Christian Atheism
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2017-06-16 · 1:06:39 · 8,801 words
religion-theologyhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisphilosophy-generalcommunism-socialismecology-climatecinema-art-cultureethicssubjectivityhistory
Žižek argues for what he calls 'Christian atheism' as the ethical stance appropriate to the present moment, using the triple anniversary of the October Revolution, Marx's Capital, and the Shanghai Commune as a political-historical frame. He develops a reading of Protestantism centered on predestination and radical freedom, arguing that genuine freedom is experienced as fate, a position he links to Hegel, Kant, Lacan, and Schelling. He then engages critically with new materialism and object-oriented ontology, using the limit-case of describing Auschwitz as an assemblage to expose the hidden anthropocentrism in such approaches. The talk closes with the claim that the 'divine dimension' is best understood materialistically as a void or absence, an irreducible sense that something is wrong with our reality, illustrated by a Danish thriller film clip.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 16
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The ethical stance Žižek advocates: reading Christianity in a radically atheist way, where God truly dies on the cross and does not return, leaving humanity condemned to freedom and pure goodness without any divine guarantee.
Implicitly invoked through the Shanghai Commune and Capital discussions, where abstract theoretical categories (value, commune, class) take on real historical force.
The Orthodox Christian notion of human deification, man becoming God through Christ's incarnation, which Žižek contrasts with the Protestant view that incarnation is a one-way, terminal event.
The Protestant doctrine that salvation is decided in advance by God, which Žižek reinterprets not as fatalistic passivity but as the engine of radical freedom: not knowing one's fate compels incessant ethical activity.
Luther's insistence that God's will is radically opaque to us, which Žižek reads materialistically as meaning God himself is 'crazy' and does not know what he is doing, a bar on claiming to be an instrument of divine or historical necessity.
Borrowed from Schelling: a free choice that is not made in time but constitutes the subject's very being, experienced phenomenologically as fate or compulsion rather than deliberate selection.
The structure whereby a free contingent act, once performed, is experienced retroactively as necessary fate: we freely decide and then discover we could not have done otherwise.
The symbolic order invoked in the discussion of structural psychoanalysis: the system that supposedly runs the game and overdetermines the subject, against which Žižek insists on radical subjective responsibility.
The psychoanalytic/structuralist thesis that the subject is wholly determined by past traumas and the symbolic order, which Žižek accepts as a fact while insisting it cannot serve as an excuse for ethical non-responsibility.
Drawn from Deleuze/Latour/Bennett: a flat ontological network of heterogeneous actants (human, animal, material) in interaction, which Žižek both credits and critiques for concealing a latent anthropocentrism.
Latour/Bennett's term for any participant in an assemblage regardless of whether it is human or nonhuman, invoked by Žižek to describe new materialist ontology.
as “inhuman gaze”
The perspective external to human concerns from which reality is viewed as pure material process, Žižek uses it to expose the paradox that only humans can adopt it, making it the most arrogant anthropocentrism.
as “reversed white man's burden”
Žižek's label for the liberal self-humiliation that attributes all Third World violence to colonialism, which secretly reinstates European subjects as the only ones capable of moral judgment.
The tradition of defining God only through negation; Žižek reappropriates it to mean not that God exceeds description but that God simply is the void, the absence at the heart of reality.
as “void as divine dimension”
Žižek's materialist reinterpretation of God: the divine is not a positive being beyond reality but the empty place, the irreducible sense that something is terribly wrong with our world.
Marx's formula for religion, which Žižek extends to identify two additional contemporary opiates: 'the people' (as populist phantasm) and literal drugs/opium for certain intellectuals.
Stories he reaches for 5
Žižek proposes describing Auschwitz as a flat assemblage of actants, Nazis, inmates, worms eating corpses, fire, in which all are equally agents; he immediately identifies this as an 'utterly obscene vision' that is a phenomenological impossibility for ethical human beings.
“I'm even tempted… to write a short text on describing Auschwitz as an assemblage. Let's forget about human suffering, let's look Auschwitz as a collaboration between humans, victims, worms, fire there.”
Mao argued that even if US atom bombs blew up China, it would 'hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole', Žižek uses this as a case of pseudo-Kantian Olympian objectivism that requires speaking from an impossible divine standpoint.
“Even if the US atom bombs were so powerful that when dropped on China they would make a hole right through the earth… that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole.”
During the Cultural Revolution, workers and students in Shanghai took Mao's call to 'attack the headquarters' literally, overthrew local Party offices, and ignored the army, whereupon Mao sent the army to crush them in the biggest battle of the Cultural Revolution, with tens or hundreds of thousands dead.
“residents of Shanghai, workers and students, decided to take literally Mao's call… they took this literally and simply overthrew offices of local Communist Party, ignored the army and took over.”
If you see a child drowning and know that saving it will not affect your predestined salvation either way, you save the child purely out of goodness, no financial logic of merit. Žižek uses this to contrast Lutheran ethics with Catholic soteriology.
“you see a child drowning… and you know very well that it will not help your salvation in any way if you help the child or not, so it's only goodness that makes you do it.”
In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett describes a trash site as a living process of interacting actants, rotting trash, worms, insects, abandoned machines, chemical poisons, each playing an active role; Žižek credits the insight while exposing its hidden anthropocentrism.
“a complex interaction of rotting trash, worms, insects, abandoned machines, chemical poisons and each plays each element actant plays its own never purely passive role.”
Works invoked 14
Capital book
Cited as one of three anniversary events of 2017 (150th anniversary of first edition); described as having 'outlined the theoretical foundations of the Communist Revolution'.
Psycho film
Referenced only in the joke about its absurd retitling in Portugal ('The Son Who Was His Own Mother').
The Book of Job other
Read through Zapffe's lens as revealing God's 'qualitative baseness'; used to support the thesis of divine impenetrability and the Protestant vision of a God who doesn't know what he's doing.
The Idiot (novel) book
Discussed via Rowan Williams's reading: Prince Myshkin as a figure of sincere but disastrously misplaced goodness, 'wrong goodness'.
Žižek's forthcoming book (MIT Press, October), mentioned as containing a full chapter on the themes discussed in this talk.
North by Northwest film
Mentioned as an example of logical foreign retitling: in Germany it was called 'Der unsichtbare Dritte' (The Invisible Third).
Shoah film
Žižek finds it 'very suspicious ethically' overall, but grants one correct insight: that direct footage of the most brutal Auschwitz moments should be destroyed because such phenomena cannot be representationally integrated.
Danish thriller used as the central cinematic illustration of Christian-atheist ethics: the atheist detective's self-sacrifice and the girl's refusal to kill embody pure goodness without divine guarantee.
Generally called 'wonderful' but criticized at one point: Arendt was wrong to take Eichmann's self-description as a good Kantian seriously.
Freiheitsschrift essay
Schelling's text on the Essence of Human Freedom; cited (via Heidegger's endorsement) for the idea that God produced Logos to save himself from his own madness.
Vibrant Matter book
The trash site description is credited as a genuine insight in presenting an inhuman view of material interaction, but the book is ultimately critiqued for covert anthropocentrism.
Mentioned approvingly as part of the new wave of Danish crime fiction/television Žižek enjoys.
Schelling's fragments on the Ages of the World; cited alongside Freiheitsschrift for the same theological-cosmological argument about God's self-production through Logos.
Žižek likes Williams's book on Dostoevsky despite not liking Dostoevsky; uses it for the definition of 'wrong goodness' (Myshkin) and the account of the divine as irreducible incongruity.
People invoked 29
Quoted on theosis: 'He was incarnate so that we might be made God', cited as representative of the Orthodox position Žižek contrasts with Protestantism.
Quoted on theosis and deification of human nature as warrant for hope, part of the Orthodox theological framework Žižek sets up to contrast with the Protestant position.
Jane Bennett negative
Credited with genuine insight in Vibrant Matter's description of a trash site as living assemblage, but critiqued for unknowingly reinstalling anthropocentric privilege: only humans can access the universal view she advocates.
Umberto Eco positive
Credited with starting the fashion of medieval detective novels with The Name of the Rose, in Žižek's digression on detective fiction across historical periods.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Cited briefly for already noting that there are multiple 'opiates of the people' beyond religion.
Thomas Müntzer negative
Acknowledged as correctly criticizing Luther's social conservatism, but critiqued for an instrumental, quasi-totalitarian politics that claimed to be a direct expression of divine will.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited alongside Freud for the position that overdetermination by the unconscious cannot be used as an ethical alibi, you remain radically responsible for your psychic necessity.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Called 'my beloved'; cited for the formulation that the ultimate moment of divinity is when God himself becomes an atheist, on the cross.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Called a 'genius' but criticized: his aim to construct a perception 'before or after man' and his 'iridescent chaos of a world before man' is deployed by Žižek as the limit-case of impossible objectivism, illustrated by the Auschwitz assemblage thought experiment.
Mentioned approvingly as part of the Scandinavian crime fiction wave Žižek enjoys.
Adolf Eichmann negative
Used as the counter-example to genuine Kantian ethics: Eichmann wrongly externalized duty as Führer's orders rather than fully assuming subjective responsibility for what his duty was.
Paul Claudel positive
Called 'my favorite French conservative Catholic'; cited for the insight that the ultimate secret of Christianity is not 'God will help you' but 'we can only save God'.
Mentioned humorously as being 'even now mad' at Žižek for some of his lines criticizing Mao's philosophical position.
Mentioned as the originator of the 'actant' terminology taken up by Jane Bennett in assemblage theory.
Rowan Williams positive
Described as a 'good friend' (met twice); cited for his book on Dostoevsky, especially his reading of Prince Myshkin as a figure of 'wrong goodness' and his definition of the divine dimension as an irreducible sense of incongruity.
Claude Lanzmann negative
Žižek finds his Shoah 'very suspicious ethically' overall, but credits him for one insight: that direct footage of the most brutal Auschwitz moments should be burned, some phenomena cannot be integrated into our representational reality.
Mao Zedong negative
Credited with triggering the Cultural Revolution partly to reassert control; criticized philosophically for his Olympian cosmological argument that nuclear annihilation would be cosmically trivial, an impossible external standpoint.
Hannah Arendt negative
Generally admired ('wonderful Eichmann in Jerusalem') but criticized for taking seriously Eichmann's self-description as a good Kantian; Žižek argues Eichmann violated Kant precisely by using duty as an external excuse.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Cited on the idea that God produced Logos to save himself from his own madness (Freiheitsschrift, Weltalter) and on the concept of a transcendental atemporal free decision experienced as fate.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Mentioned briefly as the obvious Danish religious thinker whose paradoxical formulas ('God is not something we relate to, God is relating itself') approach a form of paradoxical materialism.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Generally disagreed with, but credited once for the point that the Holocaust is so horrible that framing it as merely a sub-chapter of class struggle diminishes its horror, the 'theological dimension' signals events that exceed normalization.
Meister Eckhart positive
Mentioned alongside Hegel as part of the mystical tradition where God had to create Logos to bring history into himself.
Karl Marx positive
Capital cited as laying the theoretical foundations for Communist Revolution; Marx's formula 'religion is the opium of the people' is engaged with critically (Žižek extends it) but remains a reference point.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek's 'favorite'; cited extensively for the reading of crucifixion (God of beyond dies), the logic of secrets being secrets for their possessors, and the dialectics of predestination and freedom. Called 'my favorite' multiple times.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited on 'Du kannst, denn du sollst' (you can because you must), on not externalizing duty, and on the ethical-cosmological antinomy: science shows we are dust yet ethics requires acting as if the universe was created for our struggle.
