence of science transforms scientific knowledge into an inconsistent field of multiple opinions. The symptom here is: did you notice the use of a very weird term for somebody educated in traditional science: "expert opinion"? Sorry but when I was young we ordinary people had opinions. Experts simply told us "this is how it really is". Today we have expert opinions. The paradigmatic category which reveals this helplessness of science is the category of limit value. You know this is a nice mode of scientific fetishization. As if you know we are told if the global warming apropos global warming if the temperature will go out will go out more than degrees, then it's catastrophe. But are we aware that these are purely contingent fixations which really which really don't mean anything? What is the problem here? Our growing freedom and control over nature, our survival itself depend on a series of stable natural parameters which we automatically take for granted: temperature, composition of the air, sufficient water, energy supply and so on. We can do what we want only insofar as we remain marginal enough so that we don't seriously perturb the parameters of the life on earth. This limitation of our freedom becomes palpable with ecological disturbances which disturbances which are the outcome of the very exponential growth of our freedom and power. Our grown growing ability to transform nature around us can destabilize the very basic geological parameters of the life on earth. The fact that humankind is becoming a geological agent on the earth indicates that as some geologists think, a new geological era is beginning. Some scientists call it Anthropocene. For example, with the recent devastating earthquakes in the interior of China. What's the problem there? There are good reasons to think that the main course or at least the unexpected strength of these earthquakes was the construction of the gigantic Three Gorges dams nearby, which resulted in large new artificial lakes. The additional pressure on the surface of the earth seems to influence the balance of the underground cliffs and thus contribute to the earthquake. So even something as elementary as the earthquake could be included into the scope of phenomena influenced by human activity. But wait a minute, the situation is even more complex. I'm now I'm now not preaching the idea that we humans are guilty for everything and so on. This is also a too easy way out. We like to be guilty since if we are guilty then it all depends on us, we pull the strings of the catastrophe so we can also save ourselves by simply changing our lives. What is really difficult for us to accept is that we are reduced to a purely passive role of an impotent observer who can only sit and watch what his fate will be. To avoid such a situation we are prone to engage in frantic obsessive activity. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food. I claim that we have here an interesting structure of again fetishist disavowal. I claim that in ecology we have two modes of disavowal. The one mode of disavowal is: we don't take the catastrophe seriously. It's the "je sais bien mais quand même" I know very well but, in the sense of: I know very well there is global warming but let's face it, we don't in our guts how do you put it? we don't really believe it. You know some stupid scientist I admire them is telling you "Oh global warming," you agree with him, then you go out you see the sun, the the sun, the wind, the trees and you say "My god can this really change?" It cannot. The conclusion from this is pretty paradoxical I claim. It is that: I'm here totally opposed to so-called "deep ecology" which claims we are too alienated by science, you know reducing nature to an object of scientific manipulation domination, we need to regain our being beings of the earth, breathing together with our environs. No, I claim that's the source of the catastrophe. We can do horrible things we don't know probably through science manipulation, but we are not ready to accept the consequences precisely because we are still as it were wired to the earth. I think we need more denaturalization. We have to bear in mind the utter fragility of nature. We have to get radically rid of this of the idea of nature as, you know, Mother Earth kind of caught in some kind of harmonious circulation, stability, homeostasis and so on which we humans with our hubris have undermined. I mean earth is a horror, nature is a horror also. Think about oil. Can you imagine what kind of catastrophes there must have been on our earth so that we have oil supplies and so on? Now the message of this is not: oh since there is no natural balance we can do whatever we want. No, no, no, I am for radical ecology, but the point is that the situation is much more tense. We cannot even fall back on some firm standard, like we just have to return to that point. There is no balance. This is I think the lesson of the good dialectical Darwinists like Stephen Jay Gould. There is no evolution, there is no natural balance, nature itself is a series nature itself is a series of catastrophes. So again, one problem with ecology is that: we know it, there is a threat of catastrophe, but we don't really accept it. We in a way don't believe it. The situation is here the same as the one wonderfully described by Bergson and others at the outset of World War I. I mean politicians, everyone was drawing attention to it for years from 1880s that the big European war is near, will explode. But people really didn't believe that it can happen. So that's one disavowal. But there is also the opposite disavowal, which also is interesting: namely the opposite one. We know that with some catastrophes, even if they are man-made, we as individuals cannot really do anything. But we are not ready to accept this totally passive position. So we like to engage in what I like to call pseudo-activity. You know I think that, sorry if this hurts you, but I think that often when we recycle and buy organic food, it's a little bit like, you know, when you have a baseball or soccer match, you watch it at home on TV and you shout "Yes do it!" in this kind of superstitious activity as if, you know, you are doing something to help your guys win. You know it's stupid but you do it. I claim it's also it's also that dimension, precisely this pseudo-activity. So to conclude, if you just allow me another five minutes. The first my first concluding point is that things are much too serious for such recycling games. Humanity should get ready to live in a much more plastic nomadic way. What do I mean? Are we aware what is happening? Probably, in all probability and I'm not saying will be the end of the world, I'm very much more optimistic here but nonetheless we are obviously approaching the time where large migrations will be population migrations will be necessary. And we are simply lacking proper mechanisms to do this. For example, in some parts of the world the desert is spreading. On the other hand, we learn that because of global warming the whole of Northern Siberia in Russia will probably become much more inhabitable. Who will organize, how will it be done, this large movement of populations? In the past this is nothing new in the history of humanity, it was often done, but how? Through spontaneous migrations which meant millions of death, war and so on and so on. We know that we cannot afford this because of weapons of mass destruction and so on. So we need some kind of a trans-state global mechanism to regulate it. Who will do this and so on? Now you will probably say all this is utopia, it can't be done, it's impossible. Ah here, just to conclude, I have another nice point. Namely did you notice how ambiguous the term "impossible" is today? How ambiguously it is used in our everyday ideological practice? On the one hand, concerning private pleasures, freedoms and scientific achievements, everything is possible. You know we are told, I don't know, soon we will be able to grow grow genetically, to grow organs, to live eternally, to have to download everything, to enhance our physical, psychic activities and so on, whatever. To travel to Moon, whatever you want. So practically almost everything is possible. But did you notice how at the same time, when you touch socio-economic relations, more and more we are taught "Oh sorry but the disintegration of communism was the end of utopias, we maturely accept," you know, the impossibility. It's like to be slightly ironic: they already make in New York they cut your penis, you have two penises, you can screw yourself, turn it around, whatever you all this is possible. But a little bit of a change in health care is not possible, no? That's a catastrophe. And maybe, maybe, maybe, just maybe I'm saying the time has come the the time has come, the time has come to change this. To claim maybe it's wise to allow a little bit more impossibilities in that region. Maybe in spite of what some technological Gnostics are telling us, we will nonetheless never really become like software, just downloading ourselves to from one to another hardware and just survive eternally. But maybe we can do something and we will have to do something at the socio-ecological level. This is what Lacan means by his notion of "real impossible". It's not this opportunistic impossible like "Oh you cannot touch it." No, no, Lacan's point is Lacan's point is not this cheap publicity "everything is possible". But from time to time impossible happens. Impossible means you do something which within the existing universe, ideological universe, appears impossible but while doing it you as it were create its own possibility. You do it as a crazy risky wager and through the act itself it becomes it becomes possible. This is what we need. So let me really conclude now with just a simple duality. On the one there is there are in French two words for "future" and you find them also in German and in my own language Slovene, but as far as I know I don't think you find them in English. It's "futur" and "avenir". And I would like simply to conclude with this: "futur" stands for future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of the tendencies which are already here. While "avenir" points more towards a radical break, a discontinuity with the present. "Avenir" is what is to come venir", not just what will be. For example if you say "the future prime minister", it can be that it will be the same as now. But if you say in French "le Premier Ministre venir", it doesn't mean the same. And I think that this is our fate today. In today's situation, the ultimate horizon of the future is what Dupuy and other theorists of catastrophe call "the dystopian fixed point": some zero virtual zero point of ecological breakdown, global economic chaos and so on and so on. Even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero point is a kind of virtual attractor towards which our reality left to itself tends. The way to combat the catastrophe is through acts which interrupt this drifting towards the fixed point and somehow open it up towards another order. So in this sense I agree with the slogan "no future". There is no future in future, but there is something there is something venir". What does this mean? Let me conclude maybe, if you allow me, just with a funny story. A Jewish friend told me that, you know, the problem of death penalty, that a rabbi had a solution that instead of directly prohibiting death penalty, which is a tricky thing which always involves then "But there are some exceptions," you know like "No death except" and so on, and then of course you always find exceptions. He said that it would be much more productive to do the opposite: to say, of course there should be death penalty, God allowed it, how can we contradict God? But instead of outrightly prohibiting it, you should say, "Oh there must be death penalty, but for every particular situation to find an excuse." You know like: death penalty in principle I'm for it, but in every concrete case I will I will show not here. And maybe this is the thing we should do. This is the intelligent catastrophe theory. We, and now I come nonetheless a little bit closer to the title, we should adopt catastrophe as this virtual point. It's not if we play this cheap freedom in the sense, "Oh it's just one of the possibilities, we will do nothing." We