Max Weber positive
Cited approvingly for the thesis linking Protestantism and capitalism; Žižek uses predestination to explain Weber's paradox that a religion of fate produced the most frenetically active social system.
Martin Luther positive
Žižek sides with Luther on divine impenetrability and against instrumentalizing politics as God's will; credits him with the key insight that predestination enables pure, disinterested goodness.
Peter Wessel Zapffe positive
Obscure Norwegian philosopher; cited for his reading of Job as confronting God's 'qualitative baseness', a cosmic cave-dweller, supporting Žižek's thesis of divine impenetrability.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky positive
Žižek says he does not like Dostoevsky but likes Williams's book about him; The Idiot is discussed via Williams's reading of Myshkin as producing catastrophe through sincere but misplaced goodness.
What it argues
Christian atheism as materialist ethicsProtestantism, predestination, and radical freedomThe dialectic of necessity and contingencyNew materialism and hidden anthropocentrismGod's self-abandonment and the void as divine dimensionThe Shanghai Commune and the limits of Communist revolutionAssemblage theory and the obscenity of radical objectivity
Dialectical moves 10
“We overcome our separation from God not by rejoining God but by realizing that this separation is already separation of God from himself.”
Alienation from the divine is not a human defect to be remedied but the very structure of divinity itself, God is already self-divided.
“God does not abandon us—abandonment is just another name for freedom; shift the perspective.”
What looks like divine desertion is, from another angle, the very gift of radical freedom.
“The ultimate moment of divinity is the moment when God himself becomes an atheist.”
The cry of dereliction on the cross ('Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani') is not a human failure but the highest divine act, God's self-negation.
“There are no good news; good news are only a different shift of perspective on the bad news.”
The Gospel does not promise relief from abandonment but invites a reframing of abandonment itself as the human condition under radical freedom.
“We have a fate but we retroactively create this fate: I freely decide something and once I decide it it retroactively becomes necessary.”
Freedom and necessity are not opposed: the truly free act is the one experienced as inevitable after the fact.
“You are predestined by fate but you are responsible even for that—you are much more radically responsible.”
Overdetermination does not diminish responsibility but intensifies it: necessity cannot serve as an alibi.
“The more new materialism tries to be objective at the level of content, the more it privileges us as the only species which has access to this universality.”
The gesture of humbling humanity before a flat ontology secretly re-crowns the human as the sole subject capable of the universal view.
“Predestination is the religious background of capitalism precisely because not knowing your fate pushes you to incessant activity.”
The doctrine that seems to counsel passivity is in fact the motor of ceaseless worldly striving, the opposite of what common sense would predict.
“God is just this absence—the empty place—the basic divine dimension is this void in the sense of: something is terribly wrong with this reality.”
The divine is not a positive entity beyond the world but the negative mark of the world's incompleteness.
“Far from being a weapon against fundamentalism, an Olympian cosmological objectivism (Mao's atomic-war argument) itself presupposes the very transcendent standpoint it claims to renounce.”
Mao's appeal to cosmic indifference requires occupying a divine-external viewpoint that is philosophically unavailable.
Claims 18
asserts
Christian atheism—reading Christianity materialistically so that God truly dies and does not return—remains the ethical stance most adequate to today's predicament.Christian atheism as contemporary ethics
asserts
The deepest insight of Protestantism is that God became man and that is the end: there is no further resurrection, the Holy Ghost is already the resurrection occurring in the Christian community.Protestant theology vs. Orthodox theosis
asserts
What dies on the cross is not an earthly representative of God but God himself—the God of beyond—leaving only human freedom.the meaning of crucifixion
asserts
We overcome our alienation from God not by reuniting with God but by realizing that this separation is also God's self-alienation.alienation from the divine
asserts
It is not we who need God's help but God who needs our help: we alone can save God.the direction of divine dependence
asserts
Predestination, properly understood, produces more radical freedom than ordinary free choice: knowing one's fate is decided but not knowing what it is compels incessant ethical activity.predestination and freedom
asserts
Max Weber's thesis about Protestantism and capitalism is explained by predestination: not knowing one's fate propels one to ceaseless worldly activity rather than passive resignation.Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism
asserts
Psychoanalytic overdetermination, like predestination, cannot be used as an excuse: one is radically responsible even for one's psychic necessity.responsibility under psychoanalytic overdetermination
rejects
Eichmann was not a Kantian but violated Kant's ethics precisely by using duty as an external determination and excuse rather than fully assuming responsibility for it.Eichmann's self-description as a good Kantian
rejects
New materialist and object-oriented ontologies, despite claiming to dethrone the human, covertly reinstall humanity as the only agent with access to universal self-knowledge.new materialism and deep ecology
rejects
Mao's Olympian argument that nuclear annihilation of China would be cosmically trivial is philosophically incoherent because it requires speaking from an impossible external standpoint.Mao's cosmological minimization of human catastrophe
reframes
Describing Auschwitz as a neutral assemblage of actants is not false as a description but is ethically obscene—an impossible phenomenon that cannot be integrated into human ethical reality.assemblage theory applied to the Holocaust
asserts
The divine dimension is best understood materialistically as a void—the irreducible sense that something is wrong with our reality—rather than as a positive transcendent entity.the nature of divinity / negative theology
reframes
Religion as opium of the people should be extended: the people themselves (populist phantasm) and literal drugs are equally contemporary opiates.Marx's formula on religion as opium
asserts
The Shanghai Commune of 1967 represents the most radical attempt to realize communist vision—direct people's power without party or army—and its violent suppression by Mao's own army is the crucial, underexamined event of 20th century Communism.the Shanghai Commune and Communist history
rejects
The Catholic linkage of salvation to good works introduces a logic of financial transaction into ethics, whereas Lutheran predestination makes possible truly disinterested goodness.Catholic soteriology of works
rejects
Academia should not be a safe space but should confront students with brutality; trigger warnings are antithetical to the university's task.trigger warnings and safe spaces in academia
asserts
Luther was right against Müntzer to insist on divine impenetrability and to prohibit claiming one's political movement as a direct instrument of divine will.Luther vs. Müntzer on politics and divine will
Quotes 15
“God became man and that's it. Nothing more. Everything already happens in the incarnation. What needs to be added is just a shift of perspective.”Slavoj Žižek · Protestant finality of incarnation / Christian atheism
“God abandons us—I'll say but that's another name for freedom. You should just shift the perspective.”Slavoj Žižek · divine abandonment as freedom
“The ultimate moment of divinity is that moment… when God himself becomes an atheist.”Slavoj Žižek · God's self-negation on the cross
“Good news are only a different shift of perspective on the bad news. We remain abandoned by God.”Slavoj Žižek · Christian atheism: no redemption, only reframing
“The secret of Christianity is not trust God, things may look bad but God will help you. No, it's the opposite, God needs our help. We only we can save God.”Slavoj Žižek · reversal of divine dependence
“Knowing that your fate is decided but not knowing what your fate is pushes you to incessant activity.”Slavoj Žižek · predestination as engine of activity / Weber thesis
“We have a fate but we retroactively create this fate. Like I freely decide something and once I decide it it retroactively becomes necessary.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive necessity / freedom as fate
“You are predestined by fate but you are responsible even for that. You are much more radically responsible.”Slavoj Žižek · radical responsibility under overdetermination
“Job finds himself confronted with a world ruler of grotesque primitiveness, a cosmic cave-dweller, a braggart and blusterer… What is new is God's qualitative baseness.”Slavoj Žižek · God's qualitative baseness / divine impenetrability
“The secrets of ancient Greeks, secrets for us, were already secrets for ancient Greeks themselves.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel on opacity of the ancient / secrets of divinity are secrets to divinity
“You don't even allow us to be genuinely evil. You treat us as such innocent children that whenever we do something wrong it must be your guilt.”Slavoj Žižek · reversed white man's burden / hidden racism of self-humiliation
“We have two other opiums of the people. For populists their opium is people themselves… The other opium of the people is opium.”Slavoj Žižek · extension of Marx's formula: people and drugs as opiates
“God is just this absence, the empty place… The basic divine dimension is this void… something is terribly wrong with this reality.”Slavoj Žižek · void as divine dimension / materialist negative theology
“Academia is not a safe place… Academia on the contrary should confront you with brutality.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of trigger warnings / academia's task
“Christ as a figure is not an active redeemer, it's just this impassive gaze which gives you the readiness to do it without any guarantee in faith.”Slavoj Žižek · Christ as impassive gaze / Christian atheism
Transcript 3 turns
Slavoj Žižek
What I want to say is that uh I think that what I call Christian atheism is still the ethical stance which fits today's predicament. Okay. Uh let me begin with a simple observation. Those who follow obscure spiritual cosmological speculations have for sure heard of one of the most popular topics in this domain, you know all these mythical stories that when three planets, usually Earth, Moon and the Sun, find themselves among along the same axis then some big cataclysmic event takes place, the whole order of the universe is momentarily thrown out of joint and the universe has to find a new balance. You remember that it wasn't taken seriously but the panic of where ideas to some Maya old Maya predictions precisely because I think Earth, Moon and Sun were in the same line, it's not good. And I think that politically something like this holds for this year which is a triple anniversary. In we do not celebrate only the centenary of the October Revolution but also the 150th anniversary of the first edition of Marx's Capital, and maybe the most tragic event, the 50th anniversary of the so-called Shanghai Commune when in the climactic moment of the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, it's a wonderful moment, maybe the crucial moment of 20th century Communism, residents of Shanghai, workers and students, decided to take literally Mao's call, you know when Mao said uh attack the headquarters, you don't need neither the Party nor the army, people should take over, well they took this literally and simply overthrew offices of local Communist Party, ignored the army and took over. And that was the crucial point because then Mao had to send the army. And it's an extremely tragic event because this was then, people don't know this, the biggest battle of the Cultural Revolution. Forget about, okay they were tragic, all those scenes, you know Red Guardists pulling their beard, terrorizing professors, intellectuals, all that. No, it was the battle for Shanghai when the army turned on the very revolutionaries and one don't know how many, the idea is that it goes into tens if not hundreds of thousands of dead people. But I I think this event is fascinating because it's, I don't like this big question was Mao sincere or not, at a certain level he was not. It's clearly that he triggered the Cultural Revolution to regain his full power in the army, sorry in the state. But it doesn't matter if Mao was manipulating. Things run out of control. Ordinary workers took it seriously. Let's have directly the rule of the commune, we don't need the Party, we don't need the army and so on and it went too far. So I think these three events mark the three stages of the Communist movement. First, Capital by Marx outlined the theoretical foundations of the Communist Revolution. Then the October Revolution was the first successful attempt to overthrow bourgeois state and build a new socio-economic order. And then the Shanghai Commune stands for the most radical attempt to immediately realize the most daring aspect of the Communist vision, the abolishment of state power and the imposition of direct people's power organized as a network of local communes. It didn't work and of course I will not answer the question today, namely the big question what went wrong. I think, that's my hypothesis, what went wrong with this cycle, perhaps the answer is to be sought and people don't talk about it but for me at least as a Christian atheist is the key date. Don't you know that today we have another, we have four planets in a line, another mega anniversary. is the years anniversary of when Martin Luther put on that door the Theses, Protestantism. And I still think that the Protestantism is the key, the greatest religious event that you can imagine. Why? Let me begin in a very simplified way, but I'm not totally bluffing because I presented a version of this text in a theological at a theological colloquium in Cambridge and it went well, what can I say? So I'm not totally bluffing, I'm not totally bluffing. Let me begin by this triad of Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Protestantism. The way I see it, maybe I'm wrong, central to the Orthodox tradition is the notion of theosis, of man becoming like God. Or to quote St. Athanasius of Alexandria, quote, "He (Christ or God) was incarnate so that we might be made God." End of quote. What should otherwise seem absurd, that fallen sinful man may become holy as God is holy, has been made possible through Jesus Christ who is God incarnate. And then uh St. Maximus the Confessor wrote in the same vein, again a quote, "A sure warrant for looking with hope to deification of human nature is provided by the incarnation of God, which