should say "Yes, okay, at the end if we bring the logic of the existing system to the end there is probably some kind of ecological social breakdown and so on." But what I like is to say: okay, this is our destiny, but we can, you know, like the Jewish advice, we can indefinitely postpone it and so on and so on. And at some point we can undermine it in this way. I am for much more I am for much more modest modest attitude here. I claim that the only way to really fight the catastrophe is to admit it as a destiny. But you see my point: not destiny in the sense of natural necessity, but destiny precisely in the sense of symbolic destiny. The existing system if it's left on its own leads towards catastrophe. This doesn't mean that it will really arrive. It's a much nicer dialectical point which is that: destiny is inevitable but what we can change is our very inevitable destiny. You will say I'm crazy here. No, I will give you a convincing example: think about capitalism and predestination. Isn't this a wonderful paradox? Did you notice it that if we accept this common sense idea that and there is a truth in it that Protestantism is the religion of capitalism. If there ever was an active social order, social order which dynamized people's activity we are all caught in frantic activity it's capitalism. Wouldn't you expect then rather the thing to be opposite: if everything is predestined, why would you work all the time? You sit down and masturbate, watch pornography and wait everything is predestined. But you see the nice paradox: precisely because it's predestined you have to be active all the time. Why? I think my friend Fredric Jameson gave me this idea. He told me that he likes to also to this this shocking proposal. He told me that if there is a concept which a Marxist should take from theology it's the concept of predestination. That is the most dialectical concept. It doesn't mean it's pre it is predestined, but and we are not free within this destiny. But we are free much more radically to change destiny itself. You know, I'm saying something similar here to what we always should learn from intelligent conservatives: to what T. S. Eliot said, you remember, when he said that every new work of art changes the entire past. And this is what I'm talking about. This is "le futur", this is the new. For example along these lines you find a wonderful example in Borges. You know when Borges said about Kafka that ordinary writers rely on their predecessors, on but Kafka created his own predecessors. Like for example of course we can say: there are elements for Kafka in Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Milton and so on. But we can see this only once Kafka is here. So in this very dialectical sense destiny and freedom are not exclusive. We are caught in destiny. Destiny would be today's technological capitalist culture. And we cannot simply do it within this space of freedom. But maybe more radically, producing something new, we can change the destiny itself. We have to do it, otherwise we live in a world where I wouldn't like to spend too much time. I'm very grateful for your patience, I was over long. Thanks very much. Please, yes. Hi. Thank you. I wanted to know when you were saying that this knowledge that we have of like global warming, all these types of things, that that knowledge does not actually affect the beliefs we have. What would be the structure of belief and and what would change beliefs fundamentally if knowledge and sort of logical constraints aren't enough to change those beliefs? I well it's a good difficult question but I even I openly admit it, I don't have if I were to have this answer, it would have been the big answer which would have changed everything. I but on the other hand, of course beliefs do change. What I only mean is that I only can give you the theoretical background, which is: this fascinates me more and more. I'm sorry if I will now repeat some old jokes of mine, maybe some of you know it. You know this idea that already Descartes was aware of it, that we believe much more than we think and our beliefs are not some deep Jungian shit deep in us. Our beliefs are out there in our activity. We we enact them. So sorry now to repeat the ultra joke that I repeat in every of my talks: Niels Bohr. You know this old joke probably you know it. He was visited once by a friend in his country house and the friend noticed a horseshoe above the entrance to the house, no? And this is at least in Europe a superstitious item, a horseshoe above the entrance allegedly prevents evil spirits entering the house, no? So he asked Niels Bohr: "Oh my god, I thought you were a scientist. Are you superstitious? Do you believe in this?" And Bohr gave him a perfect answer: "Of course I'm not an idiot, I don't believe in it that it works, but," he said, "I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it," no? Like this is this is our everyday life. We don't believe in democracy, you vote. You don't believe in law, you you know, this is what always fascinates me: how much more we believe in our activity. Here I think Freud and Marx, as I always repeat, are still of an incredible help. Contrary to what people think, Marx was aware of it when he emphasized that all the theory about commodity fetishism doesn't really cancel fetishism in our actual life. So it's not a question of knowledge. Here Marx should be read in a very precise way. I mean, don't misunderstood me, I'm very critical of Marx, I'm not fetishizing Marx and so on. But in his theory of commodity fetishism there is still something worth reading. Namely, where is fetishism for Marx? It is it is not in what we believe. Marx doesn't propose this simplistic duality: haha, money is really just a means of social exchange, social product, but we idiots think money is something magical, a magical object. No, in our actual beliefs we are like British nominalists. We think money is just a sign which gives you an item right to a part of a social product blah blah blah. Fetishist belief is how we use and deal with money in our actual life itself. So when Marx says that ideology means "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es" in German they don't know what they are doing but they are doing it Marx does not mean this stupidity "Oh we are doing something but we don't know what we are doing." No, it's more twisted. What Marx says is: we don't know what illusions we are actually following in what we are doing. It's a very nice structure where consciously you can know the truth. But illusion is not in what you think as opposed to what you do. Illusion is materialized in your social activity, in what you do. And this is to come back to what I quoted Krugman and so on, what he was aware: even if we were to know in where it leads, we would still followed the illusions which are in our acts. So I agree with you: the big question is how, when do you change that? And it's a I I do work on the answer but you know, it's I even doubt if it can be done as a conscious as a conscious action. How should I put it, that you do because here here things are very mysterious in the sense of you know, here I'm this is why I'm so fascinated by Christianity. Because I think that something like this happens in Christianity, in a good sense. The Christian we are all more or less today atheists, but at the same time I claim we maybe believe more than ever, no? We just act on our beliefs. Today's ideology is usually cynical, no? You claim, "Oh I don't care, I don't believe in anything and so on and so on." But in practice you act as if you believe. And I more and more think that maybe even not actually believing in it not only doesn't prevent things from functioning, but it's maybe even a condition of it. This is the traumatic lesson that I learned from my own political past in ex-Yugoslavia. Where you know, I am from Slovenia which is a small shitty republic, everybody knows everybody else, which means no I want to say something very precise which means that for us, general secretary of the party and so on, this wasn't a person you see once a year on the screen, this was a guy whom it was possible to meet on the street walking. So we knew the situation. And you know, I noticed something very weird: that in order to become a member of "nomenklatura" top circle not only you didn't have to take seriously the ruling ideology, but you it was obligatory not to take it seriously. Like you know I had two friends who were kind of naive communists, they really believed in self-management socialism and so on. They lost their jobs because they were perceived by ruling nomenklatura as dangerous. So you see here how to really all this question of belief and so on, it's so it's so much mystified today. I claim it's crucial to take this into account that, you know, the usual image we have is: the ancient, the old people were naive, they believed it, now we are more reflexive. First, I don't think the ancient, whatever we mean by this people, were naive. You know a wonderful book by Paul Veyne, Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, where he says of course they didn't. I mean, they were not stupid. They didn't think if you go on the Mount Olympus you will see Zeus screwing Athena or whatever you mean. They knew so how did they mean it? How did they mean it? The point is that today we believe more. That's why we need this, if I may be a little bit evil in a friendly way towards my theoretical friends, all this deconstructive jargon. For example I'm on very good terms with her personally, but this is my ironic stab at her Judith Butler, she never forgave me for it. Namely you know Judith Butler is an intelligent person whom if you were to ask her what is this I'm now exaggerating ironically she would never have said "this is a lamp". She would said, "If we strategically concede to the essentialist use of language, maybe we can risk the hypothesis just strategically that this is a lamp," no? Now but what is lost here is the fact that all this distantiation was for the ancient already included in saying this is a lamp. They didn't really mean it that this is a lamp. Like again to go back to Paul Veyne, when an ancient Greek said Zeus and so on, he didn't mean it there is real
Norman Finkelstein
Zeus. This distance was included. And the reason we have to add all these deconstructionist qualifications, no, like half the terms often in Derrida are in quotation marks, is that basically we are much like for example Umberto Eco has a nice text about love, where he said: till now it was possible to say to your lover "I love you." Now we are so afraid that we need
Zeus. This distance was included. And the reason we have to add all these deconstructionist qualifications, no, like half the terms often in Derrida are in quotation marks, is that basically we are much like for example Umberto Eco has a nice text about love, where he said: till now it was possible to say to your lover "I love you." Now we are so afraid that we need
Slavoj Žižek
a kind of qualifying distantiation, like "as a poet would have put it, I love you," "maybe I even love you" or whatever. But Eco makes a very intelligent remark where he says: but in the old days when somebody said I love you, she meant all this. These distances were included. So I claim today we are not more cynical, sophisticated. We are much more naive. Afraid of this literal belief, which is why we had explicitly to include all these qualifications and so on and so on. So again the precise question that you are asking, I think that I think that some more radical it's not a matter of simply criticizing ideology, raising consciousness etc., there has to be beliefs, these radical beliefs only change through some radical social transformations and so on. It's not a matter of enlightening people or whatever. And here I am very split by the phenomenon of today's religious fundamentalism. Like the idea being, "but they do really believe." First, I have my doubts. I spoke with some guy who is specialized in so-called "terrorist psychology." And he told me it's much more complex. Like if you take a typical terrorist who is ready to bomb himself. No, they are again not idiots. Nobody really believes, you know, what we read in our media: oh if I bomb myself I awaken in paradise, virgins. First, every Arab knows that this is a mistranslation, no? In original