makes man God to the same degree as God himself became man. Let us become the image of the one whole God, bearing nothing earthly in ourselves so that we may consort with God and become gods, receiving from God our existence as gods." End of quote. This Orthodox formula, God became man so that man uh becomes God is I think what Protestantism radically rejects. The deepest insight of Protestantism, although it's implicit already in the Bible, is that to put it very simply, God became man and that's it. Nothing more. Everything already happens in the incarnation. What needs to be added is just a shift of perspective. I think that in authentic Christian vision there is no resurrection to follow. Holy Ghost already is resurrection. Resurrection happens in the Christian community. God dies and he remains dead. We are condemned to freedom. Holy community is not, there is I read here Christianity in a radically atheist way. Holy Ghost is not some kind of a synthesis, God, man and then they are brought together. No, with crucifixion precisely that type of God, you know this primitive idea up there is an great old guy with a long beard who takes care of us so don't worry too much, ultimately we are taken care of. That's what Hegel, my favorite, puts it nicely. He says what dies on the cross is not an earthly representative of God, it's God himself, that God of beyond. So what remains we in our freedom. And that would be the properly Christian trick. I say God gave us all freedom and so on. He said but he didn't, God abandoned, he just creates us and let us alone, God abandoned us. I'll say but that's another name for freedom. You should just shift the perspective. Or to put it in another way, and I'm here I'm basing my reading on some very good theologians from my beloved Chesterton onwards. Uh in other religions to simplify it very much you have God, man. We have fallen from God, so the idea is let's climb back through some stupid spiritual exercises whatever you want. Like let's become let's get rid of our sinful nature, let's go back to God. The Christian solution is a totally different one. It is this one. Okay let's say you an ordinary believer find yourself totally abandoned by God. So what's the way out of it? Not okay let me do some good works or self-punishment to become clean. No, it's that uh at that point when I'm totally abandoned by God, I identify with Christ who finds himself in exactly the same position with the famous "Father, Father, have you forsaken me?" So that it's a wonderful insight that uh you should see in a very Hegelian way how our separation we overcome our separation from God not by rejoining God but by realizing that this separation is separation also of God from himself. That at that point we are divine because again the ultimate moment of divinity is that moment of as Gilbert Keith Chesterton put it, the moment when God himself becomes an atheist. You know because remember on the cross when Christ says "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani," Father, he for a brief moment becomes a non-believer. Which is a crazy moment. You find this in no other religion. In other religions you do find man who abandon God. Where do you find God who abandons himself? And again the Christian solution is not you suffer you are low but don't worry there are good news. No, there are no good news. Good news are only a different shift of perspective on the bad news. We remain abandoned by God. God will not come to save us as even conservative theologians who are not stupid knew, like Paul Claudel, my favorite French conservative Catholic. He says very nicely that the the ultimate secret of Christianity is not trust God, things may look bad but God will help you. No, it's the opposite, God needs our help. We only we can save God. In other words uh the divine and some theosophic speculation, I will not go into it we don't have time to lose here, uh developed this in a wonderful way where they claim that the secret of reincarnation of incarnation is not that God did something heroic to redeem us. God, God without incarnation is not fully God. God incarnates himself in man to become fully God. That's the solution of one of my favorite apart from Hegel German idealist Schelling who developed in his Heidegger claimed, no, that these two texts especially Freiheitsschrift, Schelling's text on the Essence of Human Freedom and later Weltalter, fragments on the Ages of the World, he developed this how God produced Logos, gave birth to Logos son, Schelling literally said this, to save himself of his own from his own madness. It was if I may be cynical a kind of create you know psychiatrists say if you are caught in psychosis you need creative therapy you know through work well that's what God did and uh some very if you think I'm bluffing some very intelligent Protestant theologians came to the same conclusion like a Norwegian friend of mine gave me a reference and he translated some parts to me because it's a not a well-known book famous only in Norway. The guy's name is Peter Wessel Zapffe, a book on Protestantism, God. It's a reading of Book of Job. And you know what's his reading? What does Job discover when he encounters God, when he realizes that God is doing very strange things, punishing him for nothing and so on. Here is a quote from Zapffe: "Job finds himself confronted with a world ruler (God) of grotesque primitiveness, a cosmic cave-dweller, a braggart and blusterer, almost agreeable in his total ignorance of spiritual culture. What is new for Job is not God's greatness in quantifiable terms, that we knew fully in advance. What is new is God's qualitative baseness." And I think this is masked inside also of the big Protestant topic of predestination. You mean God was simply playing a brutal game with us, he didn't care. God decided in advance you are redeemed you are lost totally irrespective of what we are doing. And I think this is the right line. I think that as intelligent Protestants saw it, this Catholic way of linking our salvation to our good works introduces immediately an element of handling of of financial transaction. I see that child drowning, should I do it or not? Well I may gain salvation so fuck it why not do it, you know. It makes our good deeds part of a almost I would say financial investment into future, no? But as Luther put it very intelligently, if there is predestination then the solution is pure goodness because you see a child drowning, sorry for this pathetic example, and you know very well that it will not help your salvation in any way if you help the child or not, so it's only goodness that uh it's only goodness that makes you that uh that makes you do it. Uh so uh sorry we are here, yes. So uh let's go on here. What uh in this position where the solution is not some kind of a reunification of God with man. We overcome our alienation of God through a simple realization that God is already alienated from himself, self-abandon. I like to apply here to divinity Hegel's wonderful reading of ancient Greek statues which are impenetrable for us. Like what does the Sphinx mean? And you know what's Hegel's formula. The secrets of ancient Greeks, secrets for us, were already secrets for ancient Greeks themselves. And Hegel's theology is precisely this one that the the secrets of divinity are secrets for for also for divinity itself. This is the old mystical topic. Hegel goes there into that line you find it in Meister Eckhart and all other guys that God had to create Logos to bring history into God himself. What happens on our earth, our theological activity decides the fate of God himself in a way. It's the other way around, it's not that God decides. No, we in our struggles, we fight for the fate of God himself. So how to bring this, and now it comes maybe it will be a little bit difficult, the proper theological point. I think I improvised a little bit already in my classes about this. I think does this mean that Protestantism simply abolishes our freedom? Everyone who knows Luther, and I don't have the time to go into it but I have it written a detailed analysis of the tension between Martin Luther and of course Thomas Müntzer, the great theologian of the German Peasant Revolt. Maybe this will surprise you but I am almost more on the early Luther's side. He was right Müntzer in criticizing Luther for his conformism, taking the side of the masters and so on. But Müntzer I think comes all too close then to this perverse instrumental position which comes close to totalitarianism. Because Luther was right and this was his greatest theological insight to insist on divine impenetrability which read in materialist way doesn't mean God knows what he is doing, we just cannot penetrate it, it means that quote from Zapffe, God is crazy, doesn't know it. So uh Luther warned against precisely what we call today fundamentalism. Any position of an agent historical who my God what is happening here, I'm getting superstitious, yesterday it was one at least they are not black cats and we will survive there. Uh but it's the Maoist movement one divides into two, yesterday there was one, okay sorry let's go on that that Luther comes too close to this seeing his political movement as direct instrument of the divine will. And this is what Luther is right to prohibit. He insists on this radical impenetrability. There is predestination but we never know what is predestination. Like our lives are decided in advance but we cannot ever know it. So it's absolutely prohibited to claim I'm an instrument of the divine will like the Stalinist Communists in a different way, historical necessity of progress towards Communism runs through me. No, we cannot do it. And I think this is authentic freedom. This idea of my life is predestined but I don't know what it is, so this terrible struggle to make the right decision. This because you know here common sense doesn't work. Because common sense would tell us why do you worry if there is predestination, sit down and masturbate and watch hardcore movies, it doesn't matter. No, the idea is that that's the great also that it doesn't work explains we all know it, I'm even repeating myself I think years ago I was already selling this here I'm sorry. Because this also explains this paradox of predestination and freedom explains the greatest mystery of this old Max Weber's thesis, Protestantism, why is Protestantism as a religion which is based on predestination, why Protestantism became the religious background at least originally of capitalism, which is precisely the most active social system, a system where you are solicited to be active like crazy all the time. Again wouldn't it be logical to claim if it's predestined fuck off I lay down, awaken me when God comes but leave me alone. No, Weber saw this clearly and Luther that precisely because you don't know it. Knowing that your fate is decided but not knowing what your fate is pushes you to incessant activity and I think that this decision, this difficult decision to discover if there is predestination, fate, necessity, what is that fate is much closer to authentic freedom than I'm using now metaphor that already used I'm sorry for my students in my class than this simple freedom of I go to a patisserie, they have strawberry cake, chocolate cake, vanilla cake, oh which one I will choose, you know this simple freedom of choice. No, true freedom is this one and even now you will say I'm crazy but let me give you an example to repeat it that already given in my class. Think about love, the choice of object in love. It must be free, if not it's not love of course no? But it never happens to you admit it as a free choice. If you say oh now I will fall in love into that lady or man it's fake. It is a free decision but as Schelling would have put it, a transcendental atemporal free decision which you experience precisely as its opposite, as your fate. You experience love as my God I cannot escape it I'm caught into it. And that's true freedom, that's the radical freedom. Now you will say this is sentimental speculation. No, I'll use another example from my class. Isn't it exactly the same with a tough political decision? Not these simple decisions, vote for Macron, vote for Le Pen, which tough I don't care. Uh but let's make a pathetic example, there is war my country is attacked and I have to decide will I risk my life do it or not. This is a free decision by me but if you take the difficult decision that you will fight, you don't experience it as a choice. You experience it, I would love not to do it but it's my duty, I cannot not do it. I have to do it. You know and I think this provides this wonderful dialectic described as far as I know by philosopher only nicely clearly only by Hegel how predestination is much more paradoxical if we read Protestantism in a materialist way then the simple notion there is predestination everything is decided. No, it means we have a fate but we retroactively create this fate. Like I freely decide something and once I decide it it retroactively becomes necessary. If I do the right thing I experience it my God I couldn't do it otherwise, I had to do it. That's freedom. So that's my first point about Protestantism which means that not only you are free but you are even more free than you thought. You are even responsible for your fate, for your necessity. And again as I already uh explained in my in in in my uh in my classes, uh here psychoanalysis rejoins Protestantism. Because in psychoanalysis the obvious result is something like predestination, you know like I think I'm a free being but no, everything is predetermined through my past traumas, through whatever you know so I discover that I'm not free. And this was the fashionable lesson half a century ago with that fashion of structuralism in France. This is how psychoanalysis was read, structural psychoanalysis. You think you are a free subject no, you are just a puppet, the big other, the symbolic order runs the game and so on. But no, Lacan follows here Freud. Yes, you are overdetermined. But you cannot use this overdetermination or psychic necessity which makes you what you are, you cannot use it as an excuse, you know like to be vulgar I'm sorry. I rape a child and then I say to the judges, sorry guys, what can I do, I was overdetermined by my unconscious complex. No. You are predestined by fate but you are responsible even for that. You are much more radically responsible and I can't go into it now I already did it in my class to develop how the same goes also for that's why it's a great thing, Kantian ethics. When Kant says "Du kannst, denn du sollst," you can do it because you must do it. Like no excuse to not do your duty, if it's your duty you have to do it. But Kant, this is not so often noticed, goes even a step further. He also implies that even doing your duty cannot be an excuse for doing your duty. Like Chris, I hate you, let me do like I have to do something, it's my duty, which will hurt you. I don't have the right to tell you, sorry guy, but it's my duty. No, I don't have the right to externalize it. I'm not responsible only to do my duty. I have to fully subjectively assume also my duty in the sense of what is my duty. This is why incidentally I mention this briefly in my class and now I will stop with