Quran, the term is the term for the best white grape dry raisins, no? And this was mistranslated as virgins. So if you want to be cynical, I like to imagine a terrorist, oh I blow myself and then up there he says, "Okay here you have the the raisins," no? And he says "Ah, sorry, I want back, a mistake," no? You know he this psychologist told me a very interesting thing: that the true reasoning of a suicide terrorist is more something like "I am not sure that I believe, I can prove it to myself by exploding myself." It's a kind of crazy wager in order to calm his own doubt. Who on the other hand, fundamentalists I claim are doing something horrible. You know what drew my attention? This fact which maybe explains it a little bit. Did you notice how many fundamentalists or these religious sects use the words like science, like "Christian Science" and so on. This would be an interesting point what science they mean. But I will immediately end it with this. But my point is that effectively this is why many fundamentalists do not have problems with science. They I think they are not believers, they know it in some sense. In the sense that for them, for example, God God appeared reincarnated, all the miracles, this has to be treated like scientific facts. They they treat divi and this is a horrible thing. This is then no longer no longer a religious belief. Authentic religion more is what my friend, an Italian priest, told me. We talked about that Turin shroud, no? And he told me: the most horrible thing that you can imagine for the church is to discover that this really is Christ's shroud. Why? My god, you know what's the first thing to do then? Give me a little bit of blood and let us check it through DNA analysis who is Jesus Christ's father really, no? Then you probably get some religious sorry some Egyptian slave screwing Mary and so on. But he and he told me "No, no, no, we don't want it, that you must have this uncertainty." For him this was a blasphemy to take, for example, immaculate conception as a fact. But I read some fundamentalists who claim no problem, they even have a hypothesis because if we do this, they claim because God doesn't have a DNA, it will be simply Mary's DNA redoubled. You but you know what I mean, like for authentic belief, which is why I think that belief and atheism do not exclude each other. Belief, for example if you believe in human dignity. Isn't there something totally crazy in it? It's a kind of real of it means people are fat, thin, stupid, evil. I nonetheless believe all of them have a certain dignity and so on. This is belief at its purest. It's always something absurd in an authentic ethically engaged belief. And it's not a question even of of religion and so on. I like to quote for example tragic lines, everybody knows them Anne Frank precisely when she become aware of all the horrors of the Nazis. She wrote in her diary, "but nonetheless I believe there is something eternal and good in every human being." This is belief at its most authentic. It's absolutely counter-factual and so on, no? So again I just wanted I know I didn't answer you. I hope I did just confuse the issues a little bit. Thank you. Let's do it one more that it will not be this Stalinist-Stalinist dialogue. Ah now you want me to do this Zen Buddhist bullshit like you ask me a complex question I say "clap with one hand" or some wise thing like that. Please. Okay. Um, thanks. This last question? Oh. Um, I'll I'll put two. First first simple, I would love to hear your take on the tea party in America just in general, particularly as it relates to the expert culture and I see it often kind of a fight against experts. Second question is on ethics in your original points. You brought up some nice critiques of Butler and Levinas and the kind of inauguration of ethics as the other sort of throwing the self out of joint. But then you brought in this interesting counter-critique that the positing of a universal suffering other by Levinas and Butler is the same thing that liberals do with the other and that whole thing. My question is: what's the best alternative? How should we see the other in the ethical situation? I'm opposed even to notion of otherness. I'm for some kind of universal I'm very old-fashioned here. I want to rehabilitate the notion of universal solidarity which is not this abstract humanist solidarity, it's a solidarity of struggle. The you know what is for me the other? Like I was in India. Let me tell you a story which will amuse you, sorry for two minutes. I had a wonderful time in India where you know they have now a big Maoist rebellion, Naxalites, no? And it confirmed I encountered one of them. I was with my friend in a taxi and we talked about politics and the chauffeur didn't understand English but understood a word here and there and asked in their language, not in English, my friend who was with me, like I heard the word Naxalite, you know the Maoist rebellion, like is your friend meaning me for or against? And my friend said for, basically, which wasn't a wise thing to say, in India they are outcasts. But then the guy was fascinated and it's it's a very mystical thing that happened, really almost sacred, and stopped the car and asked me a riddle. And the riddle was pure dirty, incredibly dirty obscenity, which I loved of course. He asked me, you know the best known image of Gandhi, where late Gandhi in his almost antique robe, he with the big stick, he walks from one village to the other, no? What does this photo mean? Now I knew I solved the riddle. I knew it must be something extremely dirty. I tried to read it in a dirty and I guessed it. I told him: "It's obvious. It's a kind of anal sex call like I need a young guy to fuck me into my ass if not I will have to do it myself with the stick." The guy was fascinated. He stepped out of the car, embraced me, he told me "You are one of us." And ah, ah, ah, wait a minute, now comes the miracle. And then we started to talk. Not exchanging dirty jokes. Just serious political talk. But you see my point: this exchange of obscenity was a kind of a moment of solidarity, you know? In the sense of we are not politically correct bullshitters, you know who do that "Ooh I like your folkloric dances, I like your whatever," no? To have authentic relation of the other you have to have this moment of like well this was our, as Lacan would have put it, surplus enjoyment, "plus-de-jouir". And then we didn't need it. Again it wasn't then an orgy of dirty jokes. We talked and and what I liked is that how we were totally different cultures. If you were to pursue this boring UNESCO topics, you know, our culture, your culture, they are both great, let's look at what we have in common. It's nothing. But we discovered a common struggle. It worked all of a sudden, all these multicultural bullshit problems: "Do I really understand you? How do I know that I really understand your culture and so on?" I claim this is a pseudo-problem. Of course I don't, but you yourself also don't understand your culture and I don't understand mine. Where we understand each other is in the struggle, the fight. That's the universality. I again, so what bothers me there with all the fragility stuff: of course there is fragility. But I like to combine this fragility with this almost Platonic moment of heroism. We may be fragile and so on but not in the literal sense but in this virtual sense we are eternal. And at that I count on those sublime moments. So again this would have been this would have been my answer. I wouldn't like to live in a world where the ultimate ethical horizon is a broken fragile perplexed other. I like one step more where you then don't redeem the other, patronize the other even less in these fake politically correct reversals. Liberals love this: to feel guilty in front of the other. "We are doing something wrong, we pretend to be out of colonialism but really," you know. And then this: "If I
a kind of qualifying distantiation, like "as a poet would have put it, I love you," "maybe I even love you" or whatever. But Eco makes a very intelligent remark where he says: but in the old days when somebody said I love you, she meant all this. These distances were included. So I claim today we are not more cynical, sophisticated. We are much more naive. Afraid of this literal belief, which is why we had explicitly to include all these qualifications and so on and so on. So again the precise question that you are asking, I think that I think that some more radical it's not a matter of simply criticizing ideology, raising consciousness etc., there has to be beliefs, these radical beliefs only change through some radical social transformations and so on. It's not a matter of enlightening people or whatever. And here I am very split by the phenomenon of today's religious fundamentalism. Like the idea being, "but they do really believe." First, I have my doubts. I spoke with some guy who is specialized in so-called "terrorist psychology." And he told me it's much more complex. Like if you take a typical terrorist who is ready to bomb himself. No, they are again not idiots. Nobody really believes, you know, what we read in our media: oh if I bomb myself I awaken in paradise, virgins. First, every Arab knows that this is a mistranslation, no? In original Quran, the term is the term for the best white grape dry raisins, no? And this was mistranslated as virgins. So if you want to be cynical, I like to imagine a terrorist, oh I blow myself and then up there he says, "Okay here you have the the raisins," no? And he says "Ah, sorry, I want back, a mistake," no? You know he this psychologist told me a very interesting thing: that the true reasoning of a suicide terrorist is more something like "I am not sure that I believe, I can prove it to myself by exploding myself." It's a kind of crazy wager in order to calm his own doubt. Who on the other hand, fundamentalists I claim are doing something horrible. You know what drew my attention? This fact which maybe explains it a little bit. Did you notice how many fundamentalists or these religious sects use the words like science, like "Christian Science" and so on. This would be an interesting point what science they mean. But I will immediately end it with this. But my point is that effectively this is why many fundamentalists do not have problems with science. They I think they are not believers, they know it in some sense. In the sense that for them, for example, God God appeared reincarnated, all the miracles, this has to be treated like scientific facts. They they treat divi and this is a horrible thing. This is then no longer no longer a religious belief. Authentic religion more is what my friend, an Italian priest, told me. We talked about that Turin shroud, no? And he told me: the most horrible thing that you can imagine for the church is to discover that this really is Christ's shroud. Why? My god, you know what's the first thing to do then? Give me a little bit of blood and let us check it through DNA analysis who is Jesus Christ's father really, no? Then you probably get some religious sorry some Egyptian slave screwing Mary and so on. But he and he told me "No, no, no, we don't want it, that you must have this uncertainty." For him this was a blasphemy to take, for example, immaculate conception as a fact. But I read some fundamentalists who claim no problem, they even have a hypothesis because if we do this, they claim because God doesn't have a DNA, it will be simply Mary's DNA redoubled. You but you know what I mean, like for authentic belief, which is why I think that belief and atheism do not exclude each other. Belief, for example if you believe in human dignity. Isn't there something totally crazy in it? It's a kind of real of it means people are fat, thin, stupid, evil. I nonetheless believe all of them have a certain dignity and so on. This is belief at its purest. It's always something absurd in an authentic ethically engaged belief. And it's not a question even of of religion and so on. I like to quote for example tragic lines, everybody knows them Anne Frank precisely when she become aware of all the horrors of the Nazis. She wrote in her diary, "but nonetheless I believe there is something eternal and good in every human being." This is belief at its most authentic. It's absolutely counter-factual and so on, no? So again I just