plagiarizing myself, don't worry I will not repeat my class. This is why I think that although I admire her at some point in her otherwise wonderful Eichmann in Jerusalem, if I remember it correctly, Hannah Arendt was wrong when she took seriously Eichmann's statement that he was just a good Kantian. He did his duty, for him duty was embodied in Führer's orders, so sorry I was doing my duty. No, Kant sorry not Kant uh Eichmann did precisely the wrong thing he was not a Kantian because he did something that Kant strictly prohibits. He used duty as an excuse. Sorry I had killing millions of Jews, what can I do that's my duty. No, you cannot refer to your duty as some objective determination that you have just to follow. You are radically responsible for your for your duty. Now I will complicate things. Now the end of self-plagiarism, you will get some new stuff. This solution, this dialectical interconnection of necessity and freedom where yes there is necessity but this necessity is in a deeper sense contingent. Like you do something in a contingent way, once you do it it retroactively becomes your fate. This solution works only on one condition. The subject believer agent is absolutely constrained by the horizon of his her its finite subjectivity. What Protestantism prohibits is the very thought that as a believer I can as it were took a position outside above myself and look upon myself as a small particle in the vast reality. Here since I already mentioned Mao Zedong I would like to criticize him a little bit at the philosophical level and incidentally because of some of my lines like this Alain Badiou is even now mad at me you know. Mao Zedong I think was wrong when he deployed his Olympian vision reducing human experience to a tiny unimportant cosmic detail. You know in his famous statement where he say we don't fear atomic war and so on. Okay with that I in principle agree. But Mao went on and said this a quote from Mao Zedong: "The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the US atom bombs were so powerful that when dropped on China they would make a hole right through the earth or even blow the earth up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system" and so on. You know it's kind of a weird excuse. Okay Americans can destroy us but what does it mean from the standpoint of the universe or whatever. I think that uh this argument Mao's only works if in a pseudo-Kantian way we presuppose some like the problem is where is Mao speaking from, from what subjective position when he states this. He acts as if he speaks from a totally external purely divine position where you see objectively reality with inhuman eyes and then you can say okay our earth is blown apart fuck it a tiny blimp in some small planet who cares. But uh here I don't have time to develop it but this is a beautiful theological topic. Intelligent Protestantism had a wonderful vision where it's again that link between contingency and necessity. On the one hand yes we are a tiny piece of shit in a vast universe. Protestantism is not ethnocentric. Which is why Protestantism insofar as it stands for modernity was precisely the religious background of modern science which precisely introduced the objective view of reality. You know that before Protestantism the medieval world was earth in the center although we humans were not the center of the universe it was God but nonetheless uh we were the highest point of the created universe everything turned around us and so on and so on. So what Protestantism unites, I don't have time to develop it now just to give you an idea, is I think something wonderful. It's at the same time this extremely brutal view from an inhuman gaze we are nothing, a tiny species on earth it doesn't matter. But nonetheless since we cannot ever really assume that view external view in our ethical practice we have to act as if and Kant Kant puts it this very nicely, although objective science is telling us that fuck it we are again one tiny piece of dust in the universe nonetheless in a big ethical struggle it's not just our fate that is decided it's as it were Kant puts it so nicely, the entire universe was created as a background for that struggle of ours. You know I love this unity of extreme ethnocentrism, the world was created so that we can fight this battle and this radical radically external view. Because uh this is in a way when you witness a big change revolution or whatever even with Holocaust, I think the intelligent argument even Habermas made it who tries to be a rationalist. But Habermas I don't agree with him made once a nice point where he says that with Holocaust and I would add nonetheless some other events like what happened in Congo, other horrible things and so on, something so horrible happens that you in a way diminish its horror when you reduce it to a simple human event. Something went wrong in class struggle whatever, it's horrible to say Holocaust was just a sub-chapter in class struggle and effect and so on. Something that Habermas said very intelligently that theological dimension means here just a way a specific way to signal that something so horrible happened that it doesn't fit our universe we cannot reknow I'll put it this way, we cannot simply renormalize it as just another historical event. That's why isn't this the title you may correct me maybe you know it more of one of the books on Holocaust, The Black Sun, the sun itself turned out you know like as some people say nicely when something like Holocaust happened, it's a shame that the world continued to exist. If there were to be an elementary ethics in the world, out of shame the world should have fallen apart. So that's and now comes come I thank you for your patience, maybe my first more interesting aspect. It's part of this that's the paradox of Protestantism radically anthropocentric but at the same time let's look at ourselves with inhuman eyes. Here I think but I'm reading them by them I mean assemblage theory, new materialism, object-oriented ontology, they can be combined with my position. Because what's the true let's call it naively shattering ethical greatness although I read it in a different way that it's usually read of I will focus here on so-called new materialism, Jane Bennett. This idea that we should look at our life in the middle of nature as a interaction of agents she calls them I think following Latour actants and they interact and we should look at it through an inhuman gaze to see this as a process of interaction even living interaction where we are just one of the elements. In her book I think Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett provides a beautiful description of a trash site. She said we think trash site just nothing, piece of shit there things rotting but she says what if we look at it with an imagined inhuman eye as a living process. We have a complex interaction of rotting trash, worms, insects, abandoned machines, chemical poisons and each plays each element actant plays its own never purely passive role. That's I think so-called new materialism or object-oriented ontology at its most radical to provide this type of inhuman view. And again I think there is an authentic theoretical and ethico-political insight in such an approach. Agency thereby becomes a social phenomenon but the limits of sociality are expanded to include all material bodies participating in the relevant assemblage. Say an ecological public is a group of bodies, some humans most of them not, and they are subjected to harm defined as a diminished capacity for action. Of course the ethical implication is that we have to acknowledge the entanglement within a larger assemblage. Like we are not nature doesn't serve us we are just one among the agents on the earth. Here comes my first modest disagreement. I think unknowingly this argument of her description also remains radically anthropocentric, you know in what sense. The more it tries to be objective at the level of content the more it privileges us human species as the only species which has access access to this universality. That's my problem with those so-called deep ecologists who claim animals even a Scandinavian friend of mine wrote a book where he claims even even beautiful canyons, pieces of nature, should be treated as subject agents with human rights. Like there is a beautiful organic totality in he gives a beautiful example of wonderful rock formation in Iceland and he says not only as it's popular to say now animals should have their rights, not just human rights, trees should have their rights, even rivers should have their rights. Yeah but you know what's the catch? They don't know it. We automatically when we want to act as deep ecologists is the most arrogant anthropocentric position that you can imagine. Because you automatically assume that we yes we apparently humiliate ourselves but we humans are the only agents who know who have access to this universal dimension. I mean uh trees don't know about their rights. When a river is ruining the trees it doesn't know that it is infringing upon upon other's rights. All you know it's the same falsity as the one I think of a certain type of multiculturalism where we claim but we don't are not the only ones who have the right, also other cultures have the right. But the more we humiliate ourselves oh we Western civilization we are just one among them, the more we act as the only one who has the access to the universal dimension and can say what the rights of the others are. Like I felt this quite often in debates in the United States. It's typical arrogant politically correct attitude that and once I witnessed it a white liberal guy of course they are always white defended black rights that's perfect I'm radically for them. But the problem was that some black guys then didn't agree with him. And basically he started to shout at them like you don't know what are your rights I will tell you, you know. That's the hidden arrogance which and I think it's the same problem with those who sympathize with refugees and so on and so on. It's I once I that's why I find suspicious this eternal self-humiliation of Europeans. I called it a reversed white man's burden. You know white man's burden is an old English expression, colonialist, for we white people are tasked by nature, God whomever, our burden is to lead other nations to civilized life whatever. Now we have the opposite version of white man's burden which is I think also a refined racism. Whenever something happens in third world countries slaughter like Rwanda it has to be an effect of colonialism. And I have an African friend from Nigeria who got the point and exploded. He said you are such racists you Europeans. You don't even allow us to be genuinely evil. You treat us as such innocent children that you know whenever we do something wrong it must be your guilt. This is the new version of white man's burden. Let's look around. There is a slaughter in Kampuchea oh it must be an effect of colonialism. There is a okay let's go on. Now things will get even much nastier. I here Jane Bennett if she were to be here would have exploded. My ultimate example of assemblage would be not as a cheap provocation, not please don't misunderstand me to read assem to read assemblage theory as proto-fascist, quite the opposite, that I'm even tempted but I'm afraid I would be even more attacked than I am to write a short text on describing Auschwitz as an assemblage. Let's forget about human suffering, let's look Auschwitz as a collaboration between humans, victims, worms, fire there and so on, a kind of objective process of material project objective process of material interaction and we can say not only the Nazis were agent, inmates were the agents, worms who ate the corpses if there were some if they were not properly burnt were agents and so on. And we can do it. But another philosophical point I'm so sad I don't have time to develop it. What we get here and now I will turn to Gilles Deleuze towards whom I'm critical but he is a genius, has in genius insights. Deleuze said that his thinking tries to construct a quote from Deleuze "a perception of reality as it was before or after man humanity, a perception released from its human coordinates." He says we should view reality as quote "iridescent chaos of a world before man." Now I claim this doesn't mean cosmological speculation how did Big Bang look. It means that take a phenomenon like Auschwitz and you look at it from outside of human concerns. Of course it's an let's not misunderstand me it's an utterly obscene vision because in some sense you cannot do it. And here I come to my next point I will be very brief I really don't want to spend too much time. I think that uh I think that uh here Deleuze introduces and he does it at some point he explicitly uses the terms the Kantian distinction between for us phenomenal reality and in itself in the sense of noumenal independent of us. Not in this naive sense that real in itself is reality out there the way it really is outside our view but in itself as I will put it like this an impossible phenomenon. The problem with the vision of Auschwitz that I gave to you is not that it's you cannot claim it's bluffing, that it's the way Auschwitz really was in the no it's still our view but it's impossible view. It's too dramatic. As ethical human being we cannot afford to look at reality in that way where inmates are the burnt people there are just reduced to one among the actants together with worms and whatever. So my point is this one that uh what uh I here Claude Lanzmann with whom I often don't agree, I think to shock you that his Shoah I find it very suspicious ethically. But at some point he was right. He wrote somewhere that if he were to discover let's say that some Nazi sadist did it, if he were to discover reels I mean movie cinema which direct shooting of the most brutal moments of Auschwitz. You see the bodies being gassed and they how in panic mother climbs upon her child to be a little bit higher to be gassed la you know all the most brutal moments. He said I would burn it immediately. And he is right. You see too much there. But you see the point. It's not that you see objective reality the way it see. You see a phenomenon, it's still a phenomenon but a phenomenon which cannot be integrated into our reality. Okay that's philosophy. Now I come to the final point which maybe problematic to some of you. At some point I got even for showing this part in London an old lady approached me and said basically she demanded from me a trigger warning. She said it was too brutal you shouldn't have shown it to us. But I don't believe in this logic of trigger warning you know. I think that academia is not a safe place when you as where you escape harsh life. Academia on the contrary should confront you with brutality you know. Okay so let's go on. In this messy world where everything is on us as ethical subjects but at the same time at the same you see the paradox I'm saying. Look for example at slavery in the United States. You can provide an objective history. It was a collaboration of black tribes in Africa who were selling the slave blah blah you do an objective history. You can do it but it's an utter obscenity to do it from this neutral way objectivity becomes