wanted I know I didn't answer you. I hope I did just confuse the issues a little bit. Thank you. Let's do it one more that it will not be this Stalinist-Stalinist dialogue. Ah now you want me to do this Zen Buddhist bullshit like you ask me a complex question I say "clap with one hand" or some wise thing like that. Please. Okay. Um, thanks. This last question? Oh. Um, I'll I'll put two. First first simple, I would love to hear your take on the tea party in America just in general, particularly as it relates to the expert culture and I see it often kind of a fight against experts. Second question is on ethics in your original points. You brought up some nice critiques of Butler and Levinas and the kind of inauguration of ethics as the other sort of throwing the self out of joint. But then you brought in this interesting counter-critique that the positing of a universal suffering other by Levinas and Butler is the same thing that liberals do with the other and that whole thing. My question is: what's the best alternative? How should we see the other in the ethical situation? I'm opposed even to notion of otherness. I'm for some kind of universal I'm very old-fashioned here. I want to rehabilitate the notion of universal solidarity which is not this abstract humanist solidarity, it's a solidarity of struggle. The you know what is for me the other? Like I was in India. Let me tell you a story which will amuse you, sorry for two minutes. I had a wonderful time in India where you know they have now a big Maoist rebellion, Naxalites, no? And it confirmed I encountered one of them. I was with my friend in a taxi and we talked about politics and the chauffeur didn't understand English but understood a word here and there and asked in their language, not in English, my friend who was with me, like I heard the word Naxalite, you know the Maoist rebellion, like is your friend meaning me for or against? And my friend said for, basically, which wasn't a wise thing to say, in India they are outcasts. But then the guy was fascinated and it's it's a very mystical thing that happened, really almost sacred, and stopped the car and asked me a riddle. And the riddle was pure dirty, incredibly dirty obscenity, which I loved of course. He asked me, you know the best known image of Gandhi, where late Gandhi in his almost antique robe, he with the big stick, he walks from one village to the other, no? What does this photo mean? Now I knew I solved the riddle. I knew it must be something extremely dirty. I tried to read it in a dirty and I guessed it. I told him: "It's obvious. It's a kind of anal sex call like I need a young guy to fuck me into my ass if not I will have to do it myself with the stick." The guy was fascinated. He stepped out of the car, embraced me, he told me "You are one of us." And ah, ah, ah, wait a minute, now comes the miracle. And then we started to talk. Not exchanging dirty jokes. Just serious political talk. But you see my point: this exchange of obscenity was a kind of a moment of solidarity, you know? In the sense of we are not politically correct bullshitters, you know who do that "Ooh I like your folkloric dances, I like your whatever," no? To have authentic relation of the other you have to have this moment of like well this was our, as Lacan would have put it, surplus enjoyment, "plus-de-jouir". And then we didn't need it. Again it wasn't then an orgy of dirty jokes. We talked and and what I liked is that how we were totally different cultures. If you were to pursue this boring UNESCO topics, you know, our culture, your culture, they are both great, let's look at what we have in common. It's nothing. But we discovered a common struggle. It worked all of a sudden, all these multicultural bullshit problems: "Do I really understand you? How do I know that I really understand your culture and so on?" I claim this is a pseudo-problem. Of course I don't, but you yourself also don't understand your culture and I don't understand mine. Where we understand each other is in the struggle, the fight. That's the universality. I again, so what bothers me there with all the fragility stuff: of course there is fragility. But I like to combine this fragility with this almost Platonic moment of heroism. We may be fragile and so on but not in the literal sense but in this virtual sense we are eternal. And at that I count on those sublime moments. So again this would have been this would have been my answer. I wouldn't like to live in a world where the ultimate ethical horizon is a broken fragile perplexed other. I like one step more where you then don't redeem the other, patronize the other even less in these fake politically correct reversals. Liberals love this: to feel guilty in front of the other. "We are doing something wrong, we pretend to be out of colonialism but really," you know. And then this: "If I
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say
say
Slavoj Žižek
this, I say Black, it's still incorrect. Then I say African-American, it's still
this, I say Black, it's still incorrect. Then I say African-American, it's still
unknown
incorrect, how should I say?" These are obscene pseudo-problems. For example,
incorrect, how should I say?" These are obscene pseudo-problems. For example,
Slavoj Žižek
you now call them them those whom we called once Indians you call them
you now call them them those whom we called once Indians you call them
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Native Americans. The encounter of a lifetime another one that I had is in Missoula, Montana. I met one of them and he told me "I hate the term Native Americans, as if you know we are nature, you white are culture or what." He told me he preferred absolutely
Native Americans. The encounter of a lifetime another one that I had is in Missoula, Montana. I met one of them and he told me "I hate the term Native Americans, as if you know we are nature, you white are culture or what." He told me he preferred absolutely
Slavoj Žižek
to be called Indian. And he gave me a wonderful reason. He said, "At least if I'm called Indian, my name is a monument to white man's stupidity, you know, who thought they are in India," no? "I prefer to be called Indian than Native American" like authentic close to nature and so on. He was a wise guy. He totally he said that the worst racism today is this, you know, "Native Americans are holistic in dialogue with nature" and so on. This he said, "No, we screwed it up, we killed more buffaloes than you white guys did when you arrived." We he tried to convince me "No, we already screwed up everything in the..." it was a wonderful a wonderful experience of how he got it, how false is this, you know, white it's as if white men now that we are no longer white man's burden in the sense of redeeming all others, we still want to be at the top. If we cannot be the top good guys, we want at least be the top bad guys. Like you know, "You other races or whatever, you may have difficult lives but you are not really guilty, it's always still our imperialist manipulations." Which basically makes us feel good. It sounds honest but basically it means: you are too stupid even to be really bad, you know, it's really us who are doing it. No, here okay I stop. I hope that made you feel better. Thanks very much. I'm sorry if I spoke too much, but please, I will tell you something... Can I conclude with something which is really important? No, no, very, very short. You know, more in Europe than in United States, we live in really I think dark times are approaching. In Europe we have now what is called "Bologna reform" of higher education all around Europe. In Europe, which is a horror. It basically means that higher education should be reoriented towards, as they put it, social use. They want to turn us into expert knowledge. You know, their idea is that what universities should produce are experts. Like you know there is unrest and then we have psychologists, sociologists who will advise the police what to do. We have ecological... But sorry, this is not thinking. Thinking is not to solve problems, thinking is to reformulate the problems. Like to think about: is this truly a problem? Where is the mystification? And this is why the good news I don't want to flatter you and all of us is that today, to pursue purely useless academic thinking, it's becoming more and more quite a subversive thing. So don't feel bad, don't get caught into this pseudo-working-class but really extremely arrogant ideological blackmail that if you are doing useless studies you should feel guilty and so on. No, we our way of thinking precisely in these new situations, who knows what it will mean, biogenetics and so on. My we are needed more than ever. Not to provide solution but simply to get what is happening. So don't feel bad in the sense of no none of this guilt, you know, like I hate this pseudo-it's manipulation like we are spending here time studying while children are starving in Africa and all that stuff, no? Trying to make you guilty, no? Don't fall into that. Do your pure useless studies and you will produce something good. Good. On that note of affirmation, let's applaud once more. Thank you.
to be called Indian. And he gave me a wonderful reason. He said, "At least if I'm called Indian, my name is a monument to white man's stupidity, you know, who thought they are in India," no? "I prefer to be called Indian than Native American" like authentic close to nature and so on. He was a wise guy. He totally he said that the worst racism today is this, you know, "Native Americans are holistic in dialogue with nature" and so on. This he said, "No, we screwed it up, we killed more buffaloes than you white guys did when you arrived." We he tried to convince me "No, we already screwed up everything in the..." it was a wonderful a wonderful experience of how he got it, how false is this, you know, white it's as if white men now that we are no longer white man's burden in the sense of redeeming all others, we still want to be at the top. If we cannot be the top good guys, we want at least be the top bad guys. Like you know, "You other races or whatever, you may have difficult lives but you are not really guilty, it's always still our imperialist manipulations." Which basically makes us feel good. It sounds honest but basically it means: you are too stupid even to be really bad, you know, it's really us who are doing it. No, here okay I stop. I hope that made you feel better. Thanks very much. I'm sorry if I spoke too much, but please, I will tell you something... Can I conclude with something which is really important? No, no, very, very short. You know, more in Europe than in United States, we live in really I think dark times are approaching. In Europe we have now what is called "Bologna reform" of higher education all around Europe. In Europe, which is a horror. It basically means that higher education should be reoriented towards, as they put it, social use. They want to turn us into expert knowledge. You know, their idea is that what universities should produce are experts. Like you know there is unrest and then we have psychologists, sociologists who will advise the police what to do. We have ecological... But sorry, this is not thinking. Thinking is not to solve problems, thinking is to reformulate the problems. Like to think about: is this truly a problem? Where is the mystification? And this is why the good news I don't want to flatter you and all of us is that today, to pursue purely useless academic thinking, it's becoming more and more quite a subversive thing. So don't feel bad, don't get caught into this pseudo-working-class but really extremely arrogant ideological blackmail that if you are doing useless studies you should feel guilty and so on. No, we our way of thinking precisely in these new situations, who knows what it will mean, biogenetics and so on. My we are needed more than ever. Not to provide solution but simply to get what is happening. So don't feel bad in the sense of no none of this guilt, you know, like I hate this pseudo-it's manipulation like we are spending here time studying while children are starving in Africa and all that stuff, no? Trying to make you guilty, no? Don't fall into that. Do your pure useless studies and you will produce something good. Good. On that note of affirmation, let's applaud once more. Thank you.