an utter obscenity. It's an obscenity to report on it in an objective way. So again if we try to bring together the two aspects, this ruthless objectivity and at the same time utter ethical engagement. What kind of ethics do we get? Here comes my final example. One of the good aspects of globalization I think I really love it is I'm not against globalization you know why. Because it's genuinely multicultural but by this I mean a simple thing, not multicultural in this usual left liberal sense but in the sense that it's not only American culture and maybe French English, also smaller nation get their chance. Do you remember how years ago there was a period of South Korean Taiwanese movies, there was a period even of of Romanian movies, they are very good wonderful sense of irony and so on. Never forget that this is also a good effect of globalization. It's not simply we will all eat hamburgers and watch Hollywood blockbusters. If anything my prediction is that Hollywood will start losing. I mean who still wants to watch their stupid these blockbusters where they even cannot produce new formulas and all they can do is endless remakes of old movies and then combining them no? Now you have Batman with Superman and so on, it's despair. So what I want to say is that I like to read the good detective novels and they are we have now a new wave and that's what I like I discovered. It's no longer those a couple of privileged sites you know like for classical whodunnit England, for hard-boiled novels LA area or United States, maybe a little bit of France and so on. Now they can happen detective novels literally everywhere at any time. Do you know that you already have novels which take place in Ancient Egypt? Priest who is a detective at some stupid Pharaoh's court. You have detective novels, Steven Saylor writes them which happen in Ancient Rome, an acquaintance of Julius Caesar does the work. You have one series on Alexander the Great and so on and so on anywhere. Medieval Umberto Eco started the fashion medieval. You have them now which take place in Tibet, in Russia and my favorite are those who take which take place in extreme circumstances. Like uh you have now a whole sub-species of detective novels which take place in two of what at least in Europe we perceive as extreme moments, the last years of war in Germany and the harshest Stalinism. Like now yesterday I finished a novel called Jim McDermott Peenemünde where Von Braun built rockets, deceptions, where there is a murder in '44 one of the engineers is shot in Peenemünde and I love or you have Stalinist one '35 a body is discovered in the middle of Moscow, an honest policeman tries to resolve the crisis but the victim is a foreigner KGB intervenes whole mess and okay not to get lost along these lines okay I will tell you a dream because nobody will want to do it I don't care if you know it. My simple dream is to do a novel but honest one, not cynical, which takes place in Auschwitz. Like inmates and one is found strangled. And they are all on the edge of dying but one of them tries to resolve it as a murder case. And then I want to do a paradoxically upbeat tragic ending. He solves the crime but then they all go in a well-known to a well-known place with the big burning machine and so on. So uh along these lines I love the new this is old story yesterday's news Sweden even even Iceland Norway Jo Nesbø. My favorite are now thrillers come from Denmark. Not only novels but also TV series The Killing and a series of novels which were made into films a trilogy. Uh I want to show you a short clip from one of them. The original title is Flaskepost, Message in a Bottle and in English I don't know why but it's a very good change of title. It was changed into A Conspiracy of Faith. Incidentally I would love to write a text on the logic of you know that now they no longer do it but in the '50s and '60s even later in some countries they were always when they dubbed a movie for another country they were changing the titles all the time. For example it's interesting Hitchcock's North by Northwest in Germany it was quite logically Der unsichtbare Dritte, the invisible third and so on. My favorite example sorry I cannot abstain for from playing bad taste racist jokes you know that for Brazilian I spoke with you Portuguese are stupid. The idea is all the intelligent guy from Portugal went to Brazil, idiots remained there. So you know the story I will not lose time of Hitchcock's Psycho. The joke in Brazil is that Psycho's title was changed in Portugal into the son who was his own mother to make it understandable for the so along along these lines this time it works. The title is A Conspiracy of Faith, a Danish movie from again a call to illegal activity, you can immediately download it from Pirate Bay or whatever. I will not bore you with the story but just I will show you just a minute please four-five minutes clip. It's the story of a honest policeman who is a described as a terminally terminally depressive guy always in despair, of course totally atheist and uh children are disappearing they are killed in a strange sadistic way and at the end he the detective locates the murderer who is really a kind of a ideal Parsifal Aryan guy with blue long hair, a pathological murderer who thinks he is an instrument of Devil, Devil's son. And his task is he says to destroy the faith of the parents, it's not just to torture children but he does this so that in presence of parents or so that parents are aware of it. And then some an ethically quite shattering scene occurs. I find it beautiful, don't be too alarmed ah if some of you trigger counter-warning a child is really drowned killed. It's not, at the end of the film he survived he was just unconscious so that you will not be too no because some people at some talk when I show this protested how can you show this and so on and so on. Don't be okay let's show now I think I described it enough. (movie clip) Loss of it. I think even the movie now loses its spirit because it's nonetheless as if after this stance you know God intervenes from the outside. But nonetheless my point is a very simple one from my Christian atheist standpoint. No the murderer is wrong. God was there two times, when he the detective offered himself, take me take me, and when the girl didn't want to stab the guy. So this is the my crazy position. I will try to be short not to go too much on now, buy my next book where you will have all the chapter on this no it's called Incontinence of the Void to appear MIT press in October. No that this is what I mean by Christian atheism. You know uh Christ as a figure is not an active redeemer, it's just this impassive gaze which gives you the readiness to do it without any guarantee in faith. I don't read this in this cheap way the guy the detective thinks he's an atheist but really he is the deepest believer. No he is. The murderer is right the deepest believer you know when the murderer tells him I'm never met a guy with such a faith as you. But precisely because he needs no guarantee whatsoever in some higher force he just has to do it in a totally hopeless situation. It's not that he wants to gain his place in heaven, that's pure divine goodness. You see a situation you have to do it. It's not because you account oh if I say this if I save this child I will be forgiven to cheat on my wife I have a bad it has nothing it has it has it has nothing to do with nothing to do with that. So uh okay uh why then now you can ask me a simple question. Why do I call this Christian atheism? Why don't I simply say it's a materialist ethics like this pure goodness no guarantee. Ah here of course I'm a materialist no misunderstanding here. But I my good friend I really like him okay not good friend I boast I exaggerate I met him two times we went along really well. You know Rowan Williams the leftist ex-archbishop of Canterbury. In his book on Dostoevsky, I don't like Dostoevsky but I like his book Williams's of Dostoevsky, he among other things I cannot restrain from briefly describing this to you he provides the best reading that I can imagine of Dostoevsky's Idiot. You know the usual reading of Idiot is he is too divine for this world, a saint. For Rowan Williams it's a wonderful reading and it's so deeply true if you know the story of Dostoevsky's Idiot. He is not pure evil, Idiot Prince Myshkin, but something much more refined. There are people and I met them they really exist who are really sincerely no doubt innocent good in themselves but the way they act in their social environment is that it's a kind of a wrong goodness. They are absolutely sincerely good but they cause catastrophe all around. You know and for example Prince Myshkin what does he cause? Nastasya Filippovna gets murdered by that other guy who whatever, he causes catastrophe around himself. Okay the same Rowan Williams provided a wonderful definition in his book on Dostoevsky on what really is the divine dimension at its most elementary. And he Rowan Williams makes a reference to four British Catholic novelists, O'Connor, Percy, Spark and Ellis and this is what he says about them, a short quote: "All four create a world in which the secular majority account of what is going on is relativized, but there is no simple alternative that anyone can step into by a single decision or even a series of decision in the sense of this secular reality is shitty and there must be a higher order. The
What I want to say is that uh I think that what I call Christian atheism is still the ethical stance which fits today's predicament. Okay. Uh let me begin with a simple observation. Those who follow obscure spiritual cosmological speculations have for sure heard of one of the most popular topics in this domain, you know all these mythical stories that when three planets, usually Earth, Moon and the Sun, find themselves among along the same axis then some big cataclysmic event takes place, the whole order of the universe is momentarily thrown out of joint and the universe has to find a new balance. You remember that it wasn't taken seriously but the panic of where ideas to some Maya old Maya predictions precisely because I think Earth, Moon and Sun were in the same line, it's not good. And I think that politically something like this holds for this year which is a triple anniversary. In we do not celebrate only the centenary of the October Revolution but also the 150th anniversary of the first edition of Marx's Capital, and maybe the most tragic event, the 50th anniversary of the so-called Shanghai Commune when in the climactic moment of the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, it's a wonderful moment, maybe the crucial moment of 20th century Communism, residents of Shanghai, workers and students, decided to take literally Mao's call, you know when Mao said uh attack the headquarters, you don't need neither the Party nor the army, people should take over, well they took this literally and simply overthrew offices of local Communist Party, ignored the army and took over. And that was the crucial point because then Mao had to send the army. And it's an extremely tragic event because this was then, people don't know this, the biggest battle of the Cultural Revolution. Forget about, okay they were tragic, all those scenes, you know Red Guardists pulling their beard, terrorizing professors, intellectuals, all that. No, it was the battle for Shanghai when the army turned on the very revolutionaries and one don't know how many, the idea is that it goes into tens if not hundreds of thousands of dead people. But I I think this event is fascinating because it's, I don't like this big question was Mao sincere or not, at a certain level he was not. It's clearly that he triggered the Cultural Revolution to regain his full power in the army, sorry in the state. But it doesn't matter if Mao was manipulating. Things run out of control. Ordinary workers took it seriously. Let's have directly the rule of the commune, we don't need the Party, we don't need the army and so on and it went too far. So I think these three events mark the three stages of the Communist movement. First, Capital by Marx outlined the theoretical foundations of the Communist Revolution. Then the October Revolution was the first successful attempt to overthrow bourgeois state and build a new socio-economic order. And then the Shanghai Commune stands for the most radical attempt to immediately realize the most daring aspect of the Communist vision, the abolishment of state power and the imposition of direct people's power organized as a network of local communes. It didn't work and of course I will not answer the question today, namely the big question what went wrong. I think, that's my hypothesis, what went wrong with this cycle, perhaps the answer is to be sought and people don't talk about it but for me at least as a Christian atheist is the key date. Don't you know that today we have another, we have four planets in a line, another mega anniversary. is the years anniversary of when Martin Luther put on that door the Theses, Protestantism. And I still think that the Protestantism is the key, the greatest religious event that you can imagine. Why? Let me begin in a very simplified way, but I'm not totally bluffing because I presented a version of this text in a theological at a theological colloquium in Cambridge and it went well, what can I say? So I'm not totally bluffing, I'm not totally bluffing. Let me begin by this triad of Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Protestantism. The way I see it, maybe I'm wrong, central to the Orthodox tradition is the notion of theosis, of man becoming like God. Or to quote St. Athanasius of Alexandria, quote, "He (Christ or God) was incarnate so that we might be made God." End of quote. What should otherwise seem absurd, that fallen sinful man may become holy as God is holy, has been made possible through Jesus Christ who is God incarnate. And then uh St. Maximus the Confessor wrote in the same vein, again a quote, "A sure warrant for looking with hope to deification of human nature is provided by the incarnation of God, which makes man God to the same degree as God himself became man. Let us become the image of the one whole God, bearing nothing earthly in ourselves so that we may consort with God and become gods, receiving from God our existence as gods." End of quote. This Orthodox formula, God became man so that man uh becomes God is I think what Protestantism radically rejects. The deepest insight of Protestantism, although it's implicit already in the Bible, is that to put it very simply, God became man and that's it. Nothing more. Everything already happens in the incarnation. What needs to be added is just a shift of perspective. I think that in authentic Christian vision there is no resurrection to follow. Holy Ghost already is resurrection. Resurrection happens in the Christian community. God dies and he remains dead. We are condemned to freedom. Holy community is not, there is I read here Christianity in a radically atheist way. Holy Ghost is not some kind of a synthesis, God, man and then they are brought together. No, with crucifixion precisely that type of God, you know this primitive idea up there is an great old guy with a long beard who takes care of us so don't worry too much, ultimately we are taken care of. That's what Hegel, my favorite, puts it nicely. He says what dies on the cross is not an earthly representative of God, it's God himself, that God of beyond. So what remains we in our freedom. And that would be the properly Christian trick. I say God gave us all freedom and so on. He said but he didn't, God abandoned, he just creates us and let us alone, God abandoned us. I'll say but that's another name for freedom. You should just shift the perspective. Or to put it in another way, and I'm here I'm basing my reading on some very good theologians from my beloved Chesterton onwards. Uh in other religions to simplify it very much you have God, man. We have fallen from God, so the idea is let's climb back through some stupid spiritual exercises whatever you want. Like let's become let's get rid of our sinful nature, let's go back to God. The Christian solution is a totally different one. It is this one. Okay let's say you an ordinary believer find yourself totally abandoned by God. So what's the way out of it? Not okay let me do some good works or self-punishment to become clean. No, it's that uh at that point when I'm totally abandoned by God, I identify with Christ who finds himself in exactly the same position with the famous "Father, Father, have you forsaken me?" So that it's a wonderful insight that uh you should see in a very Hegelian way how our separation we overcome our separation from God not by rejoining God but by realizing that this separation is separation also of God from himself. That at that point we are divine because again the ultimate moment of divinity is that moment of as Gilbert Keith Chesterton put it, the moment when God himself becomes an atheist. You know because remember on the cross when Christ says "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani," Father, he for a brief moment becomes a non-believer. Which is a crazy moment. You find this in no other religion. In other religions you do find man who abandon God. Where do you find God who abandons himself? And again the Christian solution is not you suffer you are low but don't worry there are good news. No, there are no good news. Good news are only a different shift of perspective on the bad news. We remain abandoned by God. God will not come to save us as even conservative theologians who are not stupid knew, like Paul Claudel, my favorite French conservative Catholic. He says very nicely that the the ultimate secret of Christianity is not trust God, things may look bad but God will help you. No, it's the opposite, God needs our help. We only we can save God. In other words uh the divine and some theosophic speculation, I will not go into it we don't have time to lose here, uh developed this in a wonderful way where they claim that the secret of reincarnation of incarnation is not that God did something heroic to redeem us. God, God without incarnation is not fully God. God incarnates himself in man to become fully God. That's the solution of one of my favorite apart from Hegel German idealist Schelling who developed in his Heidegger claimed, no, that these two texts especially Freiheitsschrift, Schelling's text on the Essence of Human Freedom and later Weltalter, fragments on the Ages of the World, he developed this how God produced Logos, gave birth to Logos son, Schelling literally said this, to save himself of his own from his own madness. It was if I may be cynical a kind of create you know psychiatrists say if you are caught in psychosis you need creative therapy you know through work well that's what God did and uh some very if you think I'm bluffing some very intelligent Protestant theologians came to the same conclusion like a Norwegian friend of mine gave me a reference and he translated some parts to me because it's a not a well-known book famous only in Norway. The guy's name is Peter Wessel Zapffe, a book on Protestantism, God. It's a reading of Book of Job. And you know what's his reading? What does Job discover when he encounters God, when he realizes that God is doing very strange things, punishing him for nothing and so on. Here is a quote from Zapffe: "Job finds himself confronted with a world ruler (God) of grotesque primitiveness, a cosmic cave-dweller, a braggart and blusterer, almost agreeable in his total ignorance of spiritual culture. What is new for Job is not God's greatness in quantifiable terms, that we knew fully in advance. What is new is God's qualitative baseness." And I think this is masked inside also of the big Protestant topic of predestination. You mean God was simply playing a brutal game with us, he didn't care. God decided in advance you are redeemed you are lost totally irrespective of what we are doing. And I think this is the right line. I think that as intelligent Protestants saw it, this Catholic way of linking our salvation to our good works introduces immediately an element of handling of of financial transaction. I see that child drowning, should I do it or not? Well I may gain salvation so fuck it why not do it, you know. It makes our good deeds part of a almost I would say financial investment into future, no? But as Luther put it very intelligently, if there is predestination then the solution is pure goodness because you see a child drowning, sorry for this pathetic example, and you know very well that it will not help your salvation in any way if you help the child or not, so it's only goodness that uh it's only goodness that makes you that uh that makes you do it. Uh so uh sorry we are here, yes. So uh let's go on here. What uh in this position where the solution is not some kind of a reunification of God with man. We overcome our alienation of God through a simple realization that God is already alienated from himself, self-abandon. I like to apply here to divinity Hegel's wonderful reading of ancient Greek statues which are impenetrable for us. Like what does the Sphinx mean? And you know what's Hegel's formula. The secrets of ancient Greeks, secrets for us, were already secrets for ancient Greeks themselves. And Hegel's theology is precisely this one that the the secrets of divinity are secrets for for also for divinity itself. This is the old mystical topic. Hegel goes there into that line you find it in Meister Eckhart and all other guys that God had to create Logos to bring history into God himself. What happens on our earth, our theological activity decides the fate of God himself in a way. It's the other way around, it's not that God decides. No, we in our struggles, we fight for the fate of God himself. So how to bring this, and now it comes maybe it will be a little bit difficult, the proper theological point. I think I improvised a little bit already in my classes about this. I think does this mean that Protestantism simply abolishes our freedom? Everyone who knows Luther, and I don't have the time to go into it but I have it written a detailed analysis of the tension between Martin Luther and of course Thomas Müntzer, the great theologian of the German Peasant Revolt. Maybe this will surprise you but I am almost more on the early Luther's side. He was right Müntzer in criticizing Luther for his conformism, taking the side of the masters and so on. But Müntzer I think comes all too close then to this perverse instrumental position which comes close to totalitarianism. Because Luther was right and this was his greatest theological insight to insist on divine impenetrability which read in materialist way doesn't mean God knows what he is doing, we just cannot penetrate it, it means that quote from Zapffe, God is crazy, doesn't know it. So uh Luther warned against precisely what we call today fundamentalism. Any position of an agent historical who my God what is happening here, I'm getting superstitious, yesterday it was one at least they are not black cats and we will survive there. Uh but it's the Maoist movement one divides into two, yesterday there was one, okay sorry let's go on that that Luther comes too close to this seeing his political movement as direct instrument of the divine will. And this is what Luther is right to prohibit. He insists on this radical impenetrability. There is predestination but we never know what is predestination. Like our lives are decided in advance but we cannot ever know it. So it's absolutely prohibited to claim I'm an instrument of the divine will like the Stalinist Communists in a different way, historical necessity of progress towards Communism runs through me. No, we cannot do it. And I think this is authentic freedom. This idea of my life is predestined but I don't know what it is, so this terrible struggle to make the right decision. This because you know here common sense doesn't work. Because common sense would tell us why do you worry if there is predestination, sit down and masturbate and watch hardcore movies, it doesn't matter. No, the idea is that that's the great also that it doesn't work explains we all know it, I'm even repeating myself I think years ago I was already selling this here I'm sorry. Because this also explains this paradox of predestination and freedom explains the greatest mystery of this old Max Weber's thesis, Protestantism, why is Protestantism as a religion which is based on predestination, why Protestantism became the religious background at least originally of capitalism, which is precisely the most active social system, a system where you are solicited to be active like crazy all the time. Again wouldn't it be logical to claim if it's predestined fuck off I lay down, awaken me when God comes but leave me alone. No, Weber saw this clearly and Luther that precisely because you don't know it. Knowing that your fate is decided but not knowing what your fate is pushes you to incessant activity and I think that this decision, this difficult decision to discover if there is predestination, fate, necessity, what is that fate is much closer to authentic freedom than I'm using now metaphor that already used I'm sorry for my students in my class than this simple freedom of I go to a patisserie, they have strawberry cake, chocolate cake, vanilla cake, oh which one I will choose, you know this simple freedom of choice. No, true freedom is this one and even now you will say I'm crazy but let me give you an example to repeat it that already given in my class. Think about love, the choice of object in love. It must be free, if not it's not love of course no? But it never happens to you admit it as a free choice. If you say oh now I will fall in love into that lady or man it's fake. It is a free decision but as Schelling would have put it, a transcendental atemporal free decision which you experience precisely as its opposite, as your fate. You experience love as my God I cannot escape it I'm caught into it. And that's true freedom, that's the radical freedom. Now you will say this is sentimental speculation. No, I'll use another example from my class. Isn't it exactly the same with a tough political decision? Not these simple decisions, vote for Macron, vote for Le Pen, which tough I don't care. Uh but let's make a pathetic example, there is war my country is attacked and I have to decide will I risk my life do it or not. This is a free decision by me but if you take the difficult decision that you will fight, you don't experience it as a choice. You experience it, I would love not to do it but it's my duty, I cannot not do it. I have to do it. You know and I think this provides this wonderful dialectic described as far as I know by philosopher only nicely clearly only by Hegel how predestination is much more paradoxical if we read Protestantism in a materialist way then the simple notion there is predestination everything is decided. No, it means we have a fate but we retroactively create this fate. Like I freely decide something and once I decide it it retroactively becomes necessary. If I do the right thing I experience it my God I couldn't do it otherwise, I had to do it. That's freedom. So that's my first point about Protestantism which means that not only you are free but you are even more free than you thought. You are even responsible for your fate, for your necessity. And again as I already uh explained in my in in in my uh in my classes, uh here psychoanalysis rejoins Protestantism. Because in psychoanalysis the obvious result is something like predestination, you know like I think I'm a free being but no, everything is predetermined through my past traumas, through whatever you know so I discover that I'm not free. And this was the fashionable lesson half a century ago with that fashion of structuralism in France. This is how psychoanalysis was read, structural psychoanalysis. You think you are a free subject no, you are just a puppet, the big other, the symbolic order runs the game and so on. But no, Lacan follows here Freud. Yes, you are overdetermined. But you cannot use this overdetermination or psychic necessity which makes you what you are, you cannot use it as an excuse, you know like to be vulgar I'm sorry. I rape a child and then I say to the judges, sorry guys, what can I do, I was overdetermined by my unconscious complex. No. You are predestined by fate but you are responsible even for that. You are much more radically responsible and I can't go into it now I already did it in my class to develop how the same goes also for that's why it's a great thing, Kantian ethics. When Kant says "Du kannst, denn du sollst," you can do it because you must do it. Like no excuse to not do your duty, if it's your duty you have to do it. But Kant, this is not so often noticed, goes even a step further. He also implies that even doing your duty cannot be an excuse for doing your duty. Like Chris, I hate you, let me do like I have to do something, it's my duty, which will hurt you. I don't have the right to tell you, sorry guy, but it's my duty. No, I don't have the right to externalize it. I'm not responsible only to do my duty. I have to fully subjectively assume also my duty in the sense of what is my duty. This is why incidentally I mention this briefly in my class and now I will stop with plagiarizing myself, don't worry I will not repeat my class. This is why I think that although I admire her at some point in her otherwise wonderful Eichmann in Jerusalem, if I remember it correctly, Hannah Arendt was wrong when she took seriously Eichmann's statement that he was just a good Kantian. He did his duty, for him duty was embodied in Führer's orders, so sorry I was doing my duty. No, Kant sorry not Kant uh Eichmann did precisely the wrong thing he was not a Kantian because he did something that Kant strictly prohibits. He used duty as an excuse. Sorry I had killing millions of Jews, what can I do that's my duty. No, you cannot refer to your duty as some objective determination that you have just to follow. You are radically responsible for your for your duty. Now I will complicate things. Now the end of self-plagiarism, you will get some new stuff. This solution, this dialectical interconnection of necessity and freedom where yes there is necessity but this necessity is in a deeper sense contingent. Like you do something in a contingent way, once you do it it retroactively becomes your fate. This solution works only on one condition. The subject believer agent is absolutely constrained by the horizon of his her its finite subjectivity. What Protestantism prohibits is the very thought that as a believer I can as it were took a position outside above myself and look upon myself as a small particle in the vast reality. Here since I already mentioned Mao Zedong I would like to criticize him a little bit at the philosophical level and incidentally because of some of my lines like this Alain Badiou is even now mad at me you know. Mao Zedong I think was wrong when he deployed his Olympian vision reducing human experience to a tiny unimportant cosmic detail. You know in his famous statement where he say we don't fear atomic war and so on. Okay with that I in principle agree. But Mao went on and said this a quote from Mao Zedong: "The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the US atom bombs were so powerful that when dropped on China they would make a hole right through the earth or even blow the earth up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system" and so on. You know it's kind of a weird excuse. Okay Americans can destroy us but what does it mean from the standpoint of the universe or whatever. I think that uh this argument Mao's only works if in a pseudo-Kantian way we presuppose some like the problem is where is Mao speaking from, from what subjective position when he states this. He acts as if he speaks from a totally external purely divine position where you see objectively reality with inhuman eyes and then you can say okay our earth is blown apart fuck it a tiny blimp in some small planet who cares. But uh here I don't have time to develop it but this is a beautiful theological topic. Intelligent Protestantism had a wonderful vision where it's again that link between contingency and necessity. On the one hand yes we are a tiny piece of shit in a vast universe. Protestantism is not ethnocentric. Which is why Protestantism insofar as it stands for modernity was precisely the religious background of modern science which precisely introduced the objective view of reality. You know that before Protestantism the medieval world was earth in the center although we humans were not the center of the universe it was God but nonetheless uh we were the highest point of the created universe everything turned around us and so on and so on. So what Protestantism unites, I don't have time to develop it now just to give you an idea, is I think something wonderful. It's at the same time this extremely brutal view from an inhuman gaze we are nothing, a tiny species on earth it doesn't matter. But nonetheless since we cannot ever really assume that view external view in our ethical practice we have to act as if and Kant Kant puts it this very nicely, although objective science is telling us that fuck it we are again one tiny piece of dust in the universe nonetheless in a big ethical struggle it's not just our fate that is decided it's as it were Kant puts it so nicely, the entire universe was created as a background for that struggle of ours. You know I love this unity of extreme ethnocentrism, the world was created so that we can fight this battle and this radical radically external view. Because uh this is in a way when you witness a big change revolution or whatever even with Holocaust, I think the intelligent argument even Habermas made it who tries to be a rationalist. But Habermas I don't agree with him made once a nice point where he says that with Holocaust and I would add nonetheless some other events like what happened in Congo, other horrible things and so on, something so horrible happens that you in a way diminish its horror when you reduce it to a simple human event. Something went wrong in class struggle whatever, it's horrible to say Holocaust was just a sub-chapter in class struggle and effect and so on. Something that Habermas said very intelligently that theological dimension means here just a way a specific way to signal that something so horrible happened that it doesn't fit our universe we cannot reknow I'll put it this way, we cannot simply renormalize it as just another historical event. That's why isn't this the title you may correct me maybe you know it more of one of the books on Holocaust, The Black Sun, the sun itself turned out you know like as some people say nicely when something like Holocaust happened, it's a shame that the world continued to exist. If there were to be an elementary ethics in the world, out of shame the world should have fallen apart. So that's and now comes come I thank you for your patience, maybe my first more interesting aspect. It's part of this that's the paradox of Protestantism radically anthropocentric but at the same time let's look at ourselves with inhuman eyes. Here I think but I'm reading them by them I mean assemblage theory, new materialism, object-oriented ontology, they can be combined with my position. Because what's the true let's call it naively shattering ethical greatness although I read it in a different way that it's usually read of I will focus here on so-called new materialism, Jane Bennett. This idea that we should look at our life in the middle of nature as a interaction of agents she calls them I think following Latour actants and they interact and we should look at it through an inhuman gaze to see this as a process of interaction even living interaction where we are just one of the elements. In her book I think Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett provides a beautiful description of a trash site. She said we think trash site just nothing, piece of shit there things rotting but she says what if we look at it with an imagined inhuman eye as a living process. We have a complex interaction of rotting trash, worms, insects, abandoned machines, chemical poisons and each plays each element actant plays its own never purely passive role. That's I think so-called new materialism or object-oriented ontology at its most radical to provide this type of inhuman view. And again I think there is an authentic theoretical and ethico-political insight in such an approach. Agency thereby becomes a social phenomenon but the limits of sociality are expanded to include all material bodies participating in the relevant assemblage. Say an ecological public is a group of bodies, some humans most of them not, and they are subjected to harm defined as a diminished capacity for action. Of course the ethical implication is that we have to acknowledge the entanglement within a larger assemblage. Like we are not nature doesn't serve us we are just one among the agents on the earth. Here comes my first modest disagreement. I think unknowingly this argument of her description also remains radically anthropocentric, you know in what sense. The more it tries to be objective at the level of content the more it privileges us human species as the only species which has access access to this universality. That's my problem with those so-called deep ecologists who claim animals even a Scandinavian friend of mine wrote a book where he claims even even beautiful canyons, pieces of nature, should be treated as subject agents with human rights. Like there is a beautiful organic totality in he gives a beautiful example of wonderful rock formation in Iceland and he says not only as it's popular to say now animals should have their rights, not just human rights, trees should have their rights, even rivers should have their rights. Yeah but you know what's the catch? They don't know it. We automatically when we want to act as deep ecologists is the most arrogant anthropocentric position that you can imagine. Because you automatically assume that we yes we apparently humiliate ourselves but we humans are the only agents who know who have access to this universal dimension. I mean uh trees don't know about their rights. When a river is ruining the trees it doesn't know that it is infringing upon upon other's rights. All you know it's the same falsity as the one I think of a certain type of multiculturalism where we claim but we don't are not the only ones who have the right, also other cultures have the right. But the more we humiliate ourselves oh we Western civilization we are just one among them, the more we act as the only one who has the access to the universal dimension and can say what the rights of the others are. Like I felt this quite often in debates in the United States. It's typical arrogant politically correct attitude that and once I witnessed it a white liberal guy of course they are always white defended black rights that's perfect I'm radically for them. But the problem was that some black guys then didn't agree with him. And basically he started to shout at them like you don't know what are your rights I will tell you, you know. That's the hidden arrogance which and I think it's the same problem with those who sympathize with refugees and so on and so on. It's I once I that's why I find suspicious this eternal self-humiliation of Europeans. I called it a reversed white man's burden. You know white man's burden is an old English expression, colonialist, for we white people are tasked by nature, God whomever, our burden is to lead other nations to civilized life whatever. Now we have the opposite version of white man's burden which is I think also a refined racism. Whenever something happens in third world countries slaughter like Rwanda it has to be an effect of colonialism. And I have an African friend from Nigeria who got the point and exploded. He said you are such racists you Europeans. You don't even allow us to be genuinely evil. You treat us as such innocent children that you know whenever we do something wrong it must be your guilt. This is the new version of white man's burden. Let's look around. There is a slaughter in Kampuchea oh it must be an effect of colonialism. There is a okay let's go on. Now things will get even much nastier. I here Jane Bennett if she were to be here would have exploded. My ultimate example of assemblage would be not as a cheap provocation, not please don't misunderstand me to read assem to read assemblage theory as proto-fascist, quite the opposite, that I'm even tempted but I'm afraid I would be even more attacked than I am to write a short text on describing Auschwitz as an assemblage. Let's forget about human suffering, let's look Auschwitz as a collaboration between humans, victims, worms, fire there and so on, a kind of objective process of material project objective process of material interaction and we can say not only the Nazis were agent, inmates were the agents, worms who ate the corpses if there were some if they were not properly burnt were agents and so on. And we can do it. But another philosophical point I'm so sad I don't have time to develop it. What we get here and now I will turn to Gilles Deleuze towards whom I'm critical but he is a genius, has in genius insights. Deleuze said that his thinking tries to construct a quote from Deleuze "a perception of reality as it was before or after man humanity, a perception released from its human coordinates." He says we should view reality as quote "iridescent chaos of a world before man." Now I claim this doesn't mean cosmological speculation how did Big Bang look. It means that take a phenomenon like Auschwitz and you look at it from outside of human concerns. Of course it's an let's not misunderstand me it's an utterly obscene vision because in some sense you cannot do it. And here I come to my next point I will be very brief I really don't want to spend too much time. I think that uh I think that uh here Deleuze introduces and he does it at some point he explicitly uses the terms the Kantian distinction between for us phenomenal reality and in itself in the sense of noumenal independent of us. Not in this naive sense that real in itself is reality out there the way it really is outside our view but in itself as I will put it like this an impossible phenomenon. The problem with the vision of Auschwitz that I gave to you is not that it's you cannot claim it's bluffing, that it's the way Auschwitz really was in the no it's still our view but it's impossible view. It's too dramatic. As ethical human being we cannot afford to look at reality in that way where inmates are the burnt people there are just reduced to one among the actants together with worms and whatever. So my point is this one that uh what uh I here Claude Lanzmann with whom I often don't agree, I think to shock you that his Shoah I find it very suspicious ethically. But at some point he was right. He wrote somewhere that if he were to discover let's say that some Nazi sadist did it, if he were to discover reels I mean movie cinema which direct shooting of the most brutal moments of Auschwitz. You see the bodies being gassed and they how in panic mother climbs upon her child to be a little bit higher to be gassed la you know all the most brutal moments. He said I would burn it immediately. And he is right. You see too much there. But you see the point. It's not that you see objective reality the way it see. You see a phenomenon, it's still a phenomenon but a phenomenon which cannot be integrated into our reality. Okay that's philosophy. Now I come to the final point which maybe problematic to some of you. At some point I got even for showing this part in London an old lady approached me and said basically she demanded from me a trigger warning. She said it was too brutal you shouldn't have shown it to us. But I don't believe in this logic of trigger warning you know. I think that academia is not a safe place when you as where you escape harsh life. Academia on the contrary should confront you with brutality you know. Okay so let's go on. In this messy world where everything is on us as ethical subjects but at the same time at the same you see the paradox I'm saying. Look for example at slavery in the United States. You can provide an objective history. It was a collaboration of black tribes in Africa who were selling the slave blah blah you do an objective history. You can do it but it's an utter obscenity to do it from this neutral way objectivity becomes an utter obscenity. It's an obscenity to report on it in an objective way. So again if we try to bring together the two aspects, this ruthless objectivity and at the same time utter ethical engagement. What kind of ethics do we get? Here comes my final example. One of the good aspects of globalization I think I really love it is I'm not against globalization you know why. Because it's genuinely multicultural but by this I mean a simple thing, not multicultural in this usual left liberal sense but in the sense that it's not only American culture and maybe French English, also smaller nation get their chance. Do you remember how years ago there was a period of South Korean Taiwanese movies, there was a period even of of Romanian movies, they are very good wonderful sense of irony and so on. Never forget that this is also a good effect of globalization. It's not simply we will all eat hamburgers and watch Hollywood blockbusters. If anything my prediction is that Hollywood will start losing. I mean who still wants to watch their stupid these blockbusters where they even cannot produce new formulas and all they can do is endless remakes of old movies and then combining them no? Now you have Batman with Superman and so on, it's despair. So what I want to say is that I like to read the good detective novels and they are we have now a new wave and that's what I like I discovered. It's no longer those a couple of privileged sites you know like for classical whodunnit England, for hard-boiled novels LA area or United States, maybe a little bit of France and so on. Now they can happen detective novels literally everywhere at any time. Do you know that you already have novels which take place in Ancient Egypt? Priest who is a detective at some stupid Pharaoh's court. You have detective novels, Steven Saylor writes them which happen in Ancient Rome, an acquaintance of Julius Caesar does the work. You have one series on Alexander the Great and so on and so on anywhere. Medieval Umberto Eco started the fashion medieval. You have them now which take place in Tibet, in Russia and my favorite are those who take which take place in extreme circumstances. Like uh you have now a whole sub-species of detective novels which take place in two of what at least in Europe we perceive as extreme moments, the last years of war in Germany and the harshest Stalinism. Like now yesterday I finished a novel called Jim McDermott Peenemünde where Von Braun built rockets, deceptions, where there is a murder in '44 one of the engineers is shot in Peenemünde and I love or you have Stalinist one '35 a body is discovered in the middle of Moscow, an honest policeman tries to resolve the crisis but the victim is a foreigner KGB intervenes whole mess and okay not to get lost along these lines okay I will tell you a dream because nobody will want to do it I don't care if you know it. My simple dream is to do a novel but honest one, not cynical, which takes place in Auschwitz. Like inmates and one is found strangled. And they are all on the edge of dying but one of them tries to resolve it as a murder case. And then I want to do a paradoxically upbeat tragic ending. He solves the crime but then they all go in a well-known to a well-known place with the big burning machine and so on. So uh along these lines I love the new this is old story yesterday's news Sweden even even Iceland Norway Jo Nesbø. My favorite are now thrillers come from Denmark. Not only novels but also TV series The Killing and a series of novels which were made into films a trilogy. Uh I want to show you a short clip from one of them. The original title is Flaskepost, Message in a Bottle and in English I don't know why but it's a very good change of title. It was changed into A Conspiracy of Faith. Incidentally I would love to write a text on the logic of you know that now they no longer do it but in the '50s and '60s even later in some countries they were always when they dubbed a movie for another country they were changing the titles all the time. For example it's interesting Hitchcock's North by Northwest in Germany it was quite logically Der unsichtbare Dritte, the invisible third and so on. My favorite example sorry I cannot abstain for from playing bad taste racist jokes you know that for Brazilian I spoke with you Portuguese are stupid. The idea is all the intelligent guy from Portugal went to Brazil, idiots remained there. So you know the story I will not lose time of Hitchcock's Psycho. The joke in Brazil is that Psycho's title was changed in Portugal into the son who was his own mother to make it understandable for the so along along these lines this time it works. The title is A Conspiracy of Faith, a Danish movie from again a call to illegal activity, you can immediately download it from Pirate Bay or whatever. I will not bore you with the story but just I will show you just a minute please four-five minutes clip. It's the story of a honest policeman who is a described as a terminally terminally depressive guy always in despair, of course totally atheist and uh children are disappearing they are killed in a strange sadistic way and at the end he the detective locates the murderer who is really a kind of a ideal Parsifal Aryan guy with blue long hair, a pathological murderer who thinks he is an instrument of Devil, Devil's son. And his task is he says to destroy the faith of the parents, it's not just to torture children but he does this so that in presence of parents or so that parents are aware of it. And then some an ethically quite shattering scene occurs. I find it beautiful, don't be too alarmed ah if some of you trigger counter-warning a child is really drowned killed. It's not, at the end of the film he survived he was just unconscious so that you will not be too no because some people at some talk when I show this protested how can you show this and so on and so on. Don't be okay let's show now I think I described it enough. (movie clip) Loss of it. I think even the movie now loses its spirit because it's nonetheless as if after this stance you know God intervenes from the outside. But nonetheless my point is a very simple one from my Christian atheist standpoint. No the murderer is wrong. God was there two times, when he the detective offered himself, take me take me, and when the girl didn't want to stab the guy. So this is the my crazy position. I will try to be short not to go too much on now, buy my next book where you will have all the chapter on this no it's called Incontinence of the Void to appear MIT press in October. No that this is what I mean by Christian atheism. You know uh Christ as a figure is not an active redeemer, it's just this impassive gaze which gives you the readiness to do it without any guarantee in faith. I don't read this in this cheap way the guy the detective thinks he's an atheist but really he is the deepest believer. No he is. The murderer is right the deepest believer you know when the murderer tells him I'm never met a guy with such a faith as you. But precisely because he needs no guarantee whatsoever in some higher force he just has to do it in a totally hopeless situation. It's not that he wants to gain his place in heaven, that's pure divine goodness. You see a situation you have to do it. It's not because you account oh if I say this if I save this child I will be forgiven to cheat on my wife I have a bad it has nothing it has it has it has nothing to do with nothing to do with that. So uh okay uh why then now you can ask me a simple question. Why do I call this Christian atheism? Why don't I simply say it's a materialist ethics like this pure goodness no guarantee. Ah here of course I'm a materialist no misunderstanding here. But I my good friend I really like him okay not good friend I boast I exaggerate I met him two times we went along really well. You know Rowan Williams the leftist ex-archbishop of Canterbury. In his book on Dostoevsky, I don't like Dostoevsky but I like his book Williams's of Dostoevsky, he among other things I cannot restrain from briefly describing this to you he provides the best reading that I can imagine of Dostoevsky's Idiot. You know the usual reading of Idiot is he is too divine for this world, a saint. For Rowan Williams it's a wonderful reading and it's so deeply true if you know the story of Dostoevsky's Idiot. He is not pure evil, Idiot Prince Myshkin, but something much more refined. There are people and I met them they really exist who are really sincerely no doubt innocent good in themselves but the way they act in their social environment is that it's a kind of a wrong goodness. They are absolutely sincerely good but they cause catastrophe all around. You know and for example Prince Myshkin what does he cause? Nastasya Filippovna gets murdered by that other guy who whatever, he causes catastrophe around himself. Okay the same Rowan Williams provided a wonderful definition in his book on Dostoevsky on what really is the divine dimension at its most elementary. And he Rowan Williams makes a reference to four British Catholic novelists, O'Connor, Percy, Spark and Ellis and this is what he says about them, a short quote: "All four create a world in which the secular majority account of what is going on is relativized, but there is no simple alternative that anyone can step into by a single decision or even a series of decision in the sense of this secular reality is shitty and there must be a higher order. The
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Slavoj Žižek
dimension of these fictions lies in the insistent sense of incongruity unmistakable even if no one within the fiction can say what we should be congruent with." So it's just that our world is out of joint, inconsistent, lacking something, but it's literally negative theology, not negative theology in the usual sense God is so much beyond that we cannot describe it properly. No it's simply God is just this absence, the empty place comes before what we fill it in through our images of God. The basic divine dimension is this void, just this void in the sense of our reality is not something is terribly wrong with this reality. And I think not only we can think with we can think this in a materialist way, but the only proper way is to think it in a materialist way. And here things get complicated. Here we should reject you know one of the most famous formula of Marx that religion is the opium of the people. First be careful Marx does not say for the people. This would be way too vulgar for Marx. It's not that as in a certain naive form of enlightenment some evil priests are fabricating religion the way drug dealers like from Colombia haha sorry my bad taste I'm so sorry are fabricate. No it's of the people. But you know what's my main argument against this formula today? Yes we have religion which works as the opium of the people. Of course the terrorist fundamentalist religion but never forget not just in Muslim countries. I'm here a radical pessimist. You know that FBI has under observation in United States million Christian fundamentalists suspected of be potentially terrorist. I'm sorry to tell you that's basically the same percentage as among Arabs you know. So the question should not just to be Islamophobic, it should be what is it in the dialectic of modern global capitalism that pushes people towards fundamentalism. But okay this is or this is kind of also maybe a version today of the opium religion as the opium of the people. But there are at least two others and I think Adorno already says this somewhere. We have two other opiums of the people. You will guess I hope which are they. Opium and people. For populists their opium is people themselves, you know this phantasmatic image people and so on. Le Marine Le Pen's opium are the people and so on no? The true French people threatened by and the other opium of the people is opium, for many intellectuals opium is drugs itself, opium itself, you know. So the way to get out of it, I am for a religious dimension but in this purely abstract way and I don't have time to do it a wonderful reading can be given in this sense to link since these guys are Danish people to links with the obvious person with Kierkegaard no? Whose formulas of religion when he says God is not something we relate to, God is relating itself and all those formulas who at least I think come to the edge of a certain type of very paradoxical materialism. I don't want to bore you too much and I hope you will not protest again against this politically correct madness I've shown you too much. My God if you I I know also when I talk about rapes people claim you shouldn't talk in such plastic terms or whatever you know that it's shocking. Fuck you it should be shocking, you know. Because if you just abstractly describe it then it doesn't really affect you, then it's just oh it's like bureaucratic statistics you know. No, you should be shocked by the horrors which go on. Thanks very much for your kind patience.
dimension of these fictions lies in the insistent sense of incongruity unmistakable even if no one within the fiction can say what we should be congruent with." So it's just that our world is out of joint, inconsistent, lacking something, but it's literally negative theology, not negative theology in the usual sense God is so much beyond that we cannot describe it properly. No it's simply God is just this absence, the empty place comes before what we fill it in through our images of God. The basic divine dimension is this void, just this void in the sense of our reality is not something is terribly wrong with this reality. And I think not only we can think with we can think this in a materialist way, but the only proper way is to think it in a materialist way. And here things get complicated. Here we should reject you know one of the most famous formula of Marx that religion is the opium of the people. First be careful Marx does not say for the people. This would be way too vulgar for Marx. It's not that as in a certain naive form of enlightenment some evil priests are fabricating religion the way drug dealers like from Colombia haha sorry my bad taste I'm so sorry are fabricate. No it's of the people. But you know what's my main argument against this formula today? Yes we have religion which works as the opium of the people. Of course the terrorist fundamentalist religion but never forget not just in Muslim countries. I'm here a radical pessimist. You know that FBI has under observation in United States million Christian fundamentalists suspected of be potentially terrorist. I'm sorry to tell you that's basically the same percentage as among Arabs you know. So the question should not just to be Islamophobic, it should be what is it in the dialectic of modern global capitalism that pushes people towards fundamentalism. But okay this is or this is kind of also maybe a version today of the opium religion as the opium of the people. But there are at least two others and I think Adorno already says this somewhere. We have two other opiums of the people. You will guess I hope which are they. Opium and people. For populists their opium is people themselves, you know this phantasmatic image people and so on. Le Marine Le Pen's opium are the people and so on no? The true French people threatened by and the other opium of the people is opium, for many intellectuals opium is drugs itself, opium itself, you know. So the way to get out of it, I am for a religious dimension but in this purely abstract way and I don't have time to do it a wonderful reading can be given in this sense to link since these guys are Danish people to links with the obvious person with Kierkegaard no? Whose formulas of religion when he says God is not something we relate to, God is relating itself and all those formulas who at least I think come to the edge of a certain type of very paradoxical materialism. I don't want to bore you too much and I hope you will not protest again against this politically correct madness I've shown you too much. My God if you I I know also when I talk about rapes people claim you shouldn't talk in such plastic terms or whatever you know that it's shocking. Fuck you it should be shocking, you know. Because if you just abstractly describe it then it doesn't really affect you, then it's just oh it's like bureaucratic statistics you know. No, you should be shocked by the horrors which go on. Thanks very much